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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."
1. Firefox takes over IE's spot as top browser
2. Firefox renders slashdot correctly, since this is the site that promotes it the most.
Keep up the good work!
And Firefox 1.0 PR has already hit a half million downloads. Way to go!
That's not spyware. That's multiple IE windows :)
Aww, Mozilla, the touchy feely browser. It hugs my resources!
1) Take 90% of browser market share
2) Integrate into Windows Explorer and tell judges it can't be ripped out
My best sig is this one.
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
...just cracks me up. "Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future"
It just sounds DIRTY... If there was some guys Goodger in my future, I'd certainly try to do something about it...
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
In terms of features, I don't see why anyone would NOT use firefox. You could call things like tabs, quick searches and easily accesible plugins "innovative features," but its not really that innovative, if you think about it. Its just obvious. Microsoft's IE is just a way to look at web pages. Period. No customization.
Congrats to the Mozilla folks for thinking out of the box and trying to create something that users wanted.
What's wrong with Ponsonby or Remuera - much classier. Or Manukau, Otahuhu, Papatoetoe - much more authentic. They could offer a porn-optimised version of Firefox codenamed "K-Road".
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
One cool thing about Firefox is support for extensions, extra search engines, etc. Totally configurable and that's the kind of users it's going for.
If firefox is to hit mainstream, some of the more popular plugins need to be incorporated directly into the product. At the very least, offer for download a chunky version with lots of stuff already installed. But even that won't cut it. Some features, like tabbed browsing, can't just be added on as extensions because they interact badly with other extensions.
Also, there are backward-compatibility problems with each new release. Developers of open-source extensions aren't going to keep updating their work, so supporting at least the more important extensions should be considered essential from a release perspective, and perhaps they should be incorporated into the core project where possible.
There's nothing wrong with an extension arhcitecture per se. In fact, they have worked very well in open source, e.g. Eclipse and Linux. And that's true for firefox too. However, the management of extensions requires careful consideration. In Firefox's case, there's room for improvement.
(BTW maybe this has nothing to do with the interview but it's slashdotted, that's my excuse for waffling on.)
.........that we (hypothetically) could lock down IE using policies so that IE could *only* browse intranet sites. Then install Firefox as the "Internet Browser". He said it would be too much administration for our PC support group.
:)
I came back with, "More administration than cleaning and recleaning spyware and adware from users' machines on a daily basis? Symantec and Adaware are supposed to come out with a corporate solution in Q2-05 at the cost of roughly $20-30 a seat. This would cost us nothing but the time we spend orchestrating a rollout."
I could see the gears turning, which was encouraging.
-Randy
These things are of course a matter of personal preference, but I find that the innovations in Firefox are almost invariably sensible and useful.
All too often software developers add things that seem good to them, but which the end user finds irritating or just confusing. Opera is a good case in point, with lots of gee whiz cool features that I just never got around to using. That has never happened to me with Mozilla or Firefox.
It seems that with every release I'll find some new little feature that suddenly becomes essential, or at least enhances my browsing experience in some nice way, but without detracting from other things.
The latest was the search bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen when searching in the page. How brilliant! After years of search boxes popping up on top of the text that you're reading, someone figured to drop it in a place that wasn't intrusive.
Sure, there are still things that I would like changed - like moving more of the configuration away from the "about:" system, but all in all I just like Firefox and find that its greatest feature is that it doesn't get in my way - it just does the job and lets me concentrate on content.
Three Squirrels
The main reason I was so interested in firefox to begin with (and the same reason I use it today), was that it focused on trimming out the unnecessary stuff from Mozilla. This makes startup/respopnse time much quicker. It used to take +/- 15 seconds to start mozilla, as opposed to +/- 3 seconds for firefox. Granted, I always run on older hardware, but still.
The other contenders for a fast browser (konqueror and opera) don't render pages correctly a lot of the time. Konqueror's KDE daemons make it slower to start up. Opera's banners make it rather annoying to use.
Alright, it's make fun of Techefnet's comments day! Here we go...
Thats so unfear.
Techefnet does not fear the undead, but he sure unfears the dead!
That sucked. Damn. Forget I said anything...
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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.
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
I hate to burst YOUR bubble, but your statement seems to fly in the face of certain hard facts, as underscored by the chronic microsoft ie specific security woes which have buffeted microsoft users for the past few years.
While there's no panacea, and this is no time to relax our security vigilance, there's no question that firefox is a much safer choice of browser than ie - to deny that is just plain silly.
The number one reason I switched to Firefox is the LiveHTTPHeaders extension. This handy little gadget docks in your sidebar and displays outgoing HTTP requests and incoming responses in real time. It's a must for anyone who works with server side application technologies, load balancing, content switching, or caching. Good stuff.
Oh, yeah, the pop-up blocking is great too, so is tabbed browsing.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
Will never catch on with the neophytes running Windows unless popular plugins install with a single button click and work seamlessly. Any idea why the Flash photo galleries on the USA Today site keep prompting me to reinstall Flash even though version 7.0.14.0 is already installed with Firefox/Win2K.
I've installed Firefox on the computers of two relatives, both have inquired about the problems rendering USA Today's contents. Unable to solve the problem I had to tell them to use IE. Yuck! I will gladly forego using photo galleries on USA Today in favor of using this browers but others won't.
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.
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.
I'm an undergrad that saw both the Firefox and Linux light. I'm now prostletyzing for both.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
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!
