Stan Goodman wrote: > > I don't think the developers spend much time or effort thinking about a > user's-eye view of the program. The current problem is a very good example, and > your observation that Mozilla can't be updated by installing new versions over > old ones supplies whatever emphasis was needed.
Actually it's more a problem of user forgetfulness than developer thoughtlessness. Users tend to forget that anything short of Mozilla 1.0 is effectively a preview release with sometimes radical changes from milestone to milestone, or even overnight if a major chunk of code gets checked in. While now, with the focus more on stability and performance, this is less of a problem than it was six months or a year ago, the gap between the IBM release (0.6.0) and the current version (0.9.6) is wide enough to guarantee disaster. Also, because Mozilla is readily available to end-users, people tend to forget it's really a generic wholesale off-the-warehouse-shelf product, so to speak, intended to be filtered through "packagers/retailers" (e.g. Netscape, IBM etc.) before reaching them. In other words, one would expect a branded release to deal with installation issues such as uninstalling a prior version, but not binaries zipped hot-off-the-tree. h~
