My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

I'm a long-term Firefox user, and also have pushed Firefox into our
company.

Due to various reasons, I've got automatic updates turned off on
pretty much all software I run. It is
*my* computer, I decide when I'm ready to update software. I'm happy
to get hints, though.

I'm probably also pretty old-school in the regard that I'm a keyboard
user and like menus, and the SAA standard in general. I want to see
the facts, I want a well-structured UI with a menu, and I want to know
the status about the application I know.

With FF4, suddenly "Open in new Tab" and "Open in new Window" got
exchanged in the context menu without any reason. The status bar got
removed. The menu bar hidden. For none of these changes I could
imagine any kind of usability justification. I noticed that the IT
press reception on the new release could have been better.

I also noticed that again there were claims on Firefox being so much
faster now, and so much more stable, but in reality due to the bunch
of memory leaks as a heavy user I still had to kill the Firefox
process every few days. I still saw the random hangs which completely
block all tabs for several seconds without any reason that everybody
loves.

The only good thing I got from the update to FF4 was the insight that
obviously the memory leaks and hangs of Firefox were not related to
extensions I had installed, because all of those got disabled.

Again, keep in mind: I'm one of those "I own my PC, nobody is going to
install anything on it without my approval".

Can you imagine how shocked I was to suddenly see Firefox update to
FF5 *even after I had configured it not to do so*? According to the
german law I'm under, this could even be regarded as a felony
(modifcation of computer data without consent from the owner). In any
case: It pissed me off big time. And pretty much everyone I spoke to
about it, too.

Again there has been lots of coverage in the IT press. Unlike with the
release of FF4, where the press response had been rather sceptical,
this time it was pretty much entirely negative. People on the biggest
german IT news site (heise.de) started to make fun about Mozilla and
the Firefox team. Friends on Facebook made negative comments.

Then I found out that with FF5 the online banking of a large german
bank doesn't work any more. You can log in, but no longer transfer
money. I tried to warn friends who use the same bank.. but too late,
they got updated to FF5. I don't care if this is Firefox' fault or
maybe the fault of bad browser version detection of the bank or
whatever. Mozilla interupted me in the middle of a work day, to update
my browser against my will, to then break one of the most important
applications I had.

I've resorted to using IE for that online banking for now. The only
reason I have not fully switched is because there is no Flashblock
extension available for IE.

Now during the last days, there again has been extensive coverage in
regards of Firefox in the press. Now the tone has mostly shifted to
"have these guys gone insane?". The "business users go away!"
statements from Asa, and now this extremely silly "remove version
number thing".

This is INSANE.

Obviously, for the company I work for Firefox is now dead. Silently
updating an application against adminstrative decisions is a no-go.
We'll drop Firefox.

But you are not only killing Firefox for any serious business use. You
are killing it for pretty much any kind of professional / poweruser
use. Not having a stable release of a software which is maintained
with security updates is unacceptable to a lot of people even outside
the enterprises. If a new version of some software comes out, I want
to be able to FIRST gather feedback, read from the press etc on if it
is a good idea to update or not. This is best practice in the whole
industry.

The only exception to this are non-breaking changes, in other words:
Security updates.

So, after you have decided that it's a good idea to break usability,
you have decided that breaking trust by violating my right to chose
what to install on my PC would be OK, and you have decided that I no
longer have the right NOT to be a first-mover for a software, but to
learn from the experience from others. And now you announce that in
future you even wish to hide the fact from me that you have updated
software on my computer without asking me, and making it hard to
actually report a simple thing like "Dear bank, your online banking
has stopped working with FF5, with FF4 it's fine, please fix that"?

From all I have read now it appears to me that all of these decisions
that I regard as completely stupid and wrong come from one person: Asa
Dotzler. And I can not understand why people show this much patience
with this guy, while obviously the whole f-ing industry is LAUGHING
about Mozilla right now, and at least "power users" appear to drop
Firefox in masses.

I've just uninstalled FF5, and re-installed FF3.6. The day security
updates for 3.6 end I'll move somewhere else, probably Opera or IE.
For my company, I'll talk to our IT support guys for a decision, but
obviously without a sane release/support policy, Firefox is out of
question for any business use. From what I've read here, you are going
to drop support for FF3.6 soon. So you are forcing me to move to a
different browser.

After telling all my friends, family, suppliers and business partners
for years to move to Firefox and stop using IE I feel extremely
alienated by all this.

Asa Dotzler should be fired, and the team at Mozilla should get their
act together and understand that agile software development might be a
good thing internally, but that software without a stable and
supported branch is unacceptable by any standard. The rapid release
cycle concept is a mistake, the UI changes are a mistake, the focus on
changing the usability all the time instead of making the browser more
robust is a mistake, forced updates are a mistake, abusing major
version numbers for updates is a mistake, and hiding version numbers
is a mistake.

Basically it looks like all your product management decisions during
the last months have been wrong. Get rid of the product manager that
always is wrong.

You've turned from doing good for the web to doing bad. Please stop it.