We've been too used to say yes. I'd like to remind everyone about this, and ask them to reconsider this old habit of ours.
Recently, what happened with bug 656120 made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. This bug potentially solves the Javascript memory usage problems introduced in Firefox 4. The feedback from the users on the Nightly branch was positive after landing this patch on trunk, so it was suggested for this patch to be backported to the Aurora branch.
I mentioned that this is a bad idea, but we decided to let the drivers make the call, and I think they made the right call on this: this patch should wait for Firefox 7, and should not be backported to Aurora (which would mean that it would make it into Firefox 6).
I'd like to take a moment and bring our channel rules into attention. According to these rules, the code changes that we should accept on Aurora include features backouts or disabling, security fixes, or fixes necessary to get the product into shipping state. Although I too would really like our users to get this fix as soon as possible, but rushing things like this in the last minute is one of the reasons why we used to slip our schedules in the previous release model. We were too lenient. We used to say yes to a lot of things. I could understand why. In the old release model, if a fix slipped a release, nobody could tell when it would ship in the next version of Firefox. That has changed now. Look at things this way: rushing something on a branch where it doesn't belong could potentially cause all of the other fixes on that branch to reach our users with a delay. Let's be more patient, and let's say no more often. As a wise man once said, “it's good to know that there's going to be another train in 6 weeks”.