Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

I haven't chimed in on this discussion so far, but I can't stay out of
it any longer.

On Aug 20, 5:44 pm, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:

> After reading several hundreds very passionate
> comments, it became clear that it wasn't really this version number bug
> that most people were upset about. It was actually the move the rapid
> release process and this was just one tiny aspect of that move that
> caused a lot of people who hadn't before realized that we were
> transitioning to a new model to suddenly realize that.

Then I'm not most people. (You probably knew that). I think the rapid
release process is a great idea, but there's a lot of collateral
damage. We're moving *fast* now, and that has a lot of implications
all across the ecosystem.
I just spent a fair bit of time helping an extremely savvy user deal
with the fact that add-ons that are critical to his daily use of the
browser are not compatible with Fx6. Earlier in this thread, you
wrote:

> Add-ons that you already had installed which are compatible will be
> enabled in your latest version of Firefox and will just work. Add-ons
> which are not compatible with your latest version of Firefox will be
> disabled.

And the upgrade flow for people who use and depend on incompatible
addons was apparently enough of a UX failure that he wrote to me
saying:
 "It never warned me that this operation would break my system (and
give me the option to cancel), it simply broke things then told me I
was screwed." I reproduced his issue, and while his statement isn't
accurate, the UX is bad enough that I can easily see why he thought
that. We cannot yet assume that every user will always be able to
upgrade, and so the statement that users are either current or about-
to-be-current is false. It's a laudable goal, but it's not reality
yet.

This sounds like I'm veering into a rant about the evils of rapid
release. I'm not. But we haven't completely addressed the
consequences. Until we do, making it harder for users to figure out
what version of Firefox their running is counter-productive. This is
the *last* thing we should change on the path to making version
numbers irrelevant. It is not the *next* thing we should change.

When version numbers *truly* don't matter, then I think making them
invisible is a great idea. Making them invisible now is just sweeping
problems under the rug.

-Zandr