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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."
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.
...like basic PR. Try picking a name for your software that doesn't suck ass.
Cool: Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla
Gay: Chandler, Bob, Opera
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.
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.
"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.
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.