Pascal,
Pascal Chevrel wrote:
>- And, most importantly, I follow the Mozilla project, promote it and file bugs to
>help as much as I can. Just like lots of other end-users.
>
If you file good bug reports, you are not counted as end-user anymore.
End-users are typically those who have little interest in the details of
the technology and are just interested in the output (rather than
(helping with) the process of creating it).
>I've been using Mozilla for a year now and I download nightlies very often (I have
>a fast connection), I've never lost any data and Mozilla was always more stable
>than NS4, NS6.x or IE5.5/6 on my machine.
>
You've been glad. I lost countless sent-mail copies and unsent
mail/posts/forms because of crashes.
>mozilla and promote it along with W3C standards.
>
Great.
>All the professional web designers
>I know (and I know many !) haven't installed it and do not plan to. They work for a
>target audience which is 80% IE-15% NS4 and their main concerns are called
>profitability and client deadlines.
>
:-(
>So before being scornful and rude with
>end-users, I think that coders should realize that they are their main support. How
>many ex-NS4 users would now be IE users if we, mozilla *users*, had not shown them
>an alternative ?
>
>More generally, I think that the problem is that some programmers show a clear
>contempt for users and follow the old "users are too dumb to have a clue" rule. If
>you look at the thread, you will notice that users do not complain about the lack
>of spell checker but about the lack of courteasy.
>
It's just that I feel like a horde of ignorant people are running over
me. There is no room to be polite anymore, you just need to break free
first.
There would be no need to break free, if users wouldn't end up here in
the first place.
Many users complaining here seem to be missing one important point:
There is no advantage for us if they use Mozilla. In particular, if they
use Mozilla, we get not even a tiny bit richer ("rich" as in being able
to pay the rent). They have the old-world "I am the customer and I am
the king" attitude, forgetting that they pay us nothing, so that this
rule has no basis anymore and doesn't apply. Here, developers are those
bringing use to the product. [Add here what I wrote Steve before] Of
course, people who then insist on the "but we are the users!" attitude
look completely off, when viewed from that angle.
So, yes, they are "clueless", and they are a burden. It's not their
fault (there's nothing wrong with it), but it's not ours either. We are
trying to make facts clear, in an effective way. But they don't get it
unless you talk to them in a language Gerv used. BTW: I don't think the
FAQ is rude.
I appreciate that you want to promote web-standards, but we (esp. I *g*)
would prefer, if you pointed your friends to Beonex, Netscape and co
instead of mozilla.org, because those people (or their friends) might
end up at our developer lists and asking user questions.
(OK, I admit, Beonex Communicator releases were too few recently
(understatement), but I am trying to change that. In fact, I wanted to
do that right now.)
Steve Carroll wrote:
> I am sorry, I apologize.
Accepted. :)
