From the Ars article here:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/internet-explorer-stops-its-slide-as-chrome-nears-firefox.arsThankfully some folks like silvershoes also see these issues. I don't think silvershoes or I would be here if we had ill-will towards Firefox or other users. I don't think anyone here would for a moment even dare think that (especially for me as a web designer and web developer) would want to see people use older versions of software. I have personally been tracking WebGL support in browsers for about two months now as I'd love to see 3D on desktops. So if someone can't agree with what we're saying then they're not agreeing with the statistics that are clearly showing there is a growing segment of people who don't like what Mozilla is doing.
...and the corporates were just finally letting people switch to Firefox too. Really, even IE9 is not good enough to be considered modern (and that's not an insult to the developers at Microsoft who are doing the actual work, I have full respect for them, it's their management I can't stand).
Does the average user know how to download an .XPI file, rename it to a ZIP, extract the RDF file, fix the maximum version string and then update Firefox because the extension author either did not bother or is simply too consumed to do that say, once every eight weeks?
Frequent releases of say IE 10 platform previews every two months or so are actually still exciting, why? Because they're still in last place and any web designer and web developer wants to see what the bottom line will be in five or six years (maybe). But the features and standards compliance support added to Firefox haven't even justified what a college professor would accept as a proper paragraph for Firefox 5 and Firefox 8. It's the equivalent to handing in your homework half finished at midnight saying you've done half the work and want that half corrected before you continue. There just isn't enough to bother talking about Firefox releases which means less publicity. Sure some sites will taught releases of Firefox but people like me who actually count and have a unique perspective to share (with a nice following I might add) are growing increasingly alienated. You lose people like me and you lose some serious support. I have spent a lot of time with Opera and honestly it's almost good enough for me to replace Firefox with. I really wouldn't mind because it's easier to maintain Opera even in a production environment where I have 14 copies installed (6, 7.5, 8.0, 8.5, 9.2, 9.6, 10.1, 10.6, 11.0, 11.1, 11.5, 11.6, 12.0).
So Mozilla wants to
force users to upgrade? Just think of how that will come across people diplomatically speaking. My personal response is f#$% off, I'll use the version of my software that works and stick with it. You borked it, not I. Now imagine the mother or college student studying some really non-technical indepth topic and they have to spend five minutes (on their crappy slow computer because manufacturers don't want to build anything quality) waiting because Firefox has to update
again in the middle of them needing to quickly check something. It's a massive inconvenience and for what? I'm never going to use insertAdjacentHTML or any other [b]unreliable proprietary Microsoft jScript methods that treat code like plain text and don't register nodes correctly[/i] ever and that was pretty much the only thing added in Firefox 7...and regular users were inconvenienced for
that?
Too much text to read...well if what I'm saying is too much text than for those users it's clearly too much trouble to bother trying to be diplomatic about fixing Firefox. But if you care about the same browser I do then maybe those people should start considering those flags or enjoy keeping a message on your site for the next decade telling people they need to update when they won't...and we're not talking corporate users with financial reasons, we're talking about people who these bad decisions from Mozilla are putting people in a mindset that they want to use old outdated versions of software for years to come.