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."
*SLAP!*
Don't set your standards low just because the competition does. Set 'em high because you can and should.
(I've just been in the mood to slap someone lately. Nothing personal.)
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
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
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.
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.
Funny how people always bitch about products when they dont have X feature, etc.. But when they include all of those nice features everyone wants they bitch about how bloated it has become..
> 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
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
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!
Well it makes sense, people want the products they use to only have the features THEY want. This is why plugins/extensions are nice. I don't believe that Firefox is bloated.
They have to be defended against violations in order to avoid becoming generic and therefore invalid, but that doesn't mean you can't license them to the general public for a variety of uses that you approve of. The trademark on "Linux" is perfectly fine, despite all of the Linux variants calling themselves "Linux", because Linus licensed it for that purpose. That doesn't mean that Sun could call their next Solaris version "Linux" with impunity, if it didn't have a Linux kernel.
Mozilla is trying to establish a trustworthy brand and identity, as you say; however, having an identity excludes potential participants, who are being identified as not part of the project. And their fear that other people's versions would reflect badly on them excludes those other people from feeling welcome.
One of the key strengths of the Linux brand is that people you trust for other reasons have a stake in it. Sure, there are people out there who release terrible versions of Linux, but you don't get it from them. There are also people out there who release versions of Linux with special features for just your problem, and that's part of what Linux is about (e.g., Intrinsyc ships a Linux version with special support for the hardware on their embedded devices; the Linux Audio Development project has a version which avoids skips when recording audio; these projects couldn't call themselves Linux if Linus managed the trademark the way Mozilla manages theirs, and it would reduce the recognition of Linux as something that can solve any problem you happen to have).
This is a real concern. The whole process of programming 'should' be egoless. The person who writes and maintains the code often feels to much ownership and instead of taking the the change in good grace and thankfulness they often approach the whole thing defensively. "The code was never intended to do that".
This is NOT a problem with Open Source development but with programmers as a whole, myself included but I try and suppress it. You have to 'give up' code that you have too much ownership in.
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.)
It was elaborated on slashdot once before.
The reason you see it in OSS more often than, say, the commercial world, is that people who piss off clients usually get fired. That sort of accountability to the consumer--mostly because consumers eventually affect the bottom-line--doesn't exist in the OSS world. We have to rely on trust and goodwill, and often people don't feel the need to follow any social rules because they're not being employed by anyone.
Like any development model, OSS has its good points and its bad points, and that is certainly a bad one.
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
I think you are partly right and partly wrong. With Open Source all that you get is the recognition of your project in most cases. If one person draws all the attention away from the group then you can feel left out and angry. How many people here can name any of the people on the FireFox team that haven't been in Wired Magazine. No cheating...
There are probably not many and personally I think this is what drives some of the negativity.
A couple times I have posted a bug to the FireFox Bugzilla, both times they have been duplicates. Both times I have been critisized by the person managing the bug to look before submitting. Both times the title of the bug has been totally different than anything I would have thought of.
Most of the problems come from the lack of dealing with other people. Many of these developers shouldn't be doing the customer interaction. That is why even in small companies 1st level tech support is not the developer who created/developed the project.
Well I for one think that it's awesome that Mozilla develop for the Windows platform, I have one Windows PC at work, an HP-UX and at home I use Linux. I HAVE to use Windows at work because we must support our software on Windows, Solaris and HP-UX so I think its great that I can use the same tools on all three.
FWIW this will type of thing will gradually wear Microsoft down - I no longer need to pay for MS Office, Open Office is more than good enough (and getting better all the time), eventually the only bit of MS software I'll be running on a windows box will be the OS itself.
Microsoft will shrink or they will have to adapt and start writing more quality software for less cost to the consumer - I fail to see how this is a bad thing unless you hate Microsoft for the sake of it? (I dislike them very much, not for the sake of it but because of their hideous business practices)
When I posted a carefully written response to the criticism, I got criticism...
This happens in every profession at every employer from anyone who has to do work. Its human nature to take the gravy from the plate and give others the left over bones. Of course, this doesn't help when there are no other people to enjoy the left over scraps so they get discarded.
Next time you have a problem, bring lots of gravy. The dogs might attack the problem next time without going after YOU!
More proof that the difference between us and other animals in the kingdom is that we have opposable thumbs. The advantage is we get to meet a lot of monkeys. And an infinite number of them are proficient at typing on a typewriter typing the Complete Works of William Shakespeare while ignoring your very simple question.
I feel your pain, but I disagree with that it's acting out anger -- instead, from my experiences I feel that it's not anger but a lack of ability or experience with dealing with someone who says, either directly or indirectly, that something you made is "wrong".
One thing the FOSS paradigm has done is made it possible that people with no experience in the social aspects of software development to write code that is potentially used by millions of people. It can open up a "cowboy culture" where everyone is at odds with everyone else and where, if I may borrow a line from a certain movie, "we're all our own countries with temporary allies and enemies".
I say this with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure: I was a once a pimply, antisocial code-contributor and inlooking back on my own exchanges I see that I was as bad as it gets: if someone found a bug in what I did, instead of fixing it I would spend all my energy in combating the person who reported it because surely this person was out to get me. It wasn't until a few years later when I got a "professional" job that my boss pulled me asside one day and gave me a half-hour verbal bitch-slap that I realized that a bug report is usually someone who _wants_to_help_me_. Basically, I was too arrogant to see that, and now that I'm "old and wise" I see that same thing on others.
