Slashdot Mirror
Problems With the Firefox Development Process
An anonymous reader writes "Mike
Connor, one of the core Firefox
developers, is raising a flag concerning the Mozilla Firefox
methodology of development. From his blog: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in
trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews." In an earlier
entry, he raised concrete concerns about the community involvement. Asa Dotzler
recently elaborated
on the process, as previously covered on Slashdot."
Firefox is mostly a cute interface grafted over the browser portion of the Mozilla Application Suite.
Mike Connor has a point, but we aren't talking imminent disaster. Yet.
Seriously. Mozilla's obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to their trademarks is above and beyond any other open source project's, and I think it's probably turning a lot of people off toward helping them.
M$ may have bought these AWOL reviewers in an attempt to kill Firefox?
That's strange...
From what I read on the last Slashdot Mozilla/Firefox article, people thought that there were too many coders in Firefox, thus creating bloated code...
I guess that's a myth, eh? Community misconception?
Microsoft has been getting away with bloody murder for years, shipping buggy products. So who's to make a fuss if Firefox has a couple of measly problems for a while? They'll definitely get fixed before IE, that's for sure...
Laughter is the best medicine, but in certain situations the Heimlich maneuver may be more appropriate.
Yeah, IE has been horrible with security and whatnot, who cares if firefox makes one mistake? They're still perfect in my eyes.
http://onticfusion.sytes.net/
Many of the devs are hard at work for plain Mozilla. This makes the development of Firefox seem slow, but a lot of code from Mozilla can be (and is) used in Firefox through the Gecko engine. You don't have to exclusivly work on Firefox to help Firefox.
That said, I wish there were more devs working on Firefox-specific issues.
If it is a problem of documentation, then those two remaining programmers had better work on documenting it... and quickly. If they want the architecture to be preserved when new programmers who don't understand it come along.
-Vendal Thornheart
it because firefox is mostly a win32 project?
yes, ther is port for many platformes but it
targeting IE replacement for windows users.
Replacing microsoft sh!t code probaly dont apprear
very exciting.
Mozilla *works*. I can't say the same about Firefox, at least not on the AMD 64 platform.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Perhaps you missed this story here, where it was found that Mozilla is actually faster than Firefox.
I think some things need to be funded, and if Mofo needs the cash, then Cashdot should be able to help out (maybe do a sidebar-fundraiser or something)... I'd pitch in a couple of bits for my fave browser! Hell make it a contest so people can win firefox/mozilla SWAG!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I think right now what is needed is a strong branding for Firefox that will create a reputation among the "tech-oriented" masses that get their information from magazines and cursory reading of pop-tech articles. How else will they truly gain ground against what many people perceive as the ONLY way to get online?
I think it's important to realize some people synonymize "The Internet" with Internet Explorer, because of IE auto-dialing, and auto connecting, as well as broad-band connections always being on and using it as default browser with windows.
Anything you do mainstream (particularly in the US) is already being done branding first and content second. Just take a look at TV.
We're dealing here with the WWW, possibly the most impressive achievement to date in terms of communication and information sharing. It's going to take some power to muddle through the masses, and you're not going to do it by sticking exclusively to principles at the expense of reaching the clueless.
The infrastructure, particularly the end-user "filter" of that information, is of critical importance. Idealism about open-source initiatives has to play tug-of-war with practical ways to get a broad following.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
It's nothing new, really, just a little more extreme.
Mozilla has for years made a constant and ongoing argument that they're open to all comers and want all the help they can get, only to turn people away without consideration. I don't know what it's all about, and I'm not sure I care anymore.
It's a shame, because while (for example) Ben Goodger is obviously a talented programmer, his belief that he is the only person capable of doing what he does is just crippling the effort. Allowing a few people to prove they're as good as he is (hmmm... maybe he's afraid to find that out) could move things along tremendously.
Didn't I read something just a little while ago about how firefox developers were intentionally keeping people out of the development inner circle?
I believe the main reason for this is lack of developers-oriented documentation. Even for simple extensions, one has to search around the web and hack through existing modules to see how things work; things get harder when you try to work with the actual code, which comes with a whole bunch of its own graphics toolkit, scripting etc. Sure some people may know the entire code by heart, but these things need extensive, robust documentation if more independent developers are to get involved.
Best he be careful, blog entries regarding 'conserns' might get him sacked :-)
> because this isn't fun anymore.
Mmm... "Just for Fun !!"
If you look at very successful FOSS projects, you'll see a comitted 3-5 member team which does pretty much everything for that project (projects like KDE or gnome don't classify as projects, they are meta-projects).
A project needs lots of users and around 3-4 x times the core team contributing bits and peices to keep it alive. Once that is reached, the project is pretty much self sustaining.
I feel that firefox has got a bit of elitism in their top level. Maybe those developers should take a look back into where THEY came from.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Lack of new, innovative names. Look, I like "FireFox" as well as the next guy, but let's face it, that name is getting a bit stale. Sure, 6 months ago, FireFox had a "hip," "edgy" feeling, but today, FF just isn't cutting anymore. Only Korean old people use browsers with such old fashioned names. We all know that the most productive period in FF's history was the period in which it was changing its name every other week. Features got added like crazy during those couple of months. Some people look at that as coincidence, but as I always say, "Correlation is causation." Therefore, if we want to add new features to FF quickly, we're going to need to start changing the project name weekly, if not daily or even hourly.
In order to help out the FireFox team, here are my suggestions for new, catchier names:
Fox Fire
Brush Fire
Brush Fox
Foxy Britches
Fancy Pants
Panda Britches
Moz Illa Than You
Moz Def
Linky Clicky
Clicky Linky
Spider Webby
The Amazing Spider Webby
Ultra Browser
Supa Browsa
Supa Browsa II: Supa Browsa Remix
and finally,
Internet Explorer II: Electric Bugaloo
His problem seems to be with the development process of Firefox itself, not with stuff that happening in the main Mozilla trunk. For example, the following projects he doesn't have problems with: XTF, SVG, XForms, E4X, and xulrunner (lifted from the comments).
