Mozilla Foundation Turns 1

antatack writes "It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic."

Comments

A new paradigm of sorts

[erick99]

5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That's close to 200,000 downloads a day over the last month.

This is really an amazing feat for what is essentially a volunteer group within an organization that acts as a non-profit entity. I don't know the exact status of Mozilla but I think this is descript of the actual effort. It would be remarkable for a large company, publicly funded, to do this well.

Happy Birthday!

Erick

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Doogie5526]

A good way to keep the downloads high is to release a 0.9 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 version within a week.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[erick99]

The whole concept of how Mozilla has come to be, and released high quality products, from within a framework that is radically different from the companies that otherwise do this in pure for-profit model.

Mozilla is not secretive and embraces it's end-users in a fashion that is almost antithetical to contemporary software companies. Mozilla is an exceptionally responsive entity (esp. regarding security issues it would seem). There is more but I will leave it at that. Perhaps other slash dot folks could amplify this point more eloquently than I am able.

It is simply an observation of mine and I understand that I am out on a limb. If you disagree, I do understnd.

Cheers!

Erick

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[frankthechicken]

But with the lack of info on the Mozilla site, I wonder how many people know this, and download the entire 0.9.2 version, instead of just the patch.

Surely there should at least be a note mentioning the patch on the front page?

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Timesprout]

Actually I would disagree with you here. For a long time Mozilla was more about what developers wanted to do rather than catering to end user requirements. Most for profit companies are very responsive to the needs of their customers. Pissed off customers = lost revenue. I know plenty of companies who are interested in user feedback and work well with their customers. Microsoft are pretty much a singularity in that they dont really have to care because of their ubiquity but even they listen to their customers (just not all of them).

Also I think many people forget it has taken almost 5 years for the Mozilla project to release stable useable products that we can recommend to friends/family etc. Firefox gets a lot of attention here, and rightly so, its an excellent browser but it is a long way from the original Mozilla concepts, remember when gecko was going to take over the whole universe, remember the bloat and absymal stability/performance ? After 3 years of nothing many people felt the project was on the verge of death, would never produce anything of value and was based on seriously misguided assumptions.

I would actually give Mozilla more credit for recognising (albeit belatedly) that they were not going to take over the world, that developer cool is meaningless to end users and stripping the out the crap and focussing on Firefox and Thunderbird as standalone products. Its just a pity it took so long.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[acebone]

Nope - it's not buggy.

I've yet to encounter a single bug in my current Firefox installation.

To get there however, I had to create a whole new profile, because the old profile would cause bugs in the 0.9 (which I've subsequently updated to 0.9.2)

It even shows slews and slews of large pictures without failing now, which is very good for my ahem... studies !

Success story

[Kombat]

I don't really have much to say, other than "Congratulations." They've been a poster-boy for OSS, and proven that network collaboration really can result in a stable, useful, well-developed product. I wonder what new innovations we'll be praising for the 2nd, or even 5th anniversary.

Great job guys, and thanks for the browser. :)

Buy out?

[SpooForBrains]

Considering the amazing success of Mozilla, one can't help but wonder how long it will be before someone attempts to buy it.

So I'm curious, is that even possible? Could some big corporation just come along and buy Mozilla out?

Re:Buy out?

[ear1grey]

Could some big corporation just come along and buy Mozilla out?

IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal feasability of this, however, should it prove to be a possiblity, the code that has been released under the MPL would still be available under that license.

Suppose the incumbent owner could find a way to close the devlopment tree and start to create proprietary software from that point. The last publically available version of the code would still be covered by the license agreement under which it was released so it would very quickly become the starting point for a new open-source project and development would continue unabated.

Hence, commitment to the Mozilla platform (or it's open source competition), may be significantly safer than commiting to a browser with closed source, where development can stagnate or even stall completely. Should critical vulnerabilities emerge in such products you are entirely reliant on the investment of the owning company, and if their focus is elsewhere, patches may not be forthcoming.

Model for other OSS projects?

