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Mitch Kapor Warns Against Firefox Gloating
An anonymous reader writes "Mitch Kapor, Lotus co-founder and president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, says open-source advocates should be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions despite the huge success of Firefox. He also briefly touches on Chandler in a ZDNet interview. Chandler is OSAF's personal information manager which will offer e-mail, calendaring, address and task management. The goal for Chandler, Kapor says, is to make it as successful and popular as Firefox."
Jeez, and you thought the endless dupes was bad! Now we are getting ads for vaporware products masquerading as news items by simply throwing in some open source flamebait in the title and description.
I think the main thing Firefox has to worry about is bloating itself up too big like Opera did. I remember when Opera was nice and streamlined, now it's too bloated for its own good.
I doubt Firefox is going to "fizzle" out. I think the only thing that the developers need to keep an eye on is security.
As Firefox becomes more popular it is going to become a bigger target for exploits. I think it has really yet to be seen how secure Firefox is and how quickly fixes will be released.
I know of several "exploits" that at the very least crash FF 1.0, so it isn't the be-all end-all of browsers quite yet. It is however the best browser out there right now, in my opinion.
Just my 2 cents.
That's not necessarily gloating, just being proud of your accomplishments. He also said how there is no guarantee that Firefox will increase in popularity. I think he's just being "cautiously optimistic" as people like to say now.
He owned the spreadsheet market and saw it lost to Microsoft through no fault of his own. (He'd left Lotus by then)
However, he was never able to experience the same success. No matter how much hype and support his subsequent projects had, they never panned out in the long run.
FireFox could very much be the same thing. It's a long way from 2% market share to 98%.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18 KJV
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
...like basic PR. Try picking a name for your software that doesn't suck ass.
Cool: Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla
Gay: Chandler, Bob, Opera
He says not to gloat about firefox's success, then he uses it is a standard he wants to meet.
Should you gloat about winning the lottery? No.
Would I like to win the lottery? Yes.
Popularity is absolutely the wrong goal. How about Effectiveness and small footprint? How about Easy-to-use without intrusive "value-added" bloat? How about standards compliance and a powerful, open plugin interface? Any of those would make great goals. But popularity? I sincerely hope that popularity isn't the primary goal of most open-source projects.
As long as this project doesn't settle for a 'new standard,' I say gloat away. Keep firefox worth gloating about by continuing commitment to openness, security and functionality. Make THAT the standard.
Kapor's put a lot of time, money, and probably other resources into open source. They are many who just talk a good game, and then there are others like Kapor who put millions into open source.
But hey, don't let that get in the way of a perfectly good lynching.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
1. As previous posters pointed out, CTRL-N works. It's even listed in the menu with the rest.
2. The "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder can be removed by manually editing bookmarks.html in your profile directory.
Someone really should gin up a menu item in the bookmark manager to designate an arbitrary folder as the toolbar, and allow removal of the default.
That said, I have recently started using the bookmark bar after years of dispassionately ignoring it - and you know what? it's actually very useful for keeping commonly used links (i.e. webmail, ticketing system and admin pages at work) and RSS feeds. Give it a shot, you might even like it.
3. IE-specific sites are broken, not firefox. complain to the people that spit out the poor markup.
4. two options- either change your keyboard to launch firefox with the URIs as arguments (firefox.exe -remote "openURL http://foo") or complain at logitech to fix their software to pass the URIs to the OS' default handler. The blame here lies solely with them.
Firefox will not fizzle out as long as the developers keep on their toes and change. If you do not innovate you lose, we are in the technology world now, innovation is everything, see Google? Look how fast they became successful, and for what? Innovation. Microsoft, same thing: Innovation.
The FF devs need to balance innovation with security (something, I must say, Google does perfectly and Microsoft fails at) because that is Firefox's strong promotional point: Security, and because innovation is simply key to the tech world.
All I can say is, keep on promoting Firefox, donate, support them, and most of all, REPORT BUGS... Granted, they get a sh*t load of bug reports, so, only report the good/not already reported ones.
- 1. OSS Developer writes code in spare time to scratch an itch, other developers join in the fun.
- 2. A Company decides to open source an existing commercial product, open source developers join to build on the existing code.
While paying developers to work on an EXISTING open source project does work, paying developers to CREATE an open source does not. What happens? Millions of dollars in foundation money and feature creep at an unimaginable scale.I hope Chandler overcomes these odds, but the future doesn't look bright unless their is a major turnaround. Firefox 0.1 was 10x more usable than Chandler 0.5.
