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I hate to say all these things because I use Firefox all the time, but...the communication around the add-ons issue has been poorly handled by Mozilla. I only l

I hate to say all these things because I use Firefox all the time, but...the communication around the add-ons issue has been poorly handled by Mozilla. I only learned of the problem by visiting HN. But what of the thousands of other users who don't visit HN? If you visit the Mozilla homepage, there is nothing to acknowledge the problem (at least at the time of writing this message). Let's try the Support page. Where is it? Scroll down to the bottom of the lengthy Mozilla homepage to the page footer to find the link. (How many visitors will make it to the bottom?) When you click through to the Support page, an easy-to-miss banner in tiny text appears at the top of the page that mentions the problem - screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/TAHZSWa https://imgur.com/a/TAHZSWa Additionally, when the add-ons are disabled, Firefox misleading says: "These extensions do not meet current Firefox standards so they have been deactivated". This is probably a generic message but it's also an example when a generic message is misleading. Finally, poorly-named settings like "Normandy" and "studies" that give no hint of their meaning only adds to the confusion.

ekianjo 8y ago
That's sadly not the first time Mozilla fails to communicate appropriately about issues/changes that are pushed down to the end users. They should reshuffle some of their Marketing Resources to work on proper non-promotional communication instead, so that current users at least know what to deal with.
notimetorelax 8y ago
The way I see it, people might have gotten used to software break from time to time. Once software breaks it is reasonable to expect it to get fix in a couple days when it is updated. At least this was probably the experience for the majority of users, those that noticed the issue.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  The sad reality is Mozilla has been losing mindshare to Chrome for a long time and this will rapidly accelerate it. People don't expect things to break. They expect things to work, and when things break they get angry. I love Firefox. It's my daily driver. It will continue to be. But this is a huge fuck-up and they're probably going to pay big in usership because of it.

ekianjo 8y ago

That's sadly not the first time Mozilla fails to communicate appropriately about issues/changes that are pushed down to the end users. They should reshuffle some of their Marketing Resources to work on proper non-promotional communication instead, so that current users at least know what to deal with.

notimetorelax 8y ago

The way I see it, people might have gotten used to software break from time to time. Once software breaks it is reasonable to expect it to get fix in a couple days when it is updated. At least this was probably the experience for the majority of users, those that noticed the issue.

orthecreedence 8y ago
The sad reality is Mozilla has been losing mindshare to Chrome for a long time and this will rapidly accelerate it. People don't expect things to break. They expect things to work, and when things break they get angry. I love Firefox. It's my daily driver. It will continue to be. But this is a huge fuck-up and they're probably going to pay big in usership because of it.