Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 5:47 PM, fzammetti <[email protected]> wrote:
> Further, not seriously considering the expressed thoughts of your
> community is a close #2 rule.  It's not like we've seen a 50-50 mix of
> opinions here Asa... nearly everyone is against this change, and I'm
> not sure I've seen anyone but you that's actually FOR it... everyone
> else seems to just kind of accept it... and if you look at the
> comments elsewhere that this change was reported on you see a similar
> pattern: probably 85% against, maybe 5% in favor and 10% of the "meh,
> whatever" variety.
>
> You simply can't be an effective leader in an open-source environment
> if you ignore 85% of the people expressing the same opinion.  It
> ceases being a community at that point at all in fact.
>

This is how things work, people will spend time to complain, but not
to agree. A clear example is the Mozilla Firefox page on Facebook -
every post receives dozens of complaints in the comments, but much
more (thousands of) Like's. The fact that most of the replies in this
thread have been against the change doesn't mean 85% of the users are
against it - this thread isn't anywhere near a good sample of 140+
million daily users, and most of those users won't even notice this
change if it happens.

IMO the about window should try to check for updates, and say "Firefox
checked and you are using the latest version as of 11:01 am today."
when it's updated, or "You are using Firefox 4 and may be exposed to
security vulnerabilities, update now." (where "update now" is a link
to mozilla.com/firefox) when it's outdated but can't update itself for
some reason (lack of permissions to install dir, etc). That allows
users who should care about version numbers to see it easily, and
hides the unnecessary information from users that are updated and
shouldn't need to care about it.

--
Cheers,
Reuben