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Mozilla Bug Week
Gerv continues:
"You'll be shown round our world-class web-based tools (Bugzilla, Bonsai, Tinderbox, LXR), and led through all the steps between discovering a problem and having your patch checked in to the Mozilla source tree. After checkin, those fixes and features will be appreciated by an audience of millions in Mozilla derivative products.
Not Just For Hardcore Hackers
"Mozilla's user interface is written in web technologies - defined in XUL (XML-based User-interface Language), animated with JavaScript and styled with Cascading Style Sheets. This means it can be understood, and hacked on, by anyone who understands HTML/XML, JS and Style Sheets. mozilla.org has recently developed technology to allow fixes to be made to Mozilla's UI without the need to compile Mozilla - all you need is a self-installing nightly build. This widens the field of potential contributors to everyone who's ever made a decent web page.
"So, if you have thought about getting involved in a free software project, but it all seemed to complicated or difficult, here's your chance.
"On the other hand, if you want to check the entire source tree out from CVS, compile the embedding test harness, and go into deep hack mode on Mozilla's C++ core, we'll help you do that too.
"Bug Week will be happening on IRC. Mozilla's nightly builds even include a chat client, ChatZilla, to make it even easier to participate. Look for people whose nicks begin with "BW_". We hope to have people there most of the time, although the help may be concentrated when the US West Coast or Europe is awake."
Rather than just ranting and raving about your pet peeve, you should rant, rave AND enter it into Bugzilla (after ascertaining that it isn't already in there).
Subnote: Don't directly link to individual bugs in slashdot comments. It causes spam when people add ME TOOs as comments.
(Hey, mod this anonymous bugzilla pointer post up, not the various karma whores to follow.)
I'd love to use Mozilla, but anyone ever try running it at 1600x1200 resolution?
IE at least allows consistent font sizes amongst various web pages...
...or drown in the fettid swamp that is Mozilla.
This is one of the great things about Moz. irc:// links are superhandy for redirecting someone to a chat room with a single click. :)
æeee!
I made an effort to comment of XSLT functionality with multiple newsgroup posts, but got no response. These days, I may have the time to hack Mozilla.
A very good idea of theirs to have an open house.
Sounds like fun, fun, fun!
On both Linux at home and Windows at work. Of course if you could give a slightly better description of the 'problem' you are seeing people may be able to give you some suggestions....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Is anyone else sick of hearing about this never ending project?
Mozilla is an embarrasment to open source...
yaking about them here on Slashdot is not going to help get them fixed any faster. At least go to the right forum, or write up the bug.
it is very easy to chew the fat about a problem, and then not do anything to fix the issue. Which seems to be par for the course.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
All the talented programmers are busy working on projects that have a future, mozilla gets the dregs that remain.
There's one major problem with Mozilla's email component, something that that will probably keep me from using Mozilla all together, specifically the lack of a spelling checker.
I really like the mail reader, it's got all the features that I've been looking for (multiple 'from' options, mixing pop and IMAP accounts for example) but the lack of a spelling checker is really a problem for me.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and volunteer to help them, dude, instead of criticising.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
I want to look up and see a little picture of a fucking house and click on it and end up at my homepage.
Otherwise it is a great browser.
:wq
shea right, there's no way i'd be associated with that laughing stock.
To be a lot more effective such announce should be spread a little bit more.
....). Some of these OS already back up the mozilla project , and donate engeeniring forces to the project thats good but for other OSes, distro etc it's not the case So i sugest this announce to be publihed on sites like :
Mozilla will be the browser for many alternative OSes (read OS/2, BeOS, Linux, Qnx, Aix
advogato
Beunited
QnxStart
I don't know any windows related sites, but adnantech should do it.
This announce should also be mailed on developing mailing lists like apple's darwin developement list
.
Anyway a lot of great doc are available here and are good sartup point. Sometimes ago some video detailling how to dig in the code where available on mozilla's web site (but I can't find them right now).
none Yet.
Mozilla is an embarrasment to open source...
The only time an Open Source project fails is when people can no longer find the source.
Mozilla itself could be abandoned tomorrow and it'd still be a success.. one merely needs to look at the Mozilla projects page to see the vast quantity of spin-off projects that Mozilla started. Not only are there the well known ones such as Gecko and Bugzilla but there are many, many others like two JavaScript interpreters (one in C++, one in Java), the Netscape Portable Runtime and XPCOM. There's even a commercial product (Komodo)!