I know this is bound to light a fire under a few peoples pants, but most of TBE (Tabbrowser Extensions) really should be stuffed into Firefox itself. It's just got too many good features to be totally left in the cold as an "extension". It's one of the two extensions I consider critical to my 'Zilla browsing experience (the other one being All-in-One Gestures, because mouse gestures are, to quote a friend, "teh fucking pwn")
Lemmy start a small laundry list of TBE's perks though:
-Single window mode (EVERYTHING opens in a new tab)
-Drag & Drop tab rearranging (its just common sense)
-Undo close tab (possibly the BEST feature of the entire extension. I use it daily)
-Modifyable tab bar (move it around, scroll it, make it double layered, etc)
-Customized tab behavior for new links (hypertext/bookmarks/history/javascript/external apps/etc: choose if they open a new window, tab, or load in an existing one. Very nice for steamlining your browsing experience.)
-Tab grouping (including pretty colours!)
-Tab locking (lock a tab to a specific page)
-Auto reloading of tabs
I could go on and on... TBE is like everything AND the damn kitchen sink (which is why some people seem to have a seething hatred of it). Really though, would it kill Mozilla to add just a few of the more popular features? I know extensions are supposed to be this big, grand, wonderful idea, but I think a LOT more people (especially average joe's) would be appreciative rather than pissed off to have a couple more handy dandy features. You've got to remember that if you want your browser to go mainstream, its got to have a bit of a "smack you in the face" slant for all the little old ladies and joe-sixpacks out there that aren't gonna spend an hour sifting through the extension library. Leave the "OMG my browzer has NO bloat n' runs 1.00283% fastr on my AMD becuz I compiel'd it myself" to the geeks who know and love that kind of stuff.
Just my $0.02 anyways. In the meantime i'm just gonna keep loving the hell out of this browser. Firefox RULES! \o/
It has nothing to do with "scaling well", doing a full conversion of a major dynamic site from old HTML and tables to XHTML/CSS is a lot harder than changing one flat page.
Grr. Armchair web developers are so frustrating.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
This is potentially the beginning of a huge change in the way advertising works on the internet. As people get turned on to Gecko, they will get turned on to features like AdBlock. If Gecko captures 50% market share, you can bet many of those people are viewing neither ads nor unwanted Flash content, if they're anything like me.
Does this mean an huge impending change in the way advertising works on the internet? Will companies like the NYT, who make a lot of money from ads, start embedding advertisements in ways such that AdBlocking them with regexp filters would also block out the non-ad images?
This has been happening for quite some time. Like years.
:(
Sites (like Yahoo, IGN etc) are already making you step through ad pages before seeing content. Sometimes you can block that too, but sometimes not.
The more we fight against ads, the more annoying and intrusive the ads will become
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Try blocking port80, that should get most of them. If that doesn't work, try port 21 as well.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
I myself know of Adblock - but I choose not to use it. Sites that have ads that are too annoying to use, I just don't use.
I'd rather have sites stay around longer because they are supported by advertising revenue. I don't mind a few ads as a price, and I would mind whatever payment scheme would have to replace them.
But that's just my personal stance. In the larger sense, I think that the populace at large does not care about ads so much that they seek out blocking solutions, or would even go to the effort of using an ad blocker if they could. After all, the US populace is exposed to ads so often we are just about blind to them anyway.
Popups are a differnt matter as they generate constant unpleasant irritation, and people do go to great lengths to eliminate irritations from their lives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't have specific sites. Random porn sites that are transitory, most DEFINATELY have various trojans. Firefox lets them through, and my virus checker (http://free-av.com) picks them up. All kinds of trojans. Granted, there are probably fewer because Active X doesn't work, but depending on how much time I spend surfing, I average catching between 1-3 trojans a day that come by way of Firefox.
If you average catching between 1-3 trojans a day that come by the way of Firefox, which of course means you aren't CHOOSING to download these files (that would be no fault of the browser), then surely you'll be able to come up with specific sites and post them here for us to see.
Otherwise it's just pure BS.
It's much, much, *much* more likely that you're getting these trojans through a completely different source and just blaming Firefox. You could have some other resident, hidden trojans that are downloading these things; remember that with XP and 2000 (I assume you're using one of them), once you have one trojan or worm, the floodgates are open for more to install themselves. Some will download porn adware, and some will even generate pop-up ads, hoping that you the user will think it's your browser. These trojans could even get through via a different machine on your local network if you have one, or if you have a poorly secured DSL router.
i was going to blame /. for the way the web site renders in Firefox.
,its actually firefox.
/. since its HTML is not valid.
/. or shall i play safe and blame MicroSoft.
Then i read that its not Slashdot
Then i read that it actually is
So can i continue blaming
many thanks for your invaluable opinions.
Wanted : A Signature.
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.
While I wholeheartedly agree to the spirit of your comments, I think they need addressing.
1) Yes it's a hack. Yes it's better to actually find the cause of the problem. I hate hacks as much as the next guy - but to the user it would solve all these "reflow bugs" easily and simply. There is nothing to stop them being fixed in the background and for this hack to eventually be taken out. But to a user, if a page looks screwed up, and it doesn't in internet explorer, it's firefox's fault.
Make it a preference that defaults to on, make all pages render correctly today, and worry about performance improvements later.
Functionality beats performance anytime.
2) I would suggest the refresh be double buffered, and just swap buffers when it's done. The page will take the same time to load, but after x (the time it takes it refresh the page) ms, the page will also look right.
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.
Deprecation is not a matter of opinion in the world of webstandards
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 offer exactly the same capabilities, only XHTML offers ease of use inside XSLT based publishing systems. Anyone else might just as well go on writing HTML 4.01.
What matters is that you write valid HTML, and that you separate style and structure, farming out all presentation to the linked style sheet. So I agree with the sentiment to use 'Strict with CSS'.
I see a lot of invalid XHTML on the web, where the use transitional or proprietary markup like 'topmargin' and 'center'. I always wonder, why did they add those slashes? What's the point?
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson