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Mozilla Project Turns 5
GreyWolf3000 writes "As this notice in tinderbox shows, Mozilla turns five years old today. A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use. The trunk is feature frozen for the upcoming alpha release for 1.4. Can't wait to see what's in store next!" Read on for another odometer reading -- Mozilla's 200,000th bug report, perhaps just as auspicious a landmark.
zzxc writes "The 200,000th bug has been filed in Mozilla's bugzilla, MozillaZine reports. It was filed at 5:11pm EDT. (21:11GMT) The bug, which is already 'verified invalid,' is 'MailNews crashes after extremely long 'joke of the day' html spam mail.' This comes on the 5 year anniversery of the release of Netscape's source code, also reported by MozillaZine. Bug 100000 was opened on 9/16/01 after three years of development, while bug 200000 comes in less than 19 months from the previous milestone."
This project has proven several things about large scale open source projects:
- Open source doesnt necessarily mean "instant development". It took over a year before anything useful came of the project.
- Just because you release something as open source, doesnt mean that thousands will flock and provide free development. Though thousands did flock, as soon as they saw that the code wasnt nearly usable, they gave up immediately. But, now that there is a small core of developers working on it, it is a useful product.
- Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it. It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate... There is no company to go out of business to cause Mozilla to disappear.
"...debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use..."
Not wanting to rain on their parade, as I agree that Mozilla is a great project, but isn't the only reason they have succeeded building a "large scale project" because of the significant backing of one company (Netscape/AOL)? While the community certainly had a very significant contribution, I think we might be giving it a little more credit than it is due.
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The fact is, I needed a browser and email client that is *more* than spartan to replace what I was using, and for mail that was an OS/2 program. With all that Mozilla Mail has, the OS/2 program still has a feature or two I'd like to see added to Mozilla.
But the bigger thing is that for Microsoft to be displaced to any degree, the software that does it *has* to be blessed with good features. I has to be more than spartan. And like IE, which really isn't free, Mozilla not only gives the impression of free, but *is* free. And 'free' is also required for sucess.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
One thing I hate.. but I can't all it a bug is that when I open a link in a new window or tab and it fails to connect, the browser shows a stupid dialog box and the URL of that page is about:blank.
This way I can't refresh because I lost the URL.
Sometimes I open several tabs and I need to know which links correspond to the failed windows so that I can reopen.
I think IE tries to connect twice before failing.
Fear is the mind-killer.
I agree. Much better than having the difference between version 6 and version 7 being significantly less than the difference between version 4 and version 6.
Seriously, it's like a race to see who can have the highest version number sometimes. That doesn't impress me. This is almost as bad as the MHz myth. Internet Explorer is still at version 6, and people like it.
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" A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use."
It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.
Don't get me wrong, Mozilla's a wonderful tool for the interent. I'm glad to see IE getting a run for its money. I just don't feel that any myths were shattered here.
1.) It took aaaaaaaaages.
2.) For the most part, the hard work was done and the tough decisions were made. Mozilla wasn't exactly paving the way for the internet as we see it today.
3.) It was necessary. Linux needed a AAA browser. If a good browser for Linux wasn't in demand, how far would it have gone?
I guess what I'm saying is that it's a logical evolution, not necessarily a challenge for the community. Get the community to put together an ambitious game, then we'll shatter a few myths.
I think the fact that apple chose khtml over gecko speaks more to apples goals than it does the the comparitive quality of the two engines. Though I agree that mozilla's development focus should be more toward quality than 'quantity', I happily use mozilla, and it *works well* for me.
- Gef
That's exactly what's happened to Netscape servers (former "Fast Track", Later "iPlanet"). Their code is closed and their usages is limited by AOL and Sun. If Netscape would open the source code of servers as well, today it would be much broader used web-server platform with lots of money due to potential demand for support.
Those days Netscape web application server has been beating IIS and other, while Netscape Mail, Calendar and Directory (LDAP) servers have been beating MS Exchange of those days. Besides, they have been multi-platfom originally (I used them on Solaris). Being opensourced they would beat today WebSphere and many other today's behemoths.
Less is more !