What I gather this means is that Firefox 1.1 will get some cool new backend features but that its front end stuff will remain mostly the same (excepting the preferences dialog). Is this really a bad thing?
Brian Kernighan is widely quoted as saying: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
When you're debugging, it involves rereading code you're already familiar with, so I suggest a corollary: reviewing someone else's code can be harder than writing it in the first place too.
That said, don't let it stop you from trying! Pick a patch from your favourite project and review it. Try to understand it. Look for places where it could be wrong.
Reviewing is a related but distinct skill from developing, and it can be improved with practice. A good reviewer is worth their weight in gold but it's often a thankless task (so let me take this chance to say a big thank you to markus and djm for putting up with my diffs :-).
$ find
I downloaded the code, posted up onto the relevant bugzilla entry, and waited for a response.
And waited.
And waited.
Still no response.
Seven months later, the bug flickers into life again and people start asking why this isn't here. Again, I post up reminding people that I offered to write the code, and still would. Again, utter silence. Tumbleweed drifts across the face of the bugzilla page...
Have a look, entry 79709 if you're interested (Mozilla's bugzilla set-up disallows direct linking from Slashdot). My main motivation for writing this has now gone, as I bought an OS X-based desktop too and can synchronise contacts fine now. I might still have a crack at it just for interest's sake though, but I wouldn't count on getting any contact from Mozilla people.
Cheers,
Ian
Switch to IE...
Bill Gates says "i told ya so"
All Firefox needs is to pay a major website to place a Firefox logo link in the upper-right corner of all their pages, like Netscape did with cnn.
What does that mean? (PS. I am one of the ppl in my sig)
The world is full of stupid people.
Architecture documentation
How to write Firefox extensions
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
What the Fuck did you have for Breakfast?
Let me guess, not 'Coco Pops', but rather
choco pops
coco chops
popo pops
chopo pochos
chobo chobos
cock ier than crunch
brown pants
shitty o's
and finally,
Coco Pots: the cereal for real 'visionaries'
Wait, is your name still 'earthbound kid' or should i look you up under a new, flashier name?
Get Serious.
The source code is out there. If development completely stalls on this project, maybe they should just GPL the thing and let some other group of developers take over. I'm sure there are holes in this suggestion, but it seems a sensible thing to if things really grind to a halt.
why are we obsessed with firefox being too perfect! c'mon this is a community based product and even though they strive for perfection and do quite a good job at it. they are humans and bound to be prone to problems. and we arent paying them. its our fault that we raise them to some levels and then expect them to be there just because we praise them and raise them to exhalted levels and get a free download of our favourite browser!
that slashdotters could maybe get off their backsides, quit sniping at things for a while, and do a little code review for firefox?
naaaaaahh
One maintainer for Firefox would be fine, if it were a little more modular. The problem is the same one Linus had, fairly early on. People don't scale as easily as lines of code. Basically, the Firefox code needs to be ripped into managable parcels, such that the maintenance that is done can concentrate on one parcel, rather than ALL interactions in ALL parts of the code.
Monolithic code is problematic, because for N lines of code, there are potentially !N interactions that can occur. !N gets big, very very quickly. When you use procedures wisely, then N is the number of procedures, rather than the number of lines, but it is still a VERY big number, far too big for ANY finite number of maintainers to handle sensibly.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
FF works just fine for me with Ubuntu on AMD64.
Cthulhu loves you.
The firefox developers don't develop NGT. Someone else does. So, as the parent's parent's parent's... whatever.. originally stated, we are not in imminent danger.
I agree. One of the more glaringly obvious problems is using critical FOSS resources to do Microsoft's jobs for them. It's beyond crazy. Here you have a pitifully underfunded and obviously understaffed project, supposedly for free and open source software, yet devoting the lions share of effort to helping make Windows better and therefore microsoft more money. A company that could snap it's fingers and hire 500 extra full time devs tomorrow.
To anyone who is outside looking in this situation, this is just insane, this is a duh moment, but the devs and foundation on the inside refuse to see it. They refuse to see it, or maybe it's a worse situation than that, that they do see it and that's the plan, it's certainly been looking like it for a couple years now.
Who's getting bought anyway?
I've heard the arguments "well, getting people to switch browsers and office suites will lead to acceptance of....in the mysterious future". B & S. That's crap. It's pure crap. They the 99% rest of the planet "they" are still running Microsoft because they are. Look at the numbers. This is 2005. Numbers don't lie. Just because people are running FF is not meaning they are going to switch OS. You haven't gotten ONE major computer vendor to offer parity of OS platform at the retail level. There's your proof staring you in the face. This is called "failure". You've merely made it easier for Microsoft to keep being a dominant monopolist. Done it for free, too. Or it's worse than that. So what if you win a temporary browser battle if you are still tactically losing the entire computing war on the desktop? Or maybe that's been some scheme all along, a delaying tactic to let a certain billionaire catch back up? Hmm?
The FF and Moz people need to fish or cut bait, if they want a Windows browser,fine, then develop and sell a windows browser, say that outloud and be done with it. There's your money and more devs either way. It's called actually making up your mind, making a decision. If they really are concerned with open source, they will start to actually work with the true open source community and stop propping up the closed source and expensive monopoly "community" of the wonderful world of Windows. Fish or cut bait. If moz et all decide to really fish only in the open source pond they would get a lot more support, but this half way measure is ridiculous. I know I won't donate a dime as long as they keep working on the Windows versions. Let Bill Gates and the Windows users pay their meal tickets then.
Where's that 20 somthing-year-old whiz kid whipper snapper that Google recently hired because he was part of Firefox development?
I think that's a load of horse shit.
People love Firefox and they love Mozilla. It looks like more of an organisational issue to me, the problem being not an absolute lack of contributers but an inability to get people up to the level where they take on some responsibility as part of the project rather than a contributer to the project. From the description the problem seems to be a bottleneck rather than an absolute lack of resources.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And yet, expect the "Firefox is faster" myth to continue on Slashdot forever.
Yes, that's right, kids. Firefox is slower than the Mozilla suite.
