The Mozilla 1.0 Definition

The Evil Beaver writes: "Here we go. Mozillazine is reporting that Brenden Eich, mozilla.org's Technical Bigshot, has released the criteria to what is to be the 1.0 milestone. The 'manifesto' also explains why 1.0 is so important to reach, and why it isn't just another milestone, either. The Mozillazine article is here and the definition document here.

Comments

But....

[sheriff_p]

Where's the "World Domination" item?

Ha!

[Iron_MMonkey]

No lizard shall ever defeat the Iron_MMonkey!

... 2 comments, and....

[Anonymous Coward]

I get this:

"Unable to connect to SQL server".

Whee. :P

Re:... 2 comments, and....

[hey]

Yes, we all do.
Why do they use a database to serve out articles?
What's wrong with giving the Unix path!
Nice and easy, reliable, etc.

error going to article

[mark_lybarger]

can it be the ./ effect already? i'm getting "unable to connect to SQL server" when going to the article ...

Re:error going to article

[cetan]

http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml

mirror

/. effect or a conspiracy?

[Hektor_Troy]

Could it be, that what we're seeing isn't the infamous slashdot-effect, but in fact a conspiracy preventing anyone not using the latest build of Mozilla on the latest build of the linux-kernel from entering the page?

Re:/. effect or a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been having problems getting to Mozillazine's SQL server for about 2 weeks now. But the Mozilla site is almost certain ./ed.

Re:/. effect or a conspiracy?

[damiam]

I'm using Mozilla 0.9.4 and MacOS 9.1 and it loads fine after a few reloads. But it really wasn't worth the trouble, because all it does is point you to the Mozilla site.

Its not a game you know..

[onion2k]

Better-than-any-competition standards compliance

There in lies a bit of an issue. The standards aren't done yet. Nor will they be. Standards are an evolving thing. The big issue of the Netscape/IE wars in the late 90s was that both parties tried to predict where the standards were going, and tried to go straight to the final standard without waiting for them to be ratified.

And they both failed.

We had 'non-complient' browsers, different object models, different CSS models, IE and NS specific tags.. it was a right old mess. Trying to be 'most standards complient' implies an attempt to out-do the other browsers, which is precisely where NS particularly, and to a degree IE, fell down. It gave everyone a right old headache.

The problems arise when the web designers find a new feature they happen to like a bit (CSS colour control of scroll bars being a current example), that doesn't work in all browsers, and theres a great big shift toward the browser that does the 'coolest' things.

Yes, be standards complient. Be 100% standards complient hopefully. But just remember that it has nothing to do with how complient the others are.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[StupidKatz]

Here's the REAL issue: "Standards are an evolving thing." They *shouldn't* be, and true standards do not evolve much, if at all.

Imagine if a kilogram was 2.2lb one day, then 4.3lb the next. Not much of a "standard", is it?

The major browsers were all "compliant" with ... HTML 1.0 and such base stuff, but web designers are trying to make the WWW do things it was never designed to do, and *that* is where this horrible mess of Javascript kiddies, broken CSS, and browser specific "features" came from. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not see all that flashy crap on a web site. Web sites need to contain *content*, not eye candy. :P

Re:Its not a game you know..

[onion2k]

Not quite what I meant. HTML 'standard' is set by the W3C, but it evolves. Its currently at 4.3 (I think). So does the Moz team work toward that? After all, by the time they're done it might be at 4.7. This is the trap into which NS and IE fell. They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped. Both missed the target. But had they written for what was at the time the current standard they'd have been releasing browser that, while stable and complient, would have been miles behind the competition in terms of features. Which is why writing a standards complient browser should be undertaken by someone who isn't trying to make money. Delibrately being behind your competition would be suicidal.

As for the content of web sites, I'm still a 'content is king' web master. As are many of us. But when we probably aren't the web surfing majority. People want flashy gimmicks and toys on sites. And more and more web 'designers' are all too willing to give it to them.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[CptLogic]

>>Imagine if a kilogram was 2.2lb one day, then 4.3lb the next. Not much of a "standard", is it?

That's not the "standards evolution" that happens here. It's about new functionality and methods of providing it being ratified, upgrades to existing standards such as CSS, not changing what CSS does, just expanding it's repertoire. Hence the Standard Model, to borrow from the world of Physics, keeps getting larger, so a browser needs to support more features to comply with *all* the standards.

Now they only want to be the most standards compliant browser out there, but what happens if a "feature" of another brower model suddenly gets ratified as the best way of doing things, and that "standard" gets updated to reflect this?

Standards compliance is a worthy cause, but, ultimately, a lost one. They need to sit down, pick the standards they want to use as they stand *now* and make it comply with those.
Any newer standards can be included in version 1.1 or something.

Chris.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[MartinB]

Current W3C recommendation for HTML is 4.01 (which is 4.0 with bugfixes)

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Peejeh]

Actually the current HTML spec is XHTML 1.0 Revision 2 released last week.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[MartinB]

The standards aren't done yet. Nor will they be. Standards are an evolving thing. The big issue of the Netscape/IE wars in the late 90s was that both parties tried to predict where the standards were going, and tried to go straight to the final standard without waiting for them to be ratified.

Actually that's mostly not true. The engineers from MS (predominantly but also the NS ones) were part of the forum which defined the standards (CSS1 in particular). They went back to their home companies and implemented something different.

Yes, standards evolve, just like software. But where a standard exists, it should be followed - when you're defining software behaviour, you should follow all ratified standards up until that point.

Adding stuff on top (with the intent of influencing standards) is OK, as long as the core is followed, and you recognise that your new stuff may be in conflict with future standards, and at that point, will have to be deprecated.

If there is a ratified standard for a feature, you should follow the standard or not implement the feature.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[bertilow]

Actually the current HTML spec is XHTML 1.0 Revision 2 [w3.org] released last week.

And just why do you exclude XHTML 1.1?

It's actually very unclear which version of (X)HTML is the current "HTML recommendation". If it's not XHTML 1.1 then I can't really tell from the W3C documents which one it is.

Of course XHTML 1.1 is quite unusable in today's browsers, but that's another matter. You can't really (fully) use even HTML 2 in them...

Re:Its not a game you know..

[hiroko]

The current and last version of HTML is 4.01. HTML is no longer being developed, having been superceeded by XHTML, based upon XML. These are (two of) the standards mozilla team is working to, and future standards will build upon them.

Moz does use its own extensions to the standards, and features of draft standards, but has implemented them in a manner that states them clearly as mozilla (a "moz-" prefix I think).
These extensions are not being encouraged as "wow look at this great feature" but developed to fulfill needs such as assisting the themes capability, or because a developer is particularly interested in it. The advance work is not enabled in all builds, but will give an advantage when the standard is reccommended (complete).

The point of mozillas approach to standards is to get the existing standards working fully and correctly, anything else is a bonus.

(skipping moderation duty to comment :)

Re:Its not a game you know..

[StupidKatz]

In other words...

'They' need to pick a standard. ;)

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Shafalus]

Yes, be standards complient. Be 100% standards complient hopefully. But just remember that it has nothing to do with how complient the others are.

Yes, but better-than-any-competition is intended as a pragmatic compromise; if the goal was 100% compliancy or even a near approximation, it would be as unattainable as Zeno's Tortoise. As Eich says later on:

Some people believe that most standards-compliance bugs should be fixed for anything that deserves the 1.0 brand. That's ok, but the number of milestones needed to fix such a long list is hard to guess, but probably quite large at the current fix rate.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[CptLogic]

"They" need to take a snapshot of the Standards Model at one point in time and work towards that.

It's my personal belief that all references to W3A standards, and, in fact, any other standards, should include a datestamp, akin to the "Information correct at time of printing" label you see on printed advertising and leaflets and such.

Chris.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Cujo]

The strategy for the evolution of standards is evolving, too, and partly to address this problem. Thus XHTML, placing HTML on a firmer footing, and providing a higher level of abstraction to work with. This allows you to add new tags to HTML in the future in a way that can be accomodated in an orderly fashion.

There are many emerging standards, and Mozilla complies, or is attempting to comply with, most of the key stable ones. After that, the onus is on the standards bodies to make sure they don't break Mozilla unless they aboslutely must. Besides, a lot of data on the internet would become useless if standards weren't backwards compatible. XML, for example, is a key piece of standards infrastructure that needs to evolve very carefully.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[rutledjw]

People want flashy gimmicks and toys on sites

Say's who? The only flashy toys and gimmicks are those obnoxious "flash" ads... It's amazing how much more I enjoy surfing without Flash installed. *aaahhhhhh*

The only people who want that crap are the marketing drones who think it helps them get "clicks"...

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

So wrong, neocom byte-boy ... back in the closet: standards in a free marketm are what Lusrs DO, not what they are TOLD to do. Get the difference ???
If I want, and can PAY for reptilebrained flashy eyecandy then by damn that's the 'standard' working coders will write for. What I want.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Red Avenger]

I really hate it when people try tp put things in a simple little box. The web is so much more than just "content." Thats like saying the linux kernel shouldn't end up in watches or in other devices because that wasn't what it was originally designed to do.

Don't be so close minded. The web is a constantly changing organism and I don't think there is any real appropriate definition. You can't label something that is constantly changing.

And I assure you there is much more to the web than just text. Art, music, games, and yes eye candy all exist on the web.

I for one am glad that they do.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[jdcook]

"They *shouldn't* be, and true standards do not evolve much, if at all.

"Imagine if a kilogram was 2.2lb one day, then 4.3lb the next. Not much of a "standard", is it?"

Of course, the "standard" of the kilogram evolves too. As posted on Slashdot six weeks ago, NIST is seeking an electronic kilogram rather than a hunk of metal.

Saying something changed doesn't indicate if it got better or worse. Merely that it is different. I think the purpose of a standard is to enable people to know that if they want to accomplish X, following steps 1, 2, . . . n will do that. But if they want to do Y or if there is a better way to do X, the standard needs to change. The point of having standards is to do other things. If all you care about is the standard, you can just use tautologies: "A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."

Re:Its not a game you know..

[StupidKatz]

A version number will usually suffice...

Such as the 'current as of now' HTML 4.01

Re:Its not a game you know..

[WNight]

"A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."

That's not really a tautology, it's a definition.

The tautology is to then use that definition to attempt to define the original.

"Light travels one light-year in a year."

Is a tautology.

The only reason it's not really clear is that "Light Year" is a phrase which is pretty straight forward and doesn't need a lot of explaning so the definition sounds a bit redundant and circular.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[HamNRye]

(Our scene opens in a conference room at the W3C standards meetings. Reps from Microsoft (Ms) and Netscape (NS) are in attendance.)

Ms Guy: We ned colored scrollbars in the standard.

NS Guy: But we need themes... We don't force folks to use our boring scrollbars.

Ms Guy: Yeah, but we force 90% of the world to use boring scrollbars, it should be in the standard.

NS Guy: Jerk.

Ms Guy: Hey, like it or not, IE 5.5 will support colored scrollbars, and you'll implement them eventually because you have to, standard or not.

NS Guy: Like hell.... We still haven't implemented the marquee tag. Or page transitions.

