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Mozilla's Major New Roadmap
kerz writes "mozilla.org today released a new version of it's famed roadmap, this time with some pretty major changes. First and foremost, they plan on ditching the large Mozilla suite in favor of Phoenix and Minotaur. Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient. MozillaZine has the scoop..."
Nice to see a focus on keeping the engine and the codebase lean and mean. Good luck to em.
Good thing this was posted on April 2.
What's this 'Mozilla' everyone is talking about?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
1.Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the standalone Phoenix browser.
2.Develop further the standalone mail companion application to Phoenix already begun as Minotaur, but based on the new toolkit used by Phoenix (this variant has been codenamed Thunderbird).
3.Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.
4.Fix crucial Gecko layout architecture bugs, paving the way for a more maintainable, performant, and extensible future.
5.Continue the move away from an ownership model involving a large cloud of hackers with unlimited CVS access, to a model, more common in the open source world, of vigorously defended modules with strong leadership and clear delegation, a la NSPR, JavaScript, Gecko in recent major milestones, and Phoenix.
6. ???
7. Profit!
Ok, I admit to adding 6 and 7.
Trolling is a art,
Wonder if this will help mozilla's memory footprint? Even for people like me who like to have the mail and browser open at the same time (hopefully they won't each take up X-ram)
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
Interested in AI? MACR
It's good to hear they are redefining their goals here. I think the majority of people would rather have a more stable Phoenix like browser.
Switching to this model will mean Pheonix is directly competing with Camino on Mac OS X, how could they possibly beat a Mac OS X native attempt?
This is a Good Thing, IMHO, as Mozilla itself was getting fat and bloated. Of the Mozilla step-children I like Pheonix the best and I'm glad to see that the Mozilla team has the self-honesty to realize the better way to go and ditch major portions of their established work.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
They're finally going to support Phoenix on OSX!
This is a big win for the Mac community imho. Camino is great, but there are barely enough developers to cover the front end, the main body of the Mozilla project being behind a cross platform Phoenix project is a Good Thing?.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I love Mozilla - it's my primary browser, gotta love pop-up-blocking! What I wish they would focus more energy on though is the mail client. I primarily use Netscape Messenger (netscape 4.79) for mail, and I know a lot of other people that do as well. The reason I can't/won't use Mozilla for mail yet is bugs. Basic bugs too - things I reported over 2 years ago, and they still aren't fixed yet. What kind of bugs am I talking about? For example, when you switch between IMAP mail servers, netscape messenger used to remember the last selected message from one mailbox to the other. Mozilla has never done this, but I keep getting updates that this bug is being worked on, or passed on to the next person. The other major bug I notice is that when I type in nicknames in the To and CC fields - 50% of the time, they get translated into the right email addresses, but other times they don't. My other major gripe about mozilla mail is the lack of an option to send just plain old plain text messages again. I don't want the headers of replies and forwards being turned into little graphics. I don't want symbols like ;) being turned into little smiley faces. I want to type in courier just like I can in Pine, or netscape messenger. I think more options with mozilla mail would make a lot of people happy...
I find it facinating that it at least appears that Mozilla is leading Netscape rather than the other way around. But I am left wondering how this will fit in with Netscape's future strategy. Will they continue with tradition and continue to release an all in one Internet suite, or will they begin to follow Mozila's path?
-- Kircle
1. Smaller
2. Faster
3. Less bloated
Less is more, in many, many things. Including software.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
If you're referring to the
Either way it's not Mozilla's fault since it is as modular as the user or the install script tells it to be. If you choose to install everything including the kitchen sink you can hardly complain of bloat when you get what you asked for.
(Took me a minute to figure this out... Minotaur? Thunderbird? What?)
Or perhaps this is just a way of disposing of the outstanding Mozilla bugs that no one is willing to fix? Just start a new product instead?
sPh
it is about time they cut down the size of the package.
Some people like a big package.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I was wondering how they would justify taking 5 years before reaching 2.0. Now we know :)
Seriously though, good idea. I'd love to see the whole Mozilla project turned into a Gecko app and everything else be plugins! Now that'd be cool!
