Friday

Mozilla gets aggressive in updating Firefox OS


Mozilla is adopting a more aggressive schedule in updating its "Firefox OS" operating system for mobile devices, aiming to release updates on a quarterly basis.

Alex Keybi, Mozilla's manager of release management, said this even as the company released Firefox OS 1.1, its first update to the operating system.

"Now that we have our (Firefox OS) v1.0 behind us and we’re moving forward with even more partners, we’re going to do our best to bring Firefox OS back into our heartbeat and will make quarterly feature releases available to partners along with six-weekly security updates for the previous two feature releases. As far as I know, that’s the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy out there (and may still require some tweaking)," he said in a blog post.



He noted Mozilla also continues to continue working on its Firefox browser for Mac, Linux, and Windows; Firefox for Android; and Firefox ESR.

All these products share a single platform, Gecko, and release to hundreds of millions of users almost exactly every six weeks, he noted.

"Like a well-practiced choir, we synchronize our technical and organizational heartbeat around releases. This heartbeat enables us to push a unified vision across the entire web, keep our users regularly delighted with new (many times cross-platform) functionality, and prevent any one product from lagging behind in security updates," he added.

But in the case of Firefox OS, he said Mozilla also had to juggle the timelines and requirements of all of the OEMs, carriers, and chipset manufacturers it partnered with.

 A separate article on The Next Web said the three-month feature release cycle could be a "real game-changer," though it will be "no easy feat." — VC, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com