Ms Guy: Wow, people actually use your piece of crap???

NS Guy: Look here Monopoly boy, if you've ever read Slashdot you know these people want to be reading ASCII in Lynx. You can tempt them with your "eye-candy" and "formatting", but if it ain't Courier New, it just plain blew.

Ms Guy: Yeah, whatever, Nutscrape. Aren't you glad we don't make IE for Linux?

_END_

The sad fact of it is that Microsoft can and will set the standards for a while now. It didn't occur to me until 2 days ago that colored scrollbars are not supported. Not that it makes that big of a deal, but it can help the look of your pages if you use alot of inline frames.

Microsoft already sets the font standards. (Because it's what you can expect to be on the client machine)

Netscape has to go out and do everything MS can do, and then some. Linux has to do everything Windows can do and then some.

When MSIE 1.0 came out.... But they caught up. Then they did everything Netscape could do, then they did more.

P.S. Mozilla still takes too damn long to load up.

~Hammy
http://www.nothing4sale.org

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am being fairly standards compliant right now.
Because I am reading and posting a comment to this site using Lynx, on Solaris, in an Xterm on an NT4 box with eXceed.
It's pretty nice.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

The kilogram is converging, not evolving or changing.
In other words, the standard defining it is just becoming more precise.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, leave the plugin and block the ad server.

Re:Its not a game you know..

[lsdino]

And of course people change what standard they use too. The US uses the English system with pounds, whereas the rest of the world uses the metric system with grams. We're all talking about the same thing, just using different standards. That's a difference in standard's that's completely incompatible (unlike upgrades to existing standards which are mostly backwards compatible). Of course, ideally the US would change their standard over to the metric system, but like that's going to happen (there are of course some exceptions, 2 liter bottles of soda and stuff like that).

Re:mozillazine ?!?!?!?

[Chainsaw]

No, that's Mozillaquest.

Promesing

[TheMMaster]

"* A set of promises to keep compatibility with various APIs, broadly construed (XUL 1.0 is an API), until a 2.0 or higher-numbered major release. All milestone releases and trunk development between 1.0 and 2.0 will preserve frozen interface compatibility. Mozilla 1.0 is a greenlight to hackers, corporations, and book authors to get busy building atop this stable base set of APIs."

I must say that I find this a very "mature" perspective and this is clearly showing that the people of mozilla know what they are doing and how they should do it!
Mozilla for world-domination (using mozilla since 0.6 BOY did THAT suck!!)

Re:Promesing

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Mozilla people "know what they are doing and how they should do it" then shouldn't there have been a browser release in the project's extremely long history?

Re:Promesing

[Anonymous Coward]

typeo sorry, excuse me...

Re:Promesing

[fredrik70]

Not really, considering they thrashed the whole codebase (Netscape 5) after - what was it? - 1 year ot so into the proj (it sucked basically) and started from scratch. also, did'nt attract that many other developers from the outside (Think it's better nowadays though) so it was basically only thye mozilla people who worked on it.
Personally I prefer them to work slow and get the stuff right the first time - even if I can admit it was damn frustrating in the early days of seing no progress.
But hey, we're here now and we got .9.5 which is good enough for me at least! :-)

Re:Promesing

[mali_kurac]

...then shouldn't there have been a browser release in the project's extremely long history?

What the.. They haven't released a browser yet? Holy crap! You mean to tell me the last 6 months that I've been using Mozilla have been a dream?

Man, that just turns my world upside down.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Dashslot]

If you had read the article, you would see that first they discuss why they are having a 1.0 release, and then go on to say how it has lots of things to do with freezing APIs and providing a solid basis for future changes.

Moderators, please don't mod the parent up. This karma whore has enough already.

The fear of version 1.0

[collar]

People have been complaining about the time that it has taken mozilla to reach version 1.0, but from a developers point of view finally stamping "1.0" on the thing is a very hard thing to do. You cant say "oh that will be fixed in the next version" and "that feature is coming soon". Well, you can (and do) but people dont tend to respect you as much...

I'm glad that they have been taking the time to get 1.0 to standard necessary, for some reason AOL saw fit to release netscape 6.0 when they did, which I think was a huge mistake. Lets be glad that the mozilla folks are not so keen to release a product before it is ready.

Re:It'll still suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? You know why... given MS' track record, the odds are on it only being a matter of time before another Nimda-type program takes advantage of some gaping hole in IE6 and then I get to try to explain virus removal procedures to my Dad over the phone. Again.

No thanks. I'll use Opera until Mozilla is at 1.0 stable.

Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[MosesJones]

* Is fixing this bug vital to web content developers, Mozilla distributors, Gecko embedders, or others who will depend on 1.0 for stable code and a minimal set of frozen APIs?
* Is there no alternative to fixing the bug that frees people to work on other 1.0 bugs?
* What goes wrong if we don't fix the bug, and just live with it for 1.0?
* What do we give up from 1.0 in exchange for fixing the bug?
* Can you stare down slashdot and C|net together and at the same time, and argue credibly that the bug is a 1.0 stop-ship problem? While we are not yet at the "about to ship, why should we take any more risk" stage, this question can help us prioritize and avoid unpleasant surprises later, when 1.0 is within our grasp.



Now that is proper requirements management, unusual in most open source projects. These are the 4 basic rules on requirements management.

Full on for them in doing this. They are running it like a proper project and trying to control requirements creep.

Open Source goes back into the Cathederal ?

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[Anonymous Coward]

except that KDE, with a bazaar style development scheme, wrote a very usable html browser in a very small time (well, khtml is older than gecko, but in different froms).

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[The Pim]

Now that is proper requirements management, unusual in most open source projects.

The difference between the cathedral and the bazarre is not the presence or absence of project management. This is one of the most misguided readings of Raymond's paper, as he himself makes clear.

What "The Cathedral and the Bazarre" argues (and this is frankly no great insight on Raymond's part) is that good project management doesn't require formal rules, processes, and bureaucracy. Ideally, it is based on talented leadership, shared vision, and a spirit of collaboration. This strategy is not fool-proof, of course, and is perhaps riskier than traditional management. But when it works, it demonstrably produces amazing results.

Maybe this can't work for mozilla. It wouldn't be all that shocking, since mozilla is different from most free software projects: large, built on a traditionally proprietary codebase, run largely by a major corporation. But that's no reason to slam all the projects for which it does work.

The two methods are always combined to a degree, of course. But they are not entirely compatible, so you can't just say "let's do both". Bureaucracy diminishes the importance of a leader, subjugates vision to process, and dampens enthusiasm. So I'll take bazaar management any day.

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[kiko]

Well, let's put it in another light. Mozilla is a very large project: much larger than the Linux kernel, by all counts, and it fosters a lot of different kinda of tasks than just "development". There is QA, which does the chores that we ignore or accumulate in most projects, and documenters, and people supporting users on IRC, and standards work. So while you say this is wasted effort, I say it keeps the project going, and helps distill quality from milestone to milestone. There are regressions, sure; the fact remains: this is not a toy project anymore, but a huge one. The largest we've engaged in open source, possibly.

So while your general view is probably correct - yes, we have too much beaurocracy in software development - you shouldn't forget that very large projects tend to be hard to avoid falling apart by themselves. Process isn't _just_ beaurocracy; it just _usually is_.

Let's look at the Linux kernel, for an example of a large project gone bezerk from lack of process. We now have no idea what is going on from release to release beyond ChangeLogs, there are no public CVS repositories to query changes, the review process it completely informal and unguaranteed, and there isn't even a bugtracker for users to query on current status and fixes. That's very bad for us Linux users, IMO. But because the process is highly centralized and hasn't changed for ages, it's stagnated.

The fact that a project has very good developers can postpone problems, as can the amount of goodwill in a project. But sometimes sooner than later a project will have trouble scaling. When yours does, look at mozilla for good ideas.

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[Anonymous Coward]

> good project management doesn't require formal
> rules, processes, and bureaucracy. Ideally, it is
> based on talented leadership, shared vision, and
> a spirit of collaboration.

Bad boy you thinks that mozilla.org has none of those. ;-P

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[Anonymous Coward]

> When yours does, look at mozilla for good ideas.

I am a Mozilla contributor, and I wouldn't say that it works well. For example, the review process is so slow (you need to collect 2-4 OKs, some requests being simply ignored) that it's very discouraging.

Re:Open Source goes back into the Cathederal

[maxpublic]

Over time, I've observed that the folks most critical of the process used to implement changes or improvements in the kernel are those that either:

a) have a personal beef with Linus, Linux, or one of the senior developers;

b) just don't understand the process, can't wrap their brains around the entire concept of the bizarre, and insist on something more cathedral-like to satisfy their sense or order;

c) think that if their way of doing things (each of which is different) were implemented then the kernel would somehow be better (e.g., if *they* were at the helm everything wouldn't be so 'chaotic'); or

d) are irked by the fact that ultimately there's a dictator running the show (Linus), benevolent though he is, and that *they aren't it*.

The proof is in the pudding. The Linux kernel outperforms every other commercial kernel on the market, and does so entirely through volunteer effort. Obviously the process works, and works well. No changes are necessary - "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

Max

It's a platform, so 1.0 is essential

[Khazunga]

Mozilla is more than a browser. It's a development platform, a software layer that runs on top of a number of hardware/OS platforms, and masks the differences.

In this light, an essential feature of Mozilla is backward compatibility between minor revisions. So, 1.0 means: "We're done with the APIs. Please come and hack away with them, we won't break your software".

Re:It's a platform, so 1.0 is essential

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice. But what "the people" want is a decent browser, not another operating system!

Re:It's a platform, so 1.0 is essential

[Karn]

Who are you to say what "the people" want. Personally I like Mozilla, I'm all for the way they've done things, and I'm thankful that we have such an excellent open browser that runs on MacOS, Windows, and Unix.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Uggy]

I don't think 1.0 is artificial in this case. The Mozilla devel team has posted very much in advance a specific roadmap... it's not like everybody else... hmmm, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, oh what the hell let's call the next 2.0. (ahem cough cough KDE) Mozilla has proceeded in an extremely ordered and thorough manner with a specfic and detailed roadmap. I think this 1.0 will be what 1.0 are supposed to be, stable, mature, and a platform to build on if you are a developer without it changing out from under you because of a whim.

I give the Mozilla team muchos kudos for sticking to their guns and applying rigor in a age where rigor is sorely lacking.

Wow, this definition document is amazing..

[brunes69]

"Unable to connect to SQL server"

Is this some new HTSQL standard being reffered to here? WOw, I didn't know they were working on making a XUL Query tool, thoug it wouldn't surprise me...

:o)

Re:Wow, this definition document is amazing..

[cetan]

http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml

mirror

Manifesto

[Root Down]

... but will the workers control the means of production?

(The question is more important than it might initially seem.)

Re:Manifesto

[Simm0]

For the good of the code

Give to the code and the code will give to you. :P

Re:Manifesto

[ethereal]

For once, entirely apropos:

"When you program open source, you're programming COMMUNISM."

