Version numbers and an update from the UX team

Hello there, you might find yourself wondering why no one from the UX team
has commented in the ongoing discussion about version numbers over the past
4 days.

Sorry about that, half of the team is out on vacation, and the rest of us
were out at a user research offsite, so I'm just now getting a chance to
read all of this.  You may have also noticed that no one from the UX team
commented in the bug itself, again also sorry about the delay.

== I personally believe the following things are true ==

-Making the about window primarily designed to achieve the task of checking
"am I up to date" is great
-Some technical users are reacting in a jaded way to large version bumps
like 5, 6 and 7 because it took us several years for both 3 or 4, the sudden
change in interval comes off as cheating even though that wasn't the
intention (just need to get changes out faster to further progress on the
Web)
-If a user reads that 7.0.1 was released and they don't see this in the
dialog box, they will be confused if we claim 7.0 is the most up to date
version
-Multiple decimal places in version numbers is silly, and is pretty much
only encountered in the realm of software
-Version numbers are generally speaking technical jargon, and user
experience designers generally speaking like to try to remove instances of
jargon
-Some technical users really want to see the version number in an easy way
for legitimate reasons (web developers, extension developers, IT, etc.)
these people are a minority, but like the people who need to access view
source or developer tools, they are also important. Since they are building
stuff you could even argue that they are very disproportionately important
-Under the current model we are headed towards version 47, and that is just
going to sound silly in a world used to seeing small version numbers

== One possible proposed solution (also proposed by many other people
through many channels ==

We de-jargonify the version number, and make it time based.

Format is 2011.1, 2011.2, etc. We refer to point releases simply as "a patch
to 2011.7", and we avoid press statements that include multiple decimal
places to limit all around user confusion.

We refer to the versions as "the fourth release of 2012" as a long form in
some public statements, instead of 2012.4, to further de-jargonify it and
make it human readable, but they are otherwise the same thing.

Overall keeping the version number around in the about dialog doesn't really
diminish the work to make the dialog primarily about confirming that you are
running the newest version (or that you need to apply an update), and that
is from my perspective the larger UI win here.

== Why so much emotion? ==

I think the reason this debate became so emotional is that some people want
to change client side software to behave like the Web (where the user has no
control over version), and some people simply aren't comfortable with that
model. The existence of version numbers is functionally kind of peripheral
to that debate, but nonetheless served as an effective lightning rod for a
growing storm of controversy. Ironically removing the version number wasn't
even the central point of the bug (which was primarily about further
streamlining the process of checking for updates).

So that's a quick summary of what is on the UX team's mind.

On a more personal note, I think the way that Asa has been treated over the
past few days by a few members of the Mozilla community has been shockingly
inappropriate.  Just because this is the internet and you are hiding behind
a screen a keyboard doesn't give one the moral justification to act in a
completely uncivilized manner.  We love intellectual debate, but please
remember to attack things, and not people (note the follow up thread).

-Alex