This is lame. I *LIKE* the existing XPFE browser / application suite.
Phoenix is nice, the new standalone mail/news client will probably be nice as well, but I see no good reason for them to drop the application suite.
All this talk about how Mozilla is too big, too bloated, has too many features, etc., is a load of shit, IMHO. Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine. And if anything, there are still plenty of features that *should* be put into Mozilla, that the Mozilla.org folks refuse to implement, despite how many votes the RFE has, or how many people want it.
I say they should just keep developing Mozilla as it is, keep improving it, keep adding features, and let the people who want to work on Minotaur, Phoenix, whatever, do so.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Is this an attempt to battle the smaller, faster KHTML engine that Apple picked? Sounds like the Mozilla gang is a more miffed than previously believed.
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
Mozilla originally took too much of its Netscape roots to heart. That is understandable, but its a very good thing that people were finally able to break from that past. Netscape Communicator was supposed to be all things.. Mozilla continued that track, but with a nicer rendering engine and snazzy features.
I don't personally I have a problem with the size of mozilla, but since I only use it for browsing, it will be really nice to get rid of the rest of this monolithic application.. but to have it available for when I want it.
The path it has set now reminds me of the KDE applications. The PIM/Mail suite has a great deal of functionality.. but you don't have to load it just to browse a web page. (Though many would argue that Konqueror also tries to be all things to all people..)
On Linux.. Mozilla and Phoenix are the way to go.. though on OS X, Safari is a really nice browser.
My experience of Opera's stability is quite the reverse, however. Moz hardly ever crashed. Opera crashes a couple of times a month. The difference is that when I have a load of tabs open in Moz and it crashes I then have to hunt for all the pages I was looking at. With Opera it lets me continue from exactly where I was pre-crash. I now tend to not bother with bookmarks, just open pages that are interesting in a new tab, move that tab to the left of my current active tab and leave it there. For sites like /. I tell it to refresh the page every 15 minutes, and I can see at a glance if there's any more news.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Mozilla team really need to break Mozilla up into smaller, more focused parts. That is one area I will give Microsoft credit for - they made IE and Outlook seperate programs.
The ideal for Mozilla would be (IMHO) a browser, a mail client, a download client, an IM client, and a composer. Each should be replacable - I should be able to tie the browser into whatever download agent I want, have whatever email client I want be pulled up when I click on a mailto: link, etc.
I'd even go so far as to have a caching program that the browser and downloader could talk to (to unify the disk cache system), but then I already run Squid on my systems.
Of course, all the Moz bits could and should access the same DLLs (.so's) to keep the disk and memory footprint down.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The RFEs you mention, will hopefully be things that are implementable as extensions to Phoenix - this will take some of the burden of feature enhancement requests off of the Mozilla.org folks and let others develop them independently.
That's not what it says. It does say one of its goals is :
Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.
Make risky changes to 1.5 and 1.6 Mozilla. That doesn't sound like ditching to me. The post and the Mozillazine blurb miss the jist of the document.
These are not buzzwords. 'Strawman' is a common name for a typical logical fallacy -- quite CS and unbuzzwordly for me. For a great explanation of the difference between buzzwords and terms which serve a purpose look at this list, from tunes.org:
These are not buzzwords. Now, for comparison, here's a bunch of buzzwords:
The filesystem is the package manager
I agree with you, but did you RTFA?
Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6.
(...)
the reasons for this new plan are:
1. Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism. (emphasis mine).
The idea is not to "drop" the suite, but to make it modular instead of hardwired.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Hm, I wonder to what extent this new roadmap is a reaction to Apple's decision to use khtml instead of mozilla as the basis for safari.
I know there has been a lot of kvetching on /. about the integration of the browser, mail, etc thinking it is "bloated" and "slow". As long as they communicate well (and I do mean well), I don't really care if they are developed in a more modular fashion. That is not bad and is potentially very good.