Re:Manifesto

[mav[LAG]]

No - it was Wolverhampton Wanders who beat Leicester 3-1 :)

Re:Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

Yarf! Nobody cares asshole. Ever think of leaving slashdot? I know I myself would offer you 5 dollars to do so.

On second thought, if you left slashdot may become a better place, giving me less a reason to crap flood...

So I guess I should thank you for being as lame as you are, thus lowering the bar for the rest of us. Hell, even sllort is fucking insightful compared to you! Seriously though, I hate you.

Re:Manifesto

[mimbleton]

"If you would stop posting, it would be greatly appreciated. "

Thank you for your misplaced concern but perhaps you should try to busy yourself with searching for a new job since the place you used to work folded up ( no doubt , in part, thanks to your "work" there.)
Have fun.

Re:Manifesto

[DonkPunch]

Please allow me a moment to point something out....

It is well-known amongst the "Powers That Be" that this is your 700th post.

700 posts is a significant threshold by any standard short of Signal 11.

Even more remarkable is you have achieved this with a higher-than-400,000 user id.

By way of comparison, there are users at the 30,000 level who have only made approximately 600 posts. You have posted far more than users who have been here far longer. Indeed, you must be posting multiple times per story, per day in order to achieve this respectable sum.

And given this remarkably promiscuous posting pattern, one would think you might be contributing a great deal to the discussions.

Yet this does not seem to be the case.

Therefore we are collectively considering the possiblity that you might have a psychological disorder akin to obsessive/compulsive behavior. Do you fell uncontrollably compelled to post? Do you wash your hands after each post? Does posting give a feeling of relief similar to, say, a bowel movement?

If so, please consider seeking help. You cannot keep up this pace for long without it seriously impacting your career, studies, and social life.

If it is not an obsessive/compulsive disorder, then we are left with only one possible alternative to explain your behavior.

Specifically, you are something of a wanker.

Re:Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you even care ?

Re:Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

"and you can't post crap to get modded down."

That can be easily arranged.
All I need to do is to follow your example.

Re:Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is worse, having 700 posts on some crappy site or being fucked up enough to actually go about creating new accounts just to respond to a dude you don't even know ?

Re:Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

because you must be a wanker, to post so many times, with so little relevance. In short, Because We Care.

Re:Manifesto

[Bumbleton]

Senator Thurmond:

You are the wanker du jour, my friend. 700 posts is quite an achievement, and you are offering nothing but suicide as the solution? Call us when you get over 100, and until then STFU.

Re:Manifesto

[Bumbleton]

I dunno, which is worse? they both sound pretty fucked up to me

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Pretor]

No the 1.0 is not artificial read the 1.0 definition!

The 1.0 marks the Mozilla API as a stable compatible API.

This means that users and developers can be sure that applications developed for the 1.0 version is compatible with other 1.x versions.

Just look at Galeon for a example of the problems following the Milestone releases.
For each new milestone Galeon stops working until it's updated to use the new API. After the 1.0 version is released this will no longer be an issue.

--
Pretor

Karma whoring

[Per Wigren]

Go straight to the original article instead! Mozillazine seems to be down...

Re:Karma whoring

[collar]

Ummm

"You cant karma whore with a link that's in the article."

Karma Whoring for Dummies (C) the dummies people who are probably mounting a law suit against me already.

Re:Karma whoring

[Per Wigren]

I know, but it worked, didn't it? :-)

1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[jedrek]

Hm... I look at the 1.0 release a little differently. It's a few things:

* Feature/interface freeze. A time to stop adding features. Features are being added as we speak, like the tabbed interface in 0.9.5.
* Removal of all debugging code during the release.
* Symbolic 'ready for prime time' version.

I think that the first is the most important to developers. How many skins and plugins have been made that break on the latest milestone?

For the end users the most important thing is the feeling that they're not using alpha or beta quality software, but they're using a *stable*, completed application.

This is one of the reasons that Netscape pissed me off with 6.0. It's a totally unusable browser branched of a Mozilla release that wasn't too usable itself. Then it was crudded down with Netscape's own crap. I think that this turned a lot of people off, and Netscape will pay for it down the road.

Especially on Windows. The Windows world is not the *nix world. People don't wait for the .1 or .2 release, they expect the .0 releases to work as they should. Netscape lost a lot of die-hard fans (including corporations) with the release of 6.0. I think the Mozilla team has taken this lesson to heart and the 1.0 will be rock solid.

At least I hope it will.

(btw. 0.9.5 is *really* good, I'm using it right now and find myself using MSIE 5.5 SP2 much, much less often.)

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[the_2nd_coming]

btw. 0.9.5 is *really* good, I'm using it right now and find myself using MSIE 5.5 SP2 much, much less often.)

I don't know, is it just me or is .9.5 slower than .9.4?

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Khazunga]

The Windows world is not the *nix world. People don't wait for the .1 or .2 release, they expect the .0 releases to work as they should.

Ha! Yeah, how many people do you know who have really used Windows 1.0, Word 1.0, Excel 1.0 or Windows CE 1.0? If there's a company which never gets it right the first time, it's Microsoft. I'm willing to bet that the Xbox will crash often (console crashes are very rare, you know).

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially on Windows. The Windows world is not the *nix world. People don't wait for the .1 or .2 release, they expect the .0 releases to work as they should.

You sure that you don't have Windows and *nix mixed up there?

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[drzhivago]

Thankfully console crashes are typically due to the game, not the actual device. I remember Mortal Kombat for Nintendo 64 used to hang the console every once in awhile. There will only be more crashes if there is less Q/A, since the platform does not contain many variables like a regular computer.

Greg

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[marmoset]

Which platform? I know on MacOSX, for example, there was some major NSPR work necessary to fix MP bugs that seems to have had a performance impact (there are bugs open on this, and they're working on getting the perf back where it was.)

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[gorilla]

I used Windows 1.0. It was a nightmare.

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Was there a Win1.0? Earliest I ever saw was 1.03 (and I've still got the 360K floppies to prove it!).

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree. Bugwise, the *nix world is no better than the Windows world, especially if you consider the commercial side. For example, buggy first-release embedded-development tools are incredibly widespread on both unix and Windows platforms.

Even when considering open-source software, bugs are still prevalent in the first release (which may be given a 0.x enumeration). The key difference is that OSS gives users the ability to short-circuit the bug-fixing schedule; users can go in and fix the bugs they care about.

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Heem]

I don't know, is it just me or is .9.5 slower than .9.4?
I also have found 9.5 to be much slower than previous versions - yet it could be related to the fact that about the same time as i upgraded i started getting hit with 15,000 nimda packets a day.

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Windows 1.0 (actually it was Windows 1.03 as nobody anywhere EVER used Windows 1.0) with Micrografx In*A*Vision which was for the time an excellent Vector Graphics editor.
I ran it on my XT Clone (8088 machine) with a Hercules graphic monitor.
In*A*Vision was actually the very first viable Windows application ever, and included a Windows 1.03 runtime version with the distribution (all on 360K 5-1/4" floppies, of course)
For the time it was a fine application. It worked better when Windows 2 came out, of course.

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[aozilla]

This is one of the reasons that Netscape pissed me off with 6.0. It's a totally unusable browser branched of a Mozilla release that wasn't too usable itself. Then it was crudded down with Netscape's own crap. I think that this turned a lot of people off, and Netscape will pay for it down the road.

Hell, if I ran AOL, this would be my intention. Why waste money on an open source browser when you don't make any products for any platforms which can't use IE? They probably had committments to continue to release products, so they release a piece of shit as 6.0, so what? 99% of the world was using IE already anyway, and the other 1% were either on platforms that didn't have IE or were too anti-microsoft to use IE no matter how shitty netscape is. Netscape doesn't make AOL any significant money, why not leave it to the pie-in-the-sky dreamers to do all the work for them, for free.

Re:1.0 is symbolic, not artifical

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 1.01 is available on some old software sites. It fits nicely on a floppy and is 100% black and white.

I think I have it on origional disks somewhere around here. Haven't seen 1.0 though.

best standards compliance among compeditors

[mark_lybarger]

they claim to want to have the best standards compliance among compeditors. first, who are the competition? all browsers? all free (beer) browsers? all open source browsers? secondly, why such a need for the standards compliance? in the past (and still currently afaik), browsers were build on loose compliance, and extending the standards to where they see the standards going into the future (css).

on a side note, it is good to see them put a loose timeframe on the release. their schedule has mozilla 1.0 in about 6 months, so we should expect it in about 9 realistically (sp). I can see their desire to want to lock down api's for a while on the 1.x version. We're seeing .x releases of mozilla almost every month. Won't we expect to have .x releases every month after the 1.0 release? maybe every other month?

all i want for christmas is a one point oh, a one point oh, a one point oh... :)

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[jgerman]

secondly, why such a need for the standards compliance? in the past (and still currently afaik), browsers were build on loose compliance, and extending the standards to where they see the standards going into the future (css).

Which is why we have the piece of crap system we have today. MS extensions don't work in Netscape and vice versa. I find it hard to believe that you are apparently agruing the importance to standards. It's called opening up the window of choice in operating systems and applications. When you know that any application can handle the same file formats or whatever, you have much greater flexibility in what you use to do your work, and it makes it convenient to work with others who haven't made the same choices as you.

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[mark_lybarger]

i'm totally in favor of standards and applications complying to them. i guess my major point was, why does mozilla want to be more standard compliant than any of their compeditors, especially for a 1.0 release?

while it's great to strive for excellence, this maybe the exactly the reason we're still only seeing 0.9.5 right now after what 5 years of development. i really love the browser, and all the work they've done, it just seems to me they set very high goals. they may eventually get to those goals, but this is the internet age and the competition could be moving circles around them.

if i'm a vendor or what ever, all i care about is a stable api for the time being. i need something that i can code/integrate to NOW so I can have a product in a few months. by that time the standards compliance thing could be all worked out and I'll know that i can plop 1.2.5 into all the work i've done.

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[Anonymous Coward]

They mean that they don't have to be PERFECTLY compliant for a 1.0 browzer. It's ok to just be better than anyone else. :)

The main mozilla tree will still be developed after 1.0 but it will be "for developer use only."

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[spauldo]

If you're a vendor, especially a commercial one, you're probably more interested in Netscape 6. Besides, you may need a stable API now, but guaranteed there'll be people just like you when there is a stable API. So it doesn't work out for you - well, it will work out for others later. Believe me, getting a good shining example of an XHTML/MathML/CSS2/whatever compliant browser that's rock solid and provides a stable platform will entice the vendors more than an almost-compliant browser (even IE qualifies as "almost" compliant these days).

As a webmaster, the standards compliance is the most important thing to me. I still won't be able to write pages that use the full standards, thanks to IE, NS4, and Opera, but it'll be there to set an example. Right now we're in a transitional period to CSS - standard compliance is a necessity. Granted, we can't throw our tables out completely yet, but when CSS3 comes out we should be able to. I want browsers to be at least CSS2 compliant once CSS3 is a standard.

I mean, really, who's more important here? People wanting to use API's, or webmasters? Who has more influence on the product? Sure, a few companies will use the mozilla API after a while, but not near as many as the webmasters who will design for it. What am I going to reccommend as webmaster for the corporate intranet? What am I going to design for on my public website?

