Re: FF 5. 0 and user interface

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2011/08/20 01:42 (GMT-0700) Asa Dotzler composed:
>
>> The good news is that we've moved to a much better system now where
>> users won't get a huge pile of changes every year or two. Instead
>> they'll see smaller changes spread out over many smaller releases
>> happening every 6 weeks. I believe this will allow us to make the same
>> kinds of changes we made between Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4 but without
>> disrupting the user like that.
>
> Good news is in the eye of the beholder. I'd rather large changes at infrequent
> intervals that I can budget time to cope with based upon a version upgrade
> announcement rather than minor disruptions at infrequent intervals slipstreamed
> into place. Hmmm, I sound like Mike Kaply, don't I. But, I'm a mere mortal
> user/advocate, not a large business admin.

IMO the ability of millions to comfortably and incrementally adapt to
UI changes trumps the ability of thousands to manage their systems.
Too different orders of magnitude.

Unfortunately for you and for those who like to keep a tight rein on
their software, for which it means more effort, and maybe more
trouble.
Everything has a drawback.


On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Stephan Hohe wrote:
> But then different Firefox installations will end up with different menus.
> And Firefoxes on your laptop/desktop/work machine all having different menus
> can't be a good thing.
Agree.

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Reuben Morais wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Stephan Hohe wrote:
>>
>> On the other hand: Unexcected changes to the menus and resulting user
>> confusion will already happen anyway due to rapid silent updates.
>>
>
> We could extend Sync to solve that problem.
I actually never heard of anyone who uses Sync. (Maybe it's not just
much talked?)
Please consider Sync as "progressive enhancement", rather than solving
not having it with "graceful degradation".