Frequent Releases

Saturday, February 12, 2011 3:04:57 PM

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One of the news items last week: Mozilla Firefox wants to speed up their release schedule. Apparently they plan to release not just Firefox 4 this year, but also Firefox 5, 6 and 7! They are spurred on by Chrome of course, which is getting out its feature upgrades at breakneck speed. Though I suspect many Chrome users hardly notice - one of the disadvantages of Chrome's silent upgrades is that users are not aware that they are using a newer version with new features smile

I think that the people who read my blog will be aware that, while Opera still uses rather classical version numbers, we've already moved to a schedule of multiple feature releases in a year. Quite different from the 'almost once a year' releases that Firefox manages, never mind the (recent) two-yearly schedule of Internet Explorer (wikipedia). Here's an overview of the last 5 years of Opera releases:

Version Date Cool features (add "tons of fixes" to each cell yourself)
Opera 11.50 2011 Speed Dial extensions; Password sync. Core 2.9: more HTML 5 support
Opera 11.10 April 2011 Speed Dial changes; URL Filter API; Plugin install wizard; Special use IMAP folders support; Core 2.8: CSS 3 Multicol, CSS 3 Viewport, CSS 3 Gradients, WOFF, File API, WebP
Opera 11.00 December 2010 Opera Extensions; Search suggestions; Tab stacking; Visual mouse gestures; Safer Address field; Mail panel; Mail integration of labels and filters; Plug-in on-demand; Core 2.7: CSS 3 Paged Media, CSS 3 Text, more HTML 5 support
Opera 10.60 July 2010 Core 2.6: Geolocation, Offline Web Apps, Web Workers, WebM video format
Opera 10.50 March 2010 Core 2.5: Native JSON, CSS 3 rounded corners, CSS 3 transforms and transitions, HTML 5 Video, Web Storage; Carakan JavaScript engine; Opera Widgets for Desktop; Vega graphics and UI revamp; Improved OS integration; Private browsing
Opera 10.10 November 2009 Opera Unite
Opera 10.00 September 2009 Core 2.2: Webfonts, Acid 3, CSS Colors, CSS Selectors, SVG improvements; inline spell check; Auto-update; Opera Turbo; Visual tabs; HTML mail compose; Crashlogging
Opera 9.6 October 2008 Feed preview; Mail features
Opera 9.5 June 2008 Core 2.1: SVG improvements; Opera Link; Opera Dragonfly; Quick Find (address field search); SSL-EV
Opera 9.2 April 2007 Speed Dial
Opera 9.1 December 2006 Fraud protection
Opera 9.0 June 2006 Core 2.0: Canvas, Web Forms 2.0, XSLT, XPath, Rich text editing, Acid 2; Opera Widgets; Bittorrent; Site Preferences; Content Blocking; Integrated Source Viewer, opera:config

(data picked from the excellent Opera version history document)

I'm no spokesman for Opera Software, but I hope we manage to keep up the release speed from 2010 in this year as well. It would be trendy to call them 12, 13 and 14 instead of (for example) 11.10, 11.50 and 11.60, but I'll leave it to the marketing people to decide on such things smile

BTW, I'm aware that some people will say 'stop adding features, just fix all the bugs first'. So, there's no need to add comments like that. Especially as it is totally unrealistic.

Ten years, one month, and one weekOpera Mail, by far be most used mail client

Comments

J. KingMTKnight Saturday, February 12, 2011 7:12:50 PM

I wasa little shocked the other day to see how ludicrously quickly Chrome's version number has climbed. I find it a little silly, but then maybe they want to de-emphasize the version number to the point of the ridiculous. I'd be very curious to hear some reasoning on that, anyway.

Alexodius PrimeAleksOD Saturday, February 12, 2011 8:16:47 PM

Perhaps Chrome wants to be known as just that, "Chrome", version number being irrelevant. But yes, I agree, new features are harder to discover that way. They could introduce "What's new" page with every release, I suppose.

lucideer Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:07:32 PM

I initially thought Chrome's versioning scheme was a tad ridiculous, but I'm beginning to see a benefit of it in future.

GMail's "perpetual beta" status went a long way towards popularising the "release early - release often" style of software (particularly hosted webapps) development, and the idea that having an app being used by the "lay public" that's advertised as being not entirely stable is ok. I think this is a good change personally.

What I think Chrome's versioning is doing is de-emphasising versioning altogether. A lot of people afraid to upgrade their browser to the latest version because they fear some perceived instability/bloat or have had bad upgrade experiences in the past. De-emphasis of versioning could help allay such fears and ensure people have up-to-date secure browsers. It could also dissuade UA version-sniffing which has been a major problem for Opera (particularly with the 9.8/10 fiasco).

Daniel HendrycksDanielHendrycks Sunday, February 13, 2011 7:42:16 PM

I think the releases are still too long, I did a post about it a while ago. This last year had three releases, but I think it should be counted as two, since 10.6 was the quality 10.5 should have been.

I think releases should be more about 3 months, each. It's good to see Opera is shortening it's release cycle already, though.

Rijk Monday, February 14, 2011 12:43:12 PM

@Lucideer: I do not think this UA version number sniffing is really relevant here anymore, except for a tiny number of sites. Apart from that, I generally agree with what you said. Chrome of course has the advantage of not having much history.

In the case of Firefox, IE and of course Opera, if you embark on some radical UI redesign to be as fresh and simple looking as Chrome, you are inflicting quite some change on your current users. But without such changes, you'll be left behind as an old-fashioned browser that doesn't attract new users.

Jon RimmerAmtiskaw Monday, February 14, 2011 6:57:36 PM

Web development allows you to push updates to users, instead of relying on them taking manual steps to get the latest version of your product. But traditionally this bottleneck is just moved to the browser itself (witness IE6). Google's strategy with Chrome is to adapt the web model for the browser: users get frequent, automatically-applied updates, and don't think about what version they're using any more than they think about the 'version' of CNN.com they're browsing.

PengePenge4 Sunday, February 20, 2011 1:18:37 AM

The Chrome version numbering is ridiculous. No indicates the quantity of improvements.
- The skin color changes from blue to gray: +1 main version.
- HW acceleration + small improvements: +1 main version.

I hope the Opera will never follow this stupid version numbering hype.

BTW, why omit Opera Software the x.30, x.40, x.70, x.80 and x.90 versions?smile

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