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2 comments on “Milestone: Firefox 4 launches and moves to rapid release”

  1. Curtis Koenig wrote on

    This was a really fun time, I had just joined the project a few weeks before in late Feb and I can remember the excitement of shipping. While I had shipped software before I had left the software development side of things for a corporate IT style job so getting back to actually releasing something to users was a big thrill. It was a bit odd watching all of this remotely and really wishing I had been in the office to enjoy it with all my coworkers but I had a mini-party with friends. This was all tempered a few weeks later with the all hands and a great celebration.
    The rapid release model was also a big and welcome change for security, as it meant we would have more options to get fixes into user hands at a faster rated and not have to ship special or “chemspill” releases. It’s been 2 years and 7 months since I started and it’s been great to have this event so close to the start of my journey with the project!

  2. dboswell wrote on

    On IRC Myk mentioned that this change in how we released software was really a return to rapid release. Early on in the project before Firefox, there were regular milestone releases. I don’t think they were shipping on a specific schedule, but the releases came out roughly every few weeks. You can see the release history at

    http://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/history.html