Disclaimer: I am not a decision maker on this, these are my personal
opinions, etc, etc
On 10/31/2016 3:54 PM, juar...@gmail.com wrote:
Discontinuing support for 10% of users sounds like shrinking 10% of customers,
lay off 10% of employees, reduce 10% of funds for investments.
- Is really necessary to abandon all XP users?
Shifting XP users to ESR is different from "abandonment" FWIW, but IMHO
this move is necessary. As I pointed out earlier in this discussion, the
problems have become more complicated than simply disabling certain
pieces of code when XP does not support them.
- Is possible to discontinue the most hard to support components? Somenthing like
"Video conferencing will not work in XP" or like is planned for flash.
Again, that is not the problem. The problem is more like, "Sorry 90% of
users, we can't give you a better sandbox because of the 10% of users
running an obsolete and unsupported OS," or "This feature is going to be
delayed a release because it mysteriously fails on Windows XP."
Meanwhile, our competitors *do* deliver that better sandbox or *do*
release that new feature before we do. Now we're preserving that 10% of
users at the expense of the other 90%, and it's in the latter category
where the growth will be. That sounds like a pretty lousy growth
strategy to me.
- Is possible restrict the user base affected? Like only XP SP2 and older...
Existing Firefox system requirements are for XP SP2, so we already
restrict older revisions, but that isn't really the issue here. The
issue is the gulf between all XP releases and newer versions.
As somebody who has first-hand experience with this, let me assure you:
Debugging XP-specific problems has become very unpleasant. Most
developers don't just have an XP machine sitting around to work with. We
can request a loaner from Release Engineering and debug it through
there, but that is very tedious and time consuming. Turnaround on try
builds for Windows XP is sometimes terribly slow. As XP continues to die
off, this will only get worse, not better.
I see how Mozilla is important for open web and how firefox user base is
shrinking. This worries me.
Do not confuse shrinking market share with shrinking user base. That is
only the case when the total number of users on the web remains
constant, which is not the case. Having said that, I don't want to see
shrinking market share either.
I do not believe that we can offer the highest quality experience to the
vast majority of our users by continuing to expend resources on the
past. One of our top-line goals for 2016 has been to build our core
strength. I don't know how we're supposed to do that by intentionally
tying one hand behind our back to support Windows XP.
Supporting XP might curb short-term market share losses but it will
hinder our ability to deliver long-term market share gains.
Maybe hiring one or two developers for supporting this user base is cheaper
than loosing these users.
Hopefully my other remarks in this post have made it clear that XP
support is not an issue of headcount.
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