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.

Comments

Mozilla as a primary browser

[Accipiter]

I switched to Linux as my primary OS a few months ago, and I haven't looked back. I find I don't miss Windows a bit, and I'm happy with my Slackware/AfterStep setup.

I use Mozilla as my primary browser (Nightly builds), and I find that it has gotten much better than it used to be. Bug reports hit Bugzilla, and are usually updated and/or assigned the same day. Their system is really great.

Sure, the browser has a few annoying things. Text boxes STILL don't behave properly, opening a new window in any shape or form (Ctrl+N, or a javascript function) takes *forever*, and other little things. Overall though, Mozilla is a pretty decent browser. Gecko is a great rendering engine, and tabbed browsing is just totally fucking fantastic.

Once the speed issues are addressed and the behaivior kinks are worked out, that's when 1.0 should hit.

Unfortunately, I find that I do miss the incredible speed of IE 5x. Say what you will about IE security, but it's still the best browser out there. Fortunately, I can happily make that trade-off as a Linux desktop user.

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[dangermouse]

Where did you get the idea that he's a "Free Software advocate"? Maybe he's just practical, and so finds that Slackware and Afterstep better meet his needs than Windows, but IE 5 better met his needs than Mozilla.

The automatic leap from the fact that someone uses free software to the idea that they hold some cherished belief in The Cause and spend their every waking moment promoting Free Software to others is a pretty big one to make.

You wouldn't call someone a hypocritical compact car advocate if they drove a Geo but said the Suburban has more head room, would you?

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[vipw]

you'd rather him be blinded by faith instead of being reasonable about which browser is best? Being so quick to label him a "Free Software advocate" just because he switched to primarily runs Linux is a large insult to anyone who has put time into making Linux a decent operating system. Some people think Linux is the best operating system even when they aren't blinded by rhetoric like you.

And IE is a good webbrowser; that is fairly clear. Some slashdot people like to use the best, instead of being coerced into this insanity that for some reason is expected of them

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[epukinsk]

opening a new window in any shape or form takes *forever*

I'm using Galeon (1.0.3) and it takes ~3.5 seconds from when I hit CTRL+N to when the new window is up and my home page is fully loaded.

It takes ~3.0 seconds to open a new tab. Galeon is great... the robustness of Gecko, with a nice lightweight, responsive front-end.

-Erik

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[zerocool^]

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

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[rgmoore]

If you like the way that Mozilla works but find that it's too slow, you might want to try one of the browsers that's based on the Gecko rendering engine but does away with the rest of Mozilla's overhead. I use Galeon as my primary browser (which is admittedly easier since I use GNOME as my desktop) and it is great. It pops up windows very quickly, for instance, and its tabbed browsing is actually more mature than Mozilla's. I find that it gives me the parts of Mozilla that I like the most without the weight slowing it down.

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[Kiwi]

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.

This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:

• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Konqueror
• SkipStone

Note that all of these, with the exception of Konqueror, use the same "Gecko" rendering engine.

There are also some proprietary browsers:

• Netscape. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
• Opera

This only lists the browsers which will give a reasonable browsing experience with the majority of web sites out there. There are some other open-source browsers, too, such as Amaya (still being updated, it may even be usable for normal web browsing), Grail, among others. And, of course, for the remote ssh or non-X connection, there is Lynx, W3M, and Links.

- Sam

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[jesser]

Alright, now how do you switch tabs using the keyboard?

Ctrl+pgup, Ctrl+pgdn.

I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...

Ctrl+tab has traditionally been used for "switch between frames and the url bar" by web browsers and "switch tabs" by tabbed dialogs. See bug 114974 and the linked bugs for some heated controversy on the subject of what Ctrl+tab should do in the tabbed browser.

I'm a member of the "that's what windows are for" camp. That is, I think the tabbed-browser feature is an unnecessary duplication of what window managers do, a waste of screen space, and a waste of keyboard shortcuts. Thus, I sided with keeping Ctrl+tab for switching frames. I could see a compromise in which Ctrl+tab does both, since then it would have its old behavior in the case where you only have one tab open.

What I don't want to see is for this to be turned into an argument for full keyboard configurability. I like being able to sit down at my friend's computer without having to worry about them having completely different keybindings than I do, and I don't want that to change.

Re:Mozilla vs Oprah

[Prowl]

The Oprah browser sucks. Montel and Rikki are far better, although Rikki has quite a large memory footprint...

Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares.....

[TRoLLaXeR]

Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.

Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.

Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.

But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.

Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.

They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.

So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.

Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD

Re:Mozilla vs Oprah

[gartogg]

IE may be a bit easier to run, but there is not this HUGE gap you posit. The real question for me (and, I hope, most /.ers) is whether convenience is what I care about. Is bloatware better than well written code? Do you care?

Are you willing to lend support to a system you know is currupt for the sake of a little convenience? In general I understand that the US population says yes, but to hear this sad opinion voiced here is nothing short of dissapointing.

When will people learn? doing nothing isn't just a tacit voice for the status quo, but an active opposition of change, and as Morpheus says in the matrix "many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares.....

[IpSo_]

I used to think that Mozilla was too slow and bloated. I still used it every day on my Linux box, but it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences.

However the speed issue was put on the back burner once I started using a small fraction of the features. Tabbed browsing, disabled onload popups, javascript console/debugger, etc, etc...

I still kept thinking, jeez, its just a browser people, it can't be _that_ hard to make something that renders HTML. However once I downloaded Komodo ( here )
and used it for a couple days, I saw the light. Mozilla isn't just a browser, its a platform. Komodo still suffers from Mozilla's slowness, but the amount of useful features included with it easily makes up for any speed issues. Mozilla will start to speed up once it matures more, so thats something I can wait patiently for.

Kudos to the Mozilla team, keep up the good work!

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[HanzoSan]

What are you talking about? Its already better than Netscape, Its also better than IE at loading pages, its more secure than IE, its more stable than IE, the only thing IE has left is the program loads faster and thats mainly due to it being tied into windows itself.

Mozilla in 4 years, has surpassed IE, a program which has been in development for 8 years.

Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares.....

[the Atomic Rabbit]

Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.

The core of UNIX is based on small reusable components, but I don't think that's generally true for the userland tools, anymore. Just look at Perl, Emacs (no jokes please :-), X, KDE and GNOME, and (of course) Mozilla.

Unix was originally implemented on machines with very little memory, so it made sense to obey the "Unix philosophy" strictly. Nowadays, there's room for a little more flexibility.

For example, I occasionally see posts on Slashdot from "Unix purists", complaining that the GNU tools are way too bloated compared to their Unix counterparts. I find this amusing. In my experience, fractional improvements in performance and memory use are far outweighed by having more useful features. Like any other philosophy, the Unix philosophy taken to the extreme is bad for one's health.

17 percent is not bad.

[HanzoSan]

Its in second place

Netscape is Mozilla. Mozilla is netscape.

Re:17 percent is not bad.

[macpeep]

Out of that 17%, about 90% is Netscape 4.x. Check the stats from any "neutral" site such as news sites or generic business sites for example. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have almost completely failed to gain market share back. If anything, they have LOST market share even after NS 6.x came out. And IE 6.x had a much higher market share than NS 6.x and Mozilla combined even before Windows XP came out and IE 6.x was still in beta!

Performance, stability, and correctness

[Animats]

Brendan Eich writes, in the Mozilla roadmap,

• 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.

Re:Performance, stability, and correctness

[NetJunkie]

Yeah, Microsoft did it. Or maybe without a clear direction or final decision makers a big project like this can't reach a goal. Th eone thing about commercial software is that at some point one person or group decides exactly which features will be in the next version and which ones won't. It looks like Mozilla got caught up in the "all features right now" problem and it has really shown. Don't try to be all things to all people, just make a good base browser and then build on it.

Re:Performance, stability, and correctness

[tweakt]

Dude, get a newer build. AFAIC, none of the problems you listed are issues anymore.

Minor Technicality

[CAIMLAS]

No... not slapped together. Carefully and fearfully glued together, balanced on a sharp precipice over a steep cliff, yes. :)

Re:Yes its fact

[crisco]

I ran IE 4 (the version that 'integrated' itself with the OS) on Windows 95 OSR2 without the Explorer enhancements and it ran just fine. IE 4 was a much better browser than IE 3, it wasn't the browser integration that made it so.

I think you're confusing the issues here, the browser integration stunt that MS pulled to try to avoid anti-trust legislation and the fact that they wrote a better browser with IE 4.

Moz mail

[InsaneCreator]

One thing i really hate about mozila mail on windows: not being able to choose more than one file for attachment at the same time. If you want to attach multiple files to an e-mail you have to click on "attach" for every one of them. And this was the same in Netscape 4.x

Re:Moz mail

[bunratty]

Here are the bug numbers:
Bug 43015 for attaching multiple files with the File dialog
Bug 69528 for attaching multiple files with drag-and-drop

Mozilla is great!

[Querty]

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.

Galeon?

[ainsoph]

Am I the only one who loves this browser?

I was a hardcore IE addict. Been using linux for years, but was so sucked into browsing with IE I was sickening myself. I attempted to use Mozilla over the span of the project and for sure it got better and better over time, but I do agree with folks who say: "why not just a browser?"

This is one of the strengths of IE if you ask me. IE is just a browser the other tools are moved into the mess, and IE (IMHO) has a feeling of transparancy in this way.

I never got that from Netscape, and Mozilla felt that was more and more, but it just has too many 'features' I can get elsewhere.

So anyway, I ended up getting really paranoid about IE and was searching. I realized that if I had complaints about moz then I should use it and use bugzilla. I was doing this under windows as well as linux. I found myself (like a junkie) slipping over to IE again and again.

But then I found Galeon, it has saved me from this terrible addiction. I have not missed IE in the least bit. In fact, I am completly in love with it as a browser. Mozilla is cool too, but Galeon is the one that people who complain that Mozilla should have just been a browser, galeon is this.

Galeon is what it is all about.