[goldspider]

What did the Mozilla Foundation do that has made Mozilla such a huge success? Maybe more to the point, why haven't other OSS projects taken off like Mozilla? Any ideas on what can be done on other OSS projects to achieve similar success?

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[jsebrech]

I could name three things that come to mind that mozilla did in the past year, and are underrepresented among other OSS projects:

- Focus on performance, make it faster with every release (granted, the mozilla project has been doing this for years)
- Do not treat any platform in an inferior way, focus on providing quality products on all platforms, including windows and mac.
- Have a visual design policy and team, redesigning the apps for improved ease of use, look and feel. Make sure the apps can be used easily by more than geeks. Make sure there is a fitting design for every platform the app runs on.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[kyknos.org]

but compare comparable - mozilla with some other DESKTOP oss sw

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[frostman]

While all credit is due the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla developers, one of the reasons it's so much more successful than the average good OSS project is the type of software they make.

1) Web browsing.
Nearly everyone does it. Firefox runs on most platforms. It's better than the competition. It's not geeky unless you want it to be. And with IE stagnant, more and more people are interested in the alternatives, regardless of whether they're open source.

2) E-mail.
Thunderbird is great but it's not as much greater than the other mail clients as Firefox is greater than the other browsers. But it's coming along very nicely and could have enormous success - even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future.

Both of these programs fit common needs that are not as well-served by big software companies as one might expect.

If other projects want to achieve that level of success, they should take lessons from the Mozilla Foundation for sure -- but it's not a fair measure if the other projects aren't making standard consumer apps.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Conor Turton]

I'd have to say OpenOffice is up there with Mozilla. When PC magazines start putting OpenOffice in their "Essential software" section EVERY MONTH as PC Format have been doing then you know its "got there". Deepburner and Mozilla are two recent Freeware/OSS apps that have been repeatedly appearing on PCFs cover disk.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[bgfay]

I wish that OpenOffice would start a "Firefox" project that would concentrate on a very fast, very tight project for word processing. OpenOffice is a great thing (free, does most everything anyone could ask of it) but it is a slug, a monster that eats memory and just kills older machines. If I could use OpenOffice on my home machine (which is pretty substantial) and then use a "firefox" version on my older machines (like the laptop I'm using now and most of the computers at our under-funded school), I would be all set.

Maybe I'm just getting ahead of the project here. I know that 2.0 is striving for faster startup times and the like. Maybe instead of a separate project, OO.o could focus most of their efforts on streamlining the thing.

Firefox and Thunderbird are THE open source answers for browsing and email. That's two of the necessary apps. OpenOffice plugs many of the other holes, but it needs work. Firefox is already there.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FireFury03]

I think the appearance of Firefox helped a lot - Mozilla itself is reasonably bulky and slow, but Firefox is as fast as (faster than?) IE. Firefox also does what most end users (especially the non-techy ones) want out of the box - no messing around tweaking it to work how you like. But that is not to say you can't tweak it and those cwho feel competent enough will tweak away, setting up the button bars how they like, theming it, etc.

Another thing that has undoubtedly helped is the regular IE security holes which have been hitting the mainstream press and probably also MS's apethy at fixing them and adding enhancements - on the odd occasion I'm forced to sit infront of a Windows machine and use IE, I wonder how on earth anyone can put up with the lack of features such as tabbed browsing and I'm stunned by the shear number of popups that even an un-spywared machine gets through IE - no wonder Windows users don't pay any attention to popup errors, they get so much crap popping up anyway.

Various support departments have now started recommending Firefox - the support guys here now recommend it to our customers, and where we used to get a "no, we have to use IE" response, the customers now more often than not say "oh that's a good idea, I'll try it" and end up very happy.

Also, a browser is something reasonably high profile that the average user wants - I'm sure a lot of people have a browser open practically all the time. Once someone's tried it at home then chances are they will install it at work too (assuming they don't work in a company who has a restrictive "you must use the most insecure software we can find" policy). All the coworkers will see it and install it on their workstations and home machines.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[duffbeer703]

Other OSS desktop projects have too much ideological and egotistical overhead and too much corporate influence.

