A Mini-Rant About Firefox

by Paul Sherman on March 4, 2008 · 4 comments

From my old friend Pete, via IM this morning:

Why does Firefox make me hit “Continue” every time it updates a plugin? What other options do I have???

Good point Pete.

Jeff Garbers

I’d imagine the button is there so that there’s a confirmation / recognition step in case something went wrong with the upgrade process, but you’re right – if everything worked, why bug me to tell me about it?

Maybe we see so many messages and pop-ups to tell us things worked because (1) too often they don’t, and (2) developers are sometimes under the impression that if something’s important to the code, it’s important to the user.
Paul Sherman

Good points, Jeff. I especially like the one about it being important to the code, but not necessarily to the user.
Asa Dotzler

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397493

- A
David

I disagree. Users are keenly aware that sometimes things just crash and burn. When a job simply disappears, instead of reporting the outcome, people are likely to wonder whether it has actually succeeded. Until software is much more reliable than it currently is, confirmations like this are very helpful to distinguish between successful termination and silent failure.