Mozilla Moves Into 2002? Maybe.

alanjstr writes "MozillaQuest reports that Mozilla 1.0 has been pushed back into 2002 (from Oct 2001) in its latest schedule update. Since the end of 2000, the rate of new bugs being submitted has doubled (according to the pretty graph)." However, the Mozilla guys, whom our own HeUnique talked to have said that they are still on target, and that the 2002 story is not true. So - you be the judge on this one. Or not. Whatever.

Comments

Doubling bugs

[ryants]

A possible explanation for the increased bug rate:

The rate increase in bug reporting is possibly due to wider use; as each build got better and better, more and more people tried it and found more and more things (little things) wrong.

In which case, that just means that Mozilla is getting more and more refined. I think this correlates with most people's experiences with Mozilla from build to build.

Just a thought.

Why 1.0?

[Scrag]

What is the obsession with reaching version 1.0? It's not a finished product until then? Then tell me why I have been using it for everything that several finished products can do. It won't have bugs by the time it reaches 1.0? I cant understand that either. It's not everyone will stop working on it when it reaches 1.0, so that means version 1.0 is just another version in the middle of hundreds of others.

What is really important is that the browser keeps getting better, and it is. With each release they fix tons of bugs. That isn't going to change when it reaches 1.0. I don't care if it never reaches 1.0 as long as it keeps getting better. They could call the next release 1.0 and everyone would be excited, but it wouldn't really mean anything. Just like the actual 1.0 release won't.

A Rose by any other name (?)

[Ars-Fartsica]

What is the problem? Mozilla is essentially stable and featureful from my perspective as an everyday user. Given that the product is useable today, isn't 1.0 more or less an arbitrary release point? Its not like 1.0 will close off all existing bugs and not open any new ones - every release is an incremental march towards stability with new features adding their own instabilities.

Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.

Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[goingware]

I believe it was IBM that first figured out that bugs in a large project asymptotically approach a constant number.

You may fix the worst bugs, but as time goes on more and more bugs are found, and eventually bugs pretty much crop up as you fix them.

The thing is, although bugs are constantly appearing, the frequency of the average bug decreases. You start getting bugs that happen only once every thousand user-years. Try as you might, you can't squash them all.

There is some hope, in that you can use some fundamentally better method of software engineering and things get suddenly better. The bugs still approach a constant level, but it is a smaller level. Back when IBM studied this, it was still common to write operating systems in assembly code. Using a high-level language is so much easier to debug that you can achieve better bug rates.

But at the same time, we have much greater ambitions for our software. Mozilla 1.0 will have far more features than Microsoft Word 1.0 did.

Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[caspy7]

Please, someone tell those that are responsible for posting these to never ever again post any information found on MozillaQuest. Please don't even bother visiting the site so that he gets hits. This guy sensationalises information and just plain makes stuff up. MozillaQuestQuest.com is a good place to point out his contradictions and such.
My question is how can we delegitimize this guy so the real media doesn't take his lies and run?

Walk a mile in another's shoes...

[penguin_nipple]

IMHO, 0.9.3 is an excellent browser. It's installed on all my machines ,including on both partitions of my Development box at work (w2k and slack 8.0). Yes, development my appear to be slow, but I'd simply like to point out to a few things

1. Mozilla is a massive project, whose (main) goal is a natively running browser on multiple platforms, this is no small task and they have done well thus far. I don't think anyone can point to a browser that runs on as many different platforms as well as Moz does.
2. Mozilla was one of the first major Open Source initiatives undertaken, and in fact must have been a logisitical nightmare to get rolling - especially taking into account the fact that they wiped the proverbial board clean with Mozilla - however, consider all the other issues that go into an open code distribution system.
3. We have no other development process to use as a benchmark to the development of Mozilla. Up until this point in time, all one has ever gotten is binary distributions. Very little insight and even less information from previous organizations.
4. Agreed, the much hyped 'browser-wars' are over, thank god, IMHO, those wars ended up coming down to distribution issues that Microsoft capitalized (unfairly) upon. As we all know, 99% of the world will use the browser that smacks them in the face at home. As for the corporate scene, many organizations continue to use Netscape and (from people I know who deal with these issues) will move to a stable, compliant browser when available. Which is in fact becoming more of a critical issue - called them 'web enabled' or 'network aware' applications. I would point to .NET as an example of how this scheme seems to be gaining prominence.
5. Mozilla is quite a bit more than just a browser or mark up renderer. Granted most of you wouldn't ever need the capabilities provided in XUL, but many application developers might. Cry cry cry about bloat all you want - if you are using a windoze box to read this, then you are familiar with bloat. You may bitch and moan about XUL and how horrible it is, however, it is essentially providing the multi-platform capabilities of Mozilla. And for me anyhow, it is important to have a rich, dynamic, and actively developed multiplatform browser. Try not to overlook that contribution - Mozilla is an extremely flexible piece of code.

6. I am not going to put down or put on a pedestal any of the other available browsers. I use them all, on numerous platforms, both open and closed. Konqueror is great for quick and dirty net searches. Opera is great on low-end boxen. Explorer is well...explorer...*sigh*. Mozilla is quick, stable and does everything I want to do online. This is just my opinion.