What I'm most concerned about in the roadmap is the seeming focus on just the browser and the mail app. (Yes I realize the purpose of mozilla.org is not strictly to produce those apps but realistically, those apps are the main reason anyone cares about Mozilla) I use those heavily and anything that improves them is just ducky as far as I'm concerned. But just as important, and much more ignored IMO, are the address book and calendar. These are applications that almost everyone uses in some form. Obviously people choose other options (Outlook, etc) frequently but that's in part because the ones built into Mozilla are fairly bad. I use them because they are the only transparently cross platform option which is important to me. I use them all and if they were better I think many others might too.
Anyway , I see the browser, mail, address book and calendar as the four major applications that most users really need. The Mozilla browser (and I include Phoenix and Camino here) is great and is arguably the best on the market. But the other three apps have largely been ignored for some time. They have a basic level of capability but haven't been refined significantly in some time. I still have trouble sharing information with co-workers on different systems. I still cannot easily share data with the PDA of my choice. Mozilla could really make a lot of this stuff really transparent for users. I'd love to be able to not worry about OS for these four apps. Mozilla is better than halfway there but I'm not quite sure what this change in direction means.
Phoenix is a fabulous browser component. I like Mozilla, but I think that this is just what they need. They can start by skimming off each peice and the users can integrate each part of the suite at their own discretion. Mail programs can be built off of Mozilla's XUL interface, as can chat programs, etc. It's ideal for UNIX machines where libraries are most often shared. Phoenix is fast and stable. It's the future of the Mozilla browser, and I'm glad that they've made this decision. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just improve it. Mozilla is getting to be pretty good on its own, but still isn't nearly as practical as it *could* potentially be. Phoenix takes Mozilla and really strips down the crud; It even implements cool, new features along the way.
... in the first place.
I know I'll loose points for this, but heck, even IE and OE/Outlook are seperate applications even though they mostly use the same core (MSHTML, Outlook uses the base OE libraries). Why can't Phoenix and Minotaur be like this? I love Phoenix. I use it almost exclusively at work, and pretty often at home. And, for the record, Mozilla is a dog on my home laptop, but Phoenix runs quite snappily. Modularity (more than just selecting components from the 'net install) is the way I think the Moz project should go, and I'm glad that they're heading down that path.
This is completely freaking me out.
I can only wonder at how a radical re-design this is going to turn out to be, from both a developer's and end-user's standpoint. The Mozilla project has, by all accounts, been an incredible success, and has been adopted by some major entities, eg. Sun, HP, IBM, Red Hat. By making this radical a change this soon after 1.0, do we risk alienating users and developers? I mean, now that people have gotten used to Mozilla, we turn around and dump something hugely different in their laps?
My fear is that commercial entities, along with the pro-Mozilla-the suite camp, will continue development on Mozilla Classic (the 1.4 branch), while the Phoenix folks work on NGMozilla...a fork.
Hold onto your hats, folks.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Step 1: Proclaim that Mozilla is a bloated mess.
Step 2: Find a name.
Step 3: Reach the 0.5 release, and develop a loyal following.
Step 4: Start to reach more users and get some name recognition.
Step 5: Come up with some sort of roadmap.
Step 6: Change the name due to legal issues.
Step 7: Declare 1.0 victory, and add yourself to the junkheap of other spinoff projects. Don't worry, though, there are more to join!
The middle mind speaks!
Some people like a big package.
Sometimes you want big, but sometimes you want small if you're going to do something different with it, you know, like put it somewhere that can't take something big. What I'd really like is a selectable package size.
Umm, we are still talking about Mozilla, right?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Now we know the new name for Phoenix... Mozilla!
So use Pine.
Don't laugh! I still use it as my email of choice. I used to use Netscape, but when I got DSL and my Linux machine fully running, I just stuck with Pine. (I tried Kmail for a while, and Opera mail). People laugh at me, but when I am at home, I can view attachments fine with it. When I am away from home, it is a bit harder. But I don't have to download my email either. I can download PuTTY wherever I am, ssh into my box, and read my mail in about a minute. I did this recently while traveling in France. I also use fetchmail to gather my various accounts into one on my machine at home. Even on dialup I can check my mail pretty quickly.