Of course, I'm not saying you should let them off the hook because thay don't know any better.. in fact, I'd hazard the sentement that more bitch-slapping needs to be done in the open-source world!
I don't know were I'm going with this, but that's my two cents.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
What features does IE have over Firefox?
RSS? PNG support? Popup blocker without a service pack? Proper CSS support? Integrated Sherlock? Tabbed browsing?
Oh wait, those are all features Firefox has that IE doesn't. About the only thing IE has that Firefox doesn't is ActiveX support, and the only good thing that has come from that is keeping me in business (people pay me to clean their computers of spyware/malware).
- 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)
Maybe they aren't doing the project "for free and open source software" but for users who want a decent browser on any platform? Mozilla aren't fighting any war for the desktop, because they make browsers, not desktops.
That seems to be their goal, so quite obviously windows is included, and the Mac. I notice you don't comment on the Mac, but that is also a closed source OS, even if it has Darwin underneath.
Your right that offering FireFox for Windows isn't going to get people to move off Windows. I've seen some people make the argument, but never seen it as being listed as a goal of the Moz and FF people. You can't call it failure if it wasn't their goal.
In fact, you seem to be against cross platform development altogether. It is hardly the only OSS software to do this (Open Office anyone?), and it is usually touted
Open source isn't some huge, unified movement dedicated to destroying Microsoft (although some individuals are). There isn't a "true open source" community, maybe you mean the free software community, which is based on the ideals of free software, rather than the more pragmatic open source community? (not that the two are mutually exclusive). Even then I'd think the point of open source is freedom, and that includes the freedom to delevop in MS Windows. The GPL and other licenses don't say you can't develop on a closed source OS.
Like freedom of speech lets people say things you don't like, including ideas that are against freedom of speech. Freedom to code lets you code for closed source systems, even if the people that came up with the idea don't like what you are coding for.
It isn't any half way measure, they are doing exactly what they want to do (and other major OSS projects do), and they are doing very well. It just isn't what you want, but you are free to go make a *nix only fork if you think it will get more support by loosing all the Windows people.
The problem is, we're talking about a browser here, not an operating system like Linux - it's far easier to persuade people to download a web-browser rather than an operating system (Linux). Maybe that will change, but right now the Mozilla/Firefox people have to worry about security and all the unscrupulous free-loaders who would attempt to use their name.
A lot of spyware vendors for example would be tempted to ship their own special 'enhanced' version of Firefox with the same branding and call it Firefox+ or something, with built in weather, clock, terrorist headcount, free desktop pictures, plus of course key logging, pop-ups and god knows what else. Just enough fluff to make it seem useful to a non-expert user, and just enough spyware to keep them happy. Then when it all comes out that it is spyware, Firefox will be tarred with the same brush.
That kind of thing is one good reason not to allow just anyone to use the brand.
It's sort of funny to watch how some people will compromise their morals just a little bit further as open-source projects become increasingly complex and start to suffer the same pitfalls as their closed-source brethren. The first slide occurred when Firefox security holes went unpatched for weeks. Now I see that at least one person is attempting to justify this latest concern by comparing Firefox to IE - how ironic considering the former is considered to be a completely different alternative to the latter.
The fact of the matter is that developers - open-source or closed-source - would largely prefer to work on writing new code rather than maintaining old code (especially bug fixes). New code is trailblazing and ego-stroking and cool, while bug fixes don't have nearly the same sexiness. Once a project is deployed, enthusiasm for it tends to fall away.
Now, with closed-source commercial projects you're paying people to maintain the code throughout its whole life cycle, so you can ensure that the software is enhanced and fixed as is appropriate for your business needs. People will grumble and try to squirm out of it, but if their paychecks rely on getting bug fixes and small enhancements done they can be forced to finish the work. But if you're volunteering your time to a project freely you have far more flexibility to pick and choose what you work on. I think the enthusiasm for getting 1.0.1 out the door is far thinner and weaker than the excitement generated on the march towards 1.0. This is what I perceive to be the Achilles heel of most large-scale open-source projects that don't at least have some sort of corporate interest (and therefore backing) to ensure forward progress will be continued.
This isn't an open-source bash, by the way - I have great respect for people who donate their time freely to these sorts of efforts, and open-source has done some pretty amazing things for software development.
Konkqueror == Nothing for those of us that do not use KDE.
Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with your comment (I'm an Opera user myself, under Linux and windows) and I was quite surprised you weren't modded into obliviion by some of the seemingly anti-Opera /. members, remember that Opera makes most of their money from the embedded market, especially mobile phones and PDA's. Hence there's an awful lot of incentive to get the browser to be as lightweight as possible. Similarly, alot of Opera's innovations have been related to making a browser useful with limited screen size (tabs, small screen rendering) and navigation tools (gestures, incredibly extensive shortcuts).
Conversely, FF's main aim was to develop a leaner browser than the Moz suite whilst still maintaining a Moz/Opera-like level of functionality. Now that the browser is more-or-less set in stone, expect to see alot of work being done in the smaller/faster areas. Especially with the up-and-coming Gecko-powered embedded browser that's being worked on.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
"What features does IE have over Firefox?"
It comes pre-installed on every Windows box. Don't underestimate availability.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
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.