I design all my pages in mozilla, and then add the hacks to get them presentable in IE (and opera if I feel like it). If you visit my site in IE, you won't get as good an experience as if you visited with mozilla. I reccommend mozilla to the people that read my site. And at the top of my site is a nice little sign for 4.x users - 'looking like crap in old brosers by design' (I can get away with that since I'm a low traffic site of little importance). This is what mozilla needs, and will shoot for. It's worth the wait.

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[NutscrapeSucks]

I think there's the greater issue that AOL/Netscape doesn't really have any future vision or direction for the project (except using it as a bargaining chip for AOL client negotiations with Microsoft.)

The Netscape browser began as free advertising for the (now gone elsewhere) enterprise server products that was going to make Netscape Communications a big player.

Netscape 4 (shipped in 1996) was a 'kitchen sink' project -- intended to be the client-server platform of the future -- including every imaginable feature, and a complete rebuff to the W3C with all sorts of proprietary Netscape-only interfaces, all of it implemented in an enormously buggy fashion.

Mozilla seems to be mostly an attempt to rewrite NS 4 from scratch, except this time healing the wounds by making it standards compliant and non-buggy. And add the sidebar that didn't make it into NS4.

The end result of Mozilla 1.0 seems to achieve the goals of 1996, not of 2002. It's 6 years beyond the point when "standards compliant" and "non-buggy" would be enough to attract a significant number of users. When you get right down to it, Mozilla doesn't *do* anything all that all that interesting to the end user in this day and age.

I think that's why you get tabbed browsing and other features coming in -- it's sorta an "Oh shit!" moment over at Mozilla when they realize that their work might go for naught unless they are proactive about drawing end users in to their web.

If I were them, I'd start thinking outside of the little box that they've let the W3C define and start looking at what it will take to make people want to use their shit. Yes, this means embracing and extending a little, but I think they with their supergood compliance, they can afford it.

+ Throw in every value add feature that you can get stable -- mouse gestures, Jabber, etc etc.
+ Clone corny MS features that people like - styled scrollbars, etc.
+ Prove to us that Mozilla is really a platform and not hot air. Give me something that I can use to create an application on my intranet.
+ Stop pretending the W3C DOM is usable all by itself as an API and start looking ways to add value. One prime example is the style object that IE has (it provides runtime information about element style).
+ Make sure that the Javascript/DOM environment is solid enough that I can code a heavy DHTML interface with it. Just rendering cnn.com, etc isn't good enough.
+ Ship the Fucking Manual already -- w3c.org is not a programming guide by any means. Find the people that wrote the excellent 4.x documentation and put them back to work.

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[BZ]

> One prime example is the style object that IE has
> (it provides runtime information about element
> style).

This would be the getComputedStyle() function from DOM2 Style in Mozilla. And it's buggy at the moment for most properties. And it's being worked on (by me, as it happens) and should be much better in a month or so.

> Ship the Fucking Manual already -- w3c.org is
> not a programming guide by any means. Find the
> people that wrote the excellent 4.x
> documentation and put them back to work.

Being worked on by some volunteers. You want to do it? :)

> Make sure that the Javascript/DOM environment is
> solid enough that I can code a heavy DHTML
> interface with it. Just rendering cnn.com, etc
> isn't good enough.

Um. The whole browser UI is in Javascript/DOM. It's fairly solid. :)

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[NutscrapeSucks]

> This would be the getComputedStyle() function

Cool. Although this gets into the point about the manual (how would I know this?)

Is there a place to start for people that want to work on documentation?

"Um. The whole browser UI is in Javascript/DOM. It's fairly solid."

I admit my experience was based on porting some DHTML stuff over from IE in the moz .8x timeframe. Got crashes even some NS3-type stuff, not to mention the DOM1 stuff I tried which seemed utterly broken. (yes everything was bugzilla'd) I'm sure it's better now, but I haven't had an opportunity to go back and try again. Soon, I hope.

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[maxpublic]

The end result of Mozilla 1.0 seems to achieve the goals of 1996, not of 2002. It's 6 years beyond the point when "standards compliant" and "non-buggy" would be enough to attract a significant number of users.

And yet that, coupled with speed, are the primary reasons several million people have downloaded and installed Opera. Standards compliant, non-buggy, and fast.

Max

Re:best standards compliance among compeditors

[NutscrapeSucks]

In my book, Opera solves the problems of 1994. I prefer Mozilla even though I am one of those millions who downloaded and installed it (for testing purposes).

I18N And L10N?

[LeftHanded]

I didn't see any mention of internationalization (I18N) or localization (L10N) in any part of this list. Although the Mozilla site has a section for I18N, L10N and BiDi issues, these parts of the Mozilla site seem especially quiet. The Mozilla Team has obviously been working hard on these issues; you can tell that by the features in the latest 0.9.x releases. It just seems surprising that it wasn't mentioned in the 1.0 statement. They do want World Domination, right?

Re:I18N And L10N?

[Gerv]

We'll work hard to co-ordinate with l10n teams as we near the release, so that language packs are reached simultaneously. However, bugs in the i18n area are not "come back and bite us in the butt" bugs.

If we don't work in Thai at 1.0, we don't work in Thai. But not working in Thai at 1.0 doesn't stop us working in Thai in 1.2.

BiDi should be in and working now.

Gerv

Re:I18N And L10N?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up you third world cocksucker.

Re:I18N And L10N?

[SurfsUp]

I didn't see any mention of internationalization (I18N) or localization (L10N) in any part of this list.

I didn't have to tell Mozilla anything or do anything special, and I can read sites in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Check it out, here's a four-language site. I don't know how I'd go about typing CJK text though.

Re:I18N And L10N?

[21mhz]

If we don't work in Thai at 1.0, we don't work in Thai. But not working in Thai at 1.0 doesn't stop us working in Thai in 1.2.

They talk about a stable API. The worst problems seen in i18n domain were due to incapability of interfaces to accomodate extended sets of languages, symbols, input methods etc. Heck, half of MIME is essentially an ugly hack over the present standard. Or, as others view it, an elegant hack over the ugly standard.

Well, I'm not a Moz hacker, maybe the i18n of Mozilla APIs is a finished thing.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Could be some time..??

[cybaea]

Given the size of the dependency tree for the 1.0 milestone target it looks like 1.0 could be a little way off??

Does anybody want to take a stab at a date? Does anyboy even want to count the number of bugs on that page? ;-)

Re:Could be some time..??

[riggwelter]

Does anybody want to take a stab at a date?


From the document:
we need to develop a schedule that converges on a stable, useful release in at most five milestones, preferably fewer (but likely no fewer than four).

Now, milestones tend to appear every 4 - 5 weeks, so that would be 16 - 25 weeks time (4 - 6 months)

From the document:
If things go well, we'll be within a milestone of 1.0 after 0.9.9. If 1.0 seems to continually recede as we approach it, our definition of 1.0 in terms of bugs to be fixed is broken. Therefore we will continually review the schedule and the outstanding bugs. If it takes an extra milestone (0.9.10), but 1.0 is reached soon enough, so be it -- but no one should count on an extra milestone. There won't be two or more extra milestones, or again, we will have failed to converge on a short-term stability branch and release within six months.

This would seem to confirm that timescale

Re:Could be some time..??

[PyroMosh]

Lets start a pool. (Who ever picks the date (or gets closest to the date) takes the pot, blah blah blah...)

I've got $10 on August 9, 2002.

Re:Could be some time..??

[Anonymous Coward]

7th of April for me. $10 also.

Re:Could be some time..??

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL will fire everyone in the Netscape division on December 23, 2001. The product will never go 1.0

Re:Could be some time..??

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the Mozilla Roadmap lists the projected 1.0 release date as April 5, 2002, and the maximum number of days the release has missed by is 7 (average being 3), I'm gonna say April 10, 2002, since they're probably going to wait a few days to make sure they've got it right. Of course if 0.9.8 or 0.9.9 is good enough then maybe they'll call those 1.0 instead. Or maybe it'll get delayed several more months after that. Or maybe...

What was the question again?

On a related note...

[MSBob]

Since Mozilla is beginning to look rather slick these days I have a quick question to someone enlightened. Is the new AOL (7.0?) interface based on Gecko or does it still use the IE control? Anybody in the know?

Re:On a related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses IE 5 still blah

Re:On a related note...

[BroadbandBradley]

I don't know but I hope so, the sooner the "big boys" (AOL, @home...) get away from IE as a platform the better. then they can move away from MSwindows!!!!

Re:On a related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

because IE 5 is still faster/less bloated than gecko. heh.

Re:On a related note...

[aozilla]

7.0 is a marketing number. It is by no means a major release. In fact, if you have 6.0 you can upgrade to 7.0 online without downloding the whole new program. Needless to say, they still use IE (which they will almost certainly always do).

Re:On a related note...

[BroadbandBradley]

I do support, and I have to support windows, and I'd rather not.
Windows troubleshooting is all about r&r (remove and replace) reinstall and hope, beyond that, it's not cost effective to spend hours looking for that secret registry entry, NOBODY really knows what goes on in there but MS, and they aren't telling.

I think it's great that Mozilla is cross platform, I just wish more of the support calls I field were not windows, because, by default, it's not going to work well, and ISP support line is the first call for most people who get the "explorer caused an invalid page fault in Kernel32", and they want to know why OUR crappy 'ISP?branded?IE?browserware' is messing up their system. MS Windows is a daily pain in my end user supporting ass.

Undefined Definitions

[CptLogic]

>>Good performance and memory footprint.>If things go well, we'll be within a milestone of 1.0 after 0.9.9. If 1.0 seems to continually recede as we approach it, our definition of 1.0 in terms of bugs to be fixed is broken.

What are the definitions of bugs that need to be "fixed" before a 1.0 version can be approved?

"not too many non-crash bugs and misfeatures"

Again, what counts as "not too many?"

Reading this defintion document, I don't see any hard targets to hit, or even any tolerances, just a vague commitment to tighten the code already in existence and to hit moving "standards" targets.

Judging by these criteria, I don't see how you can then stamp a *FINISHED* label to it and "ship it" as a 1.0 version.

At some point they're just going to have to decide that an arbitrary bug fix is no longer version 0.9.10 or whatever, they're just going to have to bite the bullet and call it version 1.0

As any filmmaker knows, "Nothing's ever finished"

Chris.

Re:Undefined Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

There is going to be an update with more specifics.

But basically fix the bugs that affect people regularly. I really think Mozilla is stable enough right now for 1.0. It's more stable than netscape and at least as stable as IE.

But some of the dialogues are a little wacky. And it there are lots of little polish bugs.

The big thing about 1.0 is not to have any _embarassing_ bugs and to maitain binary compatability. As it is now the XUL keeps on changing and I have to keep downloading new themes...

Probably start up time should be optomised and new window time also. Depending on how hard that is, of course.

There is a list of important todo things at the bottom of the article.

Re:Undefined Definitions

[Gerv]

I don't see how you can then stamp a *FINISHED* label to it and "ship it" as a 1.0 version.