Which sounds funny, but isn't. The only objective definition of bloat is trivial features whose maintenance cost far outweighs their benefit to the user community. I've worked on projects that had really nasty feature bloat, because individual developers were given too much independence, and wasted time working on features that appealed to them. Meanwhile, less sexy but more important features (and worse, fixes for showstopping bugs), went neglected. So yeah, you can have bloat and missing features at the same time.
I've posted bugs to Firefox Bugzilla. All I know about the Firefox "community" comes from that.
One of the bug posts, about a serious memory leak that causes a complete crash, was handled in an angry way, even though I had spent hours documenting it on two computers and two operating systems.
This is an extremely common phenomenon among Open Source authors. They often use their position as a way of acting out their anger. I was criticized because I use Firefox in a more intense way than other users! When I posted a carefully written response to the criticism, I got criticism for posting a long response.
I offered to re-write the manual for another Open Source project, and got a negative response that was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
On another project, I entered a minor bug. The program was crashing if it saw a DOS end-of-text-file character in its text file input. I got back a long, philosophical discussion about why they were not willing to fix the bug because it was a problem that came from DOS.
One person with an anger problem can literally control the development of an Open Source project by scaring away potential helpers.
In my experience, the anger is often not expressed in a way that is obviously angry. It comes as opposition, sometimes very subtle opposition, even to good ideas or to useful help. The opposition vastly increases the amount of time required to contribute to a project.
The serious Firefox crash I reported in October 2003 was still there in February 2005 in version 1.0, even though it was verified by others in a careful way.
The background for all this is that Firefox is apparently the best browser, and an important window to the world for millions of people.
This is an important subject, and there is a lot more to say, but I don't have time now.
Along with Gnome's optimization bounty, your call for money reminds me that "volunteer effort" isn't always the perfect motivation it's cracked up to be in OSS. Eventually, plain old capitalism sometimes gets the job done better. At the least, it's a damn good kickstart.
You cannot just start working on the firefox/mozilla source. It is one bloated big piece of ????. I did not even manage to compile it without downloading pre-setup environments. It took years and years to build this monster, and it is very very hard to control.
/crushing bugs is not that great work as opposing to hacking new code.
I am not saying that this a bad thing. But it is not helping to make it a community thing. I cannot see ways how this is going to change because there is just a lot of functionality in it that cannot be simplified (some code could be helped by rewriting some parts, but the total complexity stays)
Firefox is great because it has a clear target: a desktop browser for the average user. Mozilla is not that great because it is not one thing. Thunderbird is good as a mail client, but fails as an outlook replacement, or a as news client (and fails as a binary download news client).
And reviewing
I thing the succes story's of mozilla will be branches that specialize in one thing. Do one thing great, and get merged back into the main mozilla client later.
(things like desktop search, outlook replacement,Content mangememnet, composer,mobile mozilla, and things i did not hear of yet, or are only in the mind of some people)
An additional remark:
The problems with reporting bugs in Firefox are trivial compared to reporting bugs to Microsoft, in my experience.
A top-level Microsoft support technician got interested in a very well-documented bug in Windows XP that I reported. He decided, partly as an experiment to teach himself about Microsoft, to work with several Microsoft groups. Result: An entire waste of time of many, many hours, over a period of months.
I've been reporting several bugs in Windows XP for literally years, and they haven't been fixed. If you work with both Linux and Windows XP, do you notice that Linux has a powerful, bug-free Command Line Interface, and the CLI in Windows XP is weak and buggy? (Yes, I know they are working on replacing it.)
That's pretty funny stuff.
It was elaborated on slashdot once before.
This is about the core code reviewers, not the coders. The core guys have to know the codebase inside out. From what this guy is saying in his blog, four of them are AWOL and the others are ineffective. I have been wondering what's taking so long for the 1.1 release. Now I know...and I know not to expect 2.0 this year. :(
Sounds to me like there is a community of hackers waiting in the wings (just have a look at the large numbers of extensions available for firefox) - its just that they haven't allowed any of them to get past the first steps and into more involved hacking
my $0.02
I guess the whole "volunteer" thing in OSS isn't perfect after all like Slashdot has been brainwashing me to believe since 1997.
It was fun while it lasted. Onto OS X.
From my observations of lots of open source projects, and involvement in a few, this seems fairly typical. With only a few exceptions, it seems like most projects have the bulk of the work done by a very, very small number of people, usually just one. I often wonder how much the "many eyes makes all bugs shallow" maxim, while probably true, applies in practice when on most projects there simply aren't many eyes.
[dons flame retardant suit]
Read reviews of shopping cart software
why are we obsessed with firefox being too perfect!
Because a lot of people use Firefox just to stick it to Microsoft in their minds. The more rational of us use it and other alternatives simply because we see them as the technically superior browsers.
Mozilla used to be able to change themes without a restart. You'd click to change theme, and it'd change theme. However, one of the themes supplied with Mozilla used to have some kind of XUL screw up when changing over, and display two location bars. Rather than fix the problem, they simply disabled the ability of the browser to change themes on-the-fly. So to this day, you need to restart Firefox and Mozilla because they didn't want to fix a minor bug.
So yes, the themes-on-the-fly issue appears to have been swept under the rug too? Although their might've been some good technical reason for disabling instant theme-changing, I don't think it's likely.
I propose Gaff (Gaff Ain't FireFox) as a fork of Firefox. Who's with me?
- Reviewers != Coders. There are more Firefox coders than reviewers. A bottleneck is created, but hardly a crisis
- Most of Firefox's changes come from Gecko, which is done by Mozilla coders (I guess you could call them Gecko coders, although I've never heard anyone say that). There are currently about 70 reviewers, and 20 super-reviewers for mozilla. There's about 84 coders a month (down from the 150+ haydays of the Netscape area)
It's bloated compared to konqueror, too.
Konqueror isn't as featurefull, of course, but it's really not too far off these days, and it's very lightweight in comparison. Which probably has a lot to do with why Apple choose its rendering engine instead of Mozilla's.
That's just a view on the source. That's not architecture documentation.
