On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Jan Keromnes <[email protected]> wrote:
> Another point I'd like to bring up is that Nightly remains a playground for
> (sane) experiments. It's where new code arrives daily (well, nightly) right
> after it's been reviewed and tested. Sadly, this doesn't prevent things from
> breaking, or just not working right, and Nightly is another layer to keep
> Firefox safe. It's not something reliable you can expect to do stable,
> productive work on. True, it does receive a lot of bug fixes, but it's also
> where all the nastiest bugs and regressions happen before we can catch them.
> Thanks a lot for being one of our test pilots, helping us catch the problems
> before the code rolls over to stable and to millions of trusting users, but
> judging from your remarks maybe Nightly is not the best experience you can
> have of Firefox.

While I agree that Nighly is going to see breakage from time to time,
we should think of it as a playground. It's good that we have lots of
people using it as their day-to-day browser. It's even better when
developers are using it as their day-to-day developer tool. This means
that we get feedback much quicker when we accidentally break
something. And it's dramatically easier to fix something that you
broke a day ago, than something that you broke a 6 weeks ago.

So we should definitely make sure to try not disrupt people's work
flow. The fact that we have nightly users is something that is a huge
advantage to us, and something that we should nurture.

It generally seems like you guys did the right thing here. The code
landed turned off by default, it was turned off when it seemed mature
enough to experiment with, the old code was left in the tree, and you
did a fair amount of messaging.

I think only a relatively minor mistake was made, which was to
effectively force people to use it by hiding the old tool. The fact
that you could still access it through an about: URL wasn't really
helpful to most users who had no idea that was the case.

This is the price of building good software. People get upset when
they lose it and so you have to take more care when rolling out the
replacement. Both to make sure that the replacement is awesome, and to
make sure that the transition is pleasant.

On the flip side. When things do break, intentionally or accidentally,
please be civil about it. This thread has had way too... rough...
language. We're all on the same side trying to make FirefoxOS more
awesome.

/ Jonas
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