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Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers
MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things one step further and remove Firefox version numbers entirely — from the user-facing parts of the browser, anyway."
You can see the Bugzilla entry for this change, and keep up on Mozilla's reasoning and discussion through a thread on the mozilla.dev.usability newsgroup. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ... The most important thing is confidence that they're on the latest release. That's what the About dialog will give them."
Someone needs to let them know that they have a huge base of very useful, non-trivial plug-ins that people actually use, and they tend to break at least some of them with every update. We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up because frankly they're more important to us than FF itself. And now the new hotness is your addons will just start being continuously breakable at any time?
... of users not liking the inane rapid development cycle --- try to hide the rapid release of versions from the customers.
Sure it works in a world where no change ever causes a regression its fine. In the real world not so much.
That's the problem here. Firefox's ever changing APIs which are always breaking add-ons. The Chrome add-on API is much more limited and as such doesn't need to change as frequently or as drastically. How Firefox thinks they're going to succeed by becoming a crappier version of Chrome is beyond me.
This is a really stupid idea.
If the user wants to hide the version number, someone will write an extension to do that. Quit dumbing down Firefox.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Now people will think their addons break at random. I doubt the typical user will ever look at about:troubleshooting
Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.
Maybe the developers want me to have the latest version, but it's not always what I want, and above all, whether latest version or not, I want to know what I've actually got.
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
-wb-
Moz devs: "No, no. We need an add-on that shows the version number. Someone will write it."
User: "What version of FF is that add-on compatible with?"
Moz devs: "Yeah about that....fuck you."
If I have to certify my product x, works with y browser then how can my clients truly know what version of Firefox they use?
Unlike IE updates the api changes every 6 weeks and so does the html rendering and everything else. It looks like IE is the only game in town.
I am beginning to like the browser more day in and day out. Even if your job is just a help desk job it is going to be a pain to figure out which verison of the browser the client is using. If I owned a tech support company I would be strongly in favor of telling the clients to only use IE or I wont support you. Just too much variation and this is an alpha/beta quality product as far as I am concerned. Truly stable products do not update every few weeks.
http://saveie6.com/
and I'll also be dumping Firefox from the list of "supported browsers" on the sites I release
"I've found this bug in Firefox ..."
"Do you run the latest version?"
"I don't know. I'm running the version my distro gives me."
"So which one is it?"
"I don't know. It won't tell me."
"Please update to the latest version."
"Well, I already have the latest version my distro gives me. If this is actually the latest version, I have no idea."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why does Mozilla keep treating Firefox like it's something they need to apologize for? Firefox has the best add-ons out there, hands down. And it's been around for years. Why are they acting like Chrome and others are setting the standards now? Why do they act like they're in some kind of pissing contest with Google? Google is the one with something to prove here, not Mozilla.
Just knock it off and stick to your strengths.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm going to start using his name for boneheaded changes done for "me too" reasons and decision by committee.
"Man, T-Mobile really Dotzler'd their unlimited plan."
I'm not so sure I'm entirely keen on this.
From an IT perspective, it's helpful to know what versions people are running. And, from a practical perspective, who the heck updates every single day?
This is like agile development and continuously running the steaming build from last night ... it seems to completely violate any notion of a tested, supportable version of software, and turns it into a thing that is completely difficult to nail down. It's just a constantly evolving piece of software. So if something was broken for a day or so, you'll never really know WTF it was.
Hell, having done QA and the like ... the version of the browser you're running is part of the stuff you need to know so you know what you support. You can't even begin to say your software supports Firefox if you can't say anything more than "well, whatever Firefox looked like in January, we know it works on that".
I've dealt with a vendor who pretty much does constant releases of their software (several times/week), and their idiot support people mostly won't listen to you until you're running the latest version. It takes me several weeks to promote a version through my environments to do testing and get approvals, and you think my production instance is running the steaming turd you released on Friday?? How do you expect I've managed to do that? By having no control whatsoever as to what is deployed?