From what i've seen, there is a fair bit on extension making, one of my favorite sites is xulplanet.
The problem is with the architecture documentation. Sure you can work out what XPCOM is, easily enough. But if you look at the mailing lists there are a plethora of people working on writing plugins that utilise the javascript interface to XPCOM, and they don't know the difference between invoking an interface and queryInterface.
For the browser market share that firefox has, it should have a lot more plugins being written for it. But many developers are simply putting it in the too hard basket.
[Grin]
Whatever the answer is, it is definitely not in commercial software. See my comment just above: The Firefox people are great compared to Microsoft. With Microsoft, you pay to be disrespected.
Well, I'm not convinced that MS get the good people. Have you seen some Windows apps!?! But IDE integration would certainly help. If the IDES could connect to various project sites and download the latest project templates, docs, etc., then it would really help people get started. KDevelop, for instance, comes with templates for everything from Embedded development in C to console games, to DCOP-based plugins for other KDE apps. If Mozilla and other projects provided templates for plugins, syntax highlighting files etc. for major IDEs, it would really boost development interest and speed. Wouldn't hurt if people started using Tom Lord's Arch more, too :)
I have worried about that for a while now until I wrote this: earlier post
I really don't think fancy new features should (can) be a top priority right now anymore but instead the core problem of getting new developers needs to be solved not just for now but also for the future. While I agree that changing things like the versioning system won't change much I believe splitting up the codebase into more handy chunks and giving "outsiders" more power (eg regular contributers should need no code review) should be the goal. I think it's this sharp devision between core (Foundation) and outside (everybody else) developers that is the main problem here.
You know this is just plain stupid. Comparing Opera with Suns JRE bundled and Mozilla FireFox without any Java just isn't reasonable.
At you are going to do a comparison, at least compare the proper versions to each other. That is Firefox (& JRE) vs. Opera (& JRE) or Firefox (bare) vs Opera (bare). And in any of those comparisons Operas footprint is indeed smaller (at least last time I checked).
Please note that I am indeed using Firefox myself, but lets at least keep our facts somewhat reasonable.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
What surprised me was how much many open source programmers I have come across act very similar to those who code on major MMORPGs.
I keep expecting a booming voice "Who DARES approach the great and powerful wizard!"
Now this can be expected in some ways as it is easy to get overwhelmed by the popularity. Not in the ego inflating way but the ego crushing way. All the voices shouting at you makes it hard to discern the voices of reason from the voices of insanity (and boy are there many of the later)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm guessing people get to become managers of these projects 'cos the're good at development. Perhaps there is a chance for a trained manager to get involved and sort out the messy human problems, leaving the developers to get on with the hard coding.
The whole mozilla project is also in desperate need of documentation. It's nearly impossible to write applications and complex extensions without digging into the sometimes sparsely commented source code.
Documentation would also help in the review process.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
They went for a Java model with no graphical layout tool instead of building in a VB-style GUI/code editor. I cannot hack a firefox extension easily, and I have a Ph.D in comp sci. No surprise that only the 3133T kiddies are doing it?
This reminds me of the famous Microsoft Halloween document on Linux: The MS guy *wrote a device driver * in a weekend for Linux, and then mailed his bosses that there is no such thing as a weekend device driver in NT. Well folks, for once the shoe is on the other foot !
This is not a signature.
Perhaps you need to check your facts. That test compared Mozilla 1.8 alpha 6 with Firefox 1.0 (which is based on Mozilla 1.7). If they tested recent nightlies of Firefox (which are based on Mozilla 1.8), they would probably have been faster.
I don't normally buy into the conspiracy theories about Microsoft, but I am absolutely 100% certain that the steady degradation of the dos box is a classic case of MS trying to herd people away from the dark side. The dos box used to work, and work well. MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
It is absurdly obvious that to them the dos box is an abhorrent reminder of an earlier day, a trojan horse through which command line devil worshippers can work their evil, avoiding the safe, closeted world of Microsoft's GUIs.
They would absolutely love to get rid of the dos box forever, but even they need it - for example, when I was foolish enough to update the definitions in my Microsoft Spyware beta, it trashed my Microsoft firewall! MOTHER FUCKERS!! What the FUCK are you thinking! The good old dos box was the only way to recover (if you call running Microsoft's firewall "recovery"), allowing me to type in some cryptic MS bullshit "netsh Winsock reset" that rebuilds my tcp stack (or something like that). I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IT DOES!!! Why the FUCK don't you just leave the FUCKING firewall ALONE!!!!!!
Its been a bad day dealing with MS bullshite today. No more posting tonight I feel.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
Update your bookmarks...
;)
Dell is selling Suse and Mandrake systems, right?
And FF got some 19% of market share, right?
Not a failure, just not so fast.
Several people have asked for the bug number. Here it is:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266 0
(Direct links to Firefox's Bugzilla from Slashdot are denied. Put the URL into a separate tab. Take out the space in the URL inserted by Slashdot.)
This bug, and this Slashdot story, are important because, for millions of well-educated people, Firefox is a window on the world. Note that many people in less-developed countries won't be running Windows unless it is pirated, because they cannot afford it. They need high-quality free software like Firefox. In less-developed countries, it is the small percentage of educated people who are likely to have computers and a connection to the internet. These people have a disproportinately big effect on the health of their countries.
Bug ID 222660, comment #32:
Below is my most recent comment about the bug, which crashes all Firefox windows and tabs after many windows and tabs have been opened.
Problem clarified: Before the crash, Firefox uses almost 100% CPU cycles. See the file attachment in Comment #31, showing Firefox 1.0 taking 98% of the CPU cycles. The hard disk was idle at that time and had been idle for at least two minutes. Note that the bug being discussed here crashes TalkBack, too, so that there are no TalkBack reports.
Testing conditions: 1) Toshiba laptop model 2415-S205, 2.0 GHz Mobile Pentium, 512 MB of memory. Windows XP SP2, all critical patches applied. This is a different computer than used for any of the other testing.
2) Firefox 1.0 with 200 days of History. Bookmarks file is 2.5 Megabytes.