People can't believe that I still use Pine, but it is light, fast, and easy. Of course, if access to my home machine is cut off for some reason, I have to use my ISPs webmail, but I LOATHE webmail. I don't have a compelling reason to use a GUI mail client.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have not seen anything in Mozilla for a "grid" widget (kind of mini-spreadsheet in which you can change the cell contents). It has a "ListBox" widget, but it does not seem to allow direct editing of content.
Call them all the names you want, but it seems only MS and Windows products seem to offer decent grid widgets. Java's grids sucked eggs or had "unnatural" conventions from users' perspectives. (Perhaps their convention impressions are shaped by Windows, but that is the reality of the work force, for good or bad.)
Table-ized A.I.
Now if only Open Office would do the same thing...
FreeSpeech.org
IANAMD (I am not a Moz developer), but I believe one of the problems is that some things in Gecko cam't be fixed without redoing the architecture. By every account I've read, most of the Gecko codebase is a mess.
we should expect that after 1.7 Phoenix's Gecko will be diferent than Minotaur's one
Huh? Do you even know *anything* about how Moz/Phoenix/etc. work? Gecko is developed as a component which is embedded in applications, not as a part of applications themselves. Hence, there won't be a "Phoenix Gecko" and a "Minotaur Gecko". There will be Gecko, and Phoenix and Minotaur will embed it. From what I've read, installing them both on the same machine will likely have them share a common Gecko install, they won't even install two copies of it.
Not to mention that they want the Mail app to be able to stand alone or embed in Phoenix according to the user's wishes . . .
Mozilla could seriously do with some more large sponsors, though. It's just such a pity Apple didn't go for Gecko, for instance.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
As for Opera's "clean, intuitive" interface (another claim from your page), you might check out Matthew Thomas' claim that Opera is the only UI worse than Mozilla's.
Interesting.
;)
Not so long after this article about Minotaur came out on Slashdot, along with a bunch of comments talking about how cool it would be if Mozilla were to move away from the monolithic-bloat model towards the lean-mean-module approach, the Mozilla team says "hey, let's do that!"
They must read Slashdot! Well, of course they do, but they must actually take it/us seriously.
hey, anyone wanna hire me?
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Mozilla for all it failing is starting to get real recognition as a product in the market, it is being seen a real alternative to IE and now just as it starting to get traction it gets KIA.
I find it hard to believe that that a Phoenix based browser is going to reach a level of stability and adoption, any time soon.
(Someone has to say this)
This smack of developers looking at the technology and saying you know I could do better (yeah I'm guilt here as well). You know lets rebuild this and provide no migration path for existing applications and users. There must be a better way to do this with less risk and disruption.
Remember it's not always the product with the most technical merit that wins it the wins just look at IE.
Otherwise Microsoft is going to be very happy they will not have to worry about Mozilla any more.
Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine
:).
I beg to differ. On my other system, a 433 with 256MB of RAM, Mozilla is a pig. Pure and simple. It takes close to 30 seconds to load sometimes, and page rendering makes me feel like I'm back on 14.4 dialup. Contrast this with Opera, which loads in a second or 2, and renders pages as soon as they're downloaded (in fairness, I won't mention how fast IE is, because they cheat and preload most of the browser when the system boots
Now that I have an 1800XP, you're right, Moz is pretty zippy. But it's pretty sad that I'd need almost 2ghz of effective performance just to render some html.
I won't even talk about how long Moz takes to load on the Redhat box (p2-266, 256 RAM). Let's just say Galeon beats it by an order of Magnitude. Same renderer too, so just what's causing the delay? Oh yeah. Bloat.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient.
Why is Gecko allowed to undergo fairly hefty changes? Easy. Apple's release of Safari brought attention to KHTML. Heck, Mac rumor sites had all but crowned Chimera (now Camino), based on Gecko, into the OS as the default browser. Then wham, out of left field, here's Safari.
Why did such a large company go away from what the open source community considered the gold standard, Mozilla and its technologies? KHTML was a smaller codebase than Gecko, and easier for a new project to make completely their own. That's right, there was a better open source alternative out there most people had never really thought about.
