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Mozilla seems to be hell-bent on alienating users, as they did it again:
An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.
A Reg reader yesterday alerted us to an August 20 version bump that was causing so many problems, our tipster thought it was a beta that had gone seriously awry. "To sum it up, on 20th of August, Firefox 79 was unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back," our reader reported. "A lot got broken in the process: the user interface, tabs, navigation, add-ons."
Meanwhile, the Google Play store page for the completely free and open-source Firefox has a rash of one-star reviews echoing similar complaints: after the upgrade, little seemed to work as expected.
Among the complaints are a missing back button, frequent browser crashes, and extensions not working.
Sounds like a buggy release for sure. But:
Unfortunately for our source, and the other Firefox for Android users, this isn't a mistaken release or a broken beta build: it's the new version of Firefox for Android, and it's set to hit the UK today, August 25, and the US on the 27th.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
Over my career I have noticed a big difference between technology "culture" and product/marketing/sales "culture". A big difference. And, as said above, once a company transitions from technology to product/marketing/sales everything changes. The big question is why? My theory is that leaders expect all teams and employees to behave the same general way - and that they should be able to manage those teams in the same way. Put the same input in and the same output comes out. That just doesn't work. How Product/Marketing/Sales teams work is entirely different from how technology teams work, and the process of managing them has to be different as well. Most leaders don't understand this. Honestly, they don't have to - companies bump along and survive in this broken state for years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:06PM
The difference is that MBAs see all problems as people problems - their solutions typically focus on getting someone to change their mind. That's how they get, as you say, people behaving in thw same general way. But it isn't possible to change the mind of a technical problem, namely how can you quickly render HTML/JS and make access to a plethora of websites (including making some sites' rendering "customized") straightforward.
Offended and laughing about it.