   From the pace of development, Mozilla is doing fairly well. If you're a programmer, you should realize the scope of what they are doing over at Mozilla. As for Slashdot, why exactly would you guys post an article so blatantly and obviously mis-informed?? Generally I look to /. to give up interesting news, somewhat outside the normal of FUD and goofie marketing/media coverage we see everywhere on the net.

   Could someone from /. explain the motivation for posting the story in the first place? Not that an article which is critical of Mozilla or any open source should not be posted. In fact, critical articles are fine. So long as they are informed and well written which this one obviously is not.

   Just a note to Asa - your posts are very obviously showing a note of tension. Don't worry about it, you guys are doing a helluva job and from one (semi) sane coder to another I'd just like you guys at Mozilla to know that your broswer is sweet. They'll always bitch abut something *shrug*

Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[Zontar The Mindless]

The MozillaQuest site itself is so badly executed and so sophomoronic in content as to place it beyond the bounds of credibility or even lampoonability. How anyone can come up with "October + ? = 2002" is simply beyond me -- unless they've an ulterior motive. That funny biz with the screenshots and graphs struck me as an amateurish (but still annoying) attempt at disinformation.

It's just so fscking sad that anyone would even link to it, much less give it guaranteed traffic by posting a story from it as "news" here.

/. editors, please don't choose articles when you've been smoking crack. You'll just continue to embarass yourselves and waste our time. Thank you.

In the meantime, I plan to continue to ignore MozillaQuest and hope that it'll just go away.

BTW, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.3 exclusively for my email and it kicks butt (and I don't have to worry about .vbs viruses on my Windows boxes).

So when do we see a 1.0?

[Metrol]

As a FreeBSD and NT user who designs web pages, layout and font sizes really matter to me. Although I mainly use Konqueror under FreeBSD, it has far more to do with the simpler interface than it's rendering engine. To date, I haven't see any other browser display layout, fonts, and deal with Javascript better than Mozilla.

With that being said, it's still quite apparent that Mozilla is an 800lbs. gorilla when it comes to memory and CPU usage. It has gotten a LOT better in the last few builds. If these kinds of optimization issues were worked out by the next release, I would happily convert myself and others that rely on my judgement on over to Mozilla.

Thing is, even as I type this on ye olde Netscape 4.78 after browsing around to several web pages, NT is reporting about 17M of memory allocated. Just to start Mozilla is 22M, and I haven't gone anywhere yet. To further illustrate the point, I went and opened up the newsgroup readers in each, subscribed to a group, and then pulled in all the headers of that group. NS 4.7 comes in at around 18M after this operation. Mozilla at 40.5M. Not going to bother listing numbers off of FreeBSD as I'm still running 0.9.3 on there.

Personally, it's just frustrating as heck to watch. There we have this Gecko engine was does a truly beautiful job of properly rendering a web page regardless of the platform. Exactly what a browser should do! Wrapped around this is a monster of a UI that even to this day still feels like I'm trying to interact with some bad Java applet. Oh sure it is pretty, but the reaction time even on a 1.2Ghz machine is noticeable.

Looking back, I'm finding myself in total agreement with critics I disagreed with before over one point. XUL. The Mozilla folks repeatedly told us all how much longer it would take to develop this project if they stuck with native OS widgets. I just have to wonder how much time has been wasted while the resources of the Mozilla project could have had Win32, Mac, Qt, GTK versions out the door by now? Certainly projects like Galeon have shown this could have been done.

Mozilla made a wrong turn early on (IMHO) with XUL. Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace. Problem is, those projects are out on the fringe, while IE is dead center of the web universe defining the standards across the board. Mozilla is FAR more than just a browser at this point. It's the last chance gasp at taking control of web standards and the Internet itself from Microsoft.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Salsaman]

But the mozilla team have consistently stated that if mozilla were not based on XUL, there would have been no Linux version.

Besides, it makes sense from a programming perspective - you *should* abstract out the interface from the computational part of the program. It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.

And as for the responsiveness issue, personally I find no difference between native windows apps and mozilla and native linux apps and mozilla.

Plus I am sure that there will still be a few optimisations before a 1.0 release. If you knew anything about software development (which you appear not to) you would realise that the standard process is:

1) get something that works, so that people can start development in other areas

2) once it's working, start to optimise it, preferably without changing the interfaces.

I remember back when M16 came out people were saying mozilla was a POS, it was time to bury the project, it would never be usable, etc,etc. As somebody who'd been following the project since the start, I could see that some big optimisations were being a worked on, and mozilla was about to improve radically.

I told people that and was laughed at. But lo and behold, a few months later we got the 0.9.x milestones and as I predicted mozilla became very usable, to the point where people are now using it in preference to other browsers.

I believe now that many of the big optimisations are done and dusted, we will start to see a lot of the smaller optimisations worked on. The interface will improve, memory usage will go down.

In short, don't write mozilla off because it doesn't use native toolsets. Give it a chance, and we will see what happens before 1.0 comes out.