Comment 5 for bug 68158

Revision history for this message
dsurber (dnsurber) wrote : A newb's perspective

John Dong wrote:
>Firefox's official binaries are quite simple to unpack into a home
> directory and create a launcher.... It doesn't take much effort at
> all to set up your own Firefox 2.0.

John Dong wrote:
> it's not technically feasible

Does anyone besides me find the above two statements contradictory?

I'm just a user, a sophisticated user, but a newbie to Linux. I find the idea that Firefox 2.0 will not soon be available in Dapper unfathomable. Don't feed me a lot of technical rationalizations. John said it is easy to do, so do it. Installing it on my Win2k box was no problem and that's 6 years old. Since Dapper is in LTS, do you honestly expect me to be running Firefox 1.5 three years from now? Get real.

I tried updating to Edgy. Since I'm using a Matrox G550 which Edgy doesn't not support, that was a total disaster. (I really appreciate you guys releasing with a known bug of that severity.) I had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. I came very close to reinstalling my licensed Win2k. I assumed that Firefox 2.0 would soon be available on Dapper. Based on the above I am starting to rethink my decision to switch to Linux.

Yes I can figure out how to install Firefox 2.0 myself, but I've got better things to waste my time on. And if this is going to be the policy about upgrading applications, then it won't be just Firefox 2.0 I have to install. It will be Firefox 2.01 and every other revision and every revision of every other program I depend on that you decide not to support. Not an interesting proposition.

Yes, I'm a newb and I'm sure you can baffle me with technical mumbo-jumbo about why you can't do it. As a professional programmer, I occasionally do that to customers myself, but usually I admit that the customer just wants to use my product and it is my job to make it possible for him to do so. If it "doesn't take all that much effort" for me to do it, then you guys can do it if you so choose.

I like using Ubuntu. It's a real OS instead of whatever Win2k is. I'd like to continue to use it, but I'm having serious second thoughts. My experience with software upgrades and installs has been either invisible--most of the time--or a total f'ing disaster--in far too many cases. If you can't win over users like me, I've used Unix daily for 25 years, you are never going to win over Ma and Pa.