You stated, “Whether Firefox 13 should be called 4.1.8 or 5 or 13 or 2012.3 is completely irrelevant. It’s practically invisible to users. There is no canonical version numbering scheme. They don’t mean anything except that a larger number is released later.”

It is relevant to anyone using addons. Major version number changes break addons. And that is the biggest ongoing complaint by any user, even since “Compatible by default” was featured in v10. And I’ve responded to over 8,000 email over the last year my Mozilla users.

What we all know he means to level against Mozilla is…

“We [Took] Our Users[' Aversion to Intrusion] For Granted[, As Clearly Evidenced By Our Now Admitted Lack of Foresight Over The Update Experience]”

Saying that “we didn’t take our users for granted” when the crappy update process did, for a time, exist, doesn’t excuse, but *prove* Jono’s point. You were so far in the forest, all you saw were trees. “Sure, it sucked, and sure, Chrome’s % is going up, but it was all for YOU!” These are not the boyfriends girls keep (SOs we keep?).

What you do now is thank Jono for identifying a weak period in Firefox’s development, try to have better and more representative user testing in the future, *apologize to Jono and users*, turn the bad pub into good by capitalizing on the opportunity to pimp the new update process, wear the egg, and move on.

Don’t fight great criticism. Embrace and redirect it.

I like the rapid release and I like not having to wait a year or more for improvements.

I hated having my extensions break every six weeks – that was the disruptive part and it’s been resolved. And before rapid-release, x.y updates were just as disruptive to extensions. I *detested* pulling down a security fix and finding that 1/3 of my extensions didn’t work – the more so because the extensions I run are critical to my workflow. All RR did was expose how broken the relationship between extensions and updates truly was.

I am neutral about silent vs. doing the update explicitly, as long as it works with a restricted user – i.e. the updater must know that I am restricted and either elevate or not attempt (and then fail) the update. Personally, I would prefer a notification popup with “Do It” and “Remind me later” options, as long as “Do It” actually worked as a restricted user.

You can say it’s not happening in that Mozilla isn’t doing it, but it’s certainly happening in the sense that users feel that way.

I suspect that Mozilla’s non-profit nature may insulate it from users. For-profit businesses are highly dependent on their customers and go out of their way to maintain a good relationship with them; for example, nobody would make public statements like the Mozilla employee mentioned above, and if they did the company would apologize, retract the statement, and likely fire the employee to assuage customers — compare that to Mozilla’s response. In a for-profit business, if sales drop then the people responsible are often replaced– does anyone lose their job at Mozilla if Firefox usage drops? It seems like the same pressure and relationship with customers is not there.

I’m not advocating that Mozilla needs to be for-profit, but that one it should be aware that those market signals are what make businesses responsive to customer demand, and one weakness of being non-profit is that Mozilla doesn’t receive them as strongly as for-profit companies.

George…

All this seems to happen without ANY regard to the users. I’m a Nightly fan and love getting the newest things and reporting bugs too. Things like the replacement of the “downloads” popup vs the one Nightly has now that’s imbedded are a good example of my complaints. The new popup seems to steal the input focus so that I can not switch to an xterm or other app without having this new popup disappear. If I’m trying to copy data from the popup, I’m just out of luck.

All these problems that I see and hear about really do point to a seeming lack of consideration of the users by FF developers AND architects and what the users want. In my experience, if you tell customers no too frequently, they’ll go elsewhere.

I want FF to succeed! This is why I use Nightly and suffer (sic) with the daily updates.

I still use Firefox because it ships with my OS. And it is still a great browser.

But with everything bad there is something good if lessons are learned. If there is something Firefox will be able to compete with Chrome are those users. It’s more than only listen to users, the development should be user-driven. Add-Ons were an important corner-stone in that process. These updates last year were basically an Add-On slaughtering, a killing spree with your users. The software has taken over it’s users: Update or I’ll kill you.

Silent updates alone might not solve this. You can still break stuff – now even silently.

Now you tell something about lessons learned and I see first-hand technical feature descriptions as strategy of defense. But you can not solve communication problems with a technical processing. The problem is buried much deeper. Mozilla need to analyse and explain by the best sense of the word why such massive wrong decisions have been made last year. I bet the reasons are non-technical.

I am tired to listen to technical explanations. That’s how you can talk with developers if you try to convince them for something. But I’m a user, too.

One of the best benefits we have is that the only thing we need to care about are our users. There is no other agenda. No company agenda or whatever. Let’s become free again, I’d like to see more free thinking in dealing with all these problems.

Mozilla is not Google. There is no company agenda that needs to create crippled smartphone or minimal desktop devices that only need to run a browser that does everything. That’s even a very short-term strategy taking into account how fast those devices change.

Why do you aim at those devices? Who needs that crap? Let the commercial development sector feed those devices and can’t we just get a working browser that is safe, flexible, takes care of privacy, takes care about web-standards and has long term support for websites of day 0 and beyond?

Thank you. Yes you’re getting better again. But part of it would be if you find out why you did such a wrong decision first-hand.

How about you start to pick the oldest open bugs and think about why you were not able to fix them since ages? As a developer I much love these bug databases. Those issues all tell a lesson, and the older bugs tell the best lessons. There are things we don’t want to do as developers, there are things we are afraid to touch and all that stuff. There are even just things that went out of sight.

Can you stand to fix the ten oldest open tickets within each of your six week release cycles. Just the ten oldest. Just fixed. Per each release. Can you stand it?

Whether Firefox 13 should be called 4.1.8 or 5 or 13 or 2012.3 is completely irrelevant. It’s practically invisible to users. There is no canonical version numbering scheme. They don’t mean anything except that a larger number is released later.

You really don’t prove any point (except perhaps in 3) in your point. No examples, just anecdotal evidence. If you want to convince anybody that rapid releases are bad, bring up some hard facts.