Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

Asa,

I would urge you to spend a lot of time on this decision and to gain
the benefit of a lot of input.  There are both benefits and  risks of
this change, and we have some historical evidence to understand both.
I refer you to the work of Stefan Frei et. al, in which he looked at
zero-day exploits and update times (published in WEIS), where going
back as far as Firefox 2 you had a substantial advantage over other
browsers (something like > 80% in as little as 72 hours), most notably
Microsoft and Apple.  However, one of the reasons for that advantage
was confidence in Mozilla.  There can be no doubt but that there have
been compatibility problems as late as this year between major
versions of Firefox, most notably with 32->64bit plug-ins.  There has
been a distinction between "security" updates and other forms of
updates.  Having that distinction provided a confidence to users that
they lacked with Microsoft when, for instance, they rolled out
Microsoft Genuine Advantage, and other functional changes through an
update that then caused users problems.

Now it seems you propose to lump all of these changes together in a
way that the user will not be able to distinguish, i.e., repeating
Microsoft's mistakes.  The result will be higher risks of
incompatibilities, either between web sites or plug-ins.

There IS probably evidence going the other way on this, most
particularly Apple's experience with iOS and app updates.  After all,
who knows what version their apps are running.  But that is
considerably different than the underlying platform.  I will bet
people know what version of iOS their iPhone/iPad runs.