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Over a week ago, Asa pointed out that the Firebird name might not stick for more than a few months. In that post, he mentions Mozilla Browser as a possible name for the 1.5 release.

Boy talk about picking a real flamebait post to start a thread at slashdot.

The spin CaptKirk puts on the post, misses most of the points Ann makes anyway, best to go and have a read for youeself.

You've got to wonder how many people are on the sideline cheering and putting up this stuff, not becuase they want to solve the problem, but just because they like to see a fight.

Cheers

Mark O'Donohue (yes a firebird person)

Look at this, me and me4 are both Ann Harrison. That is a real shame. What's the use of trolling like that for publicity. And if you ask me, the reason why none of the mozilla developers bothered replying to this Ann, is cause they have better things to do (coding) than bitching about some niced process like this. Ann and Co, need to stop this publicity cause eventually negative publicity would hurt them. Also understand these people are borland people and very few of them (paul Reeves ) are coders.

How about Phallus? I don't think anyone else will fight for that project name.

In fact, it's already been suggested: Most People Agree: Phallus is a Really Bad Name for a Browser 8-)

There are two issues at hand here: legality and politeness. It is certainly legal for mozilla.org to choose and use the name Firebird for their browser -- it is indeed difficult to confuse a browser for a SQL server. It was also, however, impolite of them to do so without even taking the time to send an email to the FirbirdSQL people saying "Hey, we'd like to call our browser Firebird. You cool with that?" After all, it's not as if there's no similarity between the projects. They do different things, sure, but they're both open source, they're both computer programs, and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.

And don't tell me that the name-choosers were unaware of the SQL project. It took them, what, four months to pick this name? Or was it five? Five and a half? And in all that time, these inveterate computer geeks never even typed the word into Google? (As of this writing, the FirebirdSQL project still tops the list of results for that search.)

It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. Look at Gentoo the Linux distro and Gentoo the file manager. At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager saying "Gentoo the Linux distribution has nothing to do with gentoo the file manager, except the latter runs on the former. I actually used the name first, way back in September 1998. I've been in touch with the Gentoo folks, and we're cool."

So, ultimately, the parent post is only partially right: the legality of this move is a non-story. The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all. Would it really have been so hard to have sent that email? They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight. In the initial announcement of the name on the MozillaZine forums, Asa Dotzler (sp?) wrapped up with the words "Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while." Well, he got his wish -- about the legal part, anyway.

I guess most people have come to expect this from slashdot, but it should be pointed out all the same. It's too bad everyone (me included) puts up with it.

I agree, but in this case the write-up mostly plagiarizes a post on MozillaZine. The misleading posts on /. are frequently deceptive, but not as often orignially deceptive.

From MozillaZine: "InternetNews was one of the first sites to report on the renaming of Phoenix and Minotaur to Firebird and Thunderbird. Australian site LinuxWorld concentrated on the reaction from the Firebird database community, with claims that posts in "the Netscape-Mozilla newsgroup" (it's unclear exactly which newsgroup this refers to) are being censored. CNET News.com also focussed on the controversy, including a link to a page from FirebirdSQL Foundation sponsor IBPhoenix that encourages people to join the "fray" and add to the "heat in [the MozillaZine] forums". The call-to-arms also lists the email addresses of many of the more prominent Mozilla contributors and suggests deluging them with messages (even though many of the listed people had nothing to do with the name change)."

I guess most people have come to expect this from slashdot, but it should be pointed out all the same. It's too bad everyone (me included) puts up with it.

From the slashdot writeup:

"Meanwhile, IBPhoenix, an organisation that supports the development of the Firebird database, has put up a protest page, encouraging people to spam the MozillaZine forums (even though MozillaZine had nothing to do with the decision) and send masses of email to many Mozilla developers (most of whom were not involved in selecting the new name). I find it rather hypocritical [--snip--]"

From the linked article (slightly summarised):

Let the Mozilla forums know how you feel. They've already taken some heat in forums on their website. To join that fray, you must register. Check http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/index.php and http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3 075 for the discussion.

You might also send mail to the following people and groups:

Asa Dotzler - he made the announcement [..]

drivers@mozilla.org - drivers are the project managers of Mozilla [..]

These people are the technical project leaders of Mozilla. They too should be aware that the possibility for confusion exists. [--snip eight addresses--]

Listing the eight technical project leaders at the end might have been a tad excessive, but I'd hardly call that "encouraging people to spam the mozillazine forums" or harrassing mozilla developers in the way that slashdot makes out to be. It looks like an ordinary informational page to tell people how they can contact the people who are able to make a decision.

