Re: Found Asa's first comment about version numbers.

On 8/19/2011 11:50 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> Greywolf wrote:
>> On 19/08/2011 9:01 PM, André Neves wrote:
>>> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 2:54 AM, Greywolf<[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> (...)
>>>> Sorry, I _strongly_ disagree. "Check for updates" is there for those
>>>> who
>>>> want to know, so add the "20 minutes ago" there.
>>> I can't see that, can you tell me where?
>>> Not in the About menu, at least.
>>
>> Oh oh, I was talking about FF 3.6 If it's gone for FF5.0, that's another
>> reason not to move to 5.0 on this box. (My wife's laptop has FF 5.0, I'm
>> discovering more and more annoyances about it, I think I may ask her try
>> out IE9 instead.)
>
> Graywolf, I'm not going to say bad things about IE9 (it's a pretty good
> browser. I even use it about 1/3rd of the time to feel what the people I
> want to move to Firefox are feeling :-) but I think that if your wife
> found Firefox 5 to be far too different from Firefox 3.6 that she'll
> find IE9 to be even further and even more unfamiliar and annoying.
>
> Of course, she should try it. People should definitely experience all of
> the modern browsers and use the one that suits them best, but I think
> that participating in making Firefox better is probably a better path to
> getting your wife a more comfortable browser than moving her to IE9.
> With our rapid release cycle, we can make really strong usability
> improvements very quickly now. It's not like the old days where you had
> to wait a year or more to see improvements.
>
> - A

I switched my wife's computer from 3.6 to FF4 some time ago, and she 
didn't notice, or at least didn't comment.  Why?  Because I took the 
time to install a theme that made it LOOK like 3.6, and added a couple 
of extensions that added back some missing items, turned on the menubar, 
and, basically restored the old, familiar user interface (sorry UX 
guys).  This greatly reduced the 'culture shock' of the transition.  I 
fully agree than progress is a wonderful thing, but applying too many 
changes in a user interface over too short a time is a real shock to a 
user who has little experience with such things.  The UX team needs to 
learn to see it from the point of view of users like my wife.  Want to 
borrow her for testing?