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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."
What, they want to take the joy out of life? What about all past gloating; surely there is enough of that - enough to more than make up for any future gloating deficit.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
This from the guy who helped bring us Lotus Notes? Perhaps YOU should be more cautious about ignoring the requests of your user base.
/me hits F9 to refresh
Oh the irony:
He says not to gloat about firefox's success, then he uses it is a standard he wants to meet.
I like Windows XP Home Edition.
... plus even more!"
It is the most powerful operating-system for Pee Cees. It looks not as gay as Mac OS X by Steve B10 Jobs and has 1,0000,0000 times more softwares that the Linus-operating-system.
Plus, it comes with every Pee Cee for free. People who have grown acusstomt to paying RatHat 699 $$$ or more can hardly beleive this when I consult them with my proffesional Internet- and Network-Service-Center-Bureau.
Wehn I have a new customer, I take him to the back-room to show him the "alternative" to XP Home, which is Suse Linux 9.0.
I have set-up an old Pentium 133Hz and a small monochrome monitor to show teh customer what Linux looks and feels like.
I have it set-up so it runs a fullscreen-Flash-splash-screen on the KDE3.3beta-desktop. It takes 13 min until the mouse cursor responds.
The customer will them make a sound like: "BAH!"
Then I tell them: "See, this is how it is if we let the communists make software."
Then we have a good laugh, wich is psycologicallish valuable for the customer-relatively.
I always tell them:
"Windows XP Home Edition is all you can do to embiggen the producationality of your human resourcers and empower to leverage the outcome-bottomlime of your stickholder
My customers usually are like: "OMG!"
You should really try it one day; it has a very nice light-reddish color theme to hit your tastes.
Thank you!
I want his opinion on Thunderbird-Sunbird integration.
The unofficial
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.
What's not to like?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's healthy to have goals.
The unofficial
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?
Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?
How we know is more important than what we know.
...like basic PR. Try picking a name for your software that doesn't suck ass.
Cool: Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla
Gay: Chandler, Bob, Opera
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.
Well, I keep seeing people claim Opera is bloated, but how are you measuring bloat?
I generally think of bloated applications based on a few criteria:
1) Big download/space takes up: Is Opera a big download?
No, it's 3.5MB, including a flash plugin. FF is 4.7MB at my last check.
2) Slow to use: Is Opera slow?
No, it's far faster than IE, and at worst the same speed as FireFox on my machine.
3) Memory use: Does Opera use a lot of memory?
Not in the release versions on my machine...
Opera uses on average 22MB of RAM - not much on modern desktop machines, and I can of course turn off the "Use all available RAM" setting.
4) Has so many features they get in the way: Does Opera have so many features they get in the way?
Maybe. The level of customization lets me pare Opera 7.54 down to the way 5.12 looked, just a browser.
For others however, they might use some of the features I don't, or all.
The issue here is that the features don't get in the way - you can quickly turn them off, or move them around.
Frankly, #4 is all I can figure people mean when they refer to Opera as bloated, and it's really a misleading statement. It's at least as easy to remove things from Opera's interface as it is to find, download and install extensions to FireFox.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
- 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.
Why? To attract attention on him? The article was interresting in itself, it didnt deserve that kind of tricks.
He barely talk about cautiousness in ONE sentence in ONE paragraph in a 2 PAGES article!
Nobody knows what's going to happen. It's certainly not inevitable that Firefox's market share will continue to increase. I think open-source advocates would do well to be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions.
He isnt even talking about gloating!!!
...and I think there will be sufficient interest in Chandler among people who don't to make the project successful.
Many people in the organization I work for use a program called Goldmine to help them maintain contact with sizable networks of people. Goldmine is one of a suprisingly small number of programs that provide person-centric organization of information. In one view, you can see a person's contact information plus all the phone calls, appointments and email communication with that person. Once you've used a system like this, a plain-old PIM (in which email, contact info, and appointments are all stored separately) just won't cut it.
Unfortunately, Goldmine is Windows-only. We've replaced almost all of our other Windows apps with ones that run in Linux, but at the moment there is no viable Goldmine replacement. Consequently, we're watching Chandler with eagerness.
Mitch Kapor warns against gloating?? MITCH KAPOR??? Mitch Kapor telling someone not to gloat is like a crack fiend telling.. Wait, who the hell is Mitch Kapor, and what's this Lotus you speak of?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Ok i'm going to gloat... I have had this install of windows going for about 4-5 months. I have used Firefox for nearly everything web page related. I did load up IE once or twice to check a few things out. I haven't ran a spyware removal app since I installed windows... today my computer was running slow (something about the large 350mb tv shows i'm downloading i think) ... so i decided to run adaware.. it found 18 "files" all data mining and IE related. That was all the spyware my machine had gotten in 4-5 months use by using firefox.. i think that speaks for itself
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
I have a question about Lotus. Why is there no Linux version? Do you know our company (~80 boxes) is entirely windows, due only to lotus notes (6.5.3) and ERP system being Windows only. Lotus is even part of IBM now, which spends over $1 billion on Linux annually.
Domino runs on Linux, great. But we use Notes quite heavily, lots of custom databases, pda apps, custom apps etc, so iNotes is out of the question. We really are paying alotta microsoft tax only because of the ERP system which is 'promising' linux binaries, and lotus, which claims no plans yet. Its mostly java-based anyway, just compile it for Linux for each version minor number, its not too much work.
