There’s a “the bigger you are, the harder you fall” phenomena well known to crisis managers. One extension of that is “the better your reputation, the more people are shocked when you really screw up.”
Firefox, in launching version 3.0 too soon, just took a major reputation hit. The installation has caused a lot of problems for version 2.x users, to include wiping out bookmarks and a set of back/forward arrows that don’t work. There appear to be work-arounds posted at some websites, not all of which work all that well, but the bottom line is that I still have the option of going back to Internet Explorer. Sure, I loved a lot of features of Firefox better, but it’s just not worth the time to try to debug it. From what I read on a number of blogs, I’m not alone in my disappointment with the Mozilla/Firefox folks. Essentially, they did what Microsoft has been infamous for in the past (although they’ve much improved in the past couple of years, in my opinion) — releasing software too soon, before major “known issues” had been fully resolved.
So I’m accessing this blog and others sites by IE until my confidence in Firefox is restored. Hopefully they learn from this lesson!
Jonathan Bernstein
President
Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc.