Everybody Hates Firefox Updates • Hacker News Board

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#21

Post by maratd » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 9:45 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

They kind of took a stab at solving this. Firefox ESR. It's what Firefox used to be.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#22

Post by Silhouette » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:05 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #21

smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

They kind of took a stab at solving this. Firefox ESR. It's what Firefox used to be.

The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point.

There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if you're running hundreds of in-house tools on top of them.

While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long, if Mozilla want their product to be taken seriously by enterprise customers then I suspect they're going to need a lot more than a year of security fixes and a lot more than 6-12 weeks of overlap when they want to force an upgrade. It would be interesting to know whether in reality they have gained much from offering the first ESR (which is already coming to end-of-life) in terms of acceptance of the rapid release schedule in larger organisations. Maybe there is a certain size of organisation that is flexible enough to take advantage of a yearly update but can't take the overheads of stuff breaking every six weeks.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#23

Post by recoiledsnake » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:09 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

The problem with your suggestion is that they will have to maintain two codebases and support releases for the classic Firefox by proving security patches to them.

Not to mention more headaches for web developers as yet another browser shows up with its own bugs, differing support for standards like HTML5 and CSS3 etc.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#24

Post by recoiledsnake » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:13 PM UTC

jhatax wrote: post #18

breadbox wrote: post #3

The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.

Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usab…

>Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.

I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#25

Post by recoiledsnake » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:20 PM UTC

samspot wrote: post #8

I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on. So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.

> Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it.

The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#26

Post by samspot » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:35 PM UTC

recoiledsnake wrote: post #25

samspot wrote: post #8

I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on. So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.

> Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.

True, but my xbox is broken. However when it was working the updates went pretty quickly. PS updates often take up to 45 minutes.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#27

Post by samspot » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 10:36 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #9

samspot wrote: post #8

I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on. So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.

Frequent users as well. Though both sets suffer.

For sure, though they might not notice as much since its not every time they turn it on. I play some games that do weekly updates and they largely haven't been as annoying since i play them consistently. I'm sure this varies depending on personality though.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#28

Post by earl » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:06 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible.

Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the developers' heads up their shitty asses denying their shit memory management, and did I mention the enormous memory usage on OSX? Chrome essentially has the same uptime as my laptop, ie months. Firefox required daily restarts with the same browsing patterns. Plus they regularly corrupt the backing file that holds the sites you had open in your browser, so before restarting the browser to get ram back, it's a best practice to copy the location of each and every open tab to a text file.

We got my gf's laptop 8 gigs of ram to accomodate ff and I'm working on talking her into chrome. A browser written by people who know how to use free(3). Plus the updates don't hork random stuff. Plus on the rare occasions I've restarted the browser it has never broken the backing store holding the open tabs.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#29

Post by samspot » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

"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."

This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it!

I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I had no idea they bothered the general population just as much. I actually switched to chrome because of the memory leak in firebug so I didn't have quite the same experience.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#30

Post by samspot » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:21 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

You are of course entitled to your opinion but I must disagree. Users don't care what it iss called, they care about being annoyed. Firefox was always nagging you about updates while chrome silently updated in the background. And I personally have never had a chrome update do anything that I noticed immediately (like breaking my addons.)

I disagree about expectations too. Users have a great deal of built in expectations for chrome after having dealt with other browsers for years.

If firefox and chrome switched their update systems, the story we would be hearing would be "I tried chrome and i hated it.", and they probably wouldn't even bother to tell us why (the nagging update system.)