Why I can not specify personal CSS in Mozilla GUI setup? Yes I know that it is possible in some config text file to specify JS like command. But I will need to run Google, or dig in far conner of Mozilla.org. I will probably just run Opera. Ideally it should be enabled / dissabled with some hot key. Personal CSS is a good thing. Consistent fonts, colors and even one more way to disable ADs.
Also I wish Mozilla would be more keyboard friendly which makes working on laptop much more pleasant. Even better - with configurable keys.
Isn't every week Mozilla bug week? :)
Don't fuck them. That's disgusting! Kill them instead, and then feed their bodies to pigs!
If you habitually misspell words in your e-mail
messages, the problem is likely to lie with your
education rather than the software. Inclusion of
software crutches for a wetware problem only
makes the latter worse.
What are you complaining about? The only projects that end, typically, are failed projects. In order for stuff to continue to improve, it can't end. Are you also sick of hearing about the never-ending project that is windows (which just had its 5.1 release, to great fanfare) this week? What about the never-ending RealPlayer project? Or the Mac OS project? Or the WinAmp project? Or ...? If you don't like hearing about them, here's a suggestion:
Stop reading sites that print news about software!
Jackass.
Insightful: +1. Funny: +1. Flamebait: -1. Troll: -1. A good flame: priceless
.sig: file not found
Mozilla isn't all-american. People from various different countries work on Mozilla too... From South Africa to here in Canada. Identifying the lizard with the USA would more than likely alienate a good number of Mozilla hackers, and that would be a BAD THING.
:P
And communism isn't the only thing associated with the color red you know... What happened to raspberry jam, huh?
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Netscape was an American company and guess what tonto...America Online is, now this may be shocking, an American compny, so i don't know what the fuck you're talking about...
Ya a couple crusty eurotrash "coderz" contributed some bloat to the project, but let's be realistic, 90% of the developers are the crappy low skill AOL employees that got the unfortunate task of trying to make something useable out of the crusty old netscape code.
Well done.
Good to see open source projects taking a pro-active approach to bugs. It's great that you can download a free, functional piece of software and if you find a bug they'll help you fix it.
This is one of opensources strongest advantages and projects like this will only do to further this opensource cause.
With the up and coming calender functionality going in I can see me rolling this out within my company. We did look at MS Exchange - but the costings compared to our current linux setup warranted a spend of some $150,000 (with ongoing costs) - the calender functionality would address the only shortcoming the present system has.
I didn't say it failed, i said it was an embarrasment.
George Bush didn't fail, in fact he is the president of America.
Doesn't mean the guys not an embarrasment.
Ehr, it's running kinda slow on my 32MB P90. What should I do?
(Sorry, could not resist)
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
...a Beowulf cluster?
How many of those spin off projects have produced usable applications? How many of the mozilla ports actually work?
Mozilla is not based on the ''crusty old netscape code''. They tried that. They didn't get very far. Mozilla is, afaik, a pretty much complete rewrite from scratch. One of many legitimate reasons it's taken so long to get to the very useable state it is in now.
Mozilla is a very competent and capable browser. About the best available for non-Windows users and plenty of those like it too. It costs you nothing. It's totally open for anyone to do what they want with it. Why do so many people have a problem with this? If you don't like it, don't use it.
It's taken a long time coming, sure, but so was Win2K. At least you've been able to use Mozilla all the time it's been developed. I jumped on board around 0.9 after trying out the earlier versions and not being overly impressed. It's now on all my machines and my users are very happy with it.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
Raspberry and jam, hmmm ...
/. FUD points if you know from which movie that is.
"There's only _one_ man in the galaxy who would _dare_ giving me the raspberry - LONE STAR!"
5
3rd assmaster
The fact that you can not get the Flash plugin for Mozilla when running it on Windows 98. I am very happy to see that Mozilla works better at home on my Linux Mandrake 8.1 box than at work on this silly Win98 box that I am posting from right now! ;-)
;-)
Just out of curiosity, how do you get the Netscape plugin for Flash to work for Mozilla? It appears to only need to be redirected to mozilla.exe from netscape.exe? Is that true, or do I need to lay off the crack pipe again??
You're welcome.
"If you don't like it, don't use it."
Looks like 95% of computer users out there have taken your advice.
See this /. article about the calendar. It's post-1.0 work, if you can, help us out with getting Mozilla to that milestone.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
I run Mozilla is 'Mozilla Bug Week'.
