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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch
iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4.
The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers
building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch
as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird,
a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products
will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to
ensure that it is high quality."
How about a long life brandname for Mozilla Firefox?
I'd suggest Mozilla lite or Mozilla Express.
On a decnet computer IE will load in just a second or two. In contrast Mozilla takes at least 10 seconds before you get anything on the screen. Firefox is just as fast as IE. However. probably a good 50% of explorer is already loaded all that needs to be done is draw a new window, this can be proven by crashing IE (not hard) alot of times the whole desktop disapears. This shows how well firefox is written because it must load entirely from scratch.
Let's see, I can chose 1.7, or 1.4... or should I choose the stable branch? Or the trunk? (May one assume the trunk is stable?) But then there is Firefox 1.0, but that is just a version of Thunderbird(?). But of course that (which?) is just a Camino release, so everything is ok....
But what about the unstable branch? The unstable branch of what?
Could it be made any more confusing? No wait, don't take that as a challenge!
But of course more choices are always a good thing, right?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
As I tell all my users when one person has a problem they can't really document, but when everyone else is working fine... If you can't show me any evidence of it, or give more details on what exactly happens and when, then I have to conclude you're doing something wrong.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Why should I have to read the instructions?
Seriously, who writes consumer software these days based on the assumption that the consumer is going to read the instructions?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
Because the developers use Bugzilla, and a slashdotted bugzilla means they cannot get their work done.
Most users have no way of knowing whether they're doing something wrong or not. Thus telling them that they're doing something wrong without telling them exactly what won't remedy the situation, and will probably cause stress and frustration. And you wonder why people are scared of computers or why many people in a business environment have a low opinion of the IT staff.
I wish there was a way to pipe the output of /usr/games/fortune into your slashdot sig...
:-)
Write a Mozilla extension, dude, and there would be
Gerv
ok.... here is my question. When are they going to make a version of mozilla that comes all set up and ready to go when it comes to things like flash and java? Look I know that there are pluggins, and if you follow instructions carefully its not hard. But thit isn't the days of kernel 2.2.... I shouldn't have to sym link stuff anymore. How about a little box that comes up during install that askes if you would like to install java or flash support?
One more thing.... when are they going to include neat things like... right click -> kill a frame... start/stop animation... block image(not all images from the server... thats different)?
Well those are the two things I would like. I love mozilla, it rocks. I have never had it crash... even with like 20 tabs open. Thx Mozilla dev people.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
>My pages mostly just have div tags any more, and the style sheet does the rest.
Pfft. Your page has a shitload of HTML markup and tables on it. Moz does XHTML/CSS way better than IE.
It may or may not be true that "most proprietory products... are none easier to use than linux products." But that wasn't my point. (Btw, precisely which "proprietary products" did my prior post refer to?)
The point of the my prior post is that the advocates and proponents of non-OSS software do not, as a rule, refer to their customers in public forums as "a mass of ignorant idiots who apparently exist to make problems and keep help lines busy." Calling your cumstomers names is not good public relations. Adopting the irrebutable assumption that any difficulty your customers have in using your product is solely due to the fact that they are "ignorant idiots" does lead to a culture supporting product improvement or increasing market share.
There are those who try to learn what their customers want, and deliver it.
Then there are those who try to tell their customers what they should want, what they ought to do, and call their customers names.
I want more people to use OSS software. Thus, I'm sick of "consumers are a mass of ignorant idiot posts" which serve no purpose other than to insult consumers and excuse inferior design.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Buy an SMP machine and just surf and/or read mail a lot. Works every time for me.
Y'know, I've never seen anyone else mention that, but I too have noticed it...
In applications that make no attempt at all to use more than one CPU, numerous programs seem to crash on my dual that run rock-solid on a single CPU machine.
Flash, for example, dies within about five minutes if I don't set the affinity to one CPU. Same with most classic console emulators (Snes9x, as one example).
