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."
I like it (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
How about removing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.