People started talking about KHTML, Safari, Mozilla, and Gecko. Apple managed to shine a new light on what had been seen as acceptable without question because of, get this, a lack of competition (!) in the open source browser community. Until the little man came on the scene, Mozilla and its Gecko brethren had a near monopoly on the "not-IE" browser market.
So the next time someone wants to know what Apple's given the open source community after taking BSD for the core of its new OS, you'll know what to tell them. Not only has Apple open sourced Darwin and checked their improvements back into KHTML, they've also provided a competitive peer for Mozilla and other open source projects.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
All large, mature codebases are messy -- that's a true fact of life in the real software world. Maybe they don't teach that in school yet. They should.
.... Hacking all that on top of the old codebase cleanly could be done, but it would have taken a ton of effort -- assuming we could've found anyone interested in doing the work.
Gecko is less messy than the old, MozillaClassic codebase. It's still messy -- it must be so, remember, because it is real. Plus, many hands have handled it. Also, it was over-designed a bit, or a lot, in places -- but that's water under the bridge.
Gecko does a *lot*, way more than the old codebase. HTML4, CSS1, CSS2.1, parts of CSS3, DOM levels 1-3, XML, XSL-T, SVG, MathML, SOAP, WSDL,
True statement: the reason we ditched the "Netscape 5" code was not because it was messy. The reason was that we simply could not interest enough new people, inside or outside of Netscape, in learning to deal with the mess, and then clean it up, and furthermore build on top of it. Almost all of the "old people" who wrote that codebase had moved on to other things.
Someone please mention this overriding non-technical fact to http://joelonsoftware.com. Joel may be right to call all the newcomers who were unwilling to work on the old codebase "undisciplined" or "unprofessional" -- if those words are fair, then all I can say is that there are not many disciplined professionals in software to be found. I worked on both codebases extensively (I created the DOM "level 0" along with JavaScript in 1995, for Nav2), but I can't claim to be either disciplined or professional.
Meanwhile, during 1998, Netscape had a team working on the "NGLayout" project, and they wanted to contribute that new layout engine. We (mozilla.org) took a chance, preferring the new frontiers of that codebase to the crowded, overdeveloped old world. The lure of the frontier, the chance to homestead your own plot, especially using XML and JS, was what mozilla.org needed most in order to attract contributors. People simply could not sink the costs required to learn the old C/C++ codebase enough to scratch their itches.
Our gamble worked, I think. Not without many bumps along the way (and whose idea was shipping Netscape 6, anyway? Not mine!). Now, our top Gecko hackers are people such as dbaron@dbaron.org, who has recently graduated from Harvard, and who is an invited expert on the W3C CSS working group; rbs@maths.uq.edu.au; and bzbarsky@mit.edu.
Yeah, it took too long. There are no shortcuts. We should have done better. But doing "just a browser" was never in the cards, and not only because of Netscape's commitments. Mozilla is and always will be more than "just a browser". As jwz wrote here a while ago, if you want just a browser, stop whining and go use Konqueror, Galeon, K-Meleon, or any of a number of choices, depending on your preferred platform. (Don't kid yourself that Mozilla could have stopped IE's distribution-channel-based takeover, no matter what we did.)
If you want to help Mozilla, please come join us. With the new roadmap, we have more new frontier land to develop.
I think that mozilla had become a monster - a friendly one, perhaps (just look at the endearing pointy toothed grin on that red monster), but a monster all the same. And that kind of "lets pile everything together into a heap" integration is a pain for users who want to be able to pick and choose. There are lots of examples - both in the windows world and in the unix/linux... worlds.
In the windows world this is to be expected - one company wants to build one product - make you buy a new one every time any of the components changes. Given that most windows users are going to put about as much thought into selecting the products they buy/use as they do when they drive to macdonalds and have to choose between a "large" and "super size" fries, thats not unreasonable. (I'm not saying they're stupid - just that they're not putting any intellectual effort into their computing systems.)