Who said anything about a FINISHED label? It's not like we're all going to give up and go home when 1.0 is done.

Gerv

Re:Undefined Definitions

[Teun]

Less than over 65,000 known bugs is acceptable.
If you want to apply 'reputed' M$ OS standards

Re:Undefined Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. 1.0 doesn't mean finished, it means good enough to actually use. For me there's only one bug which I experience consistently enough to suggest that 1.0 should not yet be declared. I'm sure there are others that others are experiencing, though.

Re:Undefined Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

----------
I don't see how you can then stamp a *FINISHED* label to it and "ship it" as a 1.0 version.

Who said anything about a FINISHED label? It's not like we're all going to give up and go home when 1.0 is done.

Gerv
----------
Hello Gerv,
Not even if we ask you nicely Name a cash figure; I'm sure we can scrape it up between the lot of us

Sincerly,
The Internet Users Of The Wrold

Too little too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the 1.0 release has been so long coming is that making Mozilla into the browser promised has proved impossible. Now that the developers have realised that they can never make the light weight browser promised, they have decided they might as well just release v1.0.

However, the arrival of the v1 release is not going to encourage mass uptake of mozilla on the platform it really needs to make progress: Windows. Windows users already have a perfectly godd, OS integrated browser, why would they eun a bloated pig like mozilla? Which means that standards will still be chopped and changes by MS and incompatability problems will plague those on other platforms, and mozilla beocmes irrelivent, as do OSes that do not run MS browsers. THE END.

Re:Too little too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty lame troll, dude.

(p.s. posting this via Mozilla on Windows)

Good thing...

[fatcow]

That slashdot decided to finally post something from mozillazine.org -- we're getting tired of the links from the site that this parodies!

Managing scope creep

[aegilops]

I'm sure 1e5 Slashdot readers can give their two penneth in advice for project management, but suffice it to say that nailing scope for your project is a major win. Get stakeholders or key significant people to agree to what you are trying to achieve, what you include in scope, and specifically, what you exclude as out of scope.

Then, for each product or deliverable (something you can touch, or something that now exists when it didn't before etc) that you need to produce, classify them via the acronym MoSCoW:

Must

Should

Could

Won't (i.e. not in this release)

Helps to focus the mind on priorities. Otherwise, an excellent idea and full marks for the announcement so far.

Aegilops

Re:Managing scope creep

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be "MuSCoW"?

Re:Managing scope creep

[yesthatguy]

Oh, come on...everybody knows that acronyms which actually use the letters in the phrases for which they stand are so last century.

Polish?

[cybaea]

I love Poland but is it really essential to fix the Polish language bugs for a 1.0 release? Aren't there more important priorities? Isn't 1.0 about a stable API (and product!) and such, and if so, couldn't fixing spelling mistakes in the Polish language pack wait until 1.0.1 or something?

The document outlines some really good principles for managing software, but this entry confuses it for me. Any Polish people here to explain why it is critical? :-)

Re:Polish?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the off-chance that you aren't kidding, and to prevent genuinely clueless people posting follow-ups, this bug is about "polish", pronounced PAW-lish, as in "buff with a cloth to add shine". Hardy har har.

Re:Polish?

[KingAdrock]

Where are you from that you pronounce "polish", PAW-lish?

Re:Polish?

[Simm0]

Polish with regards to the mozilla community refers to "Bugs which require only a small change for a noticable improvement in the user interface" not the language.

Re:Polish?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I was reading this while driving past the Polish Museum here. Hmm, I must make time to go to the Johnson Wax wing.

(This comment introduced to show the parent as a joke, for the humor impaired reader).

Re:Polish?

[Anonymous Coward]

BAW-ston?

Now I can put mozilla-developer on my resume

[Odinson]

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100309

Hey, all the team needs to do is ask.

Re:Now I can put mozilla-developer on my resume

[pere]

For more funny bug reports, check out bug 59921 - which is a tracking bug for "interesting" bug reports.

Yes.

[dinotrac]

I was so excited when Netscape opened the code.
A long, long, time ago.

And that's the problem. I'm not sure that Mozilla even matters any more, but I think that it does. If nothing else, Microsoft's ham-handedness with product activation, etc. may re-open the window of opportunity.

The 1.0 approach Eich outlines is exactly what the project has needed for the last 18 months, if not two years.

There comes a time when you stop saying "It'll be ready when it's ready" and start asking "How do we make it ready?"

Eich's memo is the answer to that question.
Good luck, guys.
You can do it if you set your mind to it.

Re:Yes.

[Brian Feldman]

Oh, please. Microsoft's crappy browser has any domination on one non-Microsoft system at all (Macintosh). Who needs your "window of opportunity"? Mozilla will be used by the masses who run Unix, the ones who use it via embedded systems unknowingly, and hell -- Mozilla's going to be embedded in the AOL client, so you _know_ that if pure "market share" matters, it's going to end up having the most in the long run.

Mozilla is stable, fast, supports a hell of a lot of important standards correctly, and doesn't suck. Say that about any other browser if you can.

Re:Yes.

[dinotrac]

Sure - if it's ready.

The reality is that IE is 85% of browsers today.

And that's what the push to 1.0 is all about.
Making something that all of the folks who would put Mozilla in those places can use with confidence.

Re:Yes.

[gorilla]

There comes a time when you stop saying "It'll be ready when it's ready" and start asking "How do we make it ready?"

I'd say that's day 1. If you don't have a plan for getting ready, you just spend forever doing side tasks and non-important stuff. Obviously on day 1 won't be detailed, but you should evolve your plan as the project progresses.

Re:Yes.

[Jahf]

And Microsoft Windows* is well over 90% of consumer desktops today. That doesn't invalidate Linux/KDE, Solaris/CDE, Mac/OSX ... if anything it makes their development that much more important.

Mozilla is the same story ... less share means more drastic need for a viable option.

I don't expect Mozilla as a browser to be anything big, but Mozilla as a platform is terrific ... and a 1.0 release gives companies something good to target web design usability for. When Netscape 6.0 came out based on an early Mozilla it made our web UI design team cringe and has been a nightmare ever since.

Re:Yes.

[dinotrac]

I'd say that's day 1.

You'll get no argument from me.

I hope this whole experience teaches that there is some value to planning and prioritizing. Meeting goals isn't be a matter of saying "screw the bugs, send it out the door", even if some (too many?) treat it that way. It's a matter of saying "These are the things we can do now, those are the things we can do later."

It still goes out "when it's ready," but you have an idea of what "when it's ready" means.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla will be used by the masses who run Unix

Sorry, but seven portly sarcastic system administrators do not count as "the masses." We're talking about sheer numbers of people, not the size of said people.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla is stable, fast, supports a hell of a lot of important standards correctly, and doesn't suck. Say that about any other browser if you can."

Mozilla is fast? In what world? Mozilla is a pig to load and run compared to IE. It does not, from my experience, render pages faster. I've tried mozilla and I even advocated our company not standardizing on IE 2 years back arguing to wait for Mozilla but in the end the browser doesn't perform well and, well this is important, it still isn't done.

at the bottom of the buglist

[zerocool^]

At the bottom of the buglist we see Bug #100309

Description:
Opened: 2001-09-18 08:55

we need preparation as well as a good place to have the biggest & coolest party
ever!

that's a good bug to have

~z

Re:at the bottom of the buglist

[kchayer]

At the bottom of the buglist we see Bug #100309

we need preparation as well as a good place to have the biggest & coolest party ever!

These two Slashdot-related bugs amuse me:

Bug #68974

Description:
Mozilla 0.8 cannot be released until Slashdot is ready

Bug #73658

Description:
No Slashdot story for Mozilla 0.8.1 release

It seems like there was another more recent one about not being able to release 0.9.something until Slashdot was ready and working properly, but i can't seem to find it... Maybe it was just the 0.8 one above.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[pointwood]

it's not like everybody else... hmmm, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, oh what the hell let's call the next 2.0. (ahem cough cough KDE)

KDE 3 will break binary compatibility - don't say that isn't a good reason for a new major number!

It's Time

[ronmon]

Nobody can accuse them of jumping into this. It's something that they have worked toward for years now and 0.9.5 has added some great features without hurting the current level of stability. This can only be good for the project.

Disclaimer: I use Galeon, so my main interest in Moz is Gecko to power the latest Galeon release. I do ride the lizard now and then just to see what they've done though. With the tabbed windows, they've almost caught up with Galeon. :)

A note for fellow Slackers, Mozilla 0.9.5 has been up for a couple days and Galeon 0.12.4 is worth snagging as well.

Galeon can continue to function.

[dmaxwell]

I used the version of Galeon that went with 0.9.3 Mozilla and upgraded to 0.9.4. Galeon popped up a dialog that basically amounted to "Wrong Mozilla. Bad Things might happen." It continued to work well for me until Galeon was updated to match. Of course, I only view a limited number of sites.

-1 (Offtopic)

[An Onerous Coward]

I have a question regarding a problem I've had with every release since I first downloaded 0.9.1 (Win32)*. I'm a 14m3r who relies heavily on Yahoo! Mail. But whenever I hit the "Send" button to fire off an email via Mozilla/NS6, the browser simply hangs there, doing nothing. It doesn't even have the courtesy to time out. I end up having to fire up NS 4.7 or (shudder) IE.

I haven't been able to find anything about this on Bugzilla, even though it's something that would surely garner some notice. I'm afraid to submit it to Bugzilla myself, since it's possible that I either have some setting wrong or Yahoo! is using some non-compliant tricks that break their form. Either way, there's nothing Mozilla could do about it.

So, is anyone else here having this problem, and 14m3 enough to admit to having a Yahoo account? More important, does anyone know why? (I've sent this question to the Yahoo people, but haven't gotten a response).

* Sorry.

Re:-1 (Offtopic)

[tb3]

I use Yahoo mail as my filter account, and to get remote access to my POP3 account, so I wouldn't call it lame (the spam hell known as Hotmail is lame:), but I've sent Yahoo mail with Mozilla .9.4 and .9.5 without any problems. This is on W2K SP2, at work. I suspect your problem is somewhere else in your system, but I don't think it's with Mozilla or Yahoo.

Did you try a full un-install and re-install with the latest stable build?

Re:-1 (Offtopic)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 14m3r who relies heavily on Yahoo! Mail. But whenever I hit the "Send" button to fire off an email via Mozilla/NS6, the browser simply hangs there, doing nothing.

Check your cookie settings. I've had the same problem on other sites that I've checked the "never accept cookies from this site" feature, and the system hangs because the computer on the other end wants cookies, and is too dumb to tell you that it won't work without them.p.

Re:-1 (Offtopic)

[Mr M]

I have two machines both running 0.9.5 and one hangs on both Yahoo! mail send and on Slashdot! Damn!

If I erase the cache Slashdot works but soon after stops responding in the manner you speak of. Obviously this is not a blanket bug and tough to track down as it will require certain factors to be in place.

A complete uninstall might fix it but I honestly have no idea what could be causing it.

Re:-1 (Offtopic)

[Pushnell]

The simplest thing to try would be a new profile. If profile data gets corrupted, weird things like this can happen.

