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."
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.
Trademarks (unlike patents and copyrights) have to be defended against misuse and abuse or they may be judged to be unenforcible later.
This is probably a harder thing to do in the open source world, and also much more important to establish a trustworthy brand and indentity.
Firefox uses Mozilla (Gecko^H^H^H^H^HNGT) layout engine and network code, so FireFox is mostly a stripped down version of the Mozilla suite.
Actually, you're wrong. Firefox isn't any kind of version of anything else. It is an application built on top of the Gecko core technologies, designed from the ground up to be a faster, cleaner, and more capable web browser for the largest possible audience.
Mozilla 1.x is a completely different application built on top of the Gecko core technologies which was designed by a half a dozen different committees to emulate a seven year old monolithic suite of internet applications for a shrinking audience
--Asa
Architecture documentation
How to write Firefox extensions
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Somewhat related to the branding question, another Mozilla problem:
RMS wants to rebrand Firefox.
This thing will surely appear soon as another sensationalist Slashdot headline.
Yeah, take a look at Linus Torvalds. He was the beginning kernel dev, but he sought help from individuals while the kernel was growing. Now he's pretty much a yay/nay guy that makes a few decisions now and then.
Basically, if you document what you're doing, it's fairly easy to turn your project over to more people. If you don't document, then you're cementing your position as 'the coder' and making it that much harder for others to join in.
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.
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."
According to the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is meant to be a browser. I guess the project is a complete failure if they have you thinking that Firefox is the next Java or something....