New Comment: In the original filing of this bug, Firefox was characterized as "slow" as the problem with the bug advanced toward crashing Firefox. See also comment #10 "slow", comment #6, "all of the browser windows became unresponsive", and comment #13, ' "not responding" in task manager" '.
Apparently the slowness was caused by Firefox taking a huge percentage of CPU cycles before crashing.
The problem may have improved since this bug was originally posted, but the bug is still substantially the same.
Response to criticism:
1) Comment #30: "i don't see a single talkbackid anywhere in this bug report,..."
That's because whatever crashes Firefox crashes the TalkBack program as well.
2) Comment #27: "... your crash could be caused by any number of issues with Firefox, or by something completely unrelated (faulty memory?)."
That's why I tested with several different computers and two operating systems.
3) Comment #27: "... posting over and over again stating that "firefox crashed when I loaded lots of tabs" is not helpful to development in any way."
Note that the posts were in different versions of Firefox, verifying that the bug has not been fixed.
4) Comment #27: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs and have not been able to reproduce the crashes you speak of. That is why I will mark this bug WORKSFORME." And, "General descriptions of symptoms and anecdotes, like the ones in this bug, will not help resolve any issues."
Note that the actual conditions of failure are carefully documented in the original bug report, and by other authors in Comment #6 and Comment #7.
Note that the criticism in comment #27 does not document the conditions, but merely recounts the author's anecdote: "I myself frequently use many windows/tabs..."
What are many? What is frequently?
5) Comment #22: "If you're experiencing a memory leak and can document it using tools listed at http://www.mozilla.org/performance/tools.html then please open a new bug."
I've given that suggestion a lot of thought. I have a lot of debugging experience, but not with those tools. I'm guessing that learning to use the tools and searching for memory leaks would take at least a month of full-time work. I'm guessing that
" Could you provide more details regarding the memory leak issue you talked about?"
See the Slashdot comment below, Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.
MOD PARENT UP. Some excellent insight. Some people feel personally attacked when a bug is reported.
I bet they just bought Macs and got on with real life.
The default is to have 51MB of memory cache.
Read the URL from a post above to see how to fix it.
Are mailing lists so 1995? or do they still serve a purpose, if everyone was on it (it would be busy as hell) but also an online archieve might have a tonne of info etc... on it
Can I use my donated time to firefox dev as a tax deduction, ie 10hrs a week = 200$ a week tax discount? perhaps...? is that possible?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"You can't post an attack like that without giving at least a bug number."
It's not an attack. I hope it is useful input, that can help get the job done.
There is more about the bug, and the bug ID, in this Slashdot comment below: Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.
When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen. I've done it lots of times doing testing: buttons disappear, applications crash etc. It's quite possible to get Linux boxes into effectively unrecoverable states as well if you run out of memory.
Also, your bug reporting style is very poor. Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs. Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea.
Ok, what about the ad campaign funding???
.part appened, yet deleted a file w/o it.
Oh, you mean about software improvements?
Here's a serious one:
when downloading and the isp drops your dialup connection, firefox still thinks it is DL'ing, even hours later.
On a 90meg file (over 9 hours of dl'ing with earthlinks advertised 56k, 28.8 at the very best) gettng a dropped carrier at 60% reall sucks, having no resume, especially considering there is existing wget -c that simply should be called to handle such large files.
But here is the kicker:
after resuming the DL via wget -c and getting it, I then needed to dl an unrar program, upon which I found firefox still acting like it was dl'ing teh file, so I canceled it and guess what? The 90meg file vanished.
Icing on this issue:
firefox was dling a file with
IS this what is ment by community support?
He wont code an error handler for a DOS EOF? Is the guy so damn frikkin lazy he'd rather spend 15 mins arguing then fixing it? Wake up moron , code is supposed to be the slave to man and help him like god, so make it work, dont make the human work, BIAATCH!!!!
;-)
The more magic your code is , the better YOU ARE, otherwise go flip burgers and greasy ass pricken-zen-burgermeister. (GWB laff)
Rome wasnt built by ONE ASS PRICK carpenter who had a big ego, lots of people worked together.
Maybe go get sloshed real bad till you vomit, get a new perspective on code
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you can think of it, there is an extensioni nfo.php?application=firefox&version=0.9&os=all&cat egory=Humor&numpg=10&id=31
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/more
It's turtles all the way down.
I think you had spyware there causing the problem. Really bad spyware, installed into your TCP/IP stack. AntiSpyware probably just removed it.
"Posting long diatribes about exactly how you get 50 tabs open is not good bug reporting style and is going to piss of the devs."
In this case, there is no other way to report the bug. It is very elusive. As I said, I think the anecdotes are necessary in this case.
"Adding other bugs to the existing bug is also a bad idea."
Nothing was added. More information about the bug was reported.
"... piss off the devs."
That's the subject of this thread: Anger, especially anger when nothing bad has happened.
"When windows runs out of memory, all sorts of strange things happen."
I agree with you, and this was mentioned in the original bug reports. The problem may be associated with memory management in Windows XP. The problem occurs in Linux, but the symptoms are less severe.
What would be usefull is if the cmd.exe replacement from WINE or ReactOS could be fixed up, made to do all the things that Microsoft cmd.exe does (or at least the stuff important enough to matter), made to work oob on windows and released as a cmd.exe replacement for those using Windows 2000/XP/etc and who like using a CLI and want one that that is better than the version MS ships.
There is still a layout bug with Slashdot and Firefox.
Don't tell me how to fix it, just fix it.
Thanks.
Taco left in Saturday. Then after half a day without new story, Zonk showed up.
Poor boy stayed online for 24 hours straight, accepting stories and waiting for a change. But it seems he finally fainted at the keyboard without another editor coming online, and for 5 hours Slashdot is editorless. Could they maybe hire a couple more editors?
"... could you provide a link to the bug?"
See the Slashdot comment below, Firefox Bug ID 222660, All windows and tabs crash.
I've been told by Microsoft people that they are working on a complete new CLI.
When the crash occurs, it does not update the history file before crashing.
However, this is a good idea. All but the most recent history file entries would be available.