Run mozilla from the run dialog (or command prompt) with the -profilemanager option. Create a new profile, and try your mail with that.

If that doesn't work, get a bugzilla account & file a bug like everyone else :)

time to 1.0

[RestiffBard]

I've been thinking about the length of time its taking to get to 1.0 and must admit that i have been critical of the dev process for Moz in the past but no more. it just occurred to me that one of the reasons that we've been so bitchy about how long its taking is the fact that development of Mozilla is taking place in the wide open. it was a daunting task when they began and it still is. there tons of closed projects that take years to get done but we never hear about them until they are done. we've been following moz from the beginning and so the whole thing seems to take longer than it should. maybe I'm just late figuring this out but i just wnated to make sure it was said.

Re:time to 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are closed projects that take as long or longer, but the deal here is that Moz development is implicitly compared to IE development. IE has been an above-average browser since 5.0, which came out quite a while ago. In that time Netscape has continued to stagnate; while I realize this has nothing to do with Mozilla, it's hard to remember that. Netscape 4.x and before is so very horrible, and when I think "Mozilla" the first image that pops into my mind is "Netscape".

Also, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has developed an excellent browser in a fraction of the time that it has taken Mozilla. And yes, IE is also not just a browser but an API. But then again, IE only runs on one platform.

Re:time to 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

IE runs on Mac, Windows, and if I am not mistaken, Solaris. Just wanted to point that out so we can take a balanced approach here.

Re:time to 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

But ActiveX and all the other assorted stuff that make IE a "platform" on windows (such as any application being able to create a browser window by simply inheriting from IE) is windows-only. I used to be a mac developer and we wanted an integrated browser on our product, but there was no way to do this. For the windows guys it was trivial. So as a platform, IE is Windows-only, as I said.

Re:time to 1.0

[Lussarn]

Sharing the name and sharing the code isn't the same thing.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[codingOgre]

Umm, 1.2 -> 2.0 *WAS* a major jump! Why do you not think so?

Flash

[10100101]

Maybe i'll be able to use Flash on my Linux system soon...

Re:Flash

[Hornsby]

Flash has been available for linux for a LONG time. It's been working under mozilla for many releases. Just go to a website that requires flash, and when the dialog box pops up to prompt you to get the plugin, press continue(or whatever). It's all very straighforward.

Re:Flash

[spauldo]

Perhaps you mean shockwave? Like the guy above said, flash has been available for a long, long time. Same with realplayer and acrobat reader, and if you use plugger (don't have a link handy, but it's not hard to find) you can view just about any mime type supported on linux (hell, with mplayer you can view just about any movie 'cept shockwave, quicktime, or vivo - you have to compile it yourself and play with the pluggerrc file though).

I really want shockwave support. It's not often I view a page that uses it, but when I do it's usually something I really want to see.

Reversing the speed factor

[ACK!!]

Listen I have been using Mozilla on and off since it began to be bundled with various distros.

When it first came out I swear the pages it could render came up as fast as anything I saw from even Opera but the program loaded really slowly. In other words, when it finally came up it was really fast unless it crashed.

Now, Mozilla can handle most any page Netscrape can handle and loads faster but the page rendering seems to be slower on regular html pages not nearly as fast as when it came out initially. I was impressed by the .94+ version I am using right now and use it for most of my work. However, I do wish the thing was quicker in rendering pages. Any thoughts on this? Is it just my perception of the program?

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[tswinzig]

Is it just my perception of the program?

Why don't you do a scientific test instead of going by perceptions. Download one of those early builds you are talking about, and time it loading pages. Then install the latest build, and time it again.

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[pi_rules]

One thing that can be noted... FORM rendering is much faster now. Ever try loading a Bugzilla bug entry page on a M18 build? It was horrid. I'd shift away desktops and go back to coding for a bit while I waited. Ability to render tables quickly improvement/degredation is minimal compared to the gains done with the widgets. Extremely impressive when you consider they had to do this for OS after OS, or was it part of XUL?

Oh, and I'm running it on Linux, dunno if the Win32, MacOS or other ports were this slow early on.

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried the Windows version? That thing is almost twice as speedy as Linux version.

I really don't care how fast Netscape 4 loads a page. The important thing is, Mozilla _shows_ the page faster. One of the biggest weakness of Netscape 4 is that the rendering engine has to know the dimension of every element before it'll draw them on the screen. This is fine if you have a super fast network connection, but generally the Internet is not fast enough. Netscape 4 is excruciatingly slow at showing web pages, and Mozilla is many times faster in this respect.

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[Pope]

Anytime one of my fellow Mac users claims that 4.7 is faster than Moz, I tell them to go to a Slashdot page with at least 100 comments in Nested Mode.

Moz wins hands down.

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[cgleba]

I've noticed the same thing. It seems as if it used to render faster (albeit, some pages were displayed incorrectly at that time, though).

Mozilla rocks, but the thing that has kept me away from it over and over again is speed. I keep trying to 'convert' to it, but the UI speed kills me. It feels like I'm selecting menus while I'm drunk.

I've used Galeon and that's better. I just wish that they could do somthing about the UI speed in Mozilla, though. I've read many bugs about it and at least around the 0.8 version the developers 'dismissed' the UI speed 'bugs' as platform issues. They would say: "Linux redering is inherantly slow. . .Mozilla seems fast enough for me. . .", etc.

The UI is slow on ALL platforms that I've used. Perhaps it will never be sped up because of the inherant problem of using their own GUI toolkit which in effect is a platform issue (their platform) that will never get fixed :(.

Re:Reversing the speed factor

[dimator]

This is the pertinent bug:

bug 60787: Mozilla should display pages before downloading them

And once we've hit v1.0

[Flower]

We do the complete rewrite in prep for v2.0? Right?

&lt Just kidding &gt

release 1.0 is a bug!

[leuk_he]

That is funny (+5) they admit that the release of 1.0 is a bug.

Also if your have the big party and thus have this blocking bug solved i think it is not wise to release 1.0 the next day.......8-)

Re:release 1.0 is a bug!

[abischof]

That is funny (+5) they admit that the release of 1.0 [mozilla.org] is a bug.

I think you may misunderstand Bugzilla. It's an issue-tracking system, where each issue happens to have the term "bug". So, for instance, bugs are even filed for feature requests.

Re:Rule #1 from the 'manifesto'

[Anonymous Coward]

> Remember, not all /. users hate Windows
> or think Microsoft is out to get them!

How can a reasonable person not think that?
You must be new to the biz.

You are sugar coating the past...

[Carnage4Life]

They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped. Both missed the target. But had they written for what was at the time the current standard they'd have been releasing browser that, while stable and complient, would have been miles behind the competition in terms of features. Which is why writing a standards complient browser should be undertaken by someone who isn't trying to make money. Delibrately being behind your competition would be suicidal.

Both these companies tried to strongarm the W3C into accepting their versions of standards by going ahead and implementing them anyway. This began with Netscape and it's "time to market" fiasco where they felt major versions of their software had to be released at "Internet time" which lead to them forcing such travesties as Javascript, Javascript CSS and a number of other nonsensities on the web users while not fixing basic aspects of their implementation of the HTML spec like rendering tables.

Thankfully, it seems that now the major browsers have realized the errors of their ways and no longer see "time to market" as being more important than standards compliance. The Mozilla team has been doing excellent works with regards to implementing a number of the W3C standards and Microsoft has now gone as far as to start deprecating some of their own technologies in favor of the W3C versions (e.g. XDR -> XML Schema and XSL -> XSLT).

Re:You are sugar coating the past...

[dillon_rinker]

Thankfully, it seems that now the major browsers have realized the errors of their ways

The "major browser" is internet explorer. They don't worry about time to market because there's no need to out-feature the competition...because there is none. I wouldn't be too thankful for that.

possibly a good start?

[niall111]

If the 1.0 release turns out to be something with rock solid stability/compliance, would it be possible that ISP's would start suggesting their customers use Mozilla, instead of IE? This would cut down on support costs associated with the bugs in IE, which i'm sure any ISP would be happy to do.

Re:possibly a good start?

[ReinoutS]

Regardless of the stability/compliance level, a move like that would only increase the number of phone calls to the helpdesk, at this moment in any case. Why? Many braindead websites are tested only to work with IE/NS4, or simple refuse non-IE clients. Look for Tech Evangelism bugs (there are 924 of those as I write this) for a few examples.

Looking Good

[SomeOtherGuy]

Can't really speak for the whole Lizard....But the newest Galeon has been making me very happy as of late. Version 1.0 does not have to be perfect....Keep up the good work....

Rather than adding features...

[Anonymous Coward]

nobody wants. Why no offer a linux builds with anti alised text support built in. That would really please a lot of people. I know there are patches available, but they can be an pain in the arse to get working.

IMO lack of AA text in Mozilla is preventing people who might want to move to Linux from doing so. I know Konqueror does AA text via QT, but I find Konqueors' rendering a bit to immature yet.

Re:Rather than adding features...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, khtml's rendering is almost on par, if not better than gecko's. I think the last few bugs in Konqueror can be traced back to kjs.

Re:To all Mozilla performace whingers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you give the same advice to those who complain that Windows is slow? Doubt it. Hypocrite.

reminds me of a story

[G Neric]

Brenden Eich... also explains why 1.0 is so important to reach, and why it isn't just another milestone, either.

there was once a shepard boy who was so bored he started shouting "wolf! wolf!"... and soon the villagers didn't come running.

I'll keep downloading a Mozilla every 8 months or so and throw it at the fridge, and when one of them sticks, ok, that will be an important milestone to reach. So far, too slow, too bloated.

Re:reminds me of a story

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say reminds me of a Roman story.A girl has the power to predict the future, but a god cursed her so that nobody will believe her.
She predicted something, but nobody believed her. Then her prediction became true.
Years later, she predicted that Troje will fall, but nobody believed her. Eventually, that prediction came true as well.

You keep saying that Mozilla will never reach matureness, but before you'll know it, it will already have surpassed it.

Re:reminds me of a story

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but when? 5 more years? It's like waiting to get out of jail. Soon, it'll be soon, I know it'll be soon, just gotta wait, just a little more, gotta wait, gotta wait, gotta wait...

Re:To all Mozilla performace whingers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I do. I run Windows2000/Linux. I am sick of people moaing that 'mozilla is really slow on my p2 300'. Upgrade ffs. I run Mozilla on this 1.7ghz box with 1GB ram and it feels pretty smooth.

Starkly fantastic name

[Syberghost]

Brendan of the Eich. Clearly a highly-ranked Boskonian.

Re:Starkly fantastic name

[markhb]

Brendan of the Eich. Clearly a highly-ranked Boskonian.

Is that a Boston Boskonian, or a Springfield Boskonian?

Re:Starkly fantastic name

[Syberghost]

Is that a Boston Boskonian, or a Springfield Boskonian?

No, this kind of Boskonian.

Or, more specifically, this kind.

