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Mozilla 1.0 Delayed Again
Capt. Mubbers writes: "Both
Mozillaquest and RootPrompt have pointers to the new Mozilla 'Tree Management' diagram which is now showing a delay until Q4 2001. Hey, I don't mind, later should mean that they are taking the time to get it right! Cough, cough Netscape 6.0." Sometimes I wish large projects would just use a series of intriguing codewords (or name+code release date), so this point-oh anxiety never had to surface.
Damn, 2 days ago I had moderator access and nothing I wanted to do with it - now here's a post that I want to mod up and I don't have any.
Folks, MozillaQuest has been clueless from day 1. I've found numerous factual errors in their articles, all of which were obvious to me even as an outsider who just follows the various n.p.m.* newsgroups and reads *real* mozilla news sites like mozillaZine. I haven't read a single article at their site that told me anything I didn't know, except for the ones (like this one) that are just plain untrue (see other posts: the roadmap was updated weeks ago and all they changed was the "you are here" X).
I suspect this site is actually run by someone with an anti-mozilla agenda. Checking the whois indicates that the same person (Mike Angelo) owns the domains and posts practically every article on the site. And the front-page has at least 5 "Mozilla 1.0 delayed until XXXX" articles - nothing about all the great new features that have gone in recently, the giant leaps in mail/news stability and performance, the pre-loader for better startup time, Dave Hyatt's new CSS rule matching code that gives a 10% performance improvement and saves hundreds of K in runtime memory, or anything. Just "Mozilla 1.0 delayed". Way to not tell the whole story.
Read mozillaZine if you want mozilla news, or better yet, subscribe to the newsgroups and follow interesting issues in bugzilla. If only the MozillaQuest editor would bother to do that.
Stuart.
I just don't get why people think that Mozilla is taking so long. Everyone says 'Look at IE5.5, it's really good now'. But Microsoft have been developing IE for what, 4 / 5 years? Which basically means if by Q4 Mozilla is as good (and I honestly believe it will be better - and certainly technically more impressive, which will translate to future improvability) then mozilla.org has done what Microsoft did in a year less.
/surely/ what free software is about?
Mozilla appears chronologically after MSIE. So what? I know all the arguments about the browser war being lost, but I'm not so convinced, especially will the emergence of all the new platforms. Fact is, come 1.0, anyone will have the tools available to zap their new improved browser / internet suite / revolutionary cutting edge killer app into being in a very short time. Perhaps people won't adopt Mozilla, but the opportunity to do so and not reinvent the wheel is
Many of the comments here summarize all that I hate about the software development field. First, never, ever, ever, *ever* beat anyone over the head for being honest about delays. Always let developers be upfront. Second, the "point-oh" thing used to mean that "this software meets the functionality specified in the RCS for this version." The "build number" let's-give-them-a-compile-drop mentality that Microsoft has pushed on us has put software engineering standards a few generations, and I find it funny that Slashdot is officially sanctioning it.
Aargh!!!!
Tony
1) Whats the rush for AOL to release the new browser now that AOL is going with IE? None.
2) The release schedule in actuality has not changed. Go to mozillaquest and compare the two graphics for yourself - they only moved the 'X' further along and pushed the 1.0 grey branch down - the point releases have not been moved, hence, the production schedule remains the same.
3) I use mozilla day-in-and-day-out - i'm using it right now. It beats the sh*t out of IE. Why? Because if we have no other choice, and we all had to use IE, as soon as M$ sees no more competition, they will stop producing the crappy thing for other platforms. Oh, sorry Steve Jobs, we decided that Mac's are too difficult to support, bye. Then what would us Linux, BeOS, Sun, Amiga, HP, and others do? Stop using the web. Riiiiiiiiight. Time to swtich to Windows! What else has M$ showed over the years other than the ability to twist peoples arms and make them use Windows?
4) For the love of God, people - quit frickin' cutting our own throats. Mozilla is our ONLY major OpenSource platform for web applications. (Which, hopefully, some of you more intelligent slashdotters realise is the future of the web.) If you dont like it, download it and try it again - like now, today. If you still dont like it - SHUT UP! We could kick each other in the teeth day after day about how Redhat is more secure than LinuxPPC, or how Mandrake is better for newbies, ow what have you, but what does that accomplish? NOTHING. The best thing you could ever hopw of your competition is that they attack each other - united we stand folks, divided we fall.
Mozilla - you're soaking in it.
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
I drew the roadmap.
Mozilla 1.0's ship date has been the same for around 3 years now: "When It's Ready".
When I drew the first roadmap which mentioned a 1.0 release [2], I placed it "in the future", faded out and labelled "if we're lucky". The accompanying text explained that Mozilla 1.0 would be released "when it is ready". When I next changed the roadmap significantly [4], it was to add in another milestone (0.8.1) which had been requested by groups who use the Mozilla codebase in their projects (like Nautlius and AOL). So far, nothing too serious.
The next big change [5] was to simply move the roadmap along a bit so that there was more room. Mozilla 1.0 was still a faded out, but I also took the opportunity to move it along a bit too, thus keeping it at the end of the roadmap. The release date for 1.0 was not changed, it was still "when it's ready".
However, when that roadmap diagram was published, I discovered that I had previously a undiscovered power among the Slashdot community! People were outraged that the faded lines had been moved! The text hadn't changed, the release date hadn't changed, but the image was adjusted a bit and this is clearly what matters!
Wary of this amazing power, when I made my next update to the roadmap image [6] I was very careful about making the release date of the Mozilla 1.0 product extremely clear: the branch is labelled "Mozilla 1.0 (when it is ready)". I figured that would prevent another outburst from my fans.
Clearly not! Both RootPrompt and Slashdot have me as their top article! My power remains untamed! Woohoo! :-D
The roadmap images:
So when will Mozilla 1.0 be ready? We have a definition document.
However, since I started using komodo, which was built on top of Mozilla I realized Mozilla has a really great potential for writing cross platform applications. Check it out. Also, if you primarily write server-side web apps, as I do, you can use browser components as the shell of your app, say to handle files and printing, while the bulk of your application runs on your web server.
I'd also have to give Mozilla the award for being the single best source of sample code out there in the open source world. Because everything is in there, there is a very good chance that you can learn about what you are trying to do by looking at the code. Hopefully, universities will pick up on this and use Mozilla to help teach CS. That would lead to more Mozilla users(and coders).
Additionally, having a complete, open-source browser suite forces MS to keep on their toes and release a high-quality, standards compliant browser, while at the same time preventing them from having a total monopoly on the browser market.
Yes, I'd have to say that Mozilla matters.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This is what I have realised for a long time. Various things that Microsoft does could be learned from by the Linux kernal developers. Perhaps Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds should investigate whether or not it would be technically feasable to integrate Mozilla with the GNU/Linux kernal.
It makes sense to have the browser be part of the OS, since it is what most people use their PC's for all the time, might as well hide the overhead of starting it up by integrating it with the kernal.
Linux could easily start to make inroads on the desktop if it took the lead from Microsoft's very highly skilled geeks. (You can't patent putting the broswer in the OS, after all
XML support could go in there too, and possibly word processing also. They could fork a separate distro for the propellorheads that did not want all the 'extras' in their kernal. (it could all be #ifdef'd in the kernel source.
I am not a tech savvy hacker so I don't know if there are any technical reasons why this cannot be done (put Mozilla in the GNU/Linux kernal) but surely the potential upside of this approach cannot be ignored.