Another scenario: you wish to tell your web app's users that there are some issues on certain Firefox versions. You wrote "There are some issues for Firefox 7.xx". Users scratch their heads and ask, what version? Nightmare follows.
If it's your webapp, you check the User-Agent-header (which still contains the browser version) and then, if they have the problematic version, tell the user to make sure that they have the latest version of Firefox installed (which they can still check in the about box).
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.
For you as a web author and supporter, this process makes sure that you only have to test with one version of Firefox any more: The latest (minus the few percent of <= 3.6 installs still around before the fast release cycle went into effect)
You mean like http://fafsa.gov ? They tell users to get the latest browser version, and then block them if they're running anything higher than Firefox v3.6. (Complaints are met with "install 3.6" or crickets. Same problem with running any browser from Mac's 10.7 Lion, as they also do OS sniffing.)
On the bright side, removing version numbers may help push ignorant web devs away from version-based browser sniffing toward the more palatable/usable/progress-friendly functionality-based sniffing.
"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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