I'm pretty sure that for some organizations, this is going to make it really difficult to use Firefox. I'm pretty sure that in at least one or two places I've worked, this would be a complete non-starter.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
From one of the posts in the group...
Microsoft Guidelines show version number in their About Box example.
----------
Excerpt from Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines:
About ApplicationName
Opens the About window, which contains the app's copyright information
and version number.
----------
Excerpt from GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.2: ...contains the name and version number of the application, a short
Help About
description of the application's functionality, author contact
details, copyright message and a pointer to the licence under which
the application is made available.
----------
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox
will comply with after implementation of bug 678775?
No responses so far in favor of the idea... I'll toss one out:
1) No more coding some bizarre non-standard garbage code to a specific version of the software anymore. I'm looking at you, JAVA coders. And those guys still stuck in Internet Explorer 6 or whatever from 1999. You want it to work? Don't write to a browser version, write to a standard. I LIKE IT that it will be impossible to write for a browser version. I want a standards compliant browser, not version 12.345.2-19 of a browser and memorization of which sites require -20 and with can't work on anything newer than -18.
2) No more write it and forget it, never to be updated again. Updates will have to be a process not a project. You literally can't be bothered to test if your "xyz extension" is compatible with the latest version? Well, then we can't be bothered to use it anymore. That sound you're hearing is thousands of pure cruft addons getting flushed. Bye bye. Don't let the door hit you on your post-processor.
This is a business model change, and a wise one. Not a technical code change. I am no FF fanboy, they've done some really stupid things lately like "tabs on top". But this is actually a good idea.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sure, it's the responsibility of the developers of the addons to fix the problems created by Mozilla.
about:support
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Caller: "My computer will not boot into Windows"
Support: "What version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "But what version of Windows are you running?"
Caller: "Windows"
Support: "..."
With what versions is this extension compatible?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
> ... because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough ...
So let's see, we are both talking about developers who spend their own free time writing FF add-ons and give them away for free? Because "lazy" and "don't care enough" isn't exactly the first thing that comes to my mind about them.
The problem is that Firefox changes its plugin apis. So all that service would give is "Your plugin is not working"
The author of the plugin still have to update the add-on.
Lets look at The gwt plugin as an example:
To quote the Google developers (From 28 Jun 01:21) (Which is 7 days AFTER the release of Firefox 5).
"I'll note that Mozilla didn't have an OSX 64 bit SDK released until this morning, and that was a blocker for our ability to release. Once the process for their new release schedule settles down, we'll hopefully be able to have quicker turnaround. That may take a couple of releases, however."
So the needed SDK vas not released until 7 days after firefox 5. Add to the 7 days the time it take Google to update and test their plugin, and you have a case where gwt users have a month where they can get either security updates, or use their gwt plugin. But not both.
Isn't that what add-on authors are doing in the first place? (sarcasm.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
are you missing that the 'best feature' firefox brought so far, is the idea of extensions ?
Read radical news here
Could someone please post references to the relevant standards Firefox will comply with
RFC 9.402.001: Dicking around with vesion numbers and GUI behavior in lieu of performing actual work
Oh for the love of God, Firefox admins, what's going on, does the sweet, sweet, wall candy taste good? Your Aunt Mom tell you you are a special little snowflake and never mind what the bad, bad real world has to say?
I love Firefox. I really do, but honestly, it's like they are trying to be as stupid as humanly possible. I'm getting sick of "my way or the highway" program developers breaking things and telling me that they've been fixed. Do you morons notice how your market share is shrinking? Do you notice that you're producing nothing but bad press these days and people are getting pissed off at you? So your answer to this is to get in everyone's face and tell them to suck it up or go away? What are you, Tea Party-ists?
I work in tech. I need version numbers to tell what the hell people have. "You have the latest version" lies all the time like a cheap rug.
Firefox - it's this type of attitude that got me to switch from Ubuntu, where they've developed the same attitude that negative feedback means they're doing the job right. Learn a lesson here or lose more market share.
