On Feb 22, 4:01 am, Wes Garland <
[hidden email]> wrote:
> Some group of users will always complain about change. News at 11.
See, that is what I would consider a dodge and a dismissal. I thought
it became clear previously that there are legitimate and far reaching
issues with hiding the version number in a non-standard place. Sure,
there will always be complaints about change, but there's a big
difference between personal preference and standards compliance.
There's also a reason why what goes viral goes viral.
> What's the big deal? It's a number.
If the ever-increasing value of the major version number is truly
trivial and not an embarrassment, why does it seem as if there was
such a need to hide it?
After the decision was made, it seems like every time the topic was
brought up, the general solution was, "We don't need version numbers!
We can hide it! We wont support anything but the current version!
Enterprise is not supported!"
All four of which seem incredibly naive to me. Version numbers are
needed because Firefox wont be able enforce updates on every computer
on which it is installed through general network failure, explicit DNS
or IP address blocking, read only root or /usr filesystems, lack of
root access, or any number of existing or future problems that can and
most certainly will ensure that not all computers attempting to run
Firefox will be up to date. If for no other reason than to tell the
user the version they are running is not supported.
The only reasoning I can recall for hiding it that didn't seem like it
was some romanticism about having Firefox pretend to be something it
isn't was that it could confuse people. You'll have to forgive me if I
don't buy any other explanation than the primary reasoning for hiding
it being that it was considered an embarrassment. Especially since
that was the response whenever the rapid rate of major version number
bumping was brought up.
I can understand the difficulty with supporting 10 different versions
of Firefox with any number of arbitrary changes to any subsystem back
and forth between versions. But to simply refuse to, or to plan to
refuse to, is the opposite of progress. It's not like the old routines
stopped working for the versions they worked for, unless, I dunno, the
support guides were written in a style of HTML that modern browsers
don't render usably anymore.
Given that forced updates are about the only reason Firefox became
ineligible for enterprise use, I can hardly see what's happened to
Firefox as forward movement. It's consolidation on a very specific use
case, throwing all others to the wind as if the difference between
supporting only the "average user" and supporting virtually anybody
were more than 100 lines of code in difference.
If failure to link on certain platforms isn't an indication of toxic
levels of failure to maintain internal modularity, I don't know what
is.
What I really want to know is how it got to be like this. I'm not
interested in singling out one bad decision and the identities of the
people involved in making it. I want to know the process by which
decisions like this are made, because as far as I can tell, it looked
reasonable on the surface to the people involved at the time it was
made. I'm not interested in reviving the debate or trying to change
the direction Firefox is going or any other manner of dead horse
beating, I simply want to know what happened, regardless of whether
any one person thinks the decision was a good one or not.
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