IMHO, it's vapourware until it's shipped. The software world is full of projects, large and small, that were definitely going to be in the next release for sure, except when they weren't. If you've got release cycles that short, nothing is certain until real people can use it.
In any case, whatever we call as-yet-unreleased features, my views on turning HN into a running commentary on the dev process for submitters' pet projects stand.
And how many real people are going to switch browsers from whatever they're using now to Firefox nightlies because of some fixes to stuff that isn't broken on most other browsers anyway? If the answer is not "lots", why is this on HN today?
The point is that... the patch is already in the nightly builds, and thus will certainly make it into beta and release builds (even if it requires additional patches on top). So your objection to this being vaporware is simply ridiculous.
Right there, in the very first sentence of the article we're discussing, there's a reference to the channel switcher, which was pulled at the last minute from Firefox 5 having been in the dev builds for a while.
Moreover, as I mentioned before, the software world is full of examples of this on all scales. Windows Vista lost most of its headline features before it finally shipped, after months of building up expectations by Microsoft. No project is magically immune to this possibility.
Your claim about the certainty of shipping something because a test version was integrated into a dev build is simply wrong, and that is why I use terms like "vapourware" and why I think this sort of discussion is premature for HN.
It'll also ship this week to around 100,000 users who are already on the Aurora channel, and in just six weeks to literally millions of users on the beta channel.
Firefox is an open source project. Part of our mission is to enable participation by the community, and that requires doing our work in the open and talking about it in public.
> Part of our mission is to enable participation by the community, and that requires doing our work in the open and talking about it in public.
I completely respect that, and I have nothing against your philosophy whatsoever.
However, I assume that Mozilla provides those who prefer to stay up to date using the dev builds with information about significant releases via other channels. Moreover, while Firefox obviously has impressive numbers of people who do stay at the bleeding edge, is that not still only a small proportion of the total user base?
If HN winds up being that channel for every major OSS project that a few HN readers use, it will look like Slashdot a few years ago -- that is, the Slashdot that many people abandoned for a while. All I'm asking is that we leave specialised discussions about in-development features to more appropriate forums, and keep HN to mainstream announcements of wider interest (such as when an important feature actually makes it into a production build of a major product) if we're going to have feature announcements at all.
Given how often my original post has been both up- and down-voted, this seems to be a fairly polarising view, however.
I care more about 'web professionals' than 'real people' switching. This article made it likely I'll switch to the now-available early Firefox 6 versions, just to do the manual about:memory 'minimize memory usage' trick, even before Firefox 7 arrives in any form. Giant footprint and mysterious GC pauses in Firefox have been driving me to use Chrome more and more; this might reverse that trend.
Personally, this is big enough news I'm happy to see it (even in a couple different forms) on HN.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31