Time to purge some MBAs from management, you bozos.
Mozilla doesn't give me features. Addon developers do.
Opera has features. Safari has features. Firefox has... a rendering engine and a cadre of passionate programmers who make the browser palatable for Mozilla at no charge.
I would understand this particular trend in Mozilla if their browser actually did anything useful besides view web pages out-of-the-box. But it doesn't, and so I don't.
I guess the bottom line for this one is that I'm now, as a web developer, going to have to treat Firefox as a completely unsupported browser. Sure, I can go to the about:support page for my testing if I want, but when I get a bug report from an end user, how much effort is Mozilla expecting me to put in just to support whatever flavor of the week they have now?
When this "fix" is committed to Firefox, it officially comes off the list of officially supported browsers. If clients want support for Firefox, I'm not charging extra to recuperate the extra costs it will inevitably incur.
FanFictionRecs.net
Do not blame Mozilla because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough to update their addons properly
But I do blame Mozilla for starting down the path of a rapid-release cycle that is unneeded and unwanted by Firefox users. I do not blame the addon developers if they choose not to participate in the egregiously inane rapid-release cycle that Firefox is using.
The root problem is not with the addon developers, no matter how much you try to deflect the issue.
The root problem is the foolish and resource-wasteful rapid-release cycle that Firefox has engaged.
The fricking bug that makes it hang and sit (not responding) for 4-12 seconds at a time at random intervals on page loads once in a while? I am about to completely give up on it because of that. IT happens a LOT of slashdot, I would blame the poorly written CSS that slashdot uses (still get the jump to the top of page when you click on the commend dialog text box once in a while as well) but I've see it on Cisco.com as well as motorola.com
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself.
The non-technical end user should never - ever - be told to jump through these hoops.
The user doesn't understand the rules for development or the relationship between the developer and Mozilla. They only know that the Firefox browser has disabled an extension they need.
This is a bigger problem for web developers IMO. How am I supposed to take bug reports? Web developers typically have to support just about any version released in the last 5 years or so to be safe. How am I supposed to do that now?
The only solution I see is to just not support Firefox, then allow clients to pay the development costs associated with supporting it. Just the process of taking bug reports will be hours of endless run-arounds trying to figure out what version I can duplicate some random idiosyncrasy in.
FanFictionRecs.net
have all gotten serious cases of dumbtarditis.
THIS! exactly THIS!
and Yes I have notice that it seems that almost everyone in a position of power lately have become complete retards.
Good ideas innovative ideas forward thinking... None of that exists lately. It's all changes for the sake of trendy change.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have the Firefox developers gone entirely mad? I thought their rapid release schedule was stupid, but this is just plain asinine. No, in a perfect world, we would all be happiest and more productive if we were using the newest version, but we don't live in a perfect world. New versions introduce new bugs, they break addons, and, even if the new version is completely bug-free, it may not play nice with a Web site that has problems with its content or Web server.
And, as someone else already said, IT departments aren't going to like this. It's not that they're inefficient or resistant to change, but, when you're supporting several thousand desktops, you have to make sure that shiny new release isn't actually a polished turd or that it won't break something else. If something goes wrong, it may be easy to fix a problem if you're only concerned with a few machines, but what happens when that update you just pushed out to 3,000 desktops has a show-stopping problem you never saw coming? And yes, it happens. Just ask HTC about the disastrous update to the HTC Thunderbolt that caused the phone to start randomly rebooting, sometimes several times a day. I have no doubt the update was tested, and both they and Verizon were confident it was ready for deployment. Well, it wasn't. Bugs, often serious ones, can get by the most stringent testing.
Someone at Mozilla needs to put the brakes on this harebrained idea immediately, if not sooner.
it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ...
Not all of us WANT to run the latest version. Not all of us WANT to update every time you push your supposed "latest and greatest".
This, next to Linux, is the clearest example of Rule #1 of IT: Never let a programmer program your application.
