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!

Failure?

[Musashi Miyamoto]

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.

Community or company?

[m00nun1t]

"...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.

Re:Wishing Mozilla well...

[sconest]

Most configurable ? Have you ever seen the about:config page in Mozilla ? ;)

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.

Reasons Why 200,000 Bug Reports != 200,000 Bugs

[kirun]

Somebody always steps up to be the point-missing point-misser, so for their information, some reasons bug 200,000 isn't as bad as it sounds:

• Bugzilla carries bugs on the whole mozilla project, including issues with the webtools, etc.
• Sites which don't work in moz are still tracked by Bugzilla if it's the site's fault.
• Common bugs gain a large number of duplicate reports
• A lot of bug reports are RFEs rather than problems
• Bug reports are also used as trackers for groups of bugs
• Most of these bugs are fixed or closed, so they don't reflect current Moz quality
• A large number of bugs are small problems / single platform / hard to reproduce and most users never hit them