Yes you can. Just go to Macromedia's site, do the "get flash" thing, and select the Windows plugin for Netscape browsers. The installer will automatically detect Mozilla and install the plugin. You may need to restart Mozilla afterward, but then you are set.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
I tried this too, and all I got was Netscape/Netscape Compatible, which I tried, but all it did was try to install with the afore mentioned .dll that looks for netscape.exe, not mozilla.exe.
People still use mozilla? The great white hype of mozilla has finally passed i thought. Most people i know have moved on to konqueror or gone back to internet explorer. Years later and it's still in a beta state with tons of bugs and pointless bloat. I think Mozilla is gonna be one of those projects like the Hurd, nobody will just let it die, but it never really gets anywhere.
The biggest problem I have with Open Source software is that there is this myth that because something is open, anyone can fix bugs and contribute updates.
Well yes they can. But the problem stems from the lead time required to get the know the project, how it works, what does what and how different functions interact with each other.
Some examples. One of the companies I used to work for (a large IT consultancy company) I worked on a telemetry project. For every person who joined that project, there was a lead time of about three months for them to get used to, understand and know how the system works.
Okay, so that was one massive project and with people working full time on it, but Mozilla and other open source projects aren't exactly small either.
Another example. I wrote a GPL perl script called AvantSlash to take the content of Slashdot and process it for handhelds (since Slashdot's own isn't very good). Unfortunately due to a bug and an overdependence on AvantGo's caching, it accidenly spammed the slashdot site and got its IP barred. (This was in the 1.x thread, v2.0 doesn't suffer this problem).
A comment by Jamie a couple of days ago mentioned why it was banned and suggested that I contribute to slashcode.
Whilst this, in theory, is a great idea, as it would seem to be common with open source coders he unfortunately forgot that there would be several months of lead time whilst I learn how the code works, what does what and why and then, once I knew the system well, actually apply a well written patch.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source and the stuff it produces and I have a lot of respect for anyone who spends their time doing such stuff.
However, I'm just pointing out that there is a common myth amongst people in massive open source projects that people can just download, install and then immediately start dipping into the code and producing patches without having to go through the whole learning process.
So, back to Mozilla. Anything which speeds up this lead time has got to be a good thing and will have the added advantage of getting more people interested in the whole project.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The bottom line is: mozilla sucks, always has, always will. End of story.
This is a great chance for people to discover how mozilla is more than a browser. More importantly, it looks like the mozilla folk are responding to their critics who are calling this an open source project that is, in reality, closed to all but a select group
My only question is why isn't this info posted on mozilla.org? Wouldn't that be the logical place to put an announcement like this?
http://metamuscle.com - Better Bodies Through Hypertext
Most annoying bugs
Current user of...
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012
Why on earth would you want to run Flash? So you can see huge ads fly across the screen?
How many of those spin off projects have produced usable applications? How many of the mozilla ports actually work?
I myself have used Galeon, Komodo, Bugzilla and Rhino (JavaScript in Java) without problems. Rhino has actually influenced the creation of other projects itself.
Bugzilla is extremely successful. Galeon, K-Meleon, Skipstone, Activestate Komodo, the OS/2 Web Browser, Beonex... all these are successful Mozilla derivatives or spin-offs.
All the ports build and work fine - check our Tinderbox if you want.
Gerv
Netscape is Mozilla. so, install Flash (you can have it just create a directorey somewhere and dump the plug-in file [NPSWF32.DLL] in there for you to deal with yourself). then, by hand, you copy NPSWF32.DLL into your \program files\mozilla.org\mozill\plugins directory (or wherever it is you keep Mozilla caged up) and it works (perhaps needing a reboot). nothing complicated
~~~
Gervase, or 'Gerv' seems to think that mozilla is the best web browser in existence, despite constanlty being told otherwise by experienced developers who insist it sucks goat balls.
Gerv believe that the bible is an accurate historical account 'of an amazing series of events'. Furthermore, it is rumoured that Gerv refuses to worhsip at the 'Church of Emacs'.
Gervase Markham is a Christian
:-)
Absolutely. But I'm not sure why you say it as if it's an insult.
and has also been arse licking the mozilla devs to secure an internship.
Definitely. I secured this job entirely through ass-kissing; I didn't do any work on the project before at all. In fact, I worked on Konqueror for a year and a half.
mozilla is the best web browser in existence
There's no such thing as the best web browser in existence - they all have different strengths and weaknesses. But Mozilla does rock
Gerv refuses to worhsip at the 'Church of Emacs'.
Absolutely. I'm an nedit user, although I sometimes use vi for checkin comments because I'm too dumb to set CVS up to work with nedit by default.