The problem, however, does not seem associated only with one web page. It seems to become progressively worse over a period of days.
But will it be compatible with the old one as far as what commands it supports, how they work etc etc etc?
Because thats what matters to me.
Internet Explorer 7: The Search for More Money...
"Yoghurt, Yoghurt, I hate Yoghurt"
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
January 2005: "A Firefox developer talks about the project's controversial invitation-only developer recruitment policy and explains why Firefox will never grow up."
March 2005: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in trouble."
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
As the reports say, there is little doubt that there is a problem in Firefox.
But, there was a lot of resistance to fixing it. What would you do in that case? I merely documented my way of using Firefox, attempting to show that my use was not unreasonable.
In response to the resistance, others provided support that the problem really did exist and was serious. Their original reports, which have now been edited, documented that Firefox crashed the OS.
The bug has a variety of symptoms, but it seems to be one bug.
The bug report is a good example of the subject of this discussion thread. There is a lot of time-wasting resistance to acknowledging a problem.
non standards compliant CSS. (IE that is, Firefox conforms to the standards creating a headache for web developers wanting to maintain a similar look on both platforms)
The ReactOS cmd.exe will run happily on Windows. Not all features are implemented though.
"Also, your bug reporting style is very poor."
Apart from the fact that you are absolutely right, it bears repeating what other posters stated: a bugreport is a voluntary contribution made mostly by complete no-no's to the art of bug reporting.
Trying to educate these people is counter productive.
What I suggest is take a "proprietary" approach. State clearly on the page that you are thankful of their time and that you sadly can't answer all posts.
And meanwhile be grateful that actual users are so engaged that they DO report bugs...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
It looks like being a developer for Firefox/Mozilla is a branded idea.
For all the coders that want in and got knocked back - are there any open source browsers that allow hordes of people in on the development process?
If you think they've got the process wrong, you can fix it. And if you think a little open source browser can't make it against IE...
This is the most hilarious thing I've read in a while!
I've been told by Microsoft people that they are working on a complete new CLI.
They are, it has a bizarre working-name like Monox which'll probably turn into cli.net or something equally obtuse prior to release. There's a humerous anecdote about it here.
This is where the serious fun begins.
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I tried and failed to become a Firefox developer. You have to know several people who are already on the inside, so they can vouch for you. It's an exclusive club by design, not encouraging for newcomers.
I have gone the other route. I used to use Opera all the time, for various reasons. There are still some things that I like better in Opera, but I have switched to Firefox because of one main problem I had with Opera. At various times, it would hog the CPU. The PC would become unusable for about 30 seconds, and many times I would just have to kill Opera. This happened on Windows and Linux. It would also not shut down cleanly, and several times it would prevent my PC from shutting down. I would just do a Shut Down and take off for the weekend, but when I came back in on Monday, there the PC would be with an error box "This program (Opera) is not responding, shut down anyway?" When I would sit and wait for the shutdown, a lot of times Opera wouldn't give up the ghost gracefully.
I still like some things that Opera does over Firefox, like the way mouse gestures work. It just feels better in Opera. And the ability to close out the last window in a session and not have the browser close. That one bugs me about FF. I will use a mouse gesture to close the last window (not realizing it was the last tab) and the browser will be closed. In Opera, the browser will stay open with no tabs.
But I really like discussing the finer points between the two browsers I use and not have one of them be IE. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Maybe you ought to check out FireSomething
So, if I install that extension I will have new features added like crazy every week?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
A plug-in is NOT an extension. I've actually created an extension with your patch and eMailed you about it.
The idea behind having extensions is that anyone can create extensions that are enhancement requests and if they're popular enough then merge those into the codebase. This way you get an instant patch applied before it's reviewed and when reviewed, the extension dies. This will let the core development focus on bug fixes first while the most popular enhancements get applied after a round of bug fixing.
Regards,
Christopher.
Of course it's hard to find a well organized group of capable software developers to work for no beer at all.
I think that just the tip of the iceberg. No free software can survive on the long run. People (young hackers) get older and have responsibility to others (spouse / children). So fluctuation on FSW project is extremely high. And every noob thinks "oh, I could do this better" and just throws away what has been done (and is hard to maintain if you didn't live with it).
Get real. Free software is communistic crap. Imagine a long-haired-and-bearded-baker start making fuss that "all bread should be free". I really can't imagine the consequences, but one of them is decreased interest in being baker - while you can't live of it. So, if where was very popular brand of free bread, called "Mozilla FireRoll" it would be hard as hell to continue producing them as no baker was thrilled to bake it for free on the long run.
Another point - there are so much things on earth much more needed but free software. Water for little children in Africa, malaria drugs (more people die from malaria than from cancer) for tropical area and so on.
If software developers earned money with software, they could give some money/charity to needy. That would at least make some social sense. And BTW, do you know who is the richest guy on earth, how did he earn it and how much he gives for charity? Of course you do. It's the guy you all spit on.
Open source software on the other hand is a good idea. It's just that somewhere on the way "free" and "open" became synonyms, which is VERY bad and wrong.
But Mozilla's problem is that they're under-manned. Where are they supposed to find spare people to hand-hold Ian ? If this RFE was a high priority someone would have already fixed it rather than waiting for Ian to slowly pick his way through the code.
.980401040150.13172A-100000%40escher.ties.org
Why is Mozilla under-manned? Because they don't help to bring new developers into the fold. The attitude seems to be "figure it out for yourself, don't bother us until you know all the basics." Not exactly welcoming. If they bothered to find someone to hand-hold Ian for a while, they might now have a new developer who would probably be happy to help hand-hold other new developers.
If manpower is an issue, turning away new developers for lack of manpower is penny wise, pound foolish, isn't it?
Mozilla's attitude problem in this respect is nothing new. This has literally been a problem since day one. Less than 24 hours after Mozilla's initial release (almost 7 years ago now), I wanted to implement an integrated, cross-platform TELNET client for Mozilla (having already implemented the TELNET protocol from scratch before), so I posted an inquiry about it:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.3. 96
Silence. No response whatsoever! I believe I even tried contacting existing developers using IRC as well, but nobody was interested in helping me get started working with the codebase, so I gave up. I simply did not have the time to read through 1,000,000 lines of code to figure out how to get started. Discouraged, I wandered away and found other things to do with my time.
