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."
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.
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?
*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.)
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
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
From the article:
Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews. And I'm on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I'm the only person who cares enough to make it an issue.
What good is people submitting patches if no one is there to review the code prior to commit? Indeed, I submitted a very trivial usability enhancement to Firefox, and it was quickly swept under the rug. Perhaps it should simply be made into a plug-in, I don't know. Just thought I would share it as first-hand experience.
- shadowmatter
Architecture documentation
How to write Firefox extensions
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
As I read the comments in the bug, you were looking for technical information (ie, "do I have to create a stream, or is it provided to me by the dialog?" (not a direct quote)), not design. The design should be kept close to the problem, and definitely in the bug. The technical implementation details, and especially minor questions about how you do this or that, don't need to be logged in the bug. Again, as I read it, what you really needed was a comprehensive architecture document of Thunderbird, or failing that at least someone familiar with similar code that could point you in the right direction. That's a task for IRC channels (because the discussion is ephemeral, and doesn't need to be logged for anything but your development purposes) or mailing lists.
Consider it from the approver's point of view. You offered to help, ran into a technical snag, asked a question in an inappropriate forum, and disappeared for 7 months. I get that it's open source, and work is done by individuals in their spare time, but that doesn't sound to me like you were really committed to fixing the bug. If you were, you would've tracked down the information you needed (it wasn't a design question requiring a committee vote), and continued with the work. That's how I define "genuine".
That wasn't aggression, and I'm not affiliated with Firefox in any way (in fact, aside from having it installed but never using it, I have no association with the project at all). To turn it around on you, perhaps Mozilla is failing to build a community because people don't follow through on commitments? Of course, it's more likely that they're failing to build a community because they've failed to build a community. (no, really -- the fact that your technical question went unanswered can be seen as a sign of a lack of community, and short of some group of people stepping up and actively trying to build that community, the community will continue to not grow ...)
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.
It was elaborated on slashdot once before.
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)
You realize that you are arguing with a firefox developer about how firefox is built, do you not?
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."
Respectfully, Albert Gore