Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I've never had features rolled out with Windows or Office. So what does Microsoft do?
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Microsoft are a major cloud provider (these days this is their most important business unit by a long way: Office is small beer by comparison). Their cloud services do this all the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I've also never had rolled out features for Firefox.
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It happens all the time. I guarantee it's happening now because they do this with every release. In any given release a bunch of new features appear, gated as experimental trials and turned off for all but a small proportion of users. In the next release more users get it, until the developers are satisfied that it really works and it is turned on for everyone: thus only a few users are exposed to stuff so new it might have serious bugs.
The only distinction from what Amazon does is that Mozilla flips the proportions of people in trials mostly when new releases happen, but since new releases for web browsers these days are so frequent and unheralded (usually happening automatically without user interaction), this is a distinction without a difference: most users don't know when their Kindles get a software update either, and Amazon's approach means they can decouple the bandwidth-hungry, disruptive, relatively rare update push from the new-features rollout cycle, and roll new features out without having to wait for a new update push just to adjust the proportions of people in (what they should call) the new-feature trial. They only need new releases to fix some of the bugs the trials uncovered.
What *is* probably true is that most new web browser features are imperceptible to normal users: the user interface may shift slowly over time but most of the changes are at the "platform" layer, visible only to web developers: so the real impact is that websites slowly get more capable (obviously, more slowly than the features they need are rolled out to the majority of browsers). The Kindle's "reboot and a dialog appears telling you about a new feature, which you unconciously dismiss before reading it and then can never get it back again" *is* clunky as hell, and there should be a better way to do that: but I'm fairly sure that gating new features on new releases and giving them to everyone at once would be no better, and likely quite a lot worse since now you can potentially break everyone at once.
But having perceptible feature changes appear magically like this does happen in Firefox too: FF has rolled out several major UI changes this way. Nobody seems to have minded much, except insofar as some people complain about every UI change no matter how minor.
As a counterexample, FF dropped old XUL extension support all at once for everyone, without a trial run as such (after a long deprecation period and then a period in which it was disabled by default), which caused screams of rage from people relying on the old way (and then they got used to it and the screams of rage die away again). I can't see that the screams would have been any more if this had been rolled out gradually. The old extensions still all disappeared, and then there was a period in which FF was buggier than usual as the new extension system bedded down. After this, Mozilla started making much greater use of trial runs: at least this way the new features work well once they're exposed to everyone, rather than exposing everyone to lots of nice fresh bugs.