Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

On Aug 17, 10:20 pm, Stanimir Stamenkov <[email protected]> wrote:
> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:07:37 -0700 (PDT), /Dao/:
> > On Aug 17, 9:52 pm, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:
> >> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:50:48 -0700 (PDT), /Dao/:
>
> >>> It has been pointed out many times now that there are various
> >>> scenarios where "installing as we speak" isn't going to work. It's not
> >>> going to work when you're using a school or university workstation.
> >>> It's not going to work when you're offline. It's not going to work on
> >>> the computer running Ubuntu that I set up for my mother and brothers.
> >>> It's not going to work for the laptop running Windows XP that my
> >>> grandparents are using as non-admins.
>
> >> Why would the version number be significant on these setups if the
> >> user could use just whatever the administrator has put for them?  If
> >> they know which version number is the latest, and they are curious
> >> if the administrator is doing his job well by providing an up to
> >> date software, they would be probably knowledgeable enough to look
> >> on the about:support page.
>
> > As opposed to the about dialog, about:support is not widely known to
> > exist and to host the version number. Sure, we can make users jump
> > through hoops, but we can also just leave it.
>
> The use case you give doesn't appear about users which don't have
> rights to update the software anyway, but about administrators and
> eventually curious power users, which should either already know (if
> they go into such details as version numbers and probably have read
> change logs about them), or it should be really easy for them to
> find out.  When an user asks for support, helpful power users
> already explicitly ask for all the info provided on the
> about:support page (the version number alone almost never helps
> resolving a problem).

I'm not even talking about support. (And I think you're biased by the
type of support we provide for Firefox, as opposed to support provided
for web projects.)

All I was talking about above was users wanting to know whether they
are secure and if they aren't, how far they are behind. Obviously,
"You're behind, but we're loading the latest update right now" only
makes sense when the update can be loaded. Without the imminent
update, just saying "You're behind" is unnecessarily thin-lipped and
unhelpful.