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by ryanwatkins 5419 days ago
"If it's your webapp, you check the User-Agent-header"

Thats fine if your communication is only via your website. Consider if you have to send an email bulletin and explain this. Or write it up in a technical support answer.

"If it's somebody else's webapp, you still tell the user to check the about box to make sure it's the latest version of Firefox."

Sometimes there are problems in the latest version.
1 comments
pilif 5419 days ago
> Thats fine if your communication is only via your website. Consider if you have to send an email bulletin and explain this. Or write it up in a technical support answer.

The people who visit your page with the problematic version of Firefox will get to see the message. The others don't need to know.

> Sometimes there are problems in the latest version.

as you only have to deal with one version of Firefox, work around the problem in your web app code.

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DrJokepu 5419 days ago
> The people who visit your page with the problematic version of Firefox will get to see the message. The others don't need to know.

Obviously, this is not true when you're providing a web application as a service to a large corporation with big IT departments, business analysts, armies of project managers and complex contracts with all sorts of requirements.

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ryanwatkins 5419 days ago
> as you only have to deal with one version of Firefox, work around the problem in your web app code.

Ah, of course, wish I'd thought of that.

And what do you tell them in the interim, while the problem is being debugged, fixed, tested and rolled out?

I guess now its just "doesnt work in Firefox" not "doesnt work in Firefox 7, keep using 6 for now".

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pilif 5419 days ago
Why is this a problem in Firefox but not in Chrome? Chrome updates itself all the time and it's really hard to make it stop doing so.

Now Firefox is moving in the same direction and this behavior suddenly gets to be a problem.

Firefox releases new major releases every six weeks, but there is a period of 12 weeks for it to move from alpha to final. That should be enough time to debug, fix, test and roll out.

And if you are targeting corporate installations, you will probably disable Firefox auto-updating itself, but again, it's irrelevant to ask "which version of Firefox are you running?" as the answer will always be: "the latest possible" which is the latest stable in non-managed cases and the latest deployed in managed cases.

Hence I think removing the version number from the about box is no big deal and will help against all these "omg! They are crazy to release so many major versions in so little time" posts we are seeing all over the place.

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