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Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Herald has an interview with Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox at the Mozilla foundation. In it he describes how he got started, his reasons for Firefox's existence and what the future may hold for the little browser that could."
And Firefox 1.0 PR has already hit a half million downloads. Way to go!
Kiwi helping build browser
17.09.2004
By PAUL BRISLEN
The web browser wars are over and Microsoft won, right?
Well someone's forgotten to tell Ben Goodger and his team at the Mozilla Foundation because this Kiwi software engineer is taking market share from Internet Explorer (IE) with Firefox, the browser that's smaller yet smarter than anything else available.
Goodger, back in New Zealand this week visiting family and friends, works for the Mozilla Foundation and has been the lead engineer on Firefox throughout its development.
He began while still at the University of Auckland waiting for the launch of Netscape 5.0.
"I used Netscape 4.0 and basically was just designing web pages and doing web development work."
The wait for version 5.0 was a long one and when Netscape finally ceased development work on its browser and opened up the source code to the Mozilla Foundation, Goodger found himself taking time off to work in the US on the browser itself.
Today he leads a relatively small team of engineers who are hard at work preparing for the release of Firefox version 1.0 and the Kiwi input is hard to miss.
The code names for the previous versions of Firefox include Three Kings, Royal Oak, One Tree Hill and Greenlane.
Firefox has generated an enormous amount of interest among hardcore internet users around the world and for the first time has taken market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Goodger said the figures themselves varied depending on the source but US-based web training organisation W3Schools claimed IE 6.0 peaked in May of this year with 72.6 per cent market share among its "early adopter" users and had fallen back to 68.3 per cent in August.
That's the first time IE has declined in market share since its release and could mark the turning point for the browser community.
The mainstream audience is still firmly in the grasp of IE, however, with figures in excess of 90 per cent reported by several different organisations.
Most, however, report that IE is losing ground to Mozilla-based browsers and most of those switching are using Firefox.
In its first day of release the latest version of Firefox was downloaded more than 300,000 times.
So what is it about Firefox that's attracting users? Goodger said it was a combination of things.
"Some like the added features, some like the smaller size of the browser. It really depends."
Goodger is quick to point out that while Firefox is smaller than other browsers, that doesn't mean it's a "lite" version of a browser.
"It's fully featured. In fact if anything it's got more features that people use than many browsers."
Goodger and his team have been working with one goal in mind: to make a browser that makes the internet simple again.
"Do you remember how it was when you first went online? It was easier to search for things, easier to find things, there were fewer annoyances.
"That's what we want to get back to."
Goodger said Firefox gave users the chance to block pop-up windows, the bane of many users' lives, but went beyond that.
Because the browser was not tied in to the operating system, something Microsoft touted as a benefit for IE users, it was not prone to the same security vulnerabilities as IE.
"We also wanted to make the searching experience much easier for users."
Consequently Firefox has a Google search box built in and allows users to search within a web page simply by typing in the word they're looking for without having to launch a separate search box.
Goodger's favourite feature, however, is Firefox's smart keywords utility.
"It's something that's a little bit hidden so people have been slow to find it but when they do it blows them away."
Users might, for example, regularly use the company phone book online so Firefox allows them to add that search to their browser.
"So you can
More useful features, nice interface and CUSTOMIZABLE! Extensions are so good... but we'll have to see if it's too much for a simple end user.
My favorite one : WeatherFox! (URL:http://weatherfox.mozdev.org/). Crafteh (wish I knew his real name) developped this beauty following my suggestion on the MozillaZine forum and did an AWESOME job. Weather prediction anywhere in the world in your status bar... soooo usefull! Use it!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
For the record...
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard. Call it "outdated" if you like but if it works, it works, right? Isn't that the point of standards, you don't have to change them every time something new comes along?
We're hoping to move to XHTML in the future (sometime within the next year, for sure, I hope) but like everything else it goes on our priority list based on resource-cost and benefit. There are bugs that need to be squashed, meaningful features to be added, and performance improvements we need to put into place that come first.
Honestly XHTML will probably just save us a little bandwidth and make the site look a little prettier, but only the hardcore readers will notice the difference, at least if we do it right. The only real long-term benefit will be to us coders -- it should let us rip out kludgy old code, but of course that's almost as tedious as writing it in the first place, so it's a mixed win.
Yes, it's a mozilla bug, not a Slash code bug. They've known about it for a year, but it's fixed now, yay.
No, it doesn't help that someone else took a static rendering of our homepage and converted it to CSS. That's a fun experiment but of course it's very different to change the code to emit HTML to a different standard.
A shout out to Peter and Shane here for working on the XHTML theme :)
OK, resume flaming us and our sucky HTML, Offtopics all around! :)
That comment just doesn't reflect reality, DogDude.
Firefox blocks popups out of the box, doesn't support ActiveX at all, doesn't let you run EXE files directly without saving them first, isn't tied with explorer.exe, etc. How many sites do you know that have spyware which affects Firefox?
I know of none. Can you point me to any please? The only site I've come across which could cause issues is http://www.xpehbam.biz/5 which loads a java class which exploits the Microsoft JVM (NB: not Firefox), and installs a dialer. If you're running the SUN JVM, you are of course safe.
If you check the w3c validator, you will see it finds 129 errors (that may fluctuate due to the content, but there ARE errors).
Oh, and since you've BLOCKED the w3c validator, I had to go through a Coral Cache link.