Try naming some Mozilla developers... I bet you can't.

The Mozilla people have an extreme loyalty to their product. Their focus seems to be developing superior applications, period.

Other popular Open-Source projects are too focused on trying to unseat Windows or too bogged down in bureaucratic infighting.

The keys to making a successful product are:

- Make the best product that you can
- Tell your audience about it

That why Apple has always been successful at selling workstations. They build a premium, high-quality product and evangelize it.

Think about projects like GNU Hurd and FreeBSD. Each of these projects started out with the potential for greatness, but never met that potential. GNU Hurd gets no attention because its leadership is too focused on idealogical matters and vanity. FreeBSD created a political process around it that created a perception that new developers weren't welcome.

With Mozilla, you never hear about political bullshit. The leadership of the project is focused on the project instead of looking for their names in print. They certainly have made their share of mistakes, but when they do they go back and code. ... And the result is the best browser and one of the better email clients on the market.

Re:now all you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators please fix the above "anti-groupthink" moderation. Pointing out realistic flaws with what otherwise might be an excellent product and flagship of the Open Source movement might temporarily damage pride, but knowing that they exist in order that they should be fixed can only be to our advantage.

Internet Explorer Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

For just pennies a day, you could help IE get the help it needs to combat virii. Weekly updates will come with a picture of the browser you are supporting.... Please help.

Lessons Learned

[millahtime]

It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper. The things they have learned about making an OSS application successful.

I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well. Better than most people realize. The skins, that type of idea is everywhere from cell phones, to just about everything. Everyone likes to customize.

Due to what though?

[airjrdn]

I'm not putting down Mozilla, I'm using Firefox right now and have switched my wife, Mother, and my own PC's to using Firefox and Thunderbird almost across the board. I do think however you have to give credit where it's due. The massive rise in their popularity isn't soley due to the fact that they are offering a solid browser, it's also due to the fact that MS isn't.

Re:Due to what though?

[Lispy]

Ok, I know how to switch my wife, but how the hell did you switch your mother? I was planning on doing so for years.

Stupid joke I know, please ignore: ;-)

Re:I can just see who

[wfberg]

My money is on either Microsoft Trying to buy it (yeah like that would go though) or AOL. If AOL tried I would fall out of my seat laughing.

Did you even read the about screen?

Copyright © 1998-2002 by Contributors to the Mozilla codebase under the Mozilla Public License and Netscape Public License. All Rights Reserved

Netscape.. Gee.. I wondered what happened to that company.. Didn't they already get bought up?

Significant advantages?

[Apocalypse111]

I have been reading a lot about FireFox (and Opera, to be fair) here on Slashdot lately. Everyone who uses one of these alternative browsers has nothing but good things to say about them, and if someone says something bad about one then they are either attacked as being MS sheep or assaulted by a series of suggestions on how to fix the situation.

My question is this: aside from the obvious security-through-diversity advantage, and the fact that the IE HTML engine is a bit on the slow side, what are the benefits of using FireFox or Opera over, say, Slimbrowser, Crazybrowser, or MyIE2? These IE-based browsers have tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, and a host of other features that they probably borrowed (read: stole) from the "geekier" browsers out there. I'm not saying that the 2 advantages I mentioned aren't enough, but if I'm running a firewall and antivirus program, and I don't notice the speed difference between them, why should I switch?

Re:Significant advantages?

[magefile]

Spyware avoidance. Standards compliance (as a web developer, it's easier to code a Moz/Firefox/standards-compliant page, then tinker for IE-compliance, than the reverse). Less vulnerable to browser hijacking (not just because of diversity, either). Tons of extensions beyond what's available in the browsers you named.

Re:Significant advantages?

[digidave]

One important note is that Mozilla offers more than security through diversity. Mozilla avoids IE's Zone and ActiveX problems that are the cause of most of its security problems. Security comes from a better security design rather than just diversity.

I know that's not really what you meant. You wanna talk about features. Run Firefox and head over to http://update.mozilla.org/extensions to see what a lot of the fuss is about. There are hundreds of extensions you can use. My personal favorite is the Web Developer one that gives me a toolbar for editing live CSS on any site, changing my browswer to different screen sizes (test sites on 800 x 600 for example), outline all tables, validate HTML, etc. I have 6 or 7 extensions installed now and they're all extremely useful.

Re:Significant advantages?

[Ex Machina]

http://pagerankstatus.mozdev.org/ Google Pagerank status: Displays the Google Pagerank in your browser's status bar.

Re:Significant advantages?

[FireFury03]

IE has a truely broken nonstandard rendering engine - writing HTML that works in both IE and complient browsers is hell.

There are also other things that are just plain missing in the IE rendering engine - it doesn't support alphablended PNGs even though they've been around (and supported in other browsers) for years. Oddly MacIE handles them fine. It also doesn't support some very useful CSS2 properties such as position:fixed. The lack of support is bad in itself, but the fact that MS will not fix it for years is even worse. If I have to support IE then I cannot use any cool new features that the W3C specify, even if the W3C originally specified them over 5 years ago.

The whole problem with IE having such a large majority of the market is that it holds back developemtn across the whole web - MS won't implement new features because there is little pressure to do so. For them it's just money down the drain since they won't gain any market share from the development. TBH I think that any profit-making organisation with such a large chunk of the market would be in (more or less) the same state of afairs and I would be much happier with a non-profit organisation such as the Mozilla Foundation in the driving seat since they are not worried (so much) about the bottom line.

The catch

[philbert26]

The catch is badly-written websites that don't work properly without IE. Some sites won't let you do business unless you use IE. For me this is a sign that they don't know what they're doing (do you want an online credit card payment system from these guys?), but lots of people will assume that this means IE is better.

I am watching Mozilla with keen interest because it is an interesting test of the security through obscurity problem. If Mozilla takes a big market share it will attract the attention of the bad guys who currently target IE. Then we shall see if open source is a liability or an asset.

Obligatory Futurama quote

[laserbeak]

our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high,

all hail hypnotoad!

Mozilla Rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

A few months ago I got fed up of the bi-weekly exploits being discovered for IE, so I decided to give Mozilla 1.6 a try. It was awesome needless to say. I got my best friend switched over and he loves it too.

Recently I switched my mom over to use Mozilla 1.7 after discovering around 480+ spyware and trojan on her laptop.

I've tried FireFox 0.8 or 0.7 I cant remember but it was buggy and I liked the simpleness of Mozilla 1.6 better.

I still need to use IE6 for 2 things though, Windows update and Mcafee AV update both use ActiveX. Arg i hate ActiveX.

Re:now all you need

[IamTheRealMike]

That would be right if the first poster actually had posted more than random trollage. Quite a lot of people have stated they find it faster than IE and have then given concrete examples of things they find that are faster. Just saying "I think IE is faster" is a weak argument, saying it in a trollish fashion is even worse

Re:now all you need

[Ford Prefect]

I've frequently used Firefox (and the full-featured Mozilla) on a 64MB, 166MHz Pentium running Windows 98.

It's not the fastest thing ever, but it's completely usable. Perhaps it's a little slower than Internet Explorer on the same machine, but it's really not worth bothering about. Firefox is snappy, it doesn't get stuck in endless hourglass-waving pauses, and it starts pretty quickly too.

It feels considerably faster on that PC than Firefox does on my modern iBook, where it takes an age to start and even longer to display dialogue boxes and suchlike - it's why I've stuck with Safari. Maybe there is room for improvement on the Windows version of Firefox, but I'd rather the effort went into other platforms as well.

Re:Firefox.

[Sunspire]

Now all it needs is an easy update feature.

It needs an update feature that can be made to automagically download and apply the latest versions without any user interaction whatsoever if so desired, but of course optionally also a "ask before installing" feature. That would be a great boon for home users (install and forget) and lazy sysadmins (what, you expect me to walk around the office installing stuff manually, dream on).

If Firefox follows the Mozilla stable/latest branching system the updater should allow you to follow one of the branches. For example you could configure the browser to keep up with the 1.0 branch and grandma would silently get 1.0.1, 1.0.2 etc. installed with security updates and bugfixes. For more experienced user the first time after an 1.0->1.1 update there could be a one-time page describing the new cool features on the next startup.

Hari Seldon

[solarlux]

Thanks to the planning behind this foundation, after the Microsoft Empire falls, there will only be 10 years of anarchy instead of 100. In its place, an even greater (but planned) empire will replace it. That new republic will be open source.

Rumor also has it there is a second foundation, located at Slashdot End in the galaxy...

Re:now all you need

[julesh]

OK, here's my issues performance related with Mozilla (I'm on quite an old version now, 1.5, so maybe some of these have been fixed):

- startup time is slow, much worse than IE + Windows desktop load time (to account for the preloaded parts of IE).

- random pauses. Mozilla seems to occasionally stop responding for about .3 seconds. I suspect it might be using a garbage collector that has been badly tuned (?).

- html editing component (e.g. mail's compose window) has serious issues with long documents; IE's equivalent component is much faster, although not as nice IMHO.

Related problems:
- memory consumption is much higher than IE.
- some operations (e.g. moving a large volume of e-mail between mailboxes) seem to tie up all open Mozilla windows while they occur, which isn't very nice.

I'd submit these as RFEs on bugzilla, but my experience is that anything of bugzilla that isn't a showstopper bug just gets ignored for 2 years.

Significant advantages? Pretty Colors!!!

[Brain Stew]

I have been a pretty steadfast Microsoft user (WinXP, VS.NET, Office, etc.) but recently I have started using alternatives to some of their software: iTunes, Trillian, and now FireFox.

There are two reasons to this (except in the case of iTunes, that ones because I got an iPod recently)
1. Security is better (No activeX, no hijacking)
2. Customization (I can choose the way I want my software to look!)

It may seem shallow, but I switched to FireFox because it let me make a cool looking browser.

Finance ?

[Etyenne]

How are the finance of the foundation doing ? What have they done with the money ? How many people have they kept employed via the foundation ? Who are the most generous corporate donators (so I can give them my business back) ? Inquiring minds want to know!

<em class="cheerleader"> Go Mozilla ! </em>

On FireFox, speed, and machine specs

[Schwartzboy]

I have two WinXP Pro machines with 2 Ghz+ processors and 1/2 Gig of RAM each, a Slackware Cyrix machine and a Win98 PIII that are both at about 700 Mhz with 256 MB RAM, and the wife (who has finally consented to try Fire-something in the wake of the recent IE security issues and much whining from me) has a 2.4 Ghz P4 running Win98 with 1/2 a gig of RAM. On all of the machines I've used, Firefox performs exceptionally well compared to IE with some exceptions:

When the Fox is slow to load some page or another, I will frequently try the same page in IE because I'm an impatient bastard. Almost invariably, IE loads the site as slowly as the Fox, telling me that it's a server issue & not the browser's fault.

Pages that use Java take a hundred years to load in Fox. Period. Maybe there are settings that I've neglected to tweak, but the Java environment seems to start loading at whatever point the page in question calls it, adding Java's start time to the time it would normally take the page to load. IE wins for speed hands down in this case, but if I'm doing something stupid and can fix it easily, I'd love to be corrected here.

Tabs. Right now, I have about a dozen tabs open. Can't live without 'em. However, if I try to quickly flip from tab to tab and reload or submit or follow a link or run a script, after the third or fourth page I try to load I notice a difference of up to a full second when loading or when I even try to switch to another tab. Should Fox be able to withstand this kind of abuse? Dunno. Should I be able to reconfigure the browser to fix this too? Dunno, but I'd like to think so.

Overall, I'm very happy with Firefox in the speed department (curse you, Java-reliant pages!), and can't imagine subjecting IE to the same treatment without getting hourly blue screens. It's not a perfect experience, but it sucks infinitely less than the Microsoft alternative IMHO.