Slashdot has a story up describing a Windows XP upgrade that wiped out 60,000 machines at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions.
My upgrades to XP were mostly fine and my upgrades to SP2 went pretty well too.
I'm going to be gone for a few days so feel free to use this post for whatever commenting you're interested in.
Well done EDS, the best I've done is break 8 PCs out of 2000 when pushing out updates ;-) Which reminds me, easy corporate deployment and lockdown is a must-have for Firefox 2.0. This means centralised extensions which auto-populate any new user's profile on a PC, being able to prevent users installing or uninstalling extensions, the ability to update extensions once per machine, etc.
I will take the chance to post a few suggestions for further improvements.
First of all, it is important that there is the possibility to install Firefox over an existing installation. Therefore, we need a profile-migrator or whatever.
Also important is, that there is a better notification about updates. I noticed that a friend of mine was still using Firefox 0.8, and another friend Firefox 0.10, because they didn't recognice the update-notification-icon. The update notification should either be a big red bar below the title bar or at least something which gathers the user's attention but doesn't annoy them. A simple "Press "OK" to update Firefox" which prevents them from surfing the net would be bad because everybody would click "Cancel".
The third part which I found very cool would be a MDI, but I guess that's quite difficult to implement.
Improvements in native Windows XP-look would be great too, as Windows XP becomes more and more important.
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As a conclusion: PLEASE add at least my first suggestion to the official roadmap. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement and I think it's quite important...
I already is possible to install Firefox over an existing installation - the release notes no longer say to uninstall any old version before installing.
Pushing firefox on selected PC's from the corporate network would ease the firefox corporate adoption. This has to be done; there are many corporate pc's heating its chips up for the firefox to come.
Anyway I've found a couple of MSI instalers around and will try those. As soon as i have one of those MSI firefox instalers working I'll have 300 PC firefoxing around. Not big numbers for the share but my 2c's.
No idea if this is the right place to ask this, but is there any way to stop the security warnings when I try to install extensions in Firefox? I'm tired of being treated like a naughty child every time I try it. Currently installing an extension goes as follows:
I understand you probably want to stop the average user installing evil extensions. But wouldn't a Yes/No dialogue that explained why extensions could be evil accomplish the same thing? Savvy users could just click Yes and the average user would be informed. Or at least have an option to stop this insane hand-holding. I know this is a pretty minor thing, but to me it's symptomatic of greater problems with Firefox's user interface.
Opera has, probably because it's been around for a long time, evolved a gorgeously streamlined user interface (keyboard- and mouse-wise, rather than looks). For instance, switching to previous tab in Firefox is either Ctrl-Shift-Tab or Ctrl-PgUp. In Opera, it's 1. Tiny thing, but for me makes a huge difference in how fast I browse. And I'd bet it irritates the living hell out of people with certain disabilities.
Customisable keyboard shortcuts are one of the things preventing me from switching. In Opera, you can assign any shortcut to any action (from global application close to 'select the previous line in a text widget') and then save that as an individual profile. In Firefox, you have nothing. Nothing in the options, and no extension to do it. Of course, you can delve into the jars and poke through .js, and you'll end up with something that sort of works half the time.
Every time I come up against one of this type of minor niggle, I grit my teeth and try and fix it with an extension. Then there is grinding of the teeth as the extension mechanism irritates me. Finally, there is a beaten sigh, as the I realise that the extension does almost but not quite what I want. This happens a couple of time and then I just go back to Opera.
EditCSS is awesome, though.
http://www.squarefree.com/archives/000487.html describes the need for the delay on installing extensions.
Wondering if you had read this article: http://linuxpr.com/releases/7357.html (not related to todays post, but thought you would find it interesting)
It always amazes me how much money EDS gets for contracts that could be done for a tenth of a percent of what they deliver. I'm not British, but if I was I'd be pretty annoyed that the government is paying 2 billion (us or eu billion? it's too much either way! ) pounds to a US company for what likely could be done cheaper and better by a native company.
bo: Thanks, I'm glad there is a sane and valid reason for the Delay of Doom. I did google around before ranting, but I still feel like an asshat. Thanks again.