If you're curious what this means... years ago, Firefox took forever to hit 3.6, and the decision was made (mirroring Chrome) that releases would switch from "release when everything is done" to "the trains always run on time", where the release would go out at a predetermined time and anything that was ready would make it.
Mozilla also has a habit of simple question-based domains, such as "arewefastyet.com", for tracking progress.
But… the 3.6 -> 4.0 release was just such a pain. We spent more than a year trying to cram too many features in v4.
Clearly feature-based releases were just not cutting it, especially as Chrome was shipping new versions fast.
For the longest time people were saying it was the wrong move, but really - that was absolutely necessary, and proved out to be the right thing to do. The Stable / Beta / Alpha ("aurora", was that the name?) channels massively improved our yield :)
This was back when Internet Explorer was at version 7. Some Mozilla folks told me they used to get questions like "when are you going to upgrade to Internet 7 like Microsoft?"
If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.
It's definitely a common thought but there are other considerations too regardless if that's really true or not e.g. browsers needed constant security updates anyways, no reason to not also regularly deliver features that were sitting ready to be used with that update infrastructure.
Why is that site so poorly designed? I tried in both FF and Chrome. In FF I see nothing on any chart. On Chrome, I see a few data points in July and then nothing else.
As far as I can tell, this is the only official page that documents Firefox 115 ESR being extended for Windows 7-8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14 up to March 2025.
I finally gave up on firefox a year ago, after being a lifetime user. I can live with it being slightly slower than other browsers but it had strange hangs and very slow loading sometimes that made me switch and didn't find in other browsers.
It could be an extension, that specific about:config setting or sometinhg else but i switched to have a browser that doesn't require me troubleshoot this stuff.
First time I hear about "train" analogy in release management. Interesting if someone is going to build this visualisation with actual animated train models and tracks ;)
Readit News
Mozilla also has a habit of simple question-based domains, such as "arewefastyet.com", for tracking progress.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet
But… the 3.6 -> 4.0 release was just such a pain. We spent more than a year trying to cram too many features in v4.
Clearly feature-based releases were just not cutting it, especially as Chrome was shipping new versions fast.
For the longest time people were saying it was the wrong move, but really - that was absolutely necessary, and proved out to be the right thing to do. The Stable / Beta / Alpha ("aurora", was that the name?) channels massively improved our yield :)
If I remember right, after Firefox 4 they skipped a few versions and started the train model, while also trying to de-emphasize the version number in marketing.
1. This is an official Mozilla site.
2. Source is at https://github.com/mozilla/releases_insights, under MPL-2.0
3. Thanks to Pascal Chevrel for creating and maintaining this. https://whattrainisitnow.com/humans.txt
As far as I can tell, this is the only official page that documents Firefox 115 ESR being extended for Windows 7-8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14 up to March 2025.
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/07/18/100-webdriver-bi...
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