Pardon?

Submitted by jwalch.hawk on Mon, 2008-06-30 12:13

Firefox 3 isn't a fully comprehensive version?  Could've fooled me.

Are you talking about the fact that they need regular bug fixes? Yeah, it would really suck if something important like your operating system (often Windows) needed regular updates for bug fixes... Oh wait... ;)

Some bugs never even crop up during beta testing because they only happen under unusual/rare circumstances and end up getting discovered *after* the public release.  This can't be helped.  Other bugs are found during beta testing and are considered rare enough or low-impact enough that they become low priority enough that the software can be considered a stable release if it has those bugs.  So programmers' attention is relocated in other places considered to be of higher priority.  This is how software development works.  The larger the project, the more likely it is for bugs to arise and the more this prioritization happens.  It would be foolish to suggest that a software project this large-scale could ever hit public release without a single known bug and never requiring any updates to handle newly discovered bugs or security loopholes.

Or did you mean the fact that they are already working on new features?  The Mozilla team is constantly coming up with new ideas, new ways to enhance the user experience.  It's simply not possible to wait until they have every feature that they've thought of ready; they'd never end up releasing a product.  At a certain point, you basically have to say "Ok, we can have features X and Y ready by release date of ****.  We can add feature Z in a later update as a patch or something."  Again, this is something that always happens in the software industry.  Ever downloaded a game patch with added maps?  Same principle.  Two things impress me about the way the Mozilla team does this.  First, when they release the product, all the functionality included works.  It's not like there's anything that looks like it should do something that it isn't ready yet.  This means when they add features and functionality they come off as "enhancements" and not just "finishing up" what they couldn't get done by the initial release.  Secondly, like I said earlier, they are constantly coming up with new ideas.  I love to see that kind of creativity and progress.

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