712677 - New versions of firefox and addon compatibility

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, enhancement)

Description

[Dex]

Hello. First I wanted to leave feedback on your feedback site. But when the page http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/download asked me to upgrade to the newest version, otherwise it wouldn't let me leave that feedback, I was forced to try this channel. (And I am even more annoyed about the thing that bothers me thanks to that.)

So...did you guys ever consider doing research on the adoption rate of every new version of FF since v4.0? I guess you didn't. I bet there are still tons of people out there who refuse to upgrade, like myself (running v3.6.25 at the moment). 
My particular reason is addon compatibility. I've already seriously considered getting the v8 version, as soon as all of my plugins catch up with compatibility. But whoa, today you advertise me yet another major version, v9. How are the poor addon developers supposed to catch up with your speed, even the absolutely basic google toolbar didn't work with v8, last time I checked (sometime about a week ago). This makes me really amgry, up to the point of switching to google chrome and trying that one out for a change. I still didn't do that only as a matter of convenience, I've got a lot of saved passwords in my FF profile, plus a few other gadgets, (guess what, incompatible with newer versions of FF), and I'm still not angry enough to overcome the inconvenience of having to type over each password and save it inside Chrome manually, as it doesn't have the ability to import FF profile data to the full extent.

Please, try to think about this.
Thanks

Dex

Comment 2

[Dex]

sorry j.j., first time I tried to hit the submit button, the page told me something about a cgi token that it didn't receive and appeared like it didn't file the bug.

Comment 3

[j.j.]

See for example bug 692664, which is fixed in Fx11.
Things like this are reported and discussed repeatedly, but bugzilla is definitely not the place for such discussions.

Comment 4

[Dex]

I understand that very well, but forcing users to upgrade their browser to leave feedback on why they still didn't upgrade it, may well be considered as a bug from an annoyed user's perspective

Comment 5

[j.j.]

See bug 667215 comment 6 for google toolbar

Comment 6

[j.j.]

> but forcing users to upgrade their browser to leave feedback

One issue per bug report please. Feel free to file this in Product:Websites.

Comment 7

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

This is not the place for these discussions. This topic has been discussed to death in the dev.planning newsgroup: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/topics. I recommend that you dig around for those threads. There are many who agree with you, but in the end the decision was made to go along with the rapid release plan.

Regarding add-on compatibility, we have done many things to make this easier on add-on developers. Many have been able to keep up, while others haven't. We will soon implement a feature called Default To Compatible (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible), which will minimize the amount of work add-on developers need to do in order to keep their add-ons compatible with Firefox. Again, the newsgroups are the right place to have discussions about this.