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1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes. This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release bef
by azakai 14y ago
1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes.
This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release before it perfected the update process to be fully automatic and silent, that definitely caused some users issues. Mozilla has recognized that publicly and taken responsibility for that decision - and meanwhile fixed the update process as well as launched an extended support release version of Firefox that updates far less frequently.
2. The update may break stuff that you counted on, either by removing features you were using, or by breaking compatibility with other software you use. Maybe the developers never tested your use case, or worse - they tested for it but decdided it didn't matter because only 2% of users used it. Tough luck to you if you're one of those 2%.
This point is ironic - because the claim is that users are switching to Chrome, which is the inventor of the 6-week update process. Chrome's 6-week updates can break websites or features that you rely on (I heard devs complain about breakage in the plugin interfaces for examples), just like Firefox's 6-week updates can.
When you update software every 6 weeks, and you make those updates real updates (not small security updates), then you risk breaking stuff for users. If you don't like that, you can't use either Chrome or Firefox. You might prefer IE, Safari and Opera which are slower-updating (there is also the Firefox extended support release as mentioned before).
So yes, the Firefox implementation of rapid release did not begin 100% smoothly, issues were admitted and worked on. But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome).
Side note, there is definite anecdotal evidence for users leaving Firefox for Chrome over rapid release. But there is also anecdotal evidence of users moving in other directions. Looking at the browser market share statistics, Firefox has declined a little and stabilized, with most of the previous decline coming from users of Firefox 3.6, not the modern rapid release versions. Of course the anecdotal stuff could still be right - perhaps 3.6 users move to the modern version, and some modern version people leave for another browser. But it's hard to differentiate that from people just leaving 3.6 directly (and people on modern versions being happy and staying), the data is hard to interpret.
- jono_x 14y ago> But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome). Hi Azakai, Paradoxical it may be, but this is exactly what I have observed: people leaving Firefox for Chrome and citing dislike of rapid updates as the main reason. Not just the intrusiveness of the update mechanism, but the breakage of compatibility and UI habituation are also cited as reasons. Yes, these problems exist in Chrome as well as Firefox. It's just that users aren't noticing them as much in Chrome. Probably because, as new Chrome users, they don't yet have UI habituation and they don't yet have a workflow that depends on specific add-ons or other fragile compatibility issues. Maybe if they stay on Chrome for long enough they will realize that the same problems exist there. But they're the sort of problems you don't encounter right away as a new user of a browser. So yes, fixing the experience of the update itself is the highest priority since that's the number one thing that was driving people away. I know the Firefox team has been working hard on fixing this and the updates are much smoother now (especially since Firefox 12 got rid of the Windows UAC warnings.) That's great! However, I predict that in the long term there will continue to be problems in both Firefox and Chrome caused by automatic updates breaking UI habituation, compatibility, or low-frequency use cases that particular users depended on. Software that's as important as a web browser really ought to offer users an option to get just security/performance updates without any other changes. (Mozilla does offer Firefox ESR, but they don't publicize it and they discourage non-enterprise users from downloading it.)