Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

Reuben Morais wrote:
> 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 to mozilla.com/firefox) when it's outdated but can't update itself for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.

Reubin, this is an interesting proposal -- showing the version number 
only in the out of date case and not in the up to date case. We probably 
wouldn't link to the update because we can already be applying the 
update while the person reads that sentence but I think there might be 
something to explore there with the version number only when the user is 
behind the latest release.

Thanks for the input.

- A