Gerv
Ah, my bad. I have only done this on machines without NS4 installed. I guess it looks for genuine Netscape first, and then falls back to Mozilla, instead of doing the sane thing, which is installing itself into all plugin directories on your system. Or even better, displaying a list of installed browsers and asking which to install into.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
dude, don't give trolls the time of day. This one especially doesn't deserve it.
dude, don't give trolls the time of day. This one especially doesn't deserve it.
:-)
Everyone's worth the time of day.
Gerv
Making progress is a low priority. Who uses Netscape's webserver, anyway?
It's as simple as 'export EDITOR="(insert path to favorite editor here)"'
Absolutely. I'm an nedit [nedit.org] user...
Cool! My already high opinion of Gerv has increased significantly :-) Really, nedit is just so cool. I mostly use it to write VHDL code.
95% of the users don't know anything about software development and software quality and are stuck with Windows and even don't know that something else exists... Your argument is bad and you probably know it.
Duh, Spaceballs.
"When will then be now?"
"Soon!"
'nuff said. Show me the IE bug week.
Tarkwyn.
Thanks very much :-)
Gerv
When I first installed Mozilla I noticed that the Macromedia installer looks for Netscape.exe. It only does this after it has already installed the plugin itself, though. You can give the installer your Mozilla directory instead of Netscape, and the plug in will work fine. The installer might crash or ask for a reboot, but you can ingnore that once the NPSWF32.DLL file is in the Mozilla/Plugin directory.
It only needs to know where Netscape.exe is to launch a browser and send you to the Macromedia website for some promotional junk.
Once you've got a Mozilla installation working with Flash, just copy the plug-in directory to any future Mozilla installations. I haven't had to install any plugins since 0.8.3 or something.
Mozilla
"The customer is always right" means "the customer is *always* right" because the customer is telling you what they think of the good or service.
Are you saying that if the customer thinks "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report, then "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report?
provide a really simple one-field form, submit, and then say "thanks" and ask more questions.
But if you already know exactly what questions you're going to ask, why not just ask them on the Bugzilla Helper?
problem: "it blue screens" and what should it have done? "it should not blue screen"
If Bugzilla Helper b*tches about empty fields, would you mind filling in "Steps to Reproduce" telling exactly how to make Mozilla bluescreen?
Implement them myself? perhaps, but I'm a smart guy and if other people don't see the wisdom of my suggestions then there's a too strong a likelihood that my changes would make it in anyway, so I don't want to waste my time.
Just make a chrome that has such a checkbox linked to a JS pref, and make a new bug with your diffs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
File Edit View Bookmarks Help | http://slashdot.org All on one line.
Then write such a theme.
And please scrap the crap with the honking big "M" icon so the bar doesn't have to be so thick.
There already are several themes like this. Including them in the default install would make the download size too big for those who do not have the resources to move their families to areas that offer high-speed Internet access.
Will I retire or break 10K?
irc://irc.mozilla.org:6667/#bugweek
"Alert!: Unsupported URL scheme!"
Why should we surprised to see a non-standard url in a story about Mozilla?
Every week should be bug week, and not just for Mozilla. The fact is that if we want software to perform up to our expectations, we need to fix it, or at least explain our gripes to someone with the proper skills. Bugzilla is one such mechanism, but in a sense, every project on Sourceforge would greatly benefit from this kind of support.
Sometimes just showing interest is enough to motivate a developer to pursue his efforts; just think about it: why spend all your time working on something that no one else will see ? Many open-source projects fall victim to underappreciation, and are quickly abandoned. They don't ask for money, so at least give them a few minutes of your time. It's really all it takes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Are you saying that if the customer thinks "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report, then "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report?
yes, if some of your legitimate potential customers think that is a good bug report, you will lose them as customers if you do not accomodate them. Listening to them is the only way to figure out what they see in/expect from your product. Information from customers is actually very hard to come by and it should never be ignored.
Of course, you need to balance the value of their business against the cost of accomodating them. So far mozilla has failed with me. I think I would otherwise be a "good customer" and I think my perceptions match those of other potential customers, though I'm more analytical about it an more willing to take the time to post comments. If I don't represent a significant body of opinion, cool, I won't be customer and nobody needs to care.
And this matters... because... why? Honest question: how exactly do someone's religious beliefs affect in the least their ability to code?
I didn't say it failed, i said it was an embarrasment.
And your evidence and exact arguments for this statement are..?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.