Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

I posted last week about the horrible experience I had with the latest beta of the coComment system. I also posted some steps I thought that they should take to improve going forward. Today, I'm happy to share with you all that the folks at coComment have been actively participating in this most important discussion and the results are starting to show themselves.

The most important change, I think, was reverting back to the previous version of the extension. The new features included with the extension are interesting, but they weren't fully thought out and proved to be more of a problem in the real world than I'm sure the team anticipated.

They've also taken to heart many of the suggestions about the web service side of things, reverting some changes to the site and keeping some of the improvements. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the state of things today because it mostly works again.

I hope that the coComment team doesn't get gun-shy after this event, and I fully understand what it's like to be at the center of a user backlash and how easy it would be to let something like that turn your team more conservative. Experimentation and change, moving the platform forward, is a critical piece of making a successful product and building a successful company, though, and these kinds of setbacks will happen more often than you'd think if you're brave enough to give it your all. So, to those of you at coComment who have been living and working through this, keep your chins up and don't let us users grind you down too bad. We post because we care :-)