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Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble
sebFlyte writes "After the reports of problems with Firefox' development earlier this week there are now rumblings about more serious problems with the Mozilla Suite. Some developers want to spin the suite out as a community project that the foundation has no responsibility for, and others want to create a Firefox Foundation to deal with the success of the standalone browser."
I see this sort of instability as only hurting the cause. It will show the general public and/or typical PHBs that closed source software is better because the companies/foundations making it are more stable. Mozilla really needs to try to keep it together.
The Firefox interface is all XUL - not minimised at all, just with fewer features. It's what allows themes to change the interface, and extensions. If you want a XUL-less browser, try K-Meleon.
Mozilla has become a well-known name (through its history and through Firefox), while the Gecko engine is relatively unheard of. Similarly, people know Internet Explorer instead of Trident or Tasman, Opera instead of Presto, and so on.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Here's the differences:
Firefox starts up slightly faster.
The Firefox UI has a lot of features removed. The idea was to make the core browser "simple" and allow it to be customized via extensions.
Firefox generally used IE's UI as its model, whereas Mozilla used Netscape 4.x as its model.
Once the browser is loaded, rendering and speed wise they're the same. Benchmarks recently posted on Slashdot showed that the 1.8 versions of the suite were significantly faster than Firefox (based on 1.7). The next Firefox release should gain those improvements.
If you use FireFox and Thunderbird, you end up with higher memory usage as you get two copies of the Mozilla core loaded, whereas with the Suite you only have one copy loaded. This problem gets worse if you also use the standalone Composer or Calendar.
The biggest difference is to get a change done in the Mozilla UI, you have to get a large group of people to agree. Firefox has about 2 people who decide on the UI, so its easier to get changes done there.
Really, the biggest difference in Firefox is it shuts up the people who want to be able to download just a browser without the other stuff, but who also refuse to use the Mozilla net installer. If you used the Suite's net installer, you've always been able to tell it not to download the extra junk, but there's a large portion of people that liked to ignore the net installer and then bitch about being forced to download and install the parts they don't want.
Here is an article at EWeek about some of the problems with FF 1.0.1 update and the need for a better update system and more servers. He also mentions the problems with reviewers, but the update problems are far worse in the near term. The fact that the update.mozilla.org is very slow to update extensions was a bad sign. Of course extensions are non-critical compared to the browser itself. Now it looks like browser updates are handled the same way. I had much the same experience on my laptop as the author of the article. First it took forever for the update to appear. When it finally did show up the update system pushed out a completely new installer file, and messed up the installed program list with two install enteries linking to the same program. When Firefox went from 1.0PR to 1.0 it was handled much better. Only some files needed updating, it was not a complete reinstall. I believe that much of the criticism is valid and not just anti-Firefox FUD. Encourging more external contribution and finding more reviewers, as well as defining the relationship between the Firefox and Mozilla suite developers are longer term issues that need to be addressed, but better managment of the update system is something that is more pressing and is having a negative impact on users today.
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No, I don't want to explore the Recycle Bin.