But in the unix world, this grates on me Both KDE and Gnome seem to want to build bigger and burlier integrated thing-a-ma-bobs. Consider, for example, the rise of the desktop managers vs window managers. Or evolution - quite a nice mail client, an address book, a calendar and who knows what else - and I always managed to click on the wrong button and lose things. Or open office - nice spreadsheet - absolutely crappy word processor - but they come as a unit.
I would like to see XUL continued, and the roadmap looked like it was not being dropped - I think it offers lots of potential.
I'd also like to say in response to the person who asked "why chatzilla" that chatzilla might not be a requirement for most users - but it was probably a very good thing for mozilla - as chat has different requirements (in user interaction, display and in performance) than a browser does. As such, it has probably helped to shape the way mozilla has developed. Then too, I'm kind of tired of everyone saying that MIRC is IRC as though the only things allowed to exist on the network are windows applications.
"what exactly is happening to XUL?"
Short answer: nothing; sorry we mentioned it.
Longer answer: we brought XUL up because if we "switch to Phoenix" from the app-suite browser, based on Phoenix as it has been distributed so far, we drop Mac XUL support. We don't want to do that. So in the roadmap, we go out of our way to say that we *are* going to build Phoenix for OS X, when we switch.
I wonder how we can make this simple point more clear, without inviting confusion. Jumpy roadmap readers seem to skim, and fly off the handle out of fear that we're dropping XUL, or something silly like that. Rest assured, we are supporting XUL fully.
XUL with some form-submission smarts, but using XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL, or whatever's appropriate, should become the basis for web applications. XUL widgets should form the kernel of a pragmatic XForms implementation. And XUL's still great for cross-platform applications. We like XUL too.
Well, I'm thinking "I wish I could use phoenix, but I need Mozilla for the mail client." So anything which puts pressure on Minotaur to emerge sounds good to me.
I also like the newer Phoenix nightlies (using 3-9-3 at work now) but I have one big complaint, and this showed up in Mozilla 1.3, too: I frequently click and drag a link to another tab, but the recent Phoenix nightlies and Mozilla 1.3 seem to frequently not pick up the link and I have to try two or three times to drag the link and it's driving me nuts.
Does this have anything to do with mouse gestures? Can I fix it? Lately I seem to have better luck if I drag the link to the right before dragging it up to the tab; this is why I suspect it may have something to do with gestures even though I've never tried or even read about gestures.
The Phoenix nightlies are MUCH slicker looking than both Phoenix 0.5 and Mozilla 1.3. Very nice. And I love having the home button back where it belongs (as opposed to where Mozilla has it): in line with the back, forward, stop and reload buttons.
I think you're misreading them.. mostly at least.
To your first quote I think they're saying that when it comes to UI design you need somebody in charge.. keeping things from moving back and forth pointlessly or getting schizo. They're moving to a decision structure more like other large opensource projects. You can still make changes, they'll just have to be approved and tweaked before making it into main builds.
To your second quote.. to many cooks spoil the soup. They don't need sudden floods of inexperienced help that will quickly get bored and quit. That does horrible things to a codebase. If you really want to help then jump in and work on something you're interested in. If it holds up to the standards of the project and will be useful to others I'm sure they'd consider adding it to the trunk. Right now might not be a good time for scratching itches though. This big a transition will take some experienced Moz developers and they won't want to start adding features in the middle of such a transition. Familiarize yourself with what they are doing, test for bugs, submit bug reports, submit bug patches.. then they'll ask for your help coding.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A lot of people talk about Phoenix being so snappy compared to Moz, and using less memory. Now I don't know if this is a accurate measure of anything, and I KNOW it isn't directly comparable to IE, but in Task Manager, on this XP box, Phoenix currently has a Mem Usage of 35816 K. Is that supposed to be GOOD /lightweight?? I'm seriously wondering. It takes more memory than anything else on my machine right now. (FB: I have 5 tabs open).
Random is the New Order.
That formula certainly never gets old.
"Three's Company" lasted seven years on that formula...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I use the integrated suite every day -- mostly the browser, mail/news, and message compose. Before any change to the default build, we'll make sure that this mode of operation is possible if you configure mail (Thunderbird, I mean) as an add-on to the Phoenix-based browser.
