Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On 16/08/11 16:08, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> I'm absolutely with you here, but I think that removing the version
> display from the "About" dialog will have much less impact in that
> regard than you believe it has. The largest impact it has, apparently,
> is another episode of angering our community and bad press, which we
> really don't need right now.
> 
> I'm rather unconcerned about the actual change, but I'm very concerned
> about the public message and the loss or gain of peers, as both are what
> made us a large contender on a now-fast-moving market and if those turn
> against us, we have lost and the web has lost the only really open
> voice. We cannot let that happen.

Indeed.

There is a trade-off being made here, and we need to weigh the magnitude
of the actual improvement to our product's quality and appeal that
making this change will be, against the irritation the change seems to
cause to a large number of people who should be our friends and
supporters. Their irritation may be irrational - that's irrelevant.
People are not robots. Point is, we are right in the middle of doing
some major things related to the rapid release cycle in a way which has
made things quite rocky for a lot of our users - why do we want to go
increasing annoyance levels at this exact moment?

One counter to this might be to argue that all of the complainers are
not useful contributors/windbags/armchair quarterbacks. I think there's
a reasonable amount of evidence from this thread and more-private
discussions within Mozilla to show that this is not true; and I think a
lot of core Mozillians feel what kairo feels.

There is a natural, collective-decisionmaking,
we-are-all-in-this-together, keep-the-peace tendency to want to avoid
disagreeing directly with project decisionmakers after they have taken a
public stand on something. Particularly if it's the right thing done in
the wrong way. But our community, both our core community and the more
general goodwill we have among geeks worldwide, is our competitive
advantage[0], and we cannot afford to throw it away - particularly over
things which, in the grand scheme of things, are not particularly important.

Gerv

[0]
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2011/07/mozillas_competitive_advantages.html