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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,
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
(Took me a minute to figure this out... Minotaur? Thunderbird? What?)
And if you don't want all that 'bloat', then use the use the net installer and install only the browser portion.
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
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
Well, they aren't competing any more than Mozilla and Camino compete. When you're dealing with open, free projects, there really isn't such a thing as "competition".
I imagine that people would use Phoenix on the Mac if they wanted to have that nice "one browser on every platform" feeling. I know that's why I sometimes use Mozilla on my Mac.
All this means is that Mac users have even more choice when it comes to browsers, and to me that's a good thing(tm).
By the way, Phoenix already exists for the mac (sorta).
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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
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.
The corporate market is where 80% of the world's PC installs occur, and Mozilla.org has never shown the maturity to support that market.
sPh
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.
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 . . .
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.
I think you're wrong, and here's why:
First, I'd like to address your "stability and adoption" comments. Stability - Phoenix is, at the very least, as stable as Mozilla, and anecdotal evidence I've seen suggests that it may, in fact, be far more stable. Adoption is certainly not an issue - it's not like mozlla.org is saying "Hey, our previous product sucked, try this new one!" - they're merely integrating similar, better technology into an existing product, and removing some of the not-so-great parts.
As for the lack of a migration path - remember, Phoenix is based on the same technologies (Gecko, XUL, XBL) as Mozilla, so development-wise, that all stays pretty much the same. The main difference for developers will be the new code ownershp model, about which I can only say "It's about time!"
So, while the "resistant-to-change, mozilla-loving" part of me agrees with you, the logical, wants-the-best-for-Mozilla part knows that this is the rigt path for the project.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
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.
"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.
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.