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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.
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.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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.
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.
Bottom line: Take anything the Mozilla Quest site says with a HUGE grain of salt.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I just want to make sure it is very clear to slashdot readers that MozillaQuest is in no way connected with or affiliated with mozilla.org. Do not be confused by the name or the 'borrowed' mozilla graphics (mostly gone now I believe). MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site. It is a shame that slashdot, a place that many in the open source community turn for information, continues to point its readers at this kind of sensationalism.
--Asa
(my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or mozilla.org)
For all those who keep saying "Who cares when 1.0 is coming out when 0.93 is out now", and you are somewhat right, don't forget that RedHat has said (and I believe other distros will follow suit) that when mozilla reaches 1.0, it will stop carrying the horrid Netscape 4.7x altogether, in the distro, and focus on Mozilla as the default browser. This support alone will help Mozilla greatly.
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.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
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?
Point here is that 1.0 has meaning to me, should it be fairly robust I will encourage my friends to use it and install it on a bunch of machines that I don't update with every release.
What if Mozilla 0.9.8 is "fairly robust"? Will you not encourage others to use it because it is not called 1.0? What if the plans for 0.9.9 and 1.0 do not include any improvements in the "robust"ness of the app? Is is useful to hold off recommending it until the magic number 1.0 happens? What if we had never moved from the Mx Milestone naming scheme? We'd be at about Milestone M26 now. Would you wait until it hit M30 or M50 or maybe M100 before encouraging others to use it?
Of course, they are not going to fix 1500 bugs by v1.0
Actually, we average about 1500 bugs fixed every Milestone (about every 5 to 6 weeks). So I sure hope we can fix at least that many in the Milestones we have between now and 1.0.
BTW, I appreciate the sentiment of your comments. Don't take my nits as anything but nits and my questions as genuine curiosity.
--Asa
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*
While Mozilla has been under development:
Business plans have been written, VC found, businesses opened, millions made and millions lost.
We have sent probes to Mars, only to be shot down by the Martians.
Hundreds of species have gone extinct. Most of which were yet to be discovered.
People have met, married, and divorced.
I went from a shell account to SDSL. Of course, I still use the shell account.
There was peace in the Middle East. Sort of. I think.
The Olympics. More than once.
A president got blown by an intern, and we've stopped talking about it on a daily basis.
Another intern has disappeared, and we might have stopped talking of her by the time we reach 1.0.
So is it just me, or does this project seem like it is taking an insane amount of time to complete??
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.
.vbs viruses on my Windows boxes).
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
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.