Re:Starkly fantastic name

[SpinyNorman]

Here's a sig upgrade:

rm -rf /bin/laden

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh, you fucking dumbass, every new kde x.0 version is one which has a new Qt (always a _big_ change).

anyways, on unix, mozilla doesn't matter because konqueror is much better

why not call it godzilla 8-)

[leuk_he]

I think you may misunderstand Bugzilla

If it is not used for tracking bugs but used for (almost) everything why nog call it Godzilla? The big mean animal in the movies was also an animal that needed to be killed? Or why not call it 42?

Bugzilla Slahdotted?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Mozilla developers dilemma....

Story on Slashdot:

GOOD: Keep people interested in the project, debate and possibly come up with good ideas.

BAD: They generally have a Bugzilla link, gets Slashdotted, and makes one of your primary developer tools slow to a crawl for a few hours.

Standards have been "standard" for a while now...

[denzo]

Not quite what I meant. HTML 'standard' is set by the W3C, but it evolves. Its currently at 4.3 (I think). So does the Moz team work toward that? After all, by the time they're done it might be at 4.7. This is the trap into which NS and IE fell. They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped.

Sorry, but this is inaccurate.

HTML and CSS are pretty standardized and have remained fairly static; they haven't changed much (except for the CSS1 and CSS2 thing). The latest HTML standard (or rather, "recommendation") by the W3C is HTML 4.01, which was released back in December 1997. Both Netscape and IE have had multiple browser releases since then, and IE has been the most successfuly with implementing CSS earlier on (try a Netscape 4.7 browser on some advanced CSS pages and you'll see what I mean).

And for the most part, both NS and IE have been remaining true to the standards. Adding features to these standards is fine, as long as they remain true to the overall structure of HTML and CSS. The colored-scrollbar feature in IE may not be seen by other browsers, but the additional CSS statement that Microsoft added is compliant with the overall structure of CSS, and it doesn't break any functionality with other browsers. The Mozilla team should have no problems whatsoever implementing the latest standards, since they've been around for long enough, and are actually written with browser parsing in mind.

The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.

So as far as I'm concerned, the W3C has been an invaluable source for implementors, I don't see this evolving standards problem at all, and I don't understand how the Mozilla team would have any problems with them. The only problematic areas in the browsing arena are proprietary extensions, such as JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash, etc. For those, we have to turn to the companies who created these extensions to open them up for portability.

Re:Promising

[Anonymous Coward]

You think 0.6 was bad? Obviously you never saw the first couple of milestones after they trashed Netscape 5 . . . which is how long I've been using it.

Uuuhm... redundant?

[GeekDork]

It's exactly what's said in the linked article on mozilla.org. Well, I'm not a moderator today.

I do it as a matter of principle.

[jotaeleemeese]

I don't like MS corporate tactics, thus I don't use their products.

Don't argue with me, you asked, I answered.

Re:I do it as a matter of principle.

[aozilla]

I don't like MS corporate tactics, thus I don't use their products.

And you like AOL's corporate tactics, so you use their products instead?

Oh my looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

Unable to connect to SQL server

Whoohoo slashdot effect strikes again.

Manifesto?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wish they didn't use that term. I mean it makes it sound like mozilla developers are living in shacks coding and are about to hang themselves with their own underwear,

Loved the implied Slashdot threat

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you stare down slashdot and C|net together and at the same time, and argue credibly that the bug is a 1.0 stop-ship problem?

Wow! We do have some power!

Is SVG in Mozilla 1.0?

[mdubinko]

I understand that SVG code is ready for moz but not checked in, awaiting approvals, etc.

Question for Those Who Know: Will SVG be "grandfathered" into Mozilla 1.0? Or will it be put on hold for ~6 months for a post-1.0 release?

Thanks,

-m

Re:Is SVG in Mozilla 1.0?

[BZ]

If the frigging licensing issues with libart (which is necessary for the svg code) get resolved, there is no reason it could not land in the next two milestones....

for not being 1.0...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's gotta be the best damn non - 1.0+ application I've ever used.

Thanks to all the folks at Mozilla.org that made this possible!

Re:for not being 1.0...

[Anonymous Coward]

bah, konqueror is better.
mozilla still is bloated, slow, POS>

Re:for not being 1.0...

[Anonymous Coward]

shut yer trap wanker

IE6 is more bloated than mozilla thats why

[HanzoSan]

Why use IE??????? because its bloated too!

Opera isnt bloated but people want the POWER.

Call it bloat all you want, but no one likes a light weight browser, if people did they wouldnt use AOL and IE the two most bloated browsers on the planet earth.

As far as Mozilla taking IEs marketshare, its simple, AOL stops packing IE in and starts packing MOzilla, they start advertising Mozilla on ICQ.com, MOzilla on AOL.com, RealNetworks advertises MOzilla on Realplayer, Time Warner does favorable reviews on MOzilla and uses only MOzilla, MOzilla is given away free with people using cable modems, MOzilla is packed into every machine that AOL is packed into.

all of the sudden MOzilla has equal marketshare to windows.

The reason IE won is because Mozilla wasnt complete, now it is, so the battle is about to begin.

Re:IE6 is more bloated than mozilla thats why

[jiheison]

Why use IE??????? because its bloated too!

Maybe so, but it is installed and running by default (on Windows). Why waste even more resources on yet another piece of cumbersome software?

As far as Mozilla taking IEs marketshare, its simple. . .

So, basically, they use the same manipulative and anti-competitive practices that M$ used to push IE.

Re:IE6 is more bloated than mozilla thats why

[WhiteKnight07]

Yes, but IE will still have the advantage of being the "default" browser on Windows comps, overall it will probably level the playing field and make both browsers evenly matched. Fighting fire with fire so to speak.

Snipers form committee to decide where to shoot..

[cheesyfru]

This just in: Terrorist Osama bin Laden has been spotted near the Pakistan border by a team of U.S. snipers. They are currently in the process of forming a committee to decide where they should shoot the bullet to assinate Mr. bin Laden, in an operation being called "Shot of Freedom v1.0". Sgt. Mark Hawthorne, who is quickly emerging as the lead of this committee, added "we need to make sure we do this right -- we only get one shot at him, and we need to make sure we do it the best we can. Plus, we want to make sure we get the reward for killing him; there's another troop in the area with bigger and better guns, and we can't let them get to him first!" They estimate this operation will be completed somewhere around Q4 in 2002, although this assumes that the target will stay relatively still.

Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[HanzoSan]

When AOL comes with Mozilla instead of IE.
When ICQ.com Recommends MOzilla and not IE.
When Winamp is embeded or intergrated into MOzilla.
When AOL IM is intergrated into MOzilla.
When ICQ is intergrated into MOzilla.
When Mozilla is packed with computers as AOL is.
When AOL sends out CDs saying "install mozilla"
When Mozilla is recommmended by Slashdot.
When Mozilla is 100 percent compliant to all standards including IEs broken ones.
When Mozilla is turned into a AOL package which includes Netscape, AOLIM, ICQ, Winamp, all in one.

IE did this, Netscape did not, so IE won.

Mozilla now has support from AOL, and its a complete product, and a better product than IE, only a matter of time.

Re:Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[Gerv]

When Mozilla is recommmended by Slashdot.

You over-estimate your own importance, dude :-)

When Mozilla is 100 percent compliant to all standards including IEs broken ones.

Oh well. Looks like we'll never beat IE, then. Because we'll implement its extensions when hell freezes over.

Gerv

Re:Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well. Looks like we'll never beat IE, then. Because we'll implement its extensions when hell freezes over.

Where by 'we' you mean the Gecko team, mozilla.org, or yourself?

I don't see a carefully done patch that implements IE extensions without breaking existing standards being rejected. In fact, "we" already implement some of IE's extensions.

Re:Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[Gerv]

Where by 'we' you mean the Gecko team, mozilla.org, or yourself?

The last two. mozilla.org has consistently expressed an unwillingness to aid Microsoft in its quest to dominate web standards.

I don't see a carefully done patch that implements IE extensions without breaking existing standards being rejected.

I do. If there's a W3C way to do it, and an IE way to do it, we implement the W3C way only. If there is no standard in that area, we consider doing what IE does (e.g. innerHTML.)

Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)

Re:Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[Anonymous Coward]

"I do. If there's a W3C way to do it, and an IE way to do it, we implement the W3C way only. If there is no standard in that area, we consider doing what IE does (e.g. innerHTML.) "

And yet what is innerHTML other than a shortcut? What can you do with innerHTML that you couldn't do with the DOM API?

I'm not suggesting the Gecko group rush out and implement this feature. I am merely suggesting that if someone were to produce a patch or module that enabled this support, it would at least be worth consideration. Maybe people want it, maybe they don't. It is a big decision, and I think that it isn't one that you are qualified to make for the community without community involvement.

Re:Expect Mozilla to beat IE

[fabiang]

For your information, here's a comment from the main DOM engineer of Mozilla (from bug 74201 WONTFIX)

If it would've been decided in the early days of mozilla that document.all
should be supported then I wouldn've have much problem with doing so, but
deciding now to start supporting document.all is IMO a very bad idea, there are
pages our there already that use code like:

if (document.all) {
// Do IE specific stuff
} else if (document.getElementById) {
// Do mozilla specific stuff
} ...

and if we'd now all of a sudden started supporting document.all we'd break
things like this.

Even worse, the closer to IE mozilla gets (in terms of DOM functionality) the
more bugs we'll get about mozilla not working exactly as IE does, and I'm not up
for revers-engineering everything in IE at this point, that would be extremely
complicated and time consuming. We're already seeing similar problems with
mozilla's support for IE's element.offsetXXX properties, they behave more or
less the same way, but not exactly what IE does, and finding out exactly how IE
works is non-trivial (for all the hundreds of proprietary methods/properties in
IE), to say the least.

I'm all for implementing functionality in mozilla that exists in IE and is very
useful, cleanly defined and has a nice clean API, however, document.all is not
one of those things, I it's not a clean API (it's a list and a hash and callable
function, and what exactly does it contain? Who knows?), there are other nice
clean standards compliant API's that give you everything that document.all gives
you, I say that's enough.

Marking WONTFIX.

Re:It'll still suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Microsoft pay you to post this shit or do you do it for nothing?

Mozilla.org outages as a result of this article

[zachlipton]

I just wanted to keep everyone informed about what is happening to mozilla.org on the server side right now. Bugzilla has currently been shut down as a result of large amounts of database queries, etc, I have talked with those running the servers and this probably wont be up right away, but you never know. Mozillazine.org is also somewhat down (the sql server is dead), but a mirror of the article is availble at http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/mozillazine-moz1.h tml. www.mozilla.org is still up and should continue to serve out Brendan's words of wisdom.

Please stand by,

Re:Mozilla.org outages as a result of this article

[zachlipton]

Bugzilla is back up now, please do not overload it.

It still matters.

[pi_rules]

I do some web development, and I get clients calling our customers saying X feature isn't working on their browser. Know why? It's a buggy build of IE either on Win32 or a Mac almost all of the time. My suggestion to them is to grab the newest build of Mozilla and try it out. I can't say for certain they actually did it, but I've never gotten a complaint from a person that I told to use Mozilla again. I'm going through this right now with somebody trying to print complex HTML out on a Mac - - it's just not working. Try Netscape, if that fails, try Mozilla. I'm hoping word spreads.