Remember, your add-ons persist across upgrades, unless an incompatible change to the new toolkit (which is XUL, XBL, JS, and CSS) invalidates a particular add-on (in which case, you'll need to get the new, compatible version of that add-on once it's out; this kind of invalidation should not happen often). So once you've added the mail extension to the browser, you're set -- you should be able to operate just as you do today with the integrated app-suite.
That's the goal, anyway, and a requirement to meet before we switch the default build.
The basic no frills standalone HTML editor the world needs is vi.
And if people would stay away from Frontpage and the like, the world would be a better place too.
If you want the new release following this new roadmap to be called Mozilla 2.0 rather than 1.5 vote for the bug here
4 54
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200
Mr. Smoove
The guy at phrasewise is, frankly, an idiot.
Speaking, btw, as a former Opera user who now uses Mozilla instead, on all platforms.
Let me review a few of his points:
This is to some degree debateable whether or not the underlining thing is really a good idea or not, but it's certainly far better than the ridiculous button mimicing, and many think that it's a good idea. At any rate it's certainly hard to see how such an unobtrusive feedback mechanism could be objectionable (especially as I believe it can be turned off.)
Well, fair enough, to start with. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to redesign those menus a bit, on the other hand, in comparison to say, IE, I will defend them - it's far better to have an arguably over-complex menu than to simply eliminate the functionality entirely, which is what IE and to a lesser degree Mozilla do in comparison. But if he stopped here he'd have grudging agreement... but that he does not do.
This is just wrongheaded. Having used it, I can testify that having those two options seperate is a big usability gain. If it were a checkbox on the save dialogue, for instance, there would be considerable wasted time on each save where it needed to be toggled - which for some of us very often. Now, if you use only one or the other it would make sense to do it the way he suggests - but when you remember Operas core audience it's clear they made the right choice here.
I actually agree with this one, but it's hardly a major criticism - usability reviews are often heavy on nit-picking but this has to be one of the smallest nits I've seen picked in quite awhile. Small mistakes like this certainly don't justify the scathing tone of the review, particularly when he's comparing Opera to IE and Mozilla, both of which make far more serious mistakes.
Both factually incorrect and wrongheaded.
Factually incorrect because Opera doesn't insist on MDI anymore, it can be set to run in MDI or SDI at the users preference, and because Microsoft didn't invent MDI - it was used long before they got ahold of it.
Wrongheaded because it's relying on fallacious reasoning - even if the factual errors were correct that still wouldn't mean that MDI shouldn't be used in a browser. Many (including me) find it to be one area where MDI is really useful. So many, in fact, that Mozilla and most other browsers now implement a half-assed copy of it, so-called 'tabbed browsing.' Those that don't like MDI, of course, can still use Opera and simply set it to SDI mode, so no criticisms based on MDI really hold water anyway, regardless of whether or not you have some sort of religious aversion to it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You're right about KHTML being the better open source alternative for Apple. I would have made the same decision, were I in the Safari team's shoes a year ago, operating under the constraint of secrecy, having to hire a team who didn't know either KHTML or Gecko, and had to learn one or the other from scratch.
(Of course, I wouldn't want to work under those constraints, if I had the choice.)
I apologize if I misread the original post. Lately there has been a lot of "Apple picked KHTML, so Gecko must be deficient in all situations" talk -- but we agree that's fallacious.
Your second point misconstrues mine about Apple being prepared to carry its tine of a fork. My point is that Apple management wanted to develop in secret, which decision inherently risks a fork.
Netscape has not done that. Almost all of its MPL'ed changes, certainly all to the core Gecko code (not necessarily all of UI changes under xpfe -- but most of those, too) go into cvs.mozilla.org early and often. They don't hide behind a firewall in a commercial source tree for a year, while the open source they're based on diverges.
MPL vs. LGPL had nothing to do with the point I was making. Anyone willing to publish diffs or distribute them along with programs can perpetrate a fork of code provided under either license.