Developments in Mozilla-land

Posted Aug 26, 2011 0:06 UTC (Fri) by frabcus (guest, #25169)
In reply to: Developments in Mozilla-land by Baylink
Parent article: Developments in Mozilla-land

Asa's suggestion is, naturally, barking mad from a desktop interface point of view.

But from a web services point of view, it is already utterly standard.

Where's the Help|About dialog with version number in, say, Google Docs?

What Asa is trying to do is make the software update process for browsers the same as the software update process for web services. When you report an error, you would just say "it is in the current version" - because it must be, because you're (always) running the current version.

You can argue whether this is a good or bad thing. But I'm sure you agree that desktop and web applications are increasingly blurring together, and stealing each others benefits. Not having to worry about updates is, for most users, a benefit.

But I think it would be better if we added version numbers to web services, rather than took them away from desktop applications...

Developments in Mozilla-land

Posted Aug 26, 2011 7:29 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (2 responses)

> Where's the Help|About dialog with version number in, say, Google Docs?

Google Docs doesn't have to be updated via my distros package manager, so I don't care :). Firefox will never have any business (or rights) on my box to update itself over the Internet, and then version information starts becoming more interesting. Oh well, distros can always add the stuff back :), that's what they are for...

But enough words have been spilled over that change already, so I better shut up.

Developments in Mozilla-land

Posted Aug 26, 2011 7:32 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux is negligible portion of the Firefox user base. This change was obviously proposed with Windows users in mind who are indeed auto updated to the latest version by default in Firefox. In any case, this proposal has been dropped and not much of a point in discussing it further.

Developments in Mozilla-land

Posted Aug 29, 2011 13:01 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

Maybe so, but the only think I think when I see the upgrade box is "which plugins will break this time". I started with several add-ons, I think only three have survived the last two upgrades. I expect in two months I'll have no add-ons at all.