Slashdot Mirror
Planning For Mozilla 2.0
wikinerd writes "The MozillaWiki maintains a number of pages on Mozilla 2.0 which reveals lots of possible new features of the popular browser. What does your wishlist include about Mozilla 2.0, and how has the release of Firefox affected your use of Mozilla?"
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Use standard GNU autoconf for the builds. Get rid of all the code that says things like "#ifdef HPUX ... then do this and that and this and that because HP's C++ compiler (no, not that one, the other one... and that specific version, too!) can't make a negative zero or some such tomfoolery ... #endif". When I try to build Firefox 1.0 (One Point Fucking Oh!) on HP-UX 10.20 it falls over and dies because I'm not using HP's C++ compiler... nor the other one... and especially not that version... I'm using gcc! What do you think I am, an idiot? Why would I use anything but gcc/g++?
But it's worse than that. A few simple platform-checking #ifdefs could be fixed, the code converted into autoconf checks and replaced with HAS_FOO macros... but no. The build tree isn't even a tree -- it's a fucking forest! There are like 17 different build trees, each one gnarly and moss-covered and subtly (or not so subtly) different from the next, all plastered together into one shambling mass of code. Some of the sub-trees hard code ld -foo -bar -ZxCvB commands instead of invoking $(CXX) to be the linker. Some of them hard code cc as the compiler instead of using $(CC). I shit you not. Oh, and you can't type "make" in a sub-trees to build just that sub-tree. You have to start all over from the top level. After a few days, I gave up.
It's bad, folks. Really, really bad.
I'd be embarrassed to release something like that as a 1.0 version. 0.6 alpha 2? Sure thing, no problem. But 1.0 is supposed to be finished.
P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a "you must accept cookies in order to see this site" message, and had to pull up a page's HTML source code just to try to find out what address the cookie was coming from.
Firefox is ahead of IE on so many levels, but is years behind on this one.
support Active X controls under Windows
NO!! NO!! NO!!
Active X is the worst security model anyone could think of. Not having active X support is the #1 feature of Mozilla/Firefox. You can say tabbed browsing, better png support, etc all you want, but not having active X support is the number one reason it's better than IE at keeping spyware off of clueless user's computer. Clicking yes/no is not a good security model.