Future Directions Proposed For Mozilla

Ars-Fartsica writes "MozillaZine is now featuring a set of slides regarding future directions for Mozilla that were detailed at the recent Mozilla developers meeting. SVG and integration with programming languages are among the directions discussed."

Comments

Why Mozilla still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Try loading multiple tabs and then load another tab to a slowish site. All tabs (and the app) hang. Network layer in Moz not threaded? Slow DNS lookup? Why does it affect the rest of the app and not just the affected tab?

Sometimes X-Window hangs also...VC/1, kill Moz, X-Window is back. Bad input/network queue handling in Moz?

Seen in all versions of Moz including crufty old netscape early versions (not tabbed obviously but seen elsewhere in program usage).

It's dumb, it sucks. Brings the user interface of a kick-ass computer to its knees.

That's my rant for the day.

Icons

[Iscariot_]

It'd be really nice if they could fix the html-extension icon. I'm tired of looking at html files and thinking, did I put a shortcut to my browser here?

I'd submit something, but I am defintely no artist.

mozilla & downloading

[trolleri]

singel-clicking to engage a download works different from shift-singel-click. The first, works by downloading to a /tmp/ file and then moving it to its destination. Obviously this is not how it should be, /tmp or any other directory that isn't the intended destination most likely lies on a other partition/storage-device, which leads to redundant io-throughput as, completed, downloaded files are moved around.

I think this needs to be fixed...

Re:MS

[stonecypher]

You know, this is a shallow and incindiary read of what he said.

I too have a userland app that takes down what is otherwise a perfectly stable OS. I run Win2k AS at work, and IE takes it down on a fairly regular basis, whereas Mozilla (I don't use firefox) doesn't have any real problems. The machine has a hot-swap drive; under various other OSes, it's perfectly stable, even using IE.

There is some *very* subtle interaction going on between drivers. When I regress certain drivers - and it's not just one! - to their generic counterparts, then the problem goes away. Only IE and programs which embed IE ever have a problem (on a home box this would be an issue, because IE's pretty much everywhere; thankfully I rarely run things other than compilers on this machine.) I've had the issue for about six months now; I estimate I about half-understand it. If it were a bigger problem or if I had more free time, I'd probably finish hunting it down, but frankly, I save often enough that what it really is is an excuse for me to get up and stretch my legs once a week.

Now, you can come charging in with all the bright-eyed wonder, insisting that a userland app should never be able to take down an OS. In an RTOS or a mission critical OS, I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the phrase "windows or not" indicates that you know at one level just how silly what you're saying is. I mean, I have video games that kill many of my machines frequently. The fact of the matter is that Windows is too fragile (god, the plural-agreement center of my brain is flipping out) to make userland-app-can't-be-the-problem claims.

Now, I'm not suggesting it's firefox. Quite to the contrary: this sort of thing almost never happens under Firefox AFAIK, so it's certainly a rare situation. That said, you're flying off of the handle without so much as actually wondering what the real problem is. Very old Mozilla builds hose my XP machines. There's absolutely no reason to discount this as a user problem out of hand. In fact, I view that sort of dismissive attitude as both dangerous and damaging: dangerous because real bugs with a very limited source base which are being responsibly reported (well, to a degree - obviously not here, but I imagine this behavior of yours reaches into bugzilla, too) are not only being ignored but those user which have such machines are being driven away; damaging because you seriously sully the view of Mozilla as a dependable base for communications and applications, and if Mozilla is going to progress, that's where it needs to make headway.

In short, your tantrums are hurting us all, not just someone whom you've chosen to look down your nose at as a noob. I know it's sort of silly for me to stand on SlashDot asking for good behavior, but I'm going to do it anyway. Until you have a reason to suggest that it really isn't Mozilla beyond some wishy-washy observations about an ideal OS' stability, which we all know perfectly well XP is not a good candidate for, I request that you kindly sit down, shut up, and stop hurting the Mozilla project.

Now. I don't think the IT Manager is going to be so clueless as to call a warm boot a black screen; it doesn't make contextual sense besides, as a warm boot isn't a black screen for more than a half second in typical circumstances, and most people know the word reboot more readily than they know the fairly rare phrase "black screen." I think - and I could be wrong, he was admittedly quite vague - that the problem he's having, whatever its source, is actually killing the video signal. This implies problems in the video subsystem (likely a driver issue) or a video card which has entered an impossible state (certainly a driver issue.) Alternatives are a total catastrophic windows death, which are rare, but which do exist, or something weird which I'm not likely to think of without seeing the problem first hand.

Maybe give the people which see repeating behaviors a half of a quarter of a piece of a sliver of credit, huh? The accusations you make don't make much sense.

Oh, and by the way, if it were RAM or the CPU, firefox wouldn't be the only one setting it off, asshat.