Mythic Logos

So a recent post about the new Firefox versioning policy made me think about it a bit more closely. That post was concerned with how Firefox is weakening the meaning of versioning. But to me, the question is, as with grade inflation and economic inflation, what are the ramifications of this inflation.

For economics, it is exceedingly complicated, but basically those whose wages do not go up, savers, and creditors are all hurt by inflation. Of course, when saving and lending money becomes less attractive, economic development grinds to a halt. And no doubt all sorts of other things go wrong.

For grade inflation, what can be lost is the ranking. Top companies want top people. If a high GPA means someone is at the top, then it is useful. As mediocre students get high GPAs, that number becomes meaningless. So companies turn to something else, probably personal recommendations or internal test measures though both are certainly problematic as well. The quick filtering of taking the top students at a top school just sort of dies. In the long run, we can only hope that grade inflation deflates the notion that college graduation is relevant to having a job.

But what about browser updates? The basic problem for me is that it forces me to hit the upgrade button, downloads, relaunches, tells me various extensions are incompatible, upgrade those of them that I can, and hope that 5-10 minutes later, it all works out. As a good computer user, I can handle this. But others? It just is aggravating. And when it interrupts my workflow, it grates on my nerves.

I think for this to work out, upgrades need to be silent, not break extensions unless absolutely necessary, and have those extensions updated silently. It should just happen. I think that is what chrome does, but Firefox still does not seem to do it. They should have implemented that before changing their versioning system.

As I see it, it mostly hurts extension authors, extension users, and that’s pretty much the audience attracted to Firefox. Personally, I use Chrome and Safari almost exclusively on my new machine. They work well. They have adblocking extensions and built in developer tools. 1Password works with them. And that is about all I need. I also like Safari not needing to reboot when adding an extension.

If Firefox wants to make version numbers pointless, then they have accomplished it. If instead they want to have meaningful numbers, but different than what it has been, then one idea is to have a roadmap for what they are trying to implement, such as HTML5, CSS3, acid test compliance, speed/performance metrics, whatever, and have the “version number” be a percentage of each accomplished (well-defined in advance 0f their roadmap, of course). As every consumer product maker knows, having some numbers to brag about is key to good sales. “We have 12 megapixel cameras! 3 Ghz chips! We are 95%HTML5 compliant”