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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.
Where's the "World Domination" item?
Score:-1, Funny
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?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
"* 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!!)
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
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.
* 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 ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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".
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
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.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
"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)
... but will the workers control the means of production?
(The question is more important than it might initially seem.)
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
Hm... I look at the 1.0 release a little differently. It's a few things:
.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.
* 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
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.)
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?
I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. -M.C. Escher (1898-1972)
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? ;-)
Hi!
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?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
>>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.
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
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? :-)
Hi!
Hey, all the team needs to do is ask.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
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.
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
sig?
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.
-
Listen I have been using Mozilla on and off since it began to be bundled with various distros.
.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?
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
ACK
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).
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,
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
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.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
/. is so "powerful"?
Is this why
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.