As an SE myself, I seriously question what these programs have done to make them so unstable with a second CPU. I can only make a guess, but I'd speculate they use non-async-safe multithreaded code, which IMO makes no sense whatsoever - Why use multithreading at all, if you don't hope to make use of more than one CPU? Okay, a very small number of situations require it (Windows services, for example, wherein I have yet to find a good way to keep the SCM from tweaking without tossing it a thread), but other than such rare reasons, if you don't plan to support more than one CPU, just skip the single most bug-ridden programming concept ever created.
But, so it goes, and I seem to have started ranting. Forgive. Anyway, as much of a hassle as it seems to need to bind a process to a given CPU each time I use it, the drastically improved responsiveness of a dual CPU machine more than makes up for it.
If you ever tried that, you would know most public HTTP-servers closes the connection almost instantly due to timeout. You need to write the request in advance and copy it to telnet using the middle mouse-button.
There are those who try to learn what their customers want, and deliver it.
If this were a business relationship, I'd agree. In a business, if you *didn't* do what you describe, you'd go out of business.
But with Free (or free) software, there is no business relationship. No money exchanges hands. Users are not "customers" or "consumers" because they didn't give any money to the developers (or the mozilla.org organization -- with rare exception).
As such, developers are fully in their rights to blow off stupid comments.
And I say this *not* from a conceited or condescending developer point of view. I'm not a l337 developer.
But in my day development job, I do deal with customers from time to time. These people have contracts with us, they pay us money, and they expect us deliver X by Y date. Of course X, changes, and Y gets moved up.
In my humble opinion, a lot of X is stupid, but the customer wants it, so the customer gets it. I'm helpful. I'm nice. I make every effort to deliver.
A lot of my job in meeting the customers' demands consists of doing things that are decidedly not fun or interesting: writing documentation, creating flowcharts, dummying up boiler plate examples, etc. (We're a small shop and wear many hats).
We have to spend a good amount of time hand-holding our customers, who can be quite demanding. When some bug report can't be tracked down by our customer service or support folk, developers get pulled to investigate.
And, of course, there's the meetings. Oh God, the meetings.
I'm not complaining here, just observing. I know there are a lot of skilled developers who would love to have a good job right now, and I am truly thankful to be working. But that doesn't mean it's not frustrating at time.
My "development job" is a lot more than just writing code. But I like to write code, not all that other stuff.
So, at nights and on the weekends (Well, not recently. I've got a kid, soon to have another.) I would actually write code on little side projects. Not terribly useful to anyone besides myself. This is why I'm not a l337 developer. But I do it just because I want to, because I enjoy it. I enjoy writing things that do things.
This is what Free Software is about. Freedom of the developers. Users are nice, even desirable, but they are not customers and can make no demands on my time beyond what I'm already freely giving. I won't deride them, but I'm certainly under no obligation to meet thier demands for free.
If I want to 'deal with customers', I can just go to work, sit in my cubicle, and get paid to do it.
Free Software is not "Big Business" and I hope it doesn't become so, because then would start to look like my day job.
If money is made, fine. If users get good software, even better. But IMHO those are incidental, ancillary, indirect benefits. They may be good measurements of successful software, but they are not the *driving force* of free software. The driving force of free software is the software developer, and him creating the things he's interesting in creating.
The people actually creating all this free softare are mostly doing it for free, for Pete's sake. I haven't paid one red cent for linux, mozilla, scribus, evolution, gimp, gaim, vim, cvs, mysql, XMMS, apache, perl, bash, gcc, or any one of the huge array of software I have on my multiple systems. Nothing. I've gotten it all for free, thanks to the kindness and generosity of probably thousands of people.
They even help me out with problems from time to time, through email or support forums -- for free!
To me, it's humbling. As a *user*, I may be frustrated due to some bugs or incomplete documentation in a software package, but I really have no right to complain, unless I write a big fat check to pay for want I want, to make demands on others and expect to have those demands addressed.
Again, I'm not complaining, or thumbing my nose at users. I'm much more a user of Free Software than a creator of it.
Software Wars