Slashdot Mirror
Moving towards Mozilla 1.0
fluedke writes "The latest Mozilla CVS identifies itself as "Mozilla 1.0". It looks like this source will become the official 1.0 within the next days. Read the news posting here." And if you're one of the missing hackers, speak up.
If you feel a sudden urge to help now that the project is entering it's final stages, checkout bugzilla.mozilla.org. You can help troubleshoot other bugs by trying to replicate, and figure out if there are browser problems, or webpage problems. You have to be a member, but the form is short.
Check out http://bugzilla.mozilla.org
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I'm really looking forward to seeing Mozilla becoming a major competitor for IE. I'm actually very surprised that MS doesn't put effort into developing IE for Linux. I'm sure the thought crosses their minds though, probably just afraid that they'd be forced to open source it (and we all know how evil open source is). Go Mozilla.
My other sig is an import.
that these missing mozilla hackers are, as we speak, being ruthlessly questioned under a single, dangling lightbulb ... probably in the dark basement of some government facility by various operatives from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, held under the pretense that they have somehow violated the dmca...
just a hunch.
Finally, years after promising it, the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late? How can Mozilla & Netscape (not to mention Opera & others) make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world? I think it is too late, but maybe with the 700 pound gorilla of AOL Time Warner behind it, they can fight the 800 pound gorilla of Microsoft. Maybe the new XP service pack will convince some OEMs (that want to cozy up to AOL) to include Netscape.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
What excites me is to see another open-source project that potentially can become a best-of-breed app, like Emacs or Apache. We're getting closer and closer to the day when nobody can object to open source because they need application X, and the open-source alternative isn't as good.
Find free books.
Well, with 1.0 we will finally have a feature set that is standardized. Right now it is kind of hard to develop browser skins, XUL apps, and even web content for a browser that has major changes every week. Now we can finally develop content that can last on this browser.
Moreover, 1.0 will also give way to adoption by 3rd parties and OS vendors. You'll start to see browsers based off of Mozilla 1.0 (ie Netscape 7), and you'll start to see OS vendors such as RedHat switch to Mozilla as the default system browser.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
well the ability to turn off javascript popup windows and such (stuff you will never see IE or Netscape do)....is a big enough reason for some of the IE diehards I work around....And I have yet to see tabbed browsing on IE. Face it -- there are some "killer" features that will send the cocky IE packing...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
So, how many people are showing up to the release party? I'm in San Jose, so I'll be going to JWZ's lounge - what about the rest of you guys?
Jamie Z is throwing a Moz release party? Are you sure? Does that mean he's sorry about quitting the project and dissing it, just when it was starting to move?
I love it, if it's true.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The main change is that many APIs (Application Programming Interface) have been frozen, which means that you can now create skins, plugins, add-ons, XUL applications, applications which embed Mozilla's layout engine Gecko, etc., which will work with all future Mozilla 1.x releases. In the past, it wasn't unusual for, say, skins developed for Mozilla 0.x to break as soon as Mozilla 0.y was released.
Of course 1.0 is also more stable and polished than 0.9.9, just like 0.9.9 was more polished and stable than 0.9.8 and so forth, but the main thing is the API freeze.
See also the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
One of the problems that *I* have with Mozilla is the way they handle bugs. I used to submit a lot of bugs to BugZilla, participate in testing, etc. I can no longer be arsed to. I know it's "their program to develop", but it's very depressing when you find a bug that you find serious and notice it getting pushed from M18 to 0.9.1 to 0.9.5 to 1.0 to post 1.1...
After similar things happened to about 20 of my bugs reports I just thought I had enough of it. I still submit bugs from time to time, but I am not that interested anymore. I would rather spend my time developing and testing ebuilds for the Gentoo Linux portage system.
Oh yes, jwz is throwing a Mozilla 1.0 release party at DNA Lounge. I wouldn't call it "being sorry about quitting the project and dissing it", though... As I understand it, he never said that he didn't want Mozilla to succeed; all he said was that it was moving to slowly for him and he wanted to spend his time on something else. In fact, he would like to use it at his terminals at DNA Lounge, but can't do so yet because there is no way to rebind the mouse buttons. (I'm not posting the bug number here since I don't want Bugzilla to be slashdotted once again.)
