Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers 683
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."
Re:Version information can be important (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Don't worry the memory leaks are still there, a couple times I week I kill it and restart it just to lower its memory usage.
This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, it's the responsibility of the developers of the addons to fix the problems created by Mozilla.
Dear God, what art these people thinking???!!! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Are they -trying- to kill Firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
Linux users might be in trouble for sure and this is a great way to kill Linux at the desktop at work
Note that until the end of time, iceweasel will be at 3.5.16 in Debian Squeeze release (currently Squeeze is aliased to stable; some day "soon" wheezy will be released and that is currently 5.0 and then may remain forever after at 5.0)
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/iceweasel [debian.org]
I don't know if windows is capable of this kind of rollout, where you prevent upgrading and whatever you put in the repo just works. But for "linux on the desktop" this is pretty trivial.