[Bug 68158] A newb's perspective

[dsurber]

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.

-- 
Firefox 2.0
https://launchpad.net/bugs/68158