Re:Make IE-Compatible mode?

[jonabbey]

So that ALL of the parsing/paining logic (as well as javascript) would behave EXACTLY as IE

With what IE specification?

Mozilla is shooting for the W3C specs, which have the virtue that they do exist. Mozilla actually does have a 'broken HTML compatibility mode', which it will use if a given HTML page doesn't specify a modern HTML DTD.

Re:Make IE-Compatible mode?

[GigsVT]

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.

Re:Mozilla - how to win back Web Developers

[Fweeky]

> DIV's and SPAN's with CSS are more powerful than tables.

They're more correct than tables, and since HTML 4 Strict they've been the recommended way of laying stuff out, but it's still too hard to emulate simple table layouts in CSS, even without taking into account the worrying quantity of workarounds it's gathered in it's short life.

Still, it's worth going a good CSS layout if you can manage it:

http://glish.com/css/

http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_l es son/index.html

http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/default. as p

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[Querty]

It is faster, in the same way you get down faster if your parachute doesn't employ...

Getting better, but seriously...

[Kjella]

Mozilla *is* technically (I try to be objective here) still the third best webbrowser for Windows out there, after Opera and IE. Am I complaining over that? No. Why? Opera is ad-based, closed source. IE I don't even need to comment.

I'm sorry, but Mozilla just hasn't grown up, look at the latest milestone. Hit add bookmark and it won't give the current page as default values. That's so basic broken as can be.

Mozilla needs to work more on it's core features, way more. The latest flashy standard people use 5% of the time isn't that important if users grow tired of it doing what they do 95% of the time, and that's how it is now.

Best of luck,
Kjella

They're going to 1.0 with Java broken!

[DaveWood]

I'm a bit of an expert at this, and I've been trying a lot of pages. Mozilla fails to support all but the most trivial of Java applets. The exact pieces of the API which are broken is unclear. In my tests, 90% of a random sampling of applets wedge, if not themselves, the entire browser, on page load.

I've been watching this situation for some time, wondering if it would improve.

When the Mozilla people started talking about 1.0, I dug up the email of the Java integration maintainer. Not easy; the OJI page on Mozilla.org is incredibly stale (April 2001!):

http://www.mozilla.org/oji/

I sent him an "are you the guy?" email - he responded, "yes, that's me." Then I sent him an email asking if I could help with efforts to get Applet support up to spec by 1.0. He never wrote back.

As of now, Java is a massive hole in Mozilla. Going to any page with an applet shows the infamous Netscape puzzle piece; clicking on it starts a process to download and install a Java runtime (whether you have one installed or not) which is exceptionally crude even by Netscape standards. You get a popup window with HTML form buttons to select your JVM - one for each "supported" platform (how hard is it to detect OS?) and an extra big empty window with [object Object] popping up above it...

For some time, and continuing in 0.9.8, if you are brave enough to get that far, once you complete the install your browser will crash, and you will still have no Java support when you restart it. This is probably preferable to one previous failure mode, which was an instant application crash every time a page contained Java.

Laugh all you want about applets - this affects a lot of web pages.

If Mozilla for some assinine reason wants to kill Applet support, they need to at least cauterize the wound. As it is now, this is a huge problem that IMNSHO undermines any credibility their 1.0 designation might have.

Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken!

[pixelfreak]

Mozilla uses the Java Plug-in from Sun. This is an API that allows Mozilla to use the lastest version of Java with out having to wait for Netscape to provide support. Need to create an applet that uses Java 1.4 functionaly? Just install the lastest plugin, copy a few files from your JRE to mozilla's plugin directory and restart!

Currently Mozilla needs work in the area of finding the Java Plugin and setting up the connection between the two. Until then, copy the file 'NPOJI610.DLL' from your JRE's bin directory to the plugin folder for Mozilla and restart Mozilla.

This is documented in the relase notes

Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken!

[Chops]

For some time, and continuing in 0.9.8, if you are brave enough to get that far, once you complete the install your browser will crash, and you will still have no Java support when you restart it.

You have to enable Java support by dropping:

user_pref("plugin.do_JRE_Plugin_Scan", true);

into user.js in the appropriate directory (c:\windows\application data\mozilla\profiles\default\${something_stupid}\ ) on Win2k, ~/.mozilla/default/${something_stupid} on Linux. Why is this not the default? Beats me. This helps, too:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true)
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true)

... which disables popups.

Roaming user solution in sight.

[mattdm]

Ben Bucksch of Beonex fame has offered to work on the roaming profile support on a tips-for-code basis. See bug 17048 for the background, and bug 124026 for the funding issues.

Looks very promising -- if you want this feature, consider throwing in a few dollars. If this kind of development model turns out to work well, it could be a revolution for large Open Source / Free Software projects.

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[epsalon]

It's not that Mozilla's JS sucks, it's sites are using stupid browser detection mechanisms to distinguish between NS4 and M$IE, and Mozilla sometimes falls between the seats, and gets denied.

Whenever you find such a site, check bugzilla for it, and if it's not listed, report it for Tech Evangelsim.