Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

Asa,

Thank you for your reply.  Apparently I wasn't as clear as I needed to
be in my previous note, and so please see below as to why I believe I
am *on point*.

On Aug 16, 7:47 pm, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:
> Eliot wrote:
> > Asa,
>
> > 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.
>
> Which bugs are you referring to here?

It certainly hit WebEx hard, as you know.  I think Adobe also
encountered some issues, but these were not the only ones.


>
> > 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.
>
> You're off topic for this discussion. The decision to move to a rapid
> release cadence and to ship features along with security updates was
> made at the beginning of the year and was made at the highest levels of
> Mozilla -- not because "Asa thought it was a good idea."

The issue is not one of release timing but informed consent.  Firefox
is a major development platform.  You can probably only count on one
hand the number of more popular platforms.  In each of those cases,
there is an identified release.  And as you know far better than I do,
with releases come bugs.  And So when we have bugs, like the ones that
appeared in your partners' plug-ins, and they are tied to a release,
they want to be able to say, "do not yet upgrade to release X".  Put
in another context, my company has warned me not to upgrade my Mac to
the next release "Lion" because there are a number of
incompatibilities.  These will always exist.

At the same time, you still need to support security updates, and
those should be mandatory, for the sake of all of us.

If you hide the release name, then I don't know whether I am getting a
security update or a bunch of new code that might in fact break
things.

I hope this clarifies my view, and I wish you the best on your
decisions going forward.

Elliot