Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On Aug 17, 8:22 pm, Robert Kaiser <[email protected]> wrote:

> This cuts to the core of our problems around all this, I think: We fail
> pretty badly in communication of the merits of all we are doing right
> now. We need to improve on that. I have been meaning to write a blog
> post on how I think the new process improves stability but taking a long
> time reading through threads like this and needing to do actual work as
> well makes me have little time left for this.

Sorry for a slighly off-topic post - and I just hate to think what Asa
would say about this blatant disregard of the rules - but I do think
this particular thread is the best place for this discussion, simply
because it was linked at a lot of news sites recently and caused a lot
of people to pay attention to it. I, as a Firefox user, did not take
part in the discussions that took place almost a year ago - and only
thanks to this thread and its popularity I've learned a few important
(to me, at least) things about Mozilla, its developers, and Firefox
future. This thread _is_ the best example of communication failures
you are talking about, and, just maybe, it could also serve to improve
the situation a bit.

First. Mozilla has finally grown up, it is a big business entity now,
and, as such, it's quite compartmentalized; UX designers just don't
want to get involved with all the pesky "enterprisey stuff", and they
definitely don't think it's their duty to take the needs of other
departments and different kinds of users into account proactively. It
is a very bad sign when designers say things like "we don't really
care about enterprises - there is a separate subgroup within Mozilla,
it's their business to do that". Not an easy thing to solve, but every
big company meets this problem at some point, and most of them seem to
deal with it somehow.

Second. Violating OS standards (yes, putting version in About dialog
is a standard) is not the best way to inspire confidence in Mozilla's
official stance "we will only support standards better and better".
Sure, it's not a major problem, but it is a very bad PR - a loud and
clear voice repeatedly (thanks to Asa in this popular thread) telling
to everyone: we will support only standards that we like, and the rest
we will break, and no one could tell us what to do. The same, in fact,
could be said about the whole "software as a web page" idea:
basically, Mozilla is telling me that it decided to break a standard
long-standing industry agreement where I get to update software when I
want to, and will silently install any code it wishes on my computer -
and not a protected and managed code (as is the case with Web pages),
but native executable, a major attack vector. One disgruntled
employee, one inventive hack - and I just can't imagine the PR
consequences of this.

A few companies (Google and antivirus vendors) are willing and/or need
to break this trust (and even most of them give me an option to
disable it!), and it's their right - and that's also why I don't use
Chrome. In fact, I would have agreed to an option "hold even security
updates for a couple of days before prompting me to install - any
major harm would have already been widely published by then", but
Mozilla wants to be way more aggressive, and it's a painful breach of
accepted standards.

Third and final point. Big companies - and Mozilla is now one of them
- do tend to inhabit their own ivory towers and regard "mere users" as
a bunch of sheep that just don't know what's best for them. That's
normal and not even insulting: after all, these companies attract
talented developers, marketers and salesmen who are smarter than an
average user. What _is_ important is to make sure the charismatic
people get replaced with careful ones in time. Big companies could not
afford to let a few people within their structure to alienate users
with their decisions and/or voiced opinions. The companies HAVE to
think about their public image. In this particular case - as this
thread signifies - Mozilla should have long gone into damage control
mode and done something like this:
a) politely asked Asa to leave this thread alone and put someone else
here to calm the waters and look for a compromise,
b) postponed the decision until the outcry dies a bit and press moves
on to other news,
c) maybe even tried to (oh, horror!) make the designers reconsider the
holy grail - the idea of the "browser-as-a-web-page" - after actually
forming a committee, doing some focus groups, votes, publishing, and
even advertising their "new, user-driven decision process", etc.

Not because the result is actually important in itself - even though
it is - but simply as a basic survival mechanism for a big company in
a "bad PR" situation. Mozilla loses a lot of face here, a lot of
respect from its users, and there _are_ alternative browsers fighting
to get a few more percentage points at its expense and finally
succeeding this year (guess why). The series of decisions alienating
"advanced users" (who, by the way, choose software for a lot of people
around them) is long enough and loud enough - and it's rapidly
becoming unmanageable from a PR point of view. It is definitely not my
business to tell Mozilla what to do - I could only switch browsers and
forget the whole thing - but please, Mozilla, do something, so there
would be no need to :-)