A couple months later, I decided to try it anyway. I checked out all the code over CVS and tried to build it. All I remember is that the build took many hours on my (admittedly slow) computer, and many megabytes as well. Again, the code was too large and unwieldy to work with, and I gave up again.
Later, still wanting to help, I started reporting some bugs to Bugzilla. Over the years, I've participated in 3 dozen bugs, and originated over a dozen myself. The first bug I reported was bug #7617, "apprunner reformats during mouse click on or tabbing to link", reported June 4, 1999. This bug was later resolved as a "duplicate" of a newer bug, #28212, "{table-reflow} Clicking on URL dynamically resizes table cells", reported February 17, 2000.
Since well over 6 months had passed without the bug being fixed, in early 2000, I decided to try again to dig into the massive volume of Mozilla code, reasoning that tracking down a specific bug would allow me to ignore most of the code and focus on the part where the bug was being caused.
Unfortunately, the bug I chose (the first one I had reported) turned out to be incredibly difficult to track down, because the problem was buried in the incremental reflow code for HTML tables, and the rendering engine was extremely complex and little documented. Nevertheless, I spent countless hours tracking down this bug, and was actually getting close to understanding the source of the problem when I ran out of time to work on it. I returned to the problem a month or two later, but by that time, the bug had been closed as WORKSFORME, and the new nightly build wasn't exhibiting the behavior anymore.
Most likely, the bug wasn't actually fixed, but rather masked by the fix for bug #28522, "Clicking or tabbing to link causes incremental reflow". This is probably why the original bug was closed as WORKSFORME -- because nobody actually found and fixed the bug. This means that the incremental reflow bug probably still existed, and just wasn't obvious anymore. That bug may still exist today!
I wanted to go back and verify whether the bug was really fixed or not, but I never found the time and energy to expend on such an effort, when the bug was no longer being manifested as it once was. Regardless, this experience convinced me that Mozilla was too fast-m
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
The project is just so darned big. I couldn't find object-leve documentation (a'la Javadoc) to even guide me. Once, several people were clamoring for a feature (using the scrollwheel to navigate through the tabs), but some mozilla engineer marked it won't-implement and promptly dropped off. I volunteered to implement it and send patches to anyone who'd want it (not necessarilly back to mozilla if they didn't want it), but I didn't even know where to begin in such a huge source tree. I asked for leads from anyone on that buglist, but no one even deigned to point the filename out to me.
Honestly, it's not very conducive to hack on it. (At least in my opinion)
What you said is a good example of exactly how Open Source projects self-destruct.
Behind the facade of reasonableness, there is unreasoning resistence. Basically, these are the facts:
- Everyone seems to agree that there is a problem. Numerous people have reported several related symptoms.
- Firefox sometimes increases memory use when tabs or windows are closed, exactly the opposite of what is expected.
- Firefox sometimes uses 98% of CPU cycles, when no pages are loading, and there is no disk access.
- Firefox crashes during normal use sometimes.
This is, effectively, what you said:- I don't like the way you are telling me that there is a bug. There are too many words.
- I don't like the reports from other people who agreed with you.
- I don't like any of the speculation by you about what is wrong.
- Your expectations of the software are too great.
- I don't like that you refuse to donate a month of your time learning to use new tools and searching for the bug.
- I reserve the right to interpret what you said so that it looks as bad as possible, even if I need to change or ignore the facts.
- The only interpretation I will accept about what you said is the most narrow interpretation possible. I refuse to generalize from strong indications.
- Other software is probably causing this bug. Effectively, it is okay if this software crashes because other software is poorly written.
- All knowledge about software bugs is definite and well-defined. What you have reported is not, so you are wrong.
- "... you don't tell them what the problem is" seems like a reasonable complaint to me, even though the entire discussion is about an elusive bug. (If we knew what causes the problem, we would not be having the discussion.)
That's anger, hidden as much as possible in a facade of reasonableness. It doesn't take much of that to destroy whatever cohesiveness there might be in a social group. People will leave the project, giving personal reasons. The usually won't identify clearly what made the project seem heavy to them.I'm convinced that this bug is being reported in the best possible way, given the difficult circumstances. At this stage, no one knows how to define the problem more clearly. That does not mean that an obvious problem should be ignored.
Inability to make good theories about what causes the symptoms of this bug is not a negative indication about anyone, including Firefox developers. It is a very difficult bug to characterize. Sometimes software bugs are like that.
This problem has such general symptoms that anyone with experience in debugging software might have the reasonable theory that fixing this problem might fix other problems, too, that are not now identified to be related.
What I've said here does not have any personal intent. In fact, I thank you for giving me a chance to explain more clearly what I consider to be a very destructive phenomenon.
I think this is an important discussion, partly because Firefox is about as close to mission-critical software as is possible while having no direct effect on human health and safety. Internet access is having an enormous positive effect on the world, and Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape seems to be the best way we have to make use of that resource. There are several OS alternatives that work quite well. Firefox seems to be the best candidate for the browser.
Architecture gives a bird's eye view on a project. You linked to source code, which is "in the trenches".
See my comment, What you said is an example of this kind of anger.. Here are more characterizations of this type of anger, prompted by what you said, effectively:
Opera's engine is versatile enough that it's used internally for Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Adobe GoLive CS, among others.
Those apps have apparently decided not to use Gecko.
Funny, Linus and the kernel dev team have been criticized lately for also not accepting patches and for screwing around with the versioning scheme. Your point kind of falls flat in the face of the news lately.
MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
No.
95 and 98 were based on MS-DOS, so that terminal you were running was a shell to MS-DOS itself.
Windows NT, 2000, and beyond are based on the NT codebase which isn't centered on DOS. So, surprise, the terminal suddenly isn't a fully functioning MS-DOS, because there is no MS-DOS in the system. I recall that using MS-DOS as the foundation for Windows was a criticism at the time. Apparently, some want it back.
you got owned, just deal with it and move on.
