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Mozilla Development Roadmap Updated
yota writes: "The guys at mozilla.org just published an updated development roadmap with some interesting thoughts about what will happen after Mozilla 1.0 will be released. Enjoy!" This is worth reading even if you skim toward the bottom and jump to the Intertwingle link. The Mozilla project isn't slapped together -- this kind of forethought and explanation is proof.
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In that update, I wrote "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness" and not any particular new feature. Just before 2001 began, I wrote that useful and relevant (defined by the community) extensions are always welcome, provided that they don't have a high opportunity cost in terms of contributors who otherwise could and would have helped hack on 1.0. But by the fall of 2001, as noted in the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto, the opportunity costs of features and extensions had grown to the point where such "non-1.0" work jeopardized a 1.0 milestone that fit into any achievable schedule.
That sounds about right. Feature creep has damaged the project.Simple text box editing doesn't work right. Window opening takes too long. Menu popup is slow, and sometimes even breaks. Wierd behavior appears after the browser has opened large numbers of windows. All this stuff is basic, yet it's been botched.
Sometimes I wonder if Mozilla has secretly been sabotaged by Microsoft. Maybe they're paying people to bloat the code, add unwanted features, and make Mozilla unstable. Or maybe there's a secret deal between AOL and Microsoft to make it suck. That's how it looks from the user side.
I think that one of the greatest features of Mozilla is that you can take the W3 CSS2 spec and use it pretty much as a manual.
I work at a web-design company, and the web-designers are starting to realise this. Mozilla is the ONLY browser that gets this close to standards compliance, IE6 is still al LONG way behind. NS 4.7 just plain sucks at modern HTML/CSS; Opera doesn't cut it either. Konqueror is pretty impressive, giving IE a run for it's money.
Couple that with the fact that Mozilla is cross-platform, can be embedded and is truly Open Source makes it a really great product.
That would just encorage "web developers" (I use the term very loosly) to only test their pages in IE. There are more than two browsers, you know. We don't need to give people the impression that it's "OK" to just spit something out of frontpage that isn't anywhere near valid HTML.
It's downright dangerous. I'll give an example. I took VB programming course in college (I was forced), and the professor posted the grades on the web. The grades were listed next to the last four digits of our student ID, at least in IE, mostly anonymous. Apparently though, he just did some sort of "embed database" command in Frontpage, because in Opera, I could see a major error. Everyone's home address, phone number, SSN, etc was included with thier grades! On the web!
Frontpage put the whole database into the web page, and because you could only see the field they actually wanted to show in IE, he went ahead and put it up! One quick glance at the HTML would have been enough for him to see the mistake.
So everyone always asks "What has MS ever done to you?" Well, I think I have a good story to tell them, and also a good reason people should not target browsers for "IE compatibility". We have standards for a reason, follow them.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I upgraded my dual P2-450 to dual P3-850 last week. That seems to have fixed the Mozzila performance problems I was having under Linux (mainly long delays rendering pages).
In my mind, this is the problem. I want to run linux on my shitty computers, not on my box of doom. In my world, a dual p3-850 is more power than I would know what to do with, although if i remember correctly, the 850 is 100 mhz bus speed, the 800 was either,833, and 866 were 133 speed - I have an 800/133. Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web. Some of the nightly build footprints on mandrake have been huge - to the tune of using 100 megs of memory, or something. That's just bad programming for an OS that many people see as being the os for "the other other computer".
Linux community: don't forget that many people looking to switch to linux will want to put it on their 400 mhz boxes that they have recently replaced with the P4-2.2 Ghz box. Don't write code for the latter, write it for the former.
~z
sig?