This constant push to have "shiny" shoved down everyone's throats without regard to what the end user wants must stop. People have no idea what they're running now so your dictatorial forcing of upgrades does nothing to make people feel comfortable with the software they're using.
Maybe YOU want to have the latest version, but I don't. And as is said on here on a daily basis, once it's on my machine, I'll do what I want with it.
It looks like it's time to move to another browser and stop suggesting people move from IE to Fx. Congratulations you arrogant pricks, you've jumped the shark.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mozilla Corporation gets most of the funding from Google, and so it's no surprise that Firefox is becoming more like Chrome.
Are many of the influential people involved with Firefox development Google employees? And/or many Google die-hard fanboys? If so that alone explains much of it ...
As to what the end game is?... Firefox, while keeping its branding / look, becoming a Chrome clone? -or- Firefox simply being made redundant, and eventually killed off, by getting most Firefox users over to Chrome - from anecdotal reports, people are switching in droves.
What gets me is where are the FORKS? ... if big corporations and developers rely on Firefox, why aren't any forking recent versions of it? Imho, 3.6x would be a fantastic fork point, and improve on that.
I don't understand why people get into such a huge fuss about changing the fecking version number, it's probably the most inconsequential part of the entire browser?
Because most people want software that, you know, works.
They don't want things to randomly break and force them to spend half an hour on Google trying to fix it.
They don't want to be forced to upgrade to a new version that removes useful features.
They don't want to be forced to upgrade to a new version simply because the developers refuse to port security fixes back to the old one.
When a software developer starts to imagine they're more important than their users, they soon discover they don't have any users anymore.
1- take a perfectly working version numbering scheme
2- mess it up to try and look like Chrome, come with all love Chrome for its sexy, round version numbers. And for nothing else.
3- get rid of version numbers entirely rather than admit you're idiots,lose face, and backtrack
4- enjoy the entertaining confusion about updates, addon compatibility, features, security....
5- watch your userbase exodus to saner pastures
6- ???
7- Profit ! (for Google)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There's also the user-agent string.
The problem is with Mozilla, and every other open source developer who thinks their way is best and to hell with the users and add-on developers. An established user base requires stability and consistency, not this months idea of what a web browser should look like. Sure, let users customize and tweak if they want to, but leave the underlying experience the same.
The Slashdot crowd may be vocal and anti the new Firefox, but the Mozilla developers need to sit up and take note. The vast majority of their current user base don't care enough to complain - they just switched to Chrome or IE. A significant number of friends and family who I converted to Firefox over the years have switched to Chrome in the past six months.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
The discussion thread link is pretty illuminating reading. It shows just how disconnected from what people actually want FF to work on these guys have become.
Why does the UI team want to remove something from Help > About that exists in basically every program there is (and is a standard on basically every major OS)? Because they think they're cool. That's why. Don't like it? You're not cool.
They need to fire Asa and the entire UI team over there. That's the only way they'll stop the bleeding of users that is going on now. These guys are completely out to lunch and are just wasting effort chasing their own tail instead of doing things that users are actually asking for.
Oh well. At one point this was a great project, now it's just a dysfunctional one. That's what happens when you get management heavy and management gets spooked about market share. They try to take shortcuts instead of simply improving the product.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Ofcourse you are able to version check.
It just is the user-visible number in the title-bar they are removing.
That is it, that is all.
New things are always on the horizon
You know what else isn't too hard? Touching your nose. Perhaps you should do that while surfing the web?
The point being that this creates problems without solving anything. What value does this bring? All I see is Mozilla purposely deciding to create problems by solving issues that don't exist.
FanFictionRecs.net
I write and maintain an addon used by my employer's customers. The addon is part of the software suite we sell and contains proprietary intellectual property - so it is not available to the public. The addons break due version number changes and too-rapid release cycle creates a burden on addon developers.
Here on slashdot is a lot of people from IT field. The majority expresses themselves against these steps planned by Mozilla. But they still keep going. So if they are not listening to IT crowd, who do they listen to?