Re:It still matters.

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably never got a complaint from them because they were off calling another web developer.

Telling 90% of the customers to sod off because a feature works in an obscure development/testing browser called 'Moe Zilla' is pretty bizarre.

Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Not intended to be flamebait, but I think Mozilla should learn from Opera. Lightweight, fast, and feels good to use.

Pity Opera is non-free... but some of Opera's features are good enough that I'd readily shell out cash for it. Hopefully one day they'll open source it... But "free" (as in freedom) doesn't necessarily mean "good" (as in quality), and "non-free" doesn't necessarily mean "bad". Something to keep in mind when judging browsers.

Re:Standards have been "standard" for a while now.

[brsett]

The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.

IMO, the consortium has a bad track record with the standard. Bad does not go far enough even, it would be a comedy of errors, if it weren't for all the suffereing web developers who have been screwed in the deal. The standards produced by the w3c have been so late in arriving, and, done so little to codify existing practices, that invariably the only implementor that released a browser in the late 90's (MS), had to develop there own unique way of doing things, while at the same time, the other implementor of reknown added similar features with different implementations (i vaguely remember some painful thing called layers), as bug fixes to its existing browser (the glorious 4.10, 4.40, and 4.40 series of nav). The standards were doa. I could go on and on about the partisanship of the standardizing body, but what's the point. The w3c has rendered themselves irrelevant. Now I just wish they would go away. If it weren't for their incompetnece, I wouldn't have to deal with all the javascript browser identifier screens (w3c is probably to blame for the existence of javascript as well) that get screwed up while I use konqueror.

Re:mozillazine ?!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article was on Mozillazine - not Mozillaquest. As far as I know Mozillaquest has not yet reported it. Mozillaquest usually has poor information content, and concentrates on summary statistics of raw bug counts without any analysis on what those bugs mean. Since the Mozilla tracking system calls everything from crashers to enhancement requests or spelling errors or documentation updates a "bug", this is at best not very useful and at worst seriously misleading.

Mozillazine is somewhat better but is something of a house organ and doesn't tend to report the negatives.

A more neutral site is Mozillanews which seems to have reasonably accurate information but not as much of it.

There is also of course the "official" Mozilla site which does have some information as well.

Re:Rule #1 from the 'manifesto'

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually *all* reasonable people think that. Thinking otherwise it paranoid delusion.

Specifications are *NOT* standards

[FrankHaynes]

Why must you propogate this mistake that standards are ever-changing?

Standards are called that precisely because they are fixed reference points on which all can agree, and without which chaos results in the particular field of endeavor in question.

What is being discussed here can be described as nothing more than a specification, because it will undoubtedly be revised over time.

Re:mozillazine ?!?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

jee, yoo no lotsa stuf howd yoo git so smat? pleez say how i cud be jus lyk yoo

Java

[mali_kurac]

Anyone else still having problems with java? I like to use ESPN.com's GameCast during the baseball playoffs. Leave the window open and I can "watch" the baseball games while at work.

Trouble is, Moz0.9.5 locks up after 10 or 20 minutes, but only when this is used. It's stable otherwise.

What's everyone else's experience with java under the current builds?

Re:Java

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't java be more related to the external java virtual machine you downloaded than mozilla? I have a feeling its probably the virtual machine you downloaded from sun..(or wherever) and not mozilla itself.

Re:Java

[JohnCub]

While I had some trouble getting java up and running on my Win32 build, once it was in, it stayed rock solid. I spend several hours at a time with java actively running and haven't had a bit of trouble with it on any of the 3 machines (all win32) that I run 0.9.5 on.

What about S/MIME support?

[the_olo]

This is an essential feature Mozilla Mail should have - S/MIME support.
It's a widely accepted standard for digital signatures and encryption of mail messages an PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).

That's funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think it was ever meant to reach 1.0.

Thank You Slashdot Editors...

[GroundBounce]

For not inserting a snide insult after the poster's comments this time; they do get
rather old.

Re:Thank You Slashdot Editors...

[The Evil Beaver]

It's probably since I didn't do for the links... They had to modify the last sentence, and that became the remarks to what I submitted.

Maybe next time... :P

Presents!

[Anonymous Coward]

W00p! Just in time for my birthday!

!!!

what's the point?

[destiney]

Who cares about a manifesto, I'd just like to see 100% CSS2 support.

I run into windoze users all the time who would be Linux users if all the available Linux browsers didn't suck.

And if you think you're gonna convince me Mozilla renders better than IE, you're nuts...

Re:what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Make a PNG image with transparent background.
2. Embed the image in a web page.
3. Change the background of the web page to something other than "white"
4. Open the web page in IE and Mozilla, and compare for yourself.

Another example (CSS2):
1. Make a fixed positioned (style="position: fixed") DIV element
2. Position it somewhere in the middle of the page.
3. View the page in IE and Mozilla

Am I nuts? These are just a few of the many examples how Mozilla renders better than IE. If you're only talking about broken HTML code, IE wins, but I don't see any reason for Mozilla to surpass IE in this area.

Not True

[Ars-Fartsica]

IE and Netscape got into trouble by trying to do an end-run around standards altogether. Features included in the 3.x series of both browsers were simply not part of any standards proposal.

multiplying the speed factor by .003

[uigrad_2000]

What I'm curious about is the Solaris versions. Why do they stink so much? They load slowly, render slowly, and they appear to not use standard X calls.

Yesterday, 0.9.4 crashed my UI. Even when I moved my pointer off the mozilla app, mozilla was still highlighted. Also, my key combinations (including my kill-9 key combo) stopped working too. It must be setting up it's own keyboard and mouse handlers!

I finally logged in remotely, and killed it off. What a boarish app!

This was v0.9.4 for Solaris 8. Of course, I haven't had such problems when running the same version for Windows or for linux. What's up? Can't the mozilla programmers afford to install Solaris on one machine for testing?

Re:multiplying the speed factor by .003

[BZ]

erm. There are solaris test machines. But they are _expensive_ so there are not many. And some of the bugs you are seeing are likely GTK bugs on solaris....

mirror? /.ed

[lazarusL]

Sorry, the server load is too high to process your request.
Please try again later.

Re:What;s so great about moziler ?

[mozkill]

Who duplicated whom? by the way, the mozilla project is VERY independent of ALL Linux projects. your use of the .NET analogy as an argument against developers working on Mozilla is a very naive point. Mozilla developers are working on a browser, not the Linux operating system. Given that fact, by Websters definition, who is the hypocrite now? You guessed it. You. :-)

Why do people try to....

[Anonymous Coward]

ignore the simple fact that mozilla is a failure if we assess it by the criteria it was original designed to. It can't, even by the most myopic 'zilla zealot be described as lightweight, nor is it the ultra stable browser we were promised.

I have the advantage of having been on the inside to some extent. Submitting patches, reporting bugs, trauling through very poorly written code. The major, and largely unidentified problem with mozilla development has been ineptitude of *certain* developers. There is no way to sugar coat it, that is what they are, totally inept, and responsible for the massive delays in development.

My rather radical solution is to *now don't spit out your coffee* ditch the current codebase, start from scratch, and take with us some very important lessons, and a lot of knowledge of how to write a standards compliant browser.

This obviously sounds like madness, however, actually writing the browser is not the hard bit, it is knowing how to make it go. The current codebase could be used as a reference in building a new browser.

If this task were to be undertaken, a few things that would need to be done differently to stop this mess happening again

1. Build a browser and only a browser. Don't go down the emacs route.

2. Keep the kids out of the cookie jar. Letting inexperienced developers loose on major parts of the codebase was stupid.

3. Setout in advance exactly what is intended, what standards the browser will support and what features it will have by the 1.0 release, then STICK TO THEM. Mozilla has suffered from over enthusiastic developers throwing in beta and even alpha quality code into the mix.

4. Listening to user feedback. Rather than say WFM, listen to the problems users are having with the code. If the programme runs slow, maybe that is a problem that needs investigating. Bugzilla was a wonderful exercise in making people believe bugs were being addressed, not so good at actually getting them addressed.

5. Define an initial target platform, work on it, if people want to branch let them do it.

Quite simply really, and had these things been done first time around, we might have seen mozilla acheive what was set out 18 months ago. All that lies ahead for mozilla now is more failure and less and less user interest as alternatives appear- Atheos has a browser based on KHTML, and I know a lot of other projects in the works for various platforms that will be based on this.

What is all the fuss.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla runs amazing on my quad Xeon system with 4GB ram. If I upgrade the ram I will be able to run other apps too.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Hal-9001]

The Mozilla devel team has posted very much in advance a specific roadmap... it's not like everybody else... hmmm, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, oh what the hell let's call the next 2.0. (ahem cough cough KDE)

Or Java. Renaming Java 1.2 java 2 caused hell for publishers publishers and authors whose books had already gone to press.

Re:1.0 is artificial anyway...

[Hal-9001]

/. ate my editing... :-(

Re:Moderate parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Unfortunatly, my penis is larger than yours.

This is not offtopic.

[The Evil Beaver]

Whoever moderated to say it was, hand in your moderating gun. Also, you can no longer tell people of Slashdot's f1r5t ps0tz!

Hell. So far, that's the most on-topic thing I've read (apart from my own submission, of course).

Re:Moderate parent down

[Bumbleton]

Hey, my penis is bigger than both of yours combined. So stop fucking with him, wanker.

Keep your beer cool...

[Khopesh]

Yes, somebody has taken a stab at the date. Accodring to the manifesto, we will see a few more releases (0.9.6-0.9.9) followed by 1.0 or 0.9.10 then 1.0. there will be NO other milestones. The document claims we have about half a year until the 1.0 release. This is the first firm forecast I've seen so far.

here's the big bug holding Mozilla 1.0 back; basically a collection of extremely important bugs. Also of tremendous importance, a dependency of this bug, the Party bug ... yes, we need a party for the release!

there is apparently more than one funny bug(here's the list) on Bugzilla.

*yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

this is worse than microsoft delays to bug fixes.

Shit ... there goes Sheldon Wanker.

[Bumbleton]

hey moron, STFU. I am quite sure I speak for all of slashdot when I tell you to suck the shit right out of my ass.

Mimbleton makes more sense than your idiotic tripe. Which isn't saying much, I will admit. Plus, he has 70 times the comments you do, which pretty much blows your sorry ass out of the water.

I've kicked myself...

[The Evil Beaver]

At first it was cool to see that an article of mine was accepted. But now, when I want to get the latest daily, I can't find out if it's good or not (the easy way) since Mozillazine is down. Let this be a warning to anyone who submits something that's important to them... It might come back and bite you in the ass.

about your sig

[Hektor_Troy]

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Is this why /. is so "powerful"?

Re:Moderate parent down

[oyvindmo]

> 700 posts! God, I just can't get over it. Maybe he has a posting problem?

He has obviously gone postal.

Re:Moderate parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

No I think you misunderstood... My penis is so large, it has a penis. And while your (impressively large) penis may be larger than my penis's penis, it is still dwarfed by my _actual_ pensis.

Thank you.