Defining exactly what constitutes bloat may be hard, but take a look at the QNX demo disk sometime if you want to see the absence of bloat. Each bootable 1.44MB floppy contained the OS, GUI, networking, Web browser, file browser, Web server, and several demo applications.
You don't give up. The point is, your list of problems is basically useless from a bug-hunting point of view: it provides no information to help the developers at all
If you had reported these as seperate bugs, with some indication of URLs that were open at the time and without all the "firefox is mission critical and godly" stuff, you probably would have got a better response. Just accept that and remember next time you report a bug.
As it stands you have said "there's a memory leak somewhere in the code". If you phoned your local highway maintenance people and said "there's a street light broken in London", you wouldn't expect to get much of a response. That's what you have done.
What you see as anger on the part of the developers is most likely frustration at your inability to understand the requirements for reporting a bug.
It works on my AMD FX-51.
I cannot accept your explanation. I have a huge amount of experience in finding software and hardware bugs, and bugs are often at this state of imperfect knowledge.
It's fine if the Firefox developers cannot find the bug, or do not have enough time to look.
It is NOT fine to present illogical arguments about it.
Because a lot of people use Firefox just to stick it to Microsoft in their minds. The more rational of us use it and other alternatives simply because we see them as the technically superior browsers.
Hence your sig I guess:
Firefox with two tabs: 49,532K Opera with two tabs: 20,188K
I couldn't agree more, although I would also add that people use Firefox because it is the "cool" thing to do.
I personally choose to use Mozilla (of the suite) because it suits me better and I do find it terribly amusing that it is currently using 29,200K (according to Windows) with one tab open for Slashdot, one for Gmail and this tab to reply to you.
This is Mozilla 1.8b on Windows 2000
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
on redhat 9, and have seen it for many months: basically after using firefox heavily for a while (many tabs open and closed, often on complex pages) firefox will start eating 100% CPU and become slow as molasses and never recover.
I've never left it running enough to actually crash, I just open a terminal window, kill it and restart it and it's back to its usual snappy self again.
I've never bothered to report this because I don't have a good repro scenario, although I do see this I'd say 2-3 times every day.
-- the cake is a lie
When I was following the XP-beta newsgroups, there was a hoorah over some serious bugs that had been reported and documented until everyone was tired of hearing about them, yet nothing was done to fix them. One of the M$ MVPs told me that he'd submitted these bugs several times, to the most official of internal channels, to no result, and he was finally told in so many words that they would not be fixed. -- At the time M$ management was having one of their periodic spasms of "Everyone aboard THIS train!" which in this case was focused on the cutesy new interface, and to hell with the OS under it.
:(
:)
It's the same sort of stupidity as observed in FuturePower's initial comment, but exercised at the corporate-management level.
[disclaimer] My XP is well-mannered overall, but I agree the CLI sucks in ways that were *not* broken in Win2K. However, you can run other command.com interfaces, from other Windows -- I've even used the one from DRDOS7
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Mike Connor, one of the core Firefox developers
---
Soon to be one of the ex core firefox developers...
You can tell he doesn't care about keeping his job since most people that blog about their corporate instability, sometimes those that barely even mention who they work for, usually get canned pretty quickly when the company finds out about it.
Mike,
I am there, I feel you. GOD I hate my job. When you are one of the only ones who puts in long hours, people leave or get fired, you fill in for them, then it becomes permanent (you filling in for a full time position that was vacated) leaving you with 2 full time job descriptions to be responsible for.
Management is so worried about their own necks and nearly certain demise, they are afraid to make positive changes which would save them and their jobs. You are not alone. Corporate America is in one of it's most idiotic phases ever, the stupidity quotient has never been greater.
I waste 90% of my time putting out fires which would be prevented if they simply let me fix stuff, broken processes, that were so poorly designed it's a miracle they work at all. I spend around 10 hours a week fighting a broken piece of crapcode that it would take around an hour to re-write.
I simply can't get management to approve it. Meanwhile that 10 hours could be used to work on projects that are anywhere from 3 months to 4 years behind.
Someone please kill me now. Maybe I need to start a blog.
l8,
AC
While Firefox has millions of users, and a dire shortage of developers and reviewers, the Suite is in a nearly opposite situation: plenty of interested developers, but relatively few users. In fact, the development community is so strong and interested in Suite that they're starting a project to "save seamonkey" (some info here). Some core developers have even hinted that they might stop working on Gecko if the Mozilla Suite is killed off.
My server
These guys are largely a bunch of weenies who spend more time preening than competing with IE.
There are other, better os browsers out there. If you want to make oss work, you have to get on board with an active and OPEN group. These little clubs with hyperweenies acting out just aren't worth wasting one's time over.
It all comes down to how you learn webpage construction. If you learned by reading through w3c docs, then yes. If you just learn as you go along, through experience, then you don't see it as that, you know what "is", and the standards are just pieces of advice, that have some relation to that.
Let's keep things realistic here (yes, I must be new here...), I'm currently working on a site, one part in particular works fine on IE, Konqueror, and Opera, but firefox renders it incorrectly. There are times when it's a pain getting something to render the same in opera while it's fine in the rest. There's differences in them all.
There may be a standards body, but that doesn't mean there's a standard.
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Keep going!
Osty and mccalli, this is great stuff!
I get re-convinced to switch to the other side after each of your posts. What a great argument.
I have found that if I load a PDF document and then use "Back" to back up to the page which had the link pointing to the pdf document that Firefox crashes. Eventually, the adobe reader process also crashes.
Don't know that this is the same issue, but it is pretty reproducable...
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Here is more analysis of how angry people act out their anger, in this case by using logical-sounding arguments designed to create frustration. Here is what the parent comment is effectively saying, in words designed to show the anger, not hide it:
Note that first person to bring "god" into the conversation (by saying "ungodly") made it completely clear that he intended to frustrate the bug-reporting process. At that point, the bug became more a social problem, and not just a technical one.
No one should doubt the enormously discouraging influence that one angry person can have on a social group.