3 ms·

I don't entirely disagree with most of what you said, but I think you underestimate the challenges. I own a small start-up, so I know how nice it is to operate

I don't entirely disagree with most of what you said, but I think you underestimate the challenges. I own a small start-up, so I know how nice it is to operate at a small scale. I let my employees chose their own browser, but I require that they keep it up to date. I can do that because I don't have to worry about supporting 500 people. I've also consulted for very large corporations. The same disruptive ideology that applies to start-ups falls flat with large corporations. The biggest mistake is to take a unilateral position with them. They will fall back to IE. They will stagnate on old versions if we don't work with them. Is that what you want? Maybe your product can avoid the corporate space altogether, but there are a lot of us who rely on them. I don't want to re-live IE6. I want browser makers to acknowledge that changing the corporate world isn't the same as creating Google or Facebook. It's far less glamorous and usually means doing shit in a way that you don't like for longer than you like. Change is coming, but it's coming slowly. I hate line-item rebuttals, because they just turn in to pissing matches, but I did want to offer some clarification on these two points. > Asking for a release timeline and asking for 3 years of support on a dead branch are entirely separate things. It's not unreasonable to ask the Mozilla keep users informed of the release schedule (don't they already do this?), but asking them to support an old version for 3 years seems silly. It takes a lot of manpower and there's no value in it for probably 95% of their customers. Let me clarify: I don't think 3 years is a viable LTS schedule for browsers. I don't know what the time frame is, but I'm sure it's not 3 years, and I'm sure it's not "We release continuously." I should have been more clear about what "similar" means when referencing Ubuntu. By similar, I mean that they should continue their march forward, but that there should be an occasional LTS release that is maintained for a longer, more planned interval. > I would say it's practical, not naive. If you want a browser that allows you to stagnate while enjoying long-term support, then either start paying someone for support, or start using IE. You agree that web browsers and word processors are different, so why should Mozilla bend over backwards to allow corporations to try to treat them the same? I'm saying it's naive (showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment) to expect that this new development cycle won't have ramifications. Mozilla is free to do what they wish with their product. What I'm claiming is that it will come at the cost of market share in the corporate world. If they don't care about the market share, then go ahead and walk on it.

dpark 15y ago
> I've also consulted for very large corporations. The same disruptive ideology that applies to start-ups falls flat with large corporations. The biggest mistake is to take a unilateral position with them. They will fall back to IE. They will stagnate on old versions if we don't work with them. Is that what you want? What I want is for corp IT departments to not pretend as if this is somehow an insurmountable change. Yeah, corporations are slow and risk-averse. How risky is it to upgrade the browser once per quarter? Are they not testing and upgrading now for the sake of security fixes? > Let me clarify: I don't think 3 years is a viable LTS schedule for browsers. I don't know what the time frame is, but I'm sure it's not 3 years, and I'm sure it's not "We release continuously." I should have been more clear about what "similar" means when referencing Ubuntu. By similar, I mean that they should continue their march forward, but that there should be an occasional LTS release that is maintained for a longer, more planned interval. Okay, I can understand that. I can see the value in dropping a version every 9 months with a guarantee of 1 year of security fixes. Or maybe drops every 6 months that get 9 months of support. I think if Mozilla is committed to backwards-compatibility moving forward, though, this shouldn't be necessary. If they can't avoid breaking changes for some reason, then it is an issue. (One exception would be breaking changes in beta/bleeding-edge features. If you build your product on unstable CSS or whatever, that's your burden. And if you built your product on features that were only around for 3 months, then you should be able to fix your product quickly.) > I'm saying it's naive (showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment) to expect that this new development cycle won't have ramifications. Mozilla is free to do what they wish with their product. What I'm claiming is that it will come at the cost of market share in the corporate world. If they don't care about the market share, then go ahead and walk on it. Thanks for the definition of naive. :) I never said it wouldn't have ramifications. I actually said the opposite. Corporate IT shops need to find a way to move more quickly. They need to change. Running everything on a multi-year upgrade cycle is ridiculous, and borderline incompetent (though the incompetence might be coming from higher up than the IT guys).
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  > Corporate IT shops need to find a way to move more quickly. They need to change. That is easy to say, and difficult to do. The simplest way I can think of to explain why is that every single move, or change, comes with a nonzero cost-per-employee. While it may be possible to reduce that cost, nobody has yet invented a way to eliminate it. When you have 5 employees, a small change that costs X-per-employee is not a big deal. When you have a few thousand...

dpark 15y ago

> I've also consulted for very large corporations. The same disruptive ideology that applies to start-ups falls flat with large corporations. The biggest mistake is to take a unilateral position with them. They will fall back to IE. They will stagnate on old versions if we don't work with them. Is that what you want? What I want is for corp IT departments to not pretend as if this is somehow an insurmountable change. Yeah, corporations are slow and risk-averse. How risky is it to upgrade the browser once per quarter? Are they not testing and upgrading now for the sake of security fixes? > Let me clarify: I don't think 3 years is a viable LTS schedule for browsers. I don't know what the time frame is, but I'm sure it's not 3 years, and I'm sure it's not "We release continuously." I should have been more clear about what "similar" means when referencing Ubuntu. By similar, I mean that they should continue their march forward, but that there should be an occasional LTS release that is maintained for a longer, more planned interval. Okay, I can understand that. I can see the value in dropping a version every 9 months with a guarantee of 1 year of security fixes. Or maybe drops every 6 months that get 9 months of support. I think if Mozilla is committed to backwards-compatibility moving forward, though, this shouldn't be necessary. If they can't avoid breaking changes for some reason, then it is an issue. (One exception would be breaking changes in beta/bleeding-edge features. If you build your product on unstable CSS or whatever, that's your burden. And if you built your product on features that were only around for 3 months, then you should be able to fix your product quickly.) > I'm saying it's naive (showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment) to expect that this new development cycle won't have ramifications. Mozilla is free to do what they wish with their product. What I'm claiming is that it will come at the cost of market share in the corporate world. If they don't care about the market share, then go ahead and walk on it. Thanks for the definition of naive. :) I never said it wouldn't have ramifications. I actually said the opposite. Corporate IT shops need to find a way to move more quickly. They need to change. Running everything on a multi-year upgrade cycle is ridiculous, and borderline incompetent (though the incompetence might be coming from higher up than the IT guys).

thaumaturgy 15y ago
> Corporate IT shops need to find a way to move more quickly. They need to change. That is easy to say, and difficult to do. The simplest way I can think of to explain why is that every single move, or change, comes with a nonzero cost-per-employee. While it may be possible to reduce that cost, nobody has yet invented a way to eliminate it. When you have 5 employees, a small change that costs X-per-employee is not a big deal. When you have a few thousand...