Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On 8/17/2011 9:27 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> 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
>
>
Thanks, Gerv.  I really can't see what harm it would do to put a build 
number in the About dialog box.  If it gives users comfort, what harm is 
there?  The message 'you have the current version' still works for most, 
and the others are gratified by a comforting version/build number.