"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold (even in the FLOSS universum)"

Po 16 července 2012

When reading this Evil Brain’s post I was thinking about my mom and wife, how both of them hate ANY update of any software. And even more about the title of this post. Price paid might not be in money, but I guess it is still true. Developers who are not motivated primarily by the feedback of their users (because they don't depend on them) are motivated by other things.

And although I am a happy user of Firefox (actually, running the Nightly ... tell me about the rapid release cycle ;)) I can see how right this post is. And how unfortunately, when MoFo doesn't depend directly on its users, the decision process may lead to weird conclusions, weird both to programmers (did you try to develop for Jetpack? its non-design and sudden demise was clearly caused by complete ignorance of design, which is too difficult to MoFo programmers and benefits only API users) as well as users (which is what this article is about).

And of course, I know that the situation is improving (see comments on the blog post), and no I don’t blame rapid release cycle on decline in the Firefox’s market share (it truly started before, and it had to decrease when the market shifted from one truly modern browser to at least three or four of them).

Category: computer Tagged: jetpack firefox