I can volunteer time.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Actually, I dispute that. Most people that claim it's more secure say that it's because of the amount of vulnerabilities being found in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox. How many people are looking for unknown vulnerabilities in IE? How many are looking at Mozilla/Firefox? This is determined by the media. When there's a MS vulnerability, it's all over the news and the finder gets a ton of glory and hopeful job offers. I see MS patches making it into mainstream news such as the Associated Press. As Firefox gets a spotlight because of a good amount of security professionals (Which happen to be coders with a personal agenda) recommending people switch, I've seen an increase in the amount of vulnerabilities reported. Don't believe me? Look at the stats and compare IE with Firefox. Yes, IEs numbers are higher, but think in proportion to how many skilled people are looking for vulnerabilities in each product. If you look at the different versions of Mozilla over the timeline they give, you can see that not many vulnerabilities were found early last year or before that compared to when Firefox really started to get attention. Imagine how many vulnerabilities would be found if they got the amount of media attention that IE vulns get. Until both products get the same amount of hacker attention, it's premature to say which is more secure.
As a security professional, I believe that as long as you keep your software patched up (computers, routers, switches, etc.), your only fear is a zero day. Hopefully you have other layers of security such as a border firewall, IPSec Transport mode with packet filtering at every host, multiple antivirus vendors software (with at least one of them configured to block password protected archives, known dangerous file types and dangerous content), ongoing training, locked down servers with all the fat trimmed, middle tier servers, etc. These things are not vendor specific. You can run Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris and still be able to do these things. Assuming you have all that set up, one zero day most likely wouldn't be enough. If someone really wants in and you've done all these things, do you really think you're going to get "pwned" because you chose a specific vendor or software package? No. You're going to get pwned because someone will be social engineered or some aspect of physical security will be bypassed. It's a hell of a lot easier to get into a company by phishing than it is to hunt down a couple silver bullet zero days as you get through each layer of security. My point is that if someone wants to get in, they can do it. It only takes a few holes at most and enough patience to find them to get to a target. It's up to the admin to ensure that it's as difficult as possible to find them and to ensure that the damage is minimized. Auditing (logging), backups, intrusion detection, policies, procedures, security assessments, a good data structure with granular permissions, etc can help minimize impact.
My professional opinion is that it just doesn't matter what you use as long as it's well administered, but if you want to force me to pick one side and guess which code has less vulnerabilities, I'm going to pick MS. Security through obscurity isn't a magic elixir, but it's definitely another layer of protection. And with all the attention MS gets, they've had an opportunity to patch up a lot of their vulnerabilities. At this point, new vulns are probably easier to find on other vendors that aren't as popular.
-Lucas
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.
Salesman: "Nothing makes you feel more like a man than a Thundercougarfalconbird."
But I always thought the goal for Chandler was to have sex with Phoebe?
Well, I'll be honest, I've only ever used FF for about 5 minutes, so I don't know if this is typical for the program.
IE for me tends to pause before displaying the page. On broadband, it's an annoying splitsecond wait for no good reason. On dial up, it's an average of 30 seconds staring at a blank screen.
IE also seems to ALWAYS reload a page when you go back to it, or forward to it.
Now, comparing to Opera (which I use far more), I have no white screen display with Opera. SOMETHING is displayed immediately, on either connection speed. And Opera will show most or all of the text of a page, even if the images are still downloading.
Back and forward are instant. I was just there, why would Opera reload the page? It even keeps the dialogue box entries that I've filled in, so if I accidentally click off of the page, I don't lose everything.
Now, with FF I can only comment on the page loading... It seemed similar to Opera. The rest IDK as I'm happy with Opera.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
From a distant perspective, Chandler looks like it's trying to be an Outlook or Evolution clone. If you think that's what's being attempted, the progress certainly hasn't been exciting.
Innovation is very much in the eye of the beholder, but Chandler's main "new" feature is its repository. It's there, it works.
Fundamentally, Chandler isn't trying to copy Outlook. It's a lot easier to copy than to create something really new. No disrespect intended towards the Ximian folks, they've done great work. But developing new standards and new architectures is really, really hard work, no one appreciates it until it's too late to change anything.
It would be interesting to compare the first 3 years' budgets of Ximian and OSAF. I expect that while OSAF started with more money in the bank, it wasn't paying that many coders until the last year or two.
While I agree with you that the Chandler team's initial vision didn't start as focused as it needed to get, your examples are really odd.
A once sentence description of Chandler might be, "A PIM that shares data between users with very low barrier to entry and allows data to be any combination of notes, tasks, events, and messages".
My memory is that RDF got thrown out pretty much right away, which is why it seems like an odd example to me. Besides, RDF still makes sense as an export target for a lot of Chandler's data, Chandler and RDF both allow for arbitrarily linked trees of information.
Jabber (XMPP) was (and still is) on the table because it's an IETF standard for instant messaging. XMPP's a very appealing way to do application level message passing.
Full disclosure: I do work for OSAF
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
*AHEM*?
If you are referring to Gecko (which I believe you are), AFAIK it most certainly does _not_ break the DOM; rather, it is the stupid and poorly written JS and CSS tricks you describe which use proprietary DOM features available from a certain rendering engine...
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
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.