Today I was expecting the release of the Opera 12 desktop web browser, but it didn't happen. The reason why I'm so aware of their release cycle is because the Opera Desktop Team regularly post publicly their beta and release candidate releases.
While making non-final releases public is not an unusual thing, their way of doing so is quite interesting. They make a new release candidate available through a blog post, and comments are open below the post to let anyone post feedback or bugs about the release. A kind of free QA team. Glancing at the comments one can see how many bugs were introduced, and how stable is the new candidate.
Of course Firefox has a more robust process, but I wonder if something as informal as blog posts and comments could work in a smaller scale. True, by today's standards making a web browser from scratch is a huge undertaking, but for small open-source projects this model of using blog posts to get feedback could work quite well.
Published on June 13, 2012 at 19:54 EDT
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