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."

Comments

pre-emptive phoenix question

[weebler]

"But what's happened to Phoenix?" I hear you ask.
0.6 is meant to be released RSN, they're going to announce the new name shortly, in fact.

Just have some patience, and hopefully it'll be worth it!

Celebrate by converting people

[PovRayMan]

Lets see who have I converted...

My Dad. Hated popups. Instead of giving him a popup blocker for IE I just installed Mozilla for him and switched his Outlook to Mozilla Mail/News. It did a fine job of importing his contact list. He got nimda through an email which infected his machine when he was using Outlook, so I explained to him that with MozMail he'd be ok. After several months use he loves it. No more bad popups for him while browsing, and email has been just fine.

That's my only personal success story, maybe if I got out more often ;-). I did turn a few people online to Phoenix and Mozilla with some luck though. I guess it's easier to convert those you personally know... so go celebrate 5 years and convert some more people over!

Re:Celebrate by converting people

[ModsOnCrack]

I hereby eat my own words. Moz 1.3 does indeed have much of the responsiveness issue fixed - opening new tabs is no slower than opening subwindows in any other application. I think I will have to re-evaluate Mozilla for daily use.

Two Opera features I wish Moz had (if anyone can point out add-ons, I'd be thrilled):

Saving windows - if Opera crashes or is closed accidentally, it can save all the windows you had open and re-open them all. This is great when you have twenty windows open, and accidentally close the browser instead of a sub-window, or when your browser crashes due to memory leakage (happens to all browsers I've ever used)

Opening multiple bookmarks - If I have five news sites I visit listed in their own bookmark folder in Opera, I can select "Open all folder items", and it opens each bookmark in a new tab. Great for online comics, checking in on message board threads, news sites, etc etc.

I'm not wholly converted yet, but I'm certainly impressed enough to give it another go.

Mozilla is a development model failure

[DeadSea]

Mozilla is a great success, but it is also a great failure. When Netscape first open sourced Mozilla development they were disallusioned. They assumed that developers would flock to the open source development effort. Netscape was looking to win the browser war without spending any money. Not being able to compete against a free product, they were looking at ways to make their product free. It didn't work. Mozilla has only succeeded today becouse Netscape (now AOL) continues to pour money into the project. Most development on the browser is still done by paid employees.

Mozilla's successes have almost all been side effects. An open bug database is one of the most revolutionary development practices that I have ever seen. Because of Bugzilla, Mozilla has far more useful features than it otherwise would have. If users hadn't been able to get through to developers I doubt that Mozilla would have popup and image blocking.

Mozilla's release schedule with nightly builds has also been a huge sucess. Mozilla has more people testing very recent versions than any other peice of software I know. Mozilla is now the most stable browser I have ever used, and I don't doubt that the nightly builds (and some talented developers) are the reason.

Hopefully now that Mozilla is very popular it will attract enough outside developers so that Netscape's original dream of no cost development to win the browser war. There are still some hurdles for developers though. Mozilla is a complicated project with a significant learning curve. It relies on some specific technologies such as XUL and XCOM which don't yet have large numbers of developers.

Re:So, um, yeah

[Yosho]

http://www.apple.com/safari

Where's the non-Mac version?

Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom.

That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.

Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware.

The banner is only "huge" if you're running at 640x480... And it's not scumware, either; the browser reports no information about your computer to Opera. You can also customize what types of banners are shown; in fact, I have a friend who paid for Opera and actually keeps the banner on because he frequently sees banners for products he's interested in.

It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.

I can't say about Safari, since I can't use it, but Opera 7 is still the fastest browser I've used, and 6 is only marginally slower. "Capable" is a relative term, but I've yet to see another browser that has features such as integrated mouse gestures (gotta have a plugin for Mozilla), a quick-preference menu (pressing F12 brings up a list of the most handy preferences), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).

It also has better user-defined CSS support than other browsers I've seen. It even comes with a number of pre-defined CSS layouts that do interesting things such as emulate text-only browsers, outline structural elements on a page, remove tables, hide only non-linking images, and so forth. Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe one of the Mozilla offshoots can do this, but I haven't seen any other browser).

-1, Sig Reply

[pyrrho]

Computer Science is Applied Philosopy...

I couldn't agree more. As a software engineer with ~15 years experience... and a BA in Philosophy.

Indeed, I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.

(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.