I guess most people have come to expect this from slashdot, but it should be pointed out all the same. It's too bad everyone (me included) puts up with it.

From the slashdot writeup:

"Meanwhile, IBPhoenix, an organisation that supports the development of the Firebird database, has put up a protest page, encouraging people to spam the MozillaZine forums (even though MozillaZine had nothing to do with the decision) and send masses of email to many Mozilla developers (most of whom were not involved in selecting the new name). I find it rather hypocritical [--snip--]"

From the linked article (slightly summarised):

Let the Mozilla forums know how you feel. They've already taken some heat in forums on their website. To join that fray, you must register. Check http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/index.php and http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3 075 for the discussion.

You might also send mail to the following people and groups:

Asa Dotzler - he made the announcement [..]

drivers@mozilla.org - drivers are the project managers of Mozilla [..]

These people are the technical project leaders of Mozilla. They too should be aware that the possibility for confusion exists. [--snip eight addresses--]

Listing the eight technical project leaders at the end might have been a tad excessive, but I'd hardly call that "encouraging people to spam the mozillazine forums" or harrassing mozilla developers in the way that slashdot makes out to be. It looks like an ordinary informational page to tell people how they can contact the people who are able to make a decision.

Actually, I'm quite suspicious that he stole that joke from me. If you go to the Mozillazine article, you see I made the joke about the Pinto over an hour before the /. article was run. True, he changed it a bit -- but I at least should get some of the karma points. ;-)

Its by design. See Surfin' Safari. Replace vs. Append? When doing clustered loading, we took two approaches. One can be seen in Mozilla, and I personally hate it. The other can be seen in Phoenix and is my favorite choice. Mozilla actually appends the tabs loaded by a bookmark group to the end of the tabbed list. This means that if you click first on a News group and load tabs 1-5 and then click on a Blogs group, you'll end up with new tabs 6-10. In Phoenix, you replace instead, so the News tabs go away and are replaced by tabs 6-10. The argument for append is basically that you end up with potential data loss in that you may lose access to the previous tabs by closing up some of the ones you replaced, e.g., if the second group has fewer tabs than the first. This is of course a solvable problem, though, and doesn't justify changing the default behavior to append.

Doesn't look like Safari will be much of an "issue" anymore. Hyatt says he's dropping support for tables in the next release... ;)

Not particularly insightful...

Phoenix is still getting a new name that will be announced rather soon--go check MozillaZine and its forums for more on that:

"The new name is still on. I believe they hope to have it cleared for Friday, by which time Thunderbird should also be approved." --Alex Bishop

Another example of the high cost of app-suite integration is the inherently overloaded and complicated user interface (just one example out of too many: the File / New sub-menu). The target audience of the suite was never clear, and seemed to shift back and forth with prevailing business- and voluntary-contributor-driven winds.

and this quote from Hyatt's blog:

A common question is going to be, "I want to write code! Can I help?" The quick answer is, "If we need your help, we'll ask for it." The best way you can help is by building the products, testing them, making suggestions in newsgroups and mailing lists, and filing bugs.

Sounds like they're saying in essence "we don't need no stinkin' help from voluntary contributors, just let us build what *we* want to build, and you'll like it, whether you like it or not."

Gaah! I've posted too much on vBulletin boards. >:-(

Here's the link again:
Phoenix Build Forum. Again, it contains valuable tips on which nightly is good or if some should be avoided due to major bugs.

Unfortunately Mozilla's calendar development recently suffered a setback when it's major supporter decided to cut back development resources. Check out this article

A little off topic but still of interest, the XFree86 project is now using Bugzilla which sounds like a step in the right direction.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? Why can't these developers just work on the fucking project and improve it and make it better without having to rewrite into yet another application? I had the exact same feeling when I saw the Phoenix announcement: WHY?!

I think you've missed the point of the Phoenix project. Have you actually used Phoenix? The browser UI is wonderful -- and that's impossible to achieve in the Mozilla project, because it has to be all things to all people.

Try taking the Is Phoenix Right For You quiz; if you like Mozilla better, great. If you don't, great.

Either way, stop complaining about what other people choose to do with their time.

Is this yet another trademark problem, as with Phoenix?

Not really. You see, Minotaur was first started last September and was just meant to be a stand-alone version of Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups.. Around the same time, the Phoenix team decided to create a mail client to accompany Phoenix called Thunderbird.

This revitalised Minotaur project combines the aims of both the old Minotaur and Thunderbird and I don't think they're quite sure what they're going to call the end product yet.

This MozillaZine article explains things well.

Sure. Dave Hyatt has been known to possibly fix hypothetical bugs that may or may not occur in Safari versions that may or may not exist.

See Classic Mac OS Builds of Mozilla Transitioning to Port Status and Classic Mac OS Build Likely to be Retired and Removed from Tree for some explanation.

See Classic Mac OS Builds of Mozilla Transitioning to Port Status and Classic Mac OS Build Likely to be Retired and Removed from Tree for some explanation.

David Hyatt is a major contributor to all of the concerned browser projects (Safari, Gecko, Chimera/Camino, Phoenix). It's not too surprising, therefore, that they look similar.

- Scott

1. Read the mozillazine forums. Especially phoenix users. It's a 0.5 release, fer crying out loud!
2. Install Preferential. It gives you a primitive, regedit-type editor for all(?) of the options in mozilla/phoenix, even the ones that aren't in the original preferences UI.
3. ??
4. Profit from being able to use your browser again.

I was wondering that myself. The best place to keep track of this stuff is the Phoenix forums.

For the record, apparently they've decided on a name, but it hasn't received final approval from the lawyers yet. When it does, I'm guessing they'll announce the name and come out with a new release shortly thereafter.

Check out the 0.6 forum from the Phoenix Build forum.

Check out the 0.6 forum from the Phoenix Build forum.

Well, I'm not sure we'll ever see Safari with this particular feature. Found this info from tab guru David Hyatt. According to this, all the other tab implementations discussed here were his idea, and he now works on Safari.

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What, exactly, does the fact, that he is not a professional UI programmer, have to do with the comment he wrote? I find that comment perfectly reasonable and it's indeed (almost) exactly how I feel using Mozilla's tabbed browsing vs. Opera's MDI windowing. The key difference between Mozilla's tabs and MDI is that there's no window management in Mozilla's tabs. MDI app has always, more or less, it's own window manager.

If you want to see a really, really bad example of MDI, just view the Metalworks demo in Java 1.4.1_01. Just try to open some windows, minimize some of them and resize the main window after that. Looks pretty stupid, eh? Compare this to Mozilla's tabs where a tab is always the same size with all the other tabs inside the same main window and the resizing is done by resizing the main window. Seems like a pretty intuitive way to work for me. Another important usability feature is that you can have multiple main windows open in paraller. Most apps have either all windows detached from each other (e.g. Gimp) or all windows inside the main window (e.g. older versions of Opera).

Check out Dave Hyatt's weblog on this issue.

The Mozilla 1.3 branch has been closed in prep. for release. There's a mention of it on Mozillazine as well.

The outstanding bug list has been mirrored here:
http://www.phule.net/mirrors/bugs-2003-02-22.html because it's not very nice to bugzilla.mozilla to link directly to it. At least not from /. :)

The reason [for the name change] is that the BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies dislikes the trademark infrigment.

We need to rename Phoenix. The kind folks over at phoenix.com have complained about trademark infringement. Anyone have thoughts on a cool, meaningful new name?

Well, the Phoenix people at mozilla.org were asked by the people at Phoenix the BIOS company to change the name. So I'd say this is a pretty good guess.

If you want the real thing, watch Code Rush (its the only working link about Code Rush that I could find). Its a very interesting documentary that follows the pre-release period of Mozilla and the problems, both at a professional and personal level, of the Netscape employees to get the first release of Mozilla out into the public (from memory: the Netscape Navigator code cleanup, the acquisition by AOL, the moral struggle and demissions because of AOL, the scepticism about open source, the story behind Zarro Boogs, the perilous quest to find the "Missing In Office" Netscape Mac developer and make him do some work for a change, the constant time pressure and its detrimental individual and social consequences, etc).

It doesnt get more factual than this.

Hey, you're right. Here's a more Slashdotesque version:

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday February 15, @09:38AM
from the taxman-downloadeth dept.
David Gerard writes "From Heese (via Mozillazine: taxpayers in the Swiss canton of Geneva are being given a CD with a French version of Mozilla 1.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 and tax program GEtax 2002. Rough English translation from Google." This strikes me as a really cool idea. I already get the cerds that tell me to file online rather than fill out paper forms, but it stll forces me to buy tax software every year.

Mark Pilgrim's excellent blog Dive Into Mark has a very comprehensive list of changes to the Webcore rendering engine. The permanent link is here. I'm impressed with how quickly he's managed to list these changes seeing as it only came out today!

One change I've noticed is Safari no longer freezes for a minute when loading certain webpages. Another nice change is that stylesheet change on Dave Hyatt's weblog actually works now. Dave is ironically one of the Safari developers, so it's just as well!!!

Yes, it certainly is interesting that an article about the term open source being coined 5 years ago (an article about nothing, then) gets on Slashdot, yet there was no mention of the 5 year annerversary of Netscape going open source (when something really did happen).

In addition to providing the best web browser for Mac users, one of the goals of Safari is to provide a fast and efficient HTML rendering engine for Mac application developers. Apple is actively preparing a Safari SDK that will be available later this year.

In other words, all good things come to those who wait, so be patient! :)

I landed the new table code from the KHTML trunk in WebCore today. Meanwhile Lars is working on a new CSS parser on the KHTML trunk that we'll be taking back into Safari once it's baked a bit longer.

The downloadable Webcore has updated KHTML code from 3.0.2. You can download stuff from KDE CVS and do the diff yourself if you doubt this. No need to re-integrate the SAFARI_BRANCH code.

As for the embeddable HTML component - search for "Safari SDK" on the following link.

Or read Dave Hyatt's blog (where he says the same thing) here.

Or see what the folks at Omnigroup are saying
here and here.

First off, just to clear this up...
soon to get easier with the X11 on Max OS X

X has been on X for quite some time. You could fink it if you wanted, or, if you want something even easier, you could XonX it or xdarwin it.

What's new, of course, is Apple's X11. That Apple would Aquafy X11 is really a great step forward, and hopefully means that -- and this is key -- Apple will start shipping Macs with X11 preinstalled.

Just as OS X's built in Java Virtual Machine makes OS X a first-rate Java deployment platform as Java apps look and act native without a single end user consideration about VMs, soon OS X could be a first-rate, well-integrated client-side deployment platform for open source software. Most importantly, this will continue to add new developers to open source movements, and that can't be bad. Even if Apple doesn't share everything they do, the fact that you'll have people used to making client-side apps increasingly contributing to open source projects is a great thing.

Not to mention that I've been impressed with what Apple's give back to the oss community, even though they technically often have no reason at all to do so. They've made Darwin open source, and have worked with the BSDs to share code that they have no pressing legal reason making them do so. Safari's updates to KHTML continue to be checked back in to the Konquerer source code by this paid Apple employee, which is another great move.

The only way I see Apple's new love of oss possibly being a bad thing is that Apple tends to hire the best away from open source projects and slap them onto Apple-first ones. Though this is great in that these people feel connected to the oss community, it has to shift their attention away from Linux and other F/free *NIXes a bit.

But more developers, especially good client-app developers, is a good thing, and having Apple return their contributions to the community is icing on the cake.

Since I'm not Dave Hyatt or Dirk Mueller, I really don't know how much of the communication going on is private mail and how much is on the mailing lists. However, I do keep tabs on what Dave says about Safari over at his blog.

As far as the KHTML side, I just keep watching CVS and I've lost count of how many messages I've seen marked with "merge from safari". It's amazing. Within two weeks of Apple's announcement, half of the code had already been imported back into the main tree and the Safari guys had picked up the new table rendering code on their end.

So subscribe to kde-cvs@kde.org and check Dave's blog, or check the kde-cvs digests (dot.kde.org links to them every time they come out) since kde-cvs is extremely heavy traffic-wise. That's the best way I know of to keep up to date on this info.

I would like to thank everyone that responded to my question. Many of your responses were knowlegable and very helpful. Allow me to clarify a few things:

• After reading your opinions, I have solidified something I was considering: I should definetly make rolling Mozilla out a choise that each of my individual users makes. This would be best accomplished by a customized installer that takes some of the configuring head-aches out of getting used to Mozilla. Most of my desire to roll out Mozilla came from good ol' evangelism. Of course, we would benefit from the increased security, but, I would much rather have my users be happy.
• Customizing the installer seems more feasible now that I've read all your suggestions.
• There is a bug at bugzilla for this very subject that one studious reader pointed out. Thank you.
• Mozillazine.org has posted a follow-up thread to this Slashdot discussion.

Again, thank you to each of you for your help. Perhaps after a bit more spit and polish is put on Mozilla, I'll reconsider a network-wide roll-out.

Dave Hyatt's weblog, the Confessions of a Mozillian

If it tells you anything, he changed the name of his weblog to Surfin' Safari about a week ago.

A number of people have commented on Safari's UA string, which is as follows: Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48 The portion of the UA string that seems to be stirring up controversy is the portion that says (like Gecko). The reason it is there is that in order to work with real-world DHTML sites you have essentially two options: you can claim to be MSIE or you can claim to be Gecko. We found that any other choice that we tried led to a significant portion of DHTML malfunctioning. You would not believe (well, maybe you would) how much DHTML exists out there that works only with MSIE or Gecko, and that uses proprietary extensions of each to accomplish the DHTML effects. Had we released a browser with a UA string that did not superficially match either MSIE or Gecko, users would have downloaded Safari and experienced many malfunctioning Web sites. If anyone thinks that would have been a good idea, please step forward in your blog and explain why. I'm willing to listen. Our solution was a compromise. We produced a user agent string that is different from Gecko's and easily distinguishable if you choose to sniff for it, but that at this time will pass most UA checks that sniff for Gecko. It may be that enough sites will start sniffing directly for our string that we can drop the "(like Gecko)" from our user agent string, but I'm not optimistic. We chose to be more like Gecko than like MSIE because we wanted to be lumped into the standards compliant category, because fundamentally we are committed to supporting DOM 1&2, CSS1&2, and enough proprietary MSIE extensions and Gecko extensions (innerHTML, createContextualFragment, offsetWidth/Height, etc.) that we could be placed in a similar category. That's all from my end. I welcome constructive feedback on this issue.

Here is his blog which talks about it.

There has been a lengthy discussion on MozillaZine here

Other Lizard Wranglers that deserve a voice in this. To be honest these guys are the ones I listen to when it comes to Mozilla.
alsa
Blizzard
mpt

Why should JWZ be quoted about a project he bailed on years ago? jwz is entertaining when he whines, it's the only reason I can think of.

Really? Dave Hyatt's weblog reports that it was fixed on last Wednesday, the 8th. My Macs are at home (I'm at work) so I can't verify right now.

Rendezvous is extremely cool tech.

For a really successful Apple topic on slashdot it needs to be...

a) something that's big in Open Source/Free software anyway like OpenOffice for Mac
b) rumour/lies
c) Apple hardware announcment

Which is a shame, because the Mac platform is really the only innovation I can see in the computing world right now. Take the Safari browser for example, David Hyatt is actually responding to other people's blogs about Safari and actually taking notice. No other company is doing things to this level of service.

Okay, we've got the first post on Apple's Discussion boards at (Posted Jan 8, 03 3:35 am) and the bug report has made it to Slashdot by 4:37 EST, I assume. The "world" knows about this problem, and has for hours.

I'm upset for a number of reasons. Hey, this is a beta, sure. As a software developer myself, a huge bug that doesn't turn up until you let someone else take a look is, unfortunately, expected. The Chinaman (Big Lebowski screenplay here if you missed the reference)... ur, bug's not the issue here, dude.

Here's what's wrong -- we've got 300,000 people who prefer mice with one button a hair's breath away from erasing pretty important folders. We can hardly expect they've backed everything up. Here are three reasons Apple's more than just dropped the ball...

1.) Fire up Software Update in OS X. We've come to expect IE updates here. There's nothing about a Safari update.
2.) Go back to apple.com/safari. Try to download. Same version they released right after the keynote. No fix offered.
3.) There's not even a mention about the problem on the Safari project lead's blog, though there are mentions that they've fixed the appearence of VersionTracker's front page (Admittedly, I sent that bug in yesterday with probably literally thousands of others). Can they really not be aware of the directory-erasing problem?

Look, this is worse than MSN Messenger going down for five hours due to human error. So what if I can't IM? I'll finally get some work done. With Safari, there are people reporting that they're losing their iPhoto set-ups, their Documents folders, and even their entire home directory. Expecting Joe iPhoto user to reattach symbolic links is a bit much, folks.

It's embarassing, even if this is some sort of strange hoax (which it certainly doesn't seem to be) that Apple's not on top of things. More than mud in Apple's eye, this is nearly scandal.