The vast majority of their current user base don't care enough to complain - they just switched to Chrome or IE.
What should worry Mozilla is that a number of linux distributions are switching. Even Ubuntu itself had the switch from Firefox to Chromium on the plate for 11.10. I would place a bet on it actually happening for the 12.04 LTS. Ubuntu, like it or not, wields a lot of clout within the open source community and when they decide to make the switch it makes a lot of distributions look long and hard at following suit.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Do not blame Mozilla because addon creators are too lazy or don't care enough to update their addons properly, or take advantage of a service Mozilla offers them. Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself.
You've conveniently skipped over those changes that really break existing add-ons. Autorolling the version range won't magically rewrite an add-on that depends on a toolbar or menu or behind-the-scenes-hook that Mozilla decided to remove or drastically change between versions.
As for lazy devs not rewriting their add-ons - As a developer myself, I can find the time to deal with Major Platform X releasing a new version once or twice a year. I do not have the time to try to keep up with this new "gotta beat Google at their own game despite them paying people to do this" monthly release philosophy. And if you want to tell me "good riddance", you certainly have every right to do that; And when the authors of Adblock, NoScript, Firebug, Download Helper, or a dozen others, decide they would rather have a life than play catch-up? Good riddance to the lot of 'em, we can always just use Chrome instead?
And as for "blame" - I would prefer Mozilla stop this shit, but I don't blame them. I just won't upgrade until all my "must-have" add-ons work.
Why would someone that doesn't like Firefox updating every 6 weeks switch to Chrome - the browser that invented the 6-week update idea?
Both of those browsers update every 6 weeks, and those 6-week updates do change the user interface, functionality, web API support, etc.
If you want a stable browser, your options are IE, Safari and Opera, and not Firefox or Chrome.
I have a dozen installations that report "Firefox 5.0 is up to date" and another dozen that report "Firefox 5.0.1" is up to date, all at the same bloody time! The only way to get a 5.0 installation to report 5.0.1 is to download the latest full installer from Mozilla. So, do I really need to go update my 5.0 machines manually or are they somehow internally running all the 5.0.1 patches and still reporting 5.0? Maybe they are getting an old status page from my proxy server. I finally decided it was faster to to just reinstall than troubleshoot the mess. I get through that and already 6.0 is here. At least I still know that they are planning to screw me with a new version tomorrow. Given such a screwed up versioning/update system, they now want to drop version numbers entirely. WTF!
I had a big post typed up about deploying and supporting Firefox in a university where webapps are critical for both student and staff, but you know, screw it. If it wasn't for the fact that I just made the system image for this Fall a few days ago I would pull Firefox out. I don't know what's up with this ridiculous "I know better than the users" behavior that's pervading more and more large open source projects, but it's turned me off of adopting Linux for my own desktops, and it's made me lose faith in Firefox. With the rapid release cycle, UI changes, and now this (which no other browser that I know of does), I might as well just recommend Chrome to people. At least it won't leak memory.
(Yeah, I'm pissed off. You know how hard it is to get large organizations to adopt open source software? Screw Firefox.)
My wife has about 10 websites that she frequents that don't support anything above FF3.6. IIRC Chrome stopped being supported around Chr6 on most of these sites. IE is supported up to IE8.
This is the same thing you see with all the add-ons.
Please fix this Mozilla. I hate having to explain to my wife how to check the supported browser page for these sites, now I have to show her how to check the FF version as well (which certainly won't be supported for what she intends to use it for anyways)?
- A Browser is more adaptable, in general more up to date with new technologies and probably easier to develop/maintain by focusing on smaller steadier releases.
If you accept this then you should also accept:
- With frequent releases, you don't want regular users to be constantly be hassled with updating their browser / add ons and flashing a new version number in their face, especially when there isn't much difference between versions.
And in general, the version number of a browser is just confusing and irrelevant to regular users.
For anyone concerned about tech support situations, the troubleshooting URL about:support will stay. Initially I was concerned about this as well, but it's not THAT serious.