On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:51:53 GMT, Nick Boyce said: > OT: They should just make FF quality high and the design impeccable -
"Quality high" is always a nice concept. But there's always 5 quality issues and resources to fix only 3. Obviously, you want to fix the 3 that matter most to your users - but which 3 are they? You really can't rely on bug reports or surveys, because those tend to have a major self-selection bias. Think about it - how many people do you know that use Firefox? How many of them have had it crash or misbehave? How many of them *reported* it? Surveys have the same problem - you can't easily run a survey of users who just want to hit their sites and *do* stuff and find out what they want - because they'll just skip your survey, hit their site, and *do* stuff. Unless of course you make the survey mandatory - in which case you tick them off because you got in the way of hitting their site and doing stuff. Or "report the list of extensions and performance numbers" - it's one thing to know that users have a range of launch times. It's something else to know that 20% of users have *consistently* longer launch times on comparabie hardware. But if you have data that shows that NoScript users take a 15% launch time hit, *that* is something you can then go do something about. Similar problems for "impeccable design" - if you want a browser that Joe Sixpack will actually *use*, then you need data on how Joe actually wants to use that browser. And *asking* Joe never works - anybody who's had to do project requirements will tell you that what the user *says* they want, what they *think* they want, and what they actually need, are almost always 3 different things. No, I'm not saying it's OK for the Mozilla crew to collect PII like that - but I can certainly understand why they feel the temptation to do so...
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