Actually, it is. The primary purpose of open-source programming is most likely to signal potential employers that the programmer has real skill. It looks good on a resume and separates a programmer from other programmers without such skills. As such, popularity is the primary goal of an open source project.
"How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?"
Yeah, what mozilla needs is more people that work on the UI. That'll really help.
Seriously though, the problem with UI in most FOSS apps (and certainly in mozilla) is not a lack of people that know how to create patches for the UI. The lack is in people that know how to design good UI. Actually, i'd think this is true in comercial apps too.
In fact, one of the design-goals for the organisation behind FireFox, have fewer UI designers. This was because the old mozilla suit suffered from the classic too-many-chefs problem when it came to the UI.
The problem with UI is that it's very easy to have an oppinion about it, but it's much harder to do it right. While FireFox and many other applications are getting better, what the FOSS world desperatly needs is more professional UI designers and more professional level testing of UI. Computers are still desperatly hard to use, mostly because of bad UI.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
Predict massive gains by extrapolating from a very recent improvement in a very small segment of your market.
Keep boasting about the features your product has that your competitor doesn't. Remind everyone that they need those specific features.
Keep telling the "journalists" out there about how your product handles the same tasks better than the competition. Faster. Smaller footprint. Better security. Easier administration.
If someone hasn't heard of your product, they aren't going to try your product.
Get out there and GLOAT.
But I always thought the goal for Chandler was to have sex with Phoebe?
Besides, which is more likely to lead to improvements? A sense of quiet pride tempered by some humility, or a superiorist attitude that Firefox is "da shiznat."
Projects that play catch-up (as happened for the first while) tend to go faster up to the point where they are more secure in themselves. Firefox is past the point of catch-up in many ways, but hopefully it will continue to show new features/improvements so that it can continue to become even greater, rather than maintaining a short lead.
The promise
I remember when Chandler was first mooted. Finally an open souce project that has a vision of how to store and communicate small bits of information. Traditionally these types of applications have been lumped together with *ugly* (but accurate) acronymn, PIM.
Free the data
This is an important step in applications. Historically data is trapped or obfusticated into applications. Once you enter the data in it you can only get at it by jumping through the fire breathing coding hoops. Ocassionally its open souce (mozilla mork) but commercial applications take this to a new level - (think MS Outlook Express).
Updated Agenda? /.'s this is not the first crack Mitch has had at this market. In '88 Mitch Kapor (father of Lotus 123, Notes) Agenda was released into the PIM market to some success. The runs are on the board. Could Chandler be the answer?
For the younger
Release early and often
Well after 0.4 release I dont see anything compelling. It has trouble working on Windows, it's monolithic and appears to be *weighed* down in specifications of how to do things rather than results. Chandler looks good on paper but in clumping email, calandering, PIM and other messaging it has lost for me its original appeal. I want it usable now. Even if it is a little bit at a time. For me like its name sake (Raymond) I'm still searching for a usable application.
Alternative
So there you have it I've trashed a computer industry veteran who has runs on the board but has failed to deliver. Whats an alternative. Well one example is a Gnome app called Tomboy. Its a simple mono, GTK based note taking applet that is searchable. It allows you to click on links according to mime types and load an application. It has spell checking (along with references to various IBM patents). But the single kicker that has moved Tomboy into my sights is the integration of Tomboy with Evolution (unix version that mirrors crappy Outlook in too may ways) and Beagle The Gnome desktop is now using Tomboy as the *PIM* input and building a plugin to Evolution (email, calander), Beagle (searching). So bit by bit it's making Chandler less attractive to me.
lessons
It helps to have access to an open souce platform. Release often and early. Build an application (especially a first version) to do one thing and do it well. Get a result. Dont bloat a product with features if it is not vital and work out how can you work with other applications. Tomboy may only have a short shelf life or morph into something else in as it develops but it works right now and does the job.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Problem is, Lucas, is that you have more to fear than a zero day when you have a lot of bugs in a certain product...that go months before they are patched or even ACKNOWLEDGED by the vendor.
Odd because I know a lot of people who are switching and they're not computer junkies and they're telling their friends to switch. The computer illiterate are now spreading the goodness. I don't care if IE comes preloaded on 9 out of 10 computers, success isn't measured in number of computers something is on. It's measured by how the fans, or the users, enjoy the product. To me, if it makes the lives of 100 people better then it's successful. And Firefox is successful for the millions who use it. Sure it's a minority, but it's pretty damn successful if you ask me and it will continue to be successful.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/