Also check out his backstage log entry about this party; interesting stuff.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
" Open source : fix it yourself and submit a patch."
Mozilla.org also has a long standing problem of ignoring patches from outside developers too.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I'm using os x, and those windows-esque controls look like ass.
What's anybody supposed to do about it? Mozilla developers can't use native widgets because the Aqua widgets do not support the rendering options required by CSS, and Mozilla developers can't use look-alike widgets because of Apple's hard-ass policy against Aqua look-alikes.
Don't like it? Make a skin that looks like KDE Liquid and submit a patch.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Personally I've been led to wonder about Moz's bug-fixing myself. Frex, I can't be the only person to notice the horrendous resource leak it causes on Win9*, just from viewing a large local directory tree. Sometimes up to 75% of resources in a few seconds flat. Or that it crashes 100% of the time when exposed to certain commonly-accessed pages. (Both are consistent and reproducible.)
:(
Gave up on the idea of submitting bugs after being flamed on (and then apparently banned from) the NNTP server just for arguing (as civilly as this post) that removing certain features was highly undesirable from a user's POV.
A shame since I would really love to be able to embrace and endorse Mozilla with no reservations.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You shouldn't develop web content for Mozilla any more than you should develop web content for Internet Explorer. You should be writing to the established standards. I'm a fairly recent convert to Mozilla (started with 1.0RC1) and have seen too many pages that don't render properly because they were written to deal with IE's idiosyncracies. A web full of pages that do the same with Mozilla would be no better.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
So what happens if the hacker dies in between?
In that case, tough beans.
United States copyright law, 17 USC 302, provides for a perpetual copyright on all works created on or after January 1, 1978. Currently, it's 150 years (life plus 70), but Congress reserves the right to pass a 20 year copyright term extension every 20 years, and if Eldred loses the Supreme Court case this fall, count on an immediate 1,000 year extension act.
And don't count on being able to talk the heirs into re-licensing the software. In general, heirs tend to be greedier about copyrights than the author was.
Will I retire or break 10K?
---"Hi guys. I have sleeping, Rip Van Winkle-ike, and have recently awoken from my slumbers."---
:-)
:-( "---
Umm... good morning
---"Truth to tell I last used Netscape 3 or was it 4. Then I turned to the evil empire and used MS IE. Recently I decided to go back and see what Netscape had been up to. Of course since then Netscape got taken over and Mozilla got to be separate from Netscape and all that stuff which we know."---
Netscape 3 was great. I ended up hacking all the nasty code outta of it and making my own modules using resource hackers and assembler. 4 was starting to be big browersaurii.
---"I ran Netscape 6.2 and also Mozilla. Boy oh boy. They are bloated and slow. Now how did a group of really very clever people come up with this? Four men and a dog (woof! - well ok, a lot more than four but you get my gist) in Norway have come up with a browser in Opera than beats the daylights out of Mozilla and/or Netscape."---
Opera's fast, Ill give you that. But it messes up on some standard webpages. It just either crashes or mis-renders. NutScrape 5 or 6 whatever just plain sucks. Bloat for nothing. Mozilla isn't as bad, but it chews up CPU like candy.I have a 333 p2. When I load up Moz, it takes minutes to load up. That aint right.
---"So how is it that all these clever people with brains the size of a minor planet screw up?"---
If you want to screw up something, put it in committee.
---"I recall the leaked MS documents. ISTR they were called the October papers or something like that where Bill gates and his cohorts saw the open source communal development projects as a serious threat. Sleep well Bill. You have no need to worry. And yet this saddens me so. I am no definitely apologist for Bill Gates and I would love MS to have a bit of serious competition but Netscape/Mozilla isn't going to worry them much."---
True, IE seems faster and Moz slower, but dont forget that IE is your desktop in Windows. In the newer NT os'es, they seperated memory so that an IE crash doesnt take down your desktop. Add that consideration to that Mozilla will be able to run on nearly every playform. MS has put IE to HP(s)UX and Solaris, but wont with Linux (duh!).
---"Like my subject says, this is not a troll but I would like to try and understand why things turned out as they did. There has got to be an explanation. Back in 1994 or thereabouts I was so pleased with Netscape 0.98 and Mosaic but it all seems to have turned sour since then.
