Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY DO NOT DO THIS

TL;DR: This change makes sense if websites are only built to be viewed
by people who can upgrade their browser whenever they like, and do not
ever have anything business critical on the web. Supporting corporate
users will be an absolute nightmare.

If users complain that "it's not working on firefox", it helps the
developer (me) to know what version the user is using, so I can know
if they've hit a limitation in firefox's standards support, or if I've
got a simple bug. It also means that they can ask their IT support
people to upgrade to a specific version. Finally, when there are new
bugs introduced in point versions (and this happens), it will make it
much more difficult to instruct users (and their in-house IT support)
to return to an earlier version until it is fixed.

This matters because there are stupidly conservative IT managers who
will refuse to upgrade to anything remotely new, in case there are
unknown security or other problems (they prefer to have more problems,
which are more widely known).

If you do this, it will make it much more difficult to communicate to
users what is the oldest supported version of firefox, it will make it
more difficult to understand their issues, and it will make it more
difficult for them and me to communicate with irrational in-house IT
support.

One other problem is that this will make it more difficult for people
to gather and understand statistics on which browser versions are in
use, both generally, and by their customer base. This will make it
more difficult to know which enhancements to firefox are safe to use,
and which are not. If you do this, it will throw us onto very
conservative development practices, such as have afflicted the web
because of Internet Explorer's giant legacy installation base.

In particular, with the rapid turn over from FF4 to FF5, that fixed a
number of issues, and it was easy to communicate to users that they
needed to upgrade. Without that, there would be a cycle of asking the
user to upgrade their browser, them reporting that they did, and it
taking time to establish that their attempted upgrade was
unsuccessful.