Thanks for the info - I'm sure changing slashcode to emit anything else at all will be a big chunk of work, and that's fair enough! No gripes about that, but it'll be great when XHTML happens.
You really don't emit HTML 3.2 though - more like a a bastardized form of it. It fails horribly with the 3.2 validator here. And blocking the W3C Validator is a bit of a giveaway too, surely?
Well I can mention one anecdote. I was searching for a crack on astalavista, and one site that had an interesting file I wanted to check out, insisted through a dialog box, that I must click yes and install their firefox extension, before I will be allowed to download the file from their site. Of course I refused, so who knows what it was. Strangely enough, my virus checker reported start.exe contained a virus. Another app packaged with a different crack. Oh the joys of windows.
I suppose the lesson is don't run proprietary software that requires a crack. I think I'm going to setup a user for browsing and a user for mail on my linux box, so my home dir is safe in case I do something retarded, since even the brightest people can be boneheaded some of the time.
yeah... im guessing there's no templating engine in use or anything, given that the site hasnt changed in years. web-developers take heed, always use a templating engine so your html and code are separate. you'll be glad you did.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Despite slashdot's attempts to block the w3c validator, it's still quite trivial to run it against the source code.
File: Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters.htm
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 180
This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!
Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2.
Nice try, Jamie. That'd be why the W3C Validator reports 207 validation errors on Slashdot's front page, eh? The HTML is absolutely rancid with unbalanced start/end tags, it's a miracle anything renders it properly.
Of course, you've done your best to hide this, haven't you? If anyone wants to try plugging "http://slashdot.org" into that validator, you'll get a "403 Forbidden" error - yep, the fine folks at Slashdot have blocked the W3C from accessing the page. But save the HTML to a local file and validate that, it'll be most illuminating. You'll need to tell it to use encoding "iso-8859-1 (Western Europe)", since that's sent in the http headers rather than defined in the HTML code.
OK, resume flaming us and our sucky HTML
Did I do OK?
but then firefox changes the way it renders the page if you twiddle a nob? Shouldn't firefox consistently render it the same (broken) way every time?
In theory, yes. Unfortunately, there's a class of bugs called "reflow" bugs - reflow is basically the incremental rendering of pages as more of the HTML is downloaded.
When certain things happen at certain times, in certain orders, the layout ends up getting rendered incorrectly until you force a reflow (you can do this by changing the text size, resizing the window, etc).
The problem with these bugs is that they're very hard to track down. A lot of the time, you can't reproduce them on a [faster|slower] connection, and if the developers aren't experiencing it, they're stuck.
My server
No. It was a bug in Fire Fox.
There's two separate arguments going on here.
The first is "Is Firefox bugged?" and the answer was "Well, it was, but it was fixed." It depended on network timing, I think, because it was intermittent. There's also another aspect to this, which is that the bug was in bug quirk compatibility mode... so if Slashdot's HTML wasn't old crap, it would never have occured at all. But it was still a bug.
The second argument is "Is Slashdot generating valid HTML code?" The answer is "No." Jamie argues that it is valid, just HTML 3.2 instead of 4.0. However, anyone running the validator can prove this wrong easily -- it's not valid HTML 3.2, either. This isn't really that big a deal, since being technically correct was much less important in HTML 3.2, but it is always annoying to have someone bald face lie to you.
It may have been that slashdot was the only site to demonstrate the bug (I think it was in 0.7, but I could be wrong), but I doubt it. It was indeed a Firefox bug, and not just a bug in the Slashdot HTML. But that does not mean the Slashdot HTML is valid.
I hope that helps. This is confusing. :)
The only real long-term benefit will be to us coders
Not true - valid XHTML has other advantages. For example, it's much easier for devices such as PDAs and phones and programs such as screen readers to parse and make sense of. Bandwidth savings is also relevant to users. Some of us, sometimes, are on slow connections. It's been well proven that having a site respond faster, even when the response is under a second to start with, makes the user experience much better.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
I hadn't either - until I just read about them and tried them out.
...". Then give it a name and a keyword (eg. dic). Now all you have to do is type 'dic anthropomorphic' in the URL box and Firefox will go to dictionary.com and look up the word for you.
Go to a site that has an input box for doing a search (eg. dictionary.com). Right click in the input box and select "Add a keyword for this search
I've been using it for 1/2 hour and I'm hooked. This will save heaps of time here at work. Eg 'pb joe' to look up joe in the phonebook on the intranet - no need to go to the page.
I've tried converting some people to Firefox before. I haven't had much luck (tabbed browsing etc didn't do it for them - go figure.) But it seems like this feature might just do it for one of my colleagues.
Also note, there should be a bookmark in you 'Quick Searches' bookmark folder that will give more info.
Firefox Setup 1.0PR.exe - 4,742,005 bytes
Opera 7.54 - ow32enen754.exe - 3,666,195 bytes
People should stop comparing Firefox to IE, that's really unfair, its like comparing a power-plant based on nuclear fuel with one based on coal. It is a difference in age.
However when we compare Firefox with Opera we can clearly see that Opera is a smaller download, it includes a very smart (the smartest I've used) email client, a news reader and an IRC client.
The day when Firefox/Mozilla will have a email client as smart as Opera's M2 and it will be every bit as accessible as it is now M2 is the day I will consider switching. Till that day I'll still be an Opera fan with all the other browser installed as an alternative.