It doesnt seem like a troll, just thought out complaints with Moz. There's a simple explanation: Look at US lawsuit against MS. It's based on that when MS gave away Netscape, the destroyed the company (no more development)
4) Use separate Moz profiles.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Understand that mozilla is a browser project second, and a platform first. To develop software based off of mozilla and toys for the mozilla browser we need a finalized API set. Check out mozdev.org to see some of the amazing stuff that is being built right now. Indi office suites, spell checkers, alternative UIs, calculators, etc. It's really hard to develop software such as this when mozilla changes every week.
As for web content. Yes standards are nice, but all browsers have bugs. I'm personally aware of quite a few bugs with mozilla's JS implementation, regardless of the fact that it is awesome. It will be nice to have mozilla at a standard milestone where web developers can put faith into known strengths and weaknesses. Most web developers develop browser specific scripts and work-arounds all the time.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Set them up with the MSIE skin for Mozilla. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Obviously, everybody saying "yaay for Netscape" isn't a real web developer. Netscape went out of their way to *not* include any kind of backwards compatibility for any DHTML. 90% of all DHTML written in the past 3 years or so simply doesn't work in NS 6+ because although NS conforms to the W3C specs (as does IE), unlike IE, there's no support for older scripting. I've tested lots of various DHTML, and virtually none of it works with NS. Sure, it'd be nice to see a new browser, but the developers' incredible idealism (the W3C "standards" and none others, whatsoever) is gonna prevent NS from going mainstream.
The one where upgrading from Netscape to Mozilla silently corrupts your preferences?
"i never could figure out why the mozilla browser keeps switching from instant skin changing to skin changing upon reboot:
Because Parts of the old skin keep showing up in the new skin. This mainly happens when the old skin has a css rule that the new skin lacks. going to reboot flushes the old skin out of memory. They drop it to cut down on the number of bugs in an impending milestone release, then pick it up again later only to drop it again for another release.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
It's too late to affect de-facto standards
That's funny.. Mozilla isn't trying to change the standards [w3.org]. Get this... it's actually FOLLOWING THEM!
You obviously don't understand what "de-facto standards" mean. That means that the standards came about by sheer use and popularity. The W3C "standards" are arbitrary standards... a third party that has no control whatsoever over web site creation (other than their own) or browser development. The W3C hasn't been truly influential for a long time. Just because somebody writes something and calls it a "standard" doesn't make it so.
Such as: Bug 82534 - Cannot type in URL/address/loaction bar or text boxes - no caret/cursor. (Keyboard locks/freezes up / no input)
3 4
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825
^_^
There's a newgroup for user discussion and questions. You can get support there, please don't use the developer forums. This the users' group:
. user.general
snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla
It destroyed the url, just copy and paste it :).
Congrats on the upcoming 1.0. I've been with you guys since 0.93 or so. Am also using Netscape 7PR1 (as my default on OS X, in fact). These are great browsers, full-featured and stable. No need to use IE anymore, and I enjoy using the same browser across all my platforms. Thanks for all the long nights and great code.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
hmm... I just read all the +1 and higher responses and no one has mentioned the thing I personally think is the best thing of all about Moz going 1.0 -- It means they finally freeze the API's.
I don't know how many of you have checked out XUL and the Moz extension API's, but with them you have the ability to write literally any kind of application with an Open Source, Cross Platform, UI built using Moz via XML, HTML and a little javascript. This, I believe, is the most revolutionary thing about Moz! Using it for a UI surface, I can encapsulate routines that require speed in a C or C++ module (or even Python, Java and some other languages) and do the rest in not too much a different way than creating a DHTML web page. And the resulting UI code is portable...
And the end result is fairly fast as well. All of the browser itself, all of the built-tools like the mail manager, the calendar, the IRC chat and so on are implemented this way. The potential of Moz as a UI development API is huge, assuming anyone creates a decent IDE for it. Nonetheless you can do things right now without an IDE, and (because the API's are frozen) you can be confident it will work with bug fix releases until they do a major update.
During development many projects demonstrating these capabilities were obsoleted when the API's changed out from under them, causing the developers to stop work until the API froze. With this at an end I fully expect to see some really cool stuff fairly soon. Check http://www.mozdev.org for some example projects (most of which probably won't go anywhere soon, but some of which are the kinds of thing I am talking about).
Jack William Bell
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
As someone who has banned people from the software devlopment list from my own open-source project, I think it may help you to understand why open-source developers sometimes do this.
People often times fail to understand that an open source project is different from a commercial project. In any releation where one person is paying another person, there is an implied releationship where the person paying the money does not have to respect the person whom they are paying. The person with the money can be pretty irrespectable and still act in a socially acceptable manner. The recipient, after all, is getting paid.
People who are used to using commercial software approach open source software in the same manner. They join a NNTP server or a mailing list for the project in question. They start ordering around the open source software devlopers, tell them what features the program must have. They don't say "please"; they certaintly don't give the open source devloper an ounce of respect. They act as if they were paying the free software developer. But they aren't.
This kind of person gets rather flustered when they realize that the releationship between an open source devloper and a user is different than the one between a customer and a company. The open source developer is, in the hierarchy of computer geeks, higher up on the ladder than an end user who can't code is. The sooner the end user understands this, the sooner they can treat the developer in a way which will not result in them getting flamed and banned.
People write software and give it away for a number of reasons, of course; but one main motivation is to obtain respect. The more open source projects one has worked on and finished, the higher the person is in the strange pecking order of the world of free software. Make enough code, and you too can be a demigod like Larry Wall, RMS, Linus Torvalds, or Dan Bernstein. Even if you are not a demigod, saying "I am a developer for this project" where the project is well known will cause you to commanded more respect.
It's simple. Respect the developer, and they will respect you. Don't respect them, and they will not respect you. Once you understand this, you are on your way to having your bug reports being acted on. Pretty soon, you will be patching; if the patch is good, you will gain more respect from the developers. Eventually, an open-source project will call you and you will respond to the call.
Good luck in your journey.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Trying looking beyond simple web browsing. If MS controls the means of accessing the Internet that 99% of users use, then they control the Internet. Repeat after me, then they control the Internet. Now, let's look at how:
1) Any future technological advancements (or 3rd party plugins) for the web are subject to Microsoft's approval. If it's not in their financial interest, it doesn't get included in the browser.
2) msn.com is the default page for IE. Most users don't change their default page. Microsoft can then charge lots of money for people to place their ads on msn.com. Secondly, Microsoft can use msn.com to promote their own products by either placing ads for them, writing "news articles" that promote them, or simply because they control the search engine results.
3) Microsoft's Media Player could be integrated into the browser and IE could more simply and easily play WMA files. If most people use WMA to encode their media files and it becomes the "standard", Microsoft can charge money for encoding music in that format.
4) Microsoft can gradually change HTML (or add a completely new proprietary web format) in their favor so that other browsers (and other operating systems) don't work properly.
And on and on and on...
Why do you think Microsoft wanted to "choke off Netscape's air supply"? Controlling the way people access the Internet gives them almost complete control of the Internet and allows them to further stifle competition as well as become very wealthy.
Well, apparently you do.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
In the words of many anxious web surfers... also repeated often by kids...
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
depressing when you find a bug that you find serious and notice it getting pushed from M18 to 0.9.1 to 0.9.5 to 1.0 to post 1.1
dnaumov, please post some Bugzilla numbers so we can see what you're talking about. I've submitted lots of bugs, and 90% of them have been resolved acceptably, even if it wasn't the answer I wanted.
For all we know, you could be asking for stuff like "I want to be able to dragdrop a picture of my face onto the toolbar and use it as the throbber".
I'm just glad I don't work with people as unprofessional as you...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
You need to install it in a new directory each time. Upgrading currently isn't guarantees to work, AFAIK.
Since the 1.0 RC's memory consumption seems to be much more realistic - no more leaks. Its getting very nice.
ostiguy
I'm not a coder, but I'm an *experienced* beta tester and I've worked on longterm volunteer projects that involved a pack of professional programmers with a dedicated testing team. IOW I'm not a beginner at this. I *do* know how to recognise and document bugs (in tedious detail :) Frex, on one project, 75% of bugs and performance issues listed in the changelog were those I'd found (and there were 8 core testers in that group).
But turn it around -- the problem I see, with Mozilla and too often elsewhere, is that testers get no respect, no matter how good they are at that job (IMO, itself as necessary as coding! What use is beautiful code that doesn't work right?) Coders too often consider testers a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst ("how dare those scum break my perfect code!")
Coders need to respect testers' work as well, but all too often the tester is treated as a second-class worker who has no right to a viewpoint on how the program should behave, at least if the coder doesn't feel like fixing the issue at hand. How does a coder expect to get and keep respect from testers if they don't feel they need to respect their testers in return? I realise bugs need to be prioritized and all that, but there's a difference between marking one "low priority" and entirely blowing it off as being too much of a PITA, or "not what *I* want" even when users are clamouring for it. (Ooops, I forgot, Mozilla is for *developers*, not for lowly users!)
And *that* is the problem I've observed with Mozilla. There are open issues that have hundreds of "votes" to fix, which remain unfixed because the coder doesn't LIKE that feature. (Check out some of the context-menu issues for examples.) Not part of the coding group? Then your opinions, and your bug reports, don't count.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It was very ironic to go over some old slashdot stories about mozilla and see how the project was indeed considered "a failure" as opposed to how it's praised today.
Or as michael, the poster of this particular story, have said before:
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Ahem.
Bill Gates Has No Penis.
Yes they could make these changes. Will they - no. Reason -- They do not want to piss off the commercial interests that rely on pop-up ads to make money. Same reason netscape will never do it. This is why Mozilla will become the standard for people who want a better browsong experience.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Ah, I see it now... Open Source developers continue to demand "respect", and continue to isolate them from actual users. Eventually, Open Source developers will develop only to please themselves. At this point, their products become useless. No. If they want to develop Open Source, then by the very definition of what they do, if they want their product to succeed, then they need to listen to the users. Elitist developers, no matter how good they may be, will never be able to develop a truly useful product.
Look at Netscape. They decided to ignore the users clamoring for backwards compatibility because they are purists. Watch it bite them in the ass when web developers turn their back on Netscape, which requires that all DHTML written in the past 4 years or so be re-written.
The apparent hypocrisy of slashdot astounds me. TV is bad, reading is good, but 9 posters out of ten point out that it was a Cardassian and don't even recognize the reference to 1984.
I mean c'mon, even I have read 1984, and I fully admit that I watch TV a hell of a lot more than I read.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I really like a lot of Mozilla browser features, like the "Block Images from this site" option which is a great banner killer. You can also disable JavaScript new window open calls with one click, this means no more popups. The Form Manager stores all your personal information and lets you fill out any pesky download or purchase forms on a web site with one click. The Password Manager is great as well, storing all your web site passwords and locking them with a single key. You can then go in and easily manage which sites you want to remember. Mozilla also has a full featured download manager, like Internet Explorer on MacOS which makes it convenient to track all your downloads. You can also pause your downloads to reserve some bandwidth if necessary. Good stuff.
Mozilla Mail also handles IMAP much better then Outlook. It handles message deletion more elegantly, and will store a copy of your Sent Mail and Drafts on your IMAP store. It also correctly caches your IMAP mailbox indexes and messages for fast access. Outlook has long delays when accessing even cached mails. What's up with that?
So that's my two cents - when you download Mozilla, immediately go into View->Theme->Get new Themes and download the Pinball theme. It is a brushed bevelled white theme that is great on the eyes and highly usable. It should be part of the Mozilla default themes. Let me know if this post influences you to download Mozilla and tell me what your thoughts are. Was I right?
-Pat
Yet it appears on the following systems:
Linux with KDE, Linux with GNOME, Windows 98/XP and MacOS..
^_^
. Eventually, Open Source developers will develop only to please themselves. At this point, their products become useless.
Oh, come on... this has always been the case, and I'd argue that it has worked pretty well so far.
Developers scratch their own itch, or just want to show off how good they are.
It's not like you are paying them to code, they do it in their time, for their own reasons, and you are in no position to demand anything. If you want something changed, and they don't feel like helping you, you'll have to help yourself.
Not a perfect system, but so far a pretty sucessfull one.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
That's the beuty of open source, if the official development team don't want a bar of you, you can say 'fuck you' & fork their app.
Then, the average web developer is a moron.
The "standards" were so fucked up after the browser war that something had to be done.
I know, I've built webapps for a living for years and ECMAscript (JavaScript) is one of the languages I use daily.
I know it sucks right now, and a lot of work has to be redone. But better now then later! It has to be done, because the rewards are huge! Client side programming for the web will only get better from now on, we're almost through to the other side.
It's a pain in the ass to rewrite all that code. All the more so since many web programmers (IMHO) are'nt very experienced as coders. (Look at the source of random pages on the net. How often do you see good OO or error handling?)
Seems I strayed a bit into web designer bashing here, but my point is, it's really too late to complain.
The changes has been made to help web developers, it took time and pain, but from now on, it's downhill...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Because it's a published standard that anybody can implement in a browser. In addition to IE and Mozilla, a properly-written page should render in any browser to the best of that browser's capabilities. Anything less is a sign of laziness on the part of the page designer.
It's bad enough that a large chunk of the web is IE-only. Do you really want to create a large chunk that's Mozilla-only? What good would that do?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
oh for gods sake
.....
try having actually compiled on OS X and looked in the Makefile
you find all kind of wonders
oh and anyone who was anyone was running Chimera at apple WWDC
(the real guys where actually committing code steve was just using it.... lamer)
regards
john 'MIPS16' jones
There is a certain responsibly that the open source devloper has to listen to bug reports and comment on them in some way. My experience with posting bug reports for Mozilla is that they are very professional and responsive. I said "opening this page crashes Mozilla", and very quickly got alot of "works for me" replies from the developers. I was using the last M## snapshot and they made it clear that the snapshot was out of date and that a lot of work had since been done correcting those kinds of bugs. Yes, they were a bit short with me when they explained that I need to use a CVS snapshot if I am going to report bugs, but they exaplined to me what I was doing wrong.
As for features not being implemented, there are a lot of factors at play here. One is that any open source project does not have enough developers to implement all of the features the users want. Another is that implementing too many features without having a strong foundation to build the features on can cause the code to quickly become unmaintainable. Another is that, form the OSS coders point of view, it looks like people saying "We want lots of shiny toys" where the people asking for the shiny toys don't understand what it takes to make the shiny toys a reality. Getting a 1.0 release out which is stable is far more important right now; the general consensus at this point is that Mozilla was over-ambitious and took far too long to finally reach 1.0.
OSS development just does not work under the rules of a consumerist culture. It's not about shiny toys. It's about learning to become very, very good at something and sharing that skill with the world.
In the consumerist point of view, going to a foreign country consists of reading a tourbook and going to all of the well-trodden "tourist attractions" and bragging to ones friends that one saw the Eiffel tower. Learning a foreign language is strictly optional. They only people this tourist sees, in general, are the overtly pushy salesmen trying to sell them useless trinkets.
Compare that to a more "hacker" (I mean hacker in the positive meaning, not the consumer-driven 'they are trying to break in to a computer' meaning) way of travelling to a foreign country. First, the hacker goes to a lot of effort to learn the foreign language for the country in question before entering the country. One, perhaps two years, of schooling in the language. Next, the hacker goes to some effort to talk to the people in the country in question in their language. Since the hacker has gone to a lot greater effort to learn things and apply their knowledge, their experience in the country is far more rewarding, allowing them to make many more friends and see many more things than the consumerist too lazy to learn the foreign language.
This isn't a hypothetical analogy. When I was in México, I noticed that the people who knew English and were trying to get me to buy things were downright offended when I spoke to them in Spanish. They knew that my Spanish was good enough that I could experience México without needing to buy their wares. I was able to get high-quality hotel rooms at a fraction of a cost of the hotel rooms english-language tour guide books hawk. I made a lot of friends who I still email in Spanish with to this day.
Just as the English-speaking vendors are offended by the hacker that can actually (somewhat) speak the local language, Bill Gates does not like a world where computer users are empowered because they have gone to some effort to learn how things actually work, allowing them to use solutions which are not controlled by him.
I hope I am not coming off as elitist here. What I am saying is "If you want something meaningful, you will have to work hard to get it". Something sometimes forgotten in today's consumerist world.
I had no idea just how hard it would be to write even a small open-source program until I started actually doing. I very quickly developed an incredible respect for what people like Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Alan Cox do. Once you understand this, I hope you can see why we sometimes act "elitist" from a consumerist point of view.
Man, that rant was far too long.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Nice bit of flamebait there. When I see something like this, the first thing I do is try to find out who is posting this kind of thing; there is certaintly something going on here which is causing you get get your panties bunched up. Don't feel bad about it; I posted the same kind of junk when I was new to the world of open source. We do things different here than what you may be used to. This may be a rude awakening; it certaintly was for me nine years ago.
OK, I went to your web site. I see you run a commercial porn site; the fact that you don't use your real name earns no respect from me, but I understand why you may wish to stay anonymous. Keep in mind that OSS people generally do not respect people who use anonymous identities unless they have good reason to do so. I am Sam Trenholme, for what it is worth, and you can find out a lot about me with a simple Google search.
I am sure that you are probably used to having the right to yell and being very discourteous when, say, your web site goes down. As well as you should have. However, acting like that with OSS developers can very quickly result in a flame war. It probably won't give you want you want; people will eventually killfile or ban you if you continue to behave like that.
Let me make one thing clear: No one is asking you to make your website compatible with Mozilla, per se. One thing that is very important in OSS is that standards are supported. OSS people who write code which does not respect the standards are put to task for their decisions. It's not like the bad proprietary world of software where IE (and Netscape, before) deliberately breaks the standards and all of the webmasters march to that drum.
What we believe in is having how, say, a web broweser renders web pages, be well documented, and that good programs follow those documents. For example, the AWK programming language has a POSIX standard which describes how an AWK interpreter should behave. When GAWK added some features which were not part of the standard, they got some heat for this. While the consensus was that the GAWK developers have a right to add features like there, there was some concern that this was a non-standard addition.
Likewise, we feel that it is important that there should be standards which web browsers follow which allow webmasters to write a single page which will render correctly on all standards-complient web browsers. We're not asking you to kiss our posteriors; we are just asking that you understand how we work and think, and how much effort it is to do what we do, effort we generally do not get paid for.
if they want their product to succeed, then they need to listen to the users.
Open source is in a very difficult transition right now; we are finally getting to the point where 1.0 versions of applications for "end users" are coming out. Open source has a very long history of writing applications for computer experts; the programs have been meeting the needs of those users very nicly for quite some time now. There is going to be a lot of tension in this transition to open source applications "for the rest of us"; it is just as much a shock to the values of veteran OSS devlopers as it is a shock for end users who are used to having someone to yell at when something goes wrong.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
AOL embeds a rendering engine in it's application. There are very few Mozilla usability issues in any embedded context since the majority of the UI is not Mozilla but rather the embedding application.
Right now AOL embeds a microsoft rendering engine in its AOL 7 client and a Mozilla rendering engine in its Compuserve cleint. Users shouldn't notice the difference between the microsoft and Mozilla rendering engines. Your usability arguement doesn't make a lot of sense in the embedded context (with the exception of web applications and other "in content" usability issues).
--Asa
This is an interesting point. W3C has recently been bending towards allowing proprietary stuff (programs, specifications, etc.) to be called "standards". This vastly decreases my willingness to assign any vast amount of trust to them.
OTOH, a dubious "Standards(tm) body" is certainly preferable to a monopoly. I might be reluctant to award something controlled by the W3C automatic approval without investigation (what are the limits and costs of *this* bastardization?), but I would never consider allowing a pseudo-standard controlled by a monopoly to be important to my purposes. I'd rather design from scratch, or do without. There's a word for people who rely on monopoly-based "standards": bankrupt.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think I may have seen one reply to a bug that I don't feel was handled politely. I'm not sure.
Mind you, I don't read any bugs that I haven't experienced. I'm not claiming that it only happened once. Merely that it is quite rare.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And FWIW, IMHO, web standards SHOULD be taken seriously, as having MS entirely control how people access the web just solidifies their monopoly in a whole new area, which is dangerous to the entire computing industry. Enough damage and stagnation in this industry has been done already.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
And damn, I sure know what you mean about banking websites...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden