A tale of two browsers

Submitted by msquire on Tue, 2011-12-20 11:00

Title	A tale of two browsers
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2011
Authors	Davis, I, Godfrey, MW, Baysal, O
Tertiary Authors	van Deursen, A, Xie, T, Zimmermann, T
Secondary Title	Proceedings of the 8th working conference on Mining software repositories - MSR '11
Pagination	238-241
Date Published	05/2011
Publisher	ACM Press
Place Published	New York, New York, USA
ISBN Number	9781450305747
Keywords	chrome, development history, Firefox, msr challenge
Abstract	We explore the space of open source systems and their user communities by examining the development artifact histories of two popular web browsers -- Firefox and Chrome -- as well as usage data. By examining the data and addressing a number of research questions, two very different profiles emerge: Firefox, as the older and established system, with long product version cycles but short bug fix cycles, and a user base that is slow to adopt newer versions; and Chrome, as the new and fast evolving system, with short version cycles, longer bug fix cycles, and a user base that very quickly adopts new versions as they become available (due largely to Chrome's mandatory automatic updates).
DOI	10.1145/1985441.1985481
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