Can Your Product Do That?
I’ve just installed Firefox 1.5 after long anticipation.
As you (hopefully) know, Firefox has great extension capabilities. An impressive collection of extensions written by individuals and third parties is available. The problem is that extensions built for previous versions of Firefox are not compatible with v1.5. Firefox is prepared for this mishap, and automatically checks which extensions are not compatible with the new version, tries to download updates for these extensions, and temporarily disables them if no update is available.
All this is quite nice, and makes the upgrade a real piece of cake. Unfortunately, I heavily use some extensions which were still not updated to comply with the new version. So, I had to rollback my installation and go back to Firefox 1.0.7.
Now, no one can mistake me for a too optimistic person, but I decided to try something which should generally not work: I’ve tried to install version 1.0.7 over the current 1.5 installation. Anyone who ever tried this with the average commercial software knows this is generally not a good idea. To my surprise, the installation was free of errors, and when I opened the browser it was just as I left it before trying the upgrade. All the extensions and themes were on place, functioning as before and even with the same settings.
Now, I don’t know if this "downgrade" capability is a formal feature or not. But frankly, I don’t care. For me, as a user, this is a great feature, which makes me even more confident in the product than before.
Can your product do that?
