Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On 16 Aug., 19:41, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:
> dbrenck wrote:
>
> > To get you back to the reality, the average support costs for firefox
> > in entrerprise environments have been rising with the new version
> > management.
>
> Firefox continues to be focused on individual users and not enterprise.
> [...] For the time being,
> Firefox is designed for individuals and not enterprises and I don't
> think the product or UX team should be focusing on developing an
> enterprise-friendly feature set until our mandate to focus on individual
> users has been changed.
>
> - A

Forgive my directness Asa, but that's non-sense.

What you are suggesting is interfereing with enterprise use which
results in anoyances of the indiviuals at work relying on Firefox.
Why should anybody want to use a tool in their sparetime, if it's
known to be the source for annoyances during day-(wok-)time?

Exactly this happend to IE (5...) in the past.
Part of Mozillas success story is the multiplicator effect when people
learned (mostly at work!) what they were capable to do, if they were
not bound to their os-specific browser.

Creating realeases that make it impossible for enterprise environment
to keep up with testing and deploying puts firefox 4 and 5(!) exactly
in the situation of ie 5. Advancement is brought to a sudden end.
Support requests (user annoyances) are rising. What kind of effect on
individuals do you expect from this? You don't really want them all to
take part in the Enterprise discussion group. Do you?

Never mind ... so you want to get rid of the version numbers. Fine.
Is filing versions as bug a sufficient concept? I doubt. So what's
your concept?

Tell us, how you expect Add-Ons to work in future without the need of
their volunteer programmers to test and touch their code every 6 weeks
.
Tell us, how you expect Ajax Frameworks like dojo, extjs and others to
be layed out in a manner they do not suddenly fail after some
irrevertable firefox "update".

Tell us, how you expect developers to react on bugreports like: "Hey
I've found a bug .. my firefox was last updated 13d 4h 6s Bunga-Bunga-
Timezone"

Tell us, how to avoid the funny experiences with google, if you check
to find a solution for you problem and you suddenly find out: Hey, all
problems ever happen to occur on "mozilla latest version".

This list can be continued, and to be honest it's an infinite evidence
of why firefox simply can't do without version numbers at the moment.
So again: What's your concept? Your solutions? Have any? What has to
be done to keep things going if there are no versions?