- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,377
Was reading an article regarding the Firefox updates: http://evilbrainjono.net/blog?showcomments=true&permalink=1094
Here are some highlights from this post:
So what's your opinion about Firefox and the rapid release process?
Here are some highlights from this post:
I've had this conversation with dozens of people across three continents. Not one person has had anything good to say about the rapid release process. Nearly 100% of my highly unscientific survey volunteered the information -- unasked, unprompted -- that the rapid release process had ruined Firefox for them.
After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization athat the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often! Let it remain stable long enough for us to learn it and get good at it. There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now have to relearn.
Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need. Developers have an emotional connection to the project; users don't.
To summarize: we did the updates in a very intrusive way, requiring lots of user attention, which made people annoyed because it happened so often. When people restarted after an update to find no visible difference, they wondered what was so important about that update. (Remember the rule that the benefit of the update needs to outweigh the pain? We broke that rule.) Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion.
So what's your opinion about Firefox and the rapid release process?