Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the web-surfing-made-safe-again dept.

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."

24 of 470 comments (clear)

  1. My Wishlist for FireFox by The_Rippa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by Trillan · · Score: 5, Funny

      An easier wish might be "Slashdot updates its HTML for 2001."

    2. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      2. Firefox renders slashdot correctly, since this is the site that promotes it the most.

      No, the IT theme is meant to be like that

    3. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I always wondered about that... in Firefox .10PR (and in previous version I used) Slashdot's main content area overlaps or runs flush with the left nav. No padding, no margin, whatever. I remember reading articles on A List Apart about redoing Slashdot, which made me wonder why this was still happening.

      Is this a problem with Firefox or with Slashdot?

      As for Firefox taking the #1 spot, I would love to see that. There are a few things I've had difficulty achieving in Firefox that work in IE, but none of them are necessary (collapsing DIV when display set to none, for example).

      One day, my boss will choke on his "we should just design for Microsoft IE and if it doesn't work in your Mozilla then maybe you shouldn't use it." Bastard.

    4. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by recursiv · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's well known (by me, and for no good reason at that) that they don't use CSS because they think HTML should be enough for any web page. After all, everyone knows that CSS is for LiveJournal lusers to set their scroll bar colors, and could not possibly have any practical application. Real men use tables for layout, and that's that. A real programmer would never prefer CSS's long spelled out english words like border-color in favor of HTML's ULs and TDs. People who use CSS to obtain some result that could be possible with straight HTML are obviously being inefficient. They are probably wasting several bytes on those long, spelled out words.
      The content is the only thing matters is the content anyway. If it's so bad, why don't you make your own front end for the RSS feed? That's the true Open Source way! Plus, what if someone tries to access /. in Netscape Navigator 3.0. It will surely choke on the CSS, and give some unpredictable result.

      Better safe than sorry.

      --
      I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
    5. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by AnyoneEB · · Score: 5, Informative
      Put simply, it's a FF rendering bug which we've had for ages
      So, wait, it's a bug in slashdot's code, 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?
      It's a FireFox bug. Changing the font size forces FireFox to rerender the page, resulting in a correct render. IIRC, the problem has something to do with threading in the render during load feature. The bug has been fixed in the .10 trunk, but, as far as I know, no one has announced either way on it being part of v1.0.
      --
      Centralization breaks the internet.
    6. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by CTho9305 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    7. Re:My Wishlist for FireFox by Trillan · · Score: 5, Informative

      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. :)

  2. Only 3 days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    And Firefox 1.0 PR has already hit a half million downloads. Way to go!

    1. Re:Only 3 days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Of course, I personally downloaded 300,000 of them myself, just to stuff the ballot box, so to speak... :-) :-)

  3. Re:firefox by Jeff+Mahoney · · Score: 5, Funny

    Aww, Mozilla, the touchy feely browser. It hugs my resources!

  4. That title... by over_exposed · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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
  5. Firefox v. IE by dan_sdot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Why those suburbs? by CynicalGeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    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".

  7. Firefox IE by FiReaNGeL · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  8. Re:Process for Takeover by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    >It'd be interesting if MS started including Firefox instead of IE

    Yeah, it'd also be interesting if Hell started importing ice.

  9. Better handling of extensions by fastdecade · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)

  10. GOOD Improvements by rueger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  11. mozilla browser was bloated, firefox is not by geekschmoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:Won't help by seizer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. LiveHTTPHeaders by john_anderson_ii · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!
  14. What happens to the net when everyone has AdBlock? by Pausanias · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  15. Re:Won't help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  16. Who should i blame then... by Insipid+Trunculance · · Score: 5, Funny

    i was going to blame /. for the way the web site renders in Firefox.

    Then i read that its not Slashdot ,its actually firefox.

    Then i read that it actually is /. since its HTML is not valid.

    So can i continue blaming /. or shall i play safe and blame MicroSoft.

    many thanks for your invaluable opinions.

    --
    Wanted : A Signature.