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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.
* 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
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.)
Here's the REAL issue: "Standards are an evolving thing." They *shouldn't* be, and true standards do not evolve much, if at all.
... 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
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
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
Hey, all the team needs to do is ask.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
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
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 :)
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
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