Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

Chris Eaton wrote:
> But how does this help my parents, or grandma, or anybody else like
> them? Those people don't go to Help>  About. To test this out I
> actually called my parents and asked them what version of FF they use.

Well, I actually dealt with half a dozen people last month who read 
about the new 5.0.1 release and were upset that they were't getting it. 
They were confused and became distrustfull of Firefox because the about 
dialog told them they were up to date with Firefox 5 but the thing they 
read on the Web told them that 5.0.1 was the latest.

I had another interesting encounter with an irate Linux user who was 
ticked off because he heard that Firefox 7 had some huge memory 
improvements but he'd checked his about window and it said he was on the 
up to date version called 5.0. He thought we were ignoring Linux and 
leaving it behind on an older version.

Your grandma might not open that dialog, but plenty of people do and 
right now it can cause them to be mislead or to not trust Firefox when 
Firefox is telling them they're up to date.

And this is just starting to be a problem. A year from now when we've 
shipped a dozen or so rapid releases, we'll have even more incorect and 
outdated articles on the web saying that some version which isn't is 
actually the latest version.

> They have absolutely no idea. They don't know Help>  About exists.
> They don't care. Long as the browser works they don't think about it.
> If it doesn't work, they still don't think to check that. They just
> call me and then I tell them to go there as the first step of
> troubleshooting.

And next time you call them, you won't have to tell them to go there. 
You'll know that they're on whatever the latest version of Firefox is 
because updates are automatic and seamless and their problems will be 
with some other thing besides being out of date -- perhaps a rogue 
add-on or a bad preference setting. You'll tell them to go to 
Help->Troubleshooting and they'll tell you what add-ons they have and 
what prefs they have set and you'll be able to help them.  Oh, and if 
you absolutely must verify that they're on the latest version, you can 
ask them what number the About->Troubleshooting says and you can compare 
that to what wikipedia says is the latest version of Firefox.


> Removing the version number from Help>  About does nothing for them.
> Clearly it causes inconvenience for other people. That's the whole
> issue here. I've not seen it explained well just what the *gain* from
> this change is. The loss is pretty clear because the power user
> community is screaming about it.

Most of the "power user community" isn't screaming about the version 
number moving. Actually most of the power user community is completely 
silent and a few dozen people are screaming.  But I don't think that 
most of them are screaming about the version number being relocated. I 
think if you read carefully and try to read between the lines more, 
you'll see that most people in this tread and in the other forums are 
upset about other issues like the rapid release cadence or the lack of 
concern for enterprise users or other only tangentially related issues. 
That's the real outcry and it's a rehashing of the same outcry that 
happened 6 months ago when we started the rapid release process. I think 
that the version number issue is mostly a chance to re-hash those other, 
older and more meaningful issues and not so much really about the 
version number.

That being said, there are clearly a few people making good arguments 
for why the version number should be removed. I'm trying to respond to 
those. I'm mostly not responding to the "rapid releases suck" or "you 
suck because you're not making an enterprise product" comments and I'm 
certainly not responding to the death threats, comparisons to Hitler or 
the suggestions that I be forcibly castrated :) I've got way more 
important things to do than that.

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