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Ask Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker
There have been several recent reports of squabbles and problems involving Mozilla and Firefox development. In an attempt to clear the air about what's going on inside the Mozilla Project and the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker has agreed to answer 10 - 12 Slashdot questions. Please look at some recent interviews with Ms. Baker and check her blog before posting in order to avoid duplication. We'll publish her answers within the next week.
Please look at some recent interviews with Ms. Baker and check her blog before posting in order to avoid duplication.
Ah... if only slashdot editors followed this advice and checked their own site, we too might avoid duplication.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Shouldn't the Firefox team be more concerned about crashes? These two ABC news stories, Chavez: Low Oil Rates a Thing of the Past and Blair's Anti-Terrorism Law Wins Approval, for example, crash the latest version of Firefox (1.01) every time. The crashes have been known and fixed for 6 months (Copy and paste the URL, Bugzilla does not accept links from Slashdot.). They have been fixed in the recent developer builds (see bottom of page), but you are warned that recent builds may have other bugs. Shouldn't the developers of a program with "more than 25 million" users release crash fixes quickly or at least warn users?
More reports from users, sometimes imperfect, with minimal editing for clarity:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11864609 "The last few releases have a habit of freezing up in various ways. It's not something that happens every day, but it happens a lot more than it used to."
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11865831 "... firefox DOES NOT let other applications that need it [memory] get it back. it [Firefox] routinely crawls the machine to a halt until it's killed and restarted."
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141 586&cid=11866690 "[Firefox] really shouldn't use as much memory as it does, and it shouldn't have the memory retention policy that it does either. The amount of memory that it uses does matter, because it completely fragments the heap, it pushes the address space of other programs to disk, and it performs... [badly] after you've used another program that requires a lot of memory.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 68266 "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."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 75707 "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."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 63855 "I'm on a Mac, so it tends to only actually crash when it's loaded down and I hit a bad flash or java applet"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 63924 "Usually though it [Firefox crash] happens after an extend period of time, without fail really, as my lone firefox window often stays open for days on end, so while my usage habits aren't much (compared to some at least) in the short term, in the long term the crashes have been making me wonder if a memory leak may be the cause, but sadly I lack the time to investigate it myself."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141586&cid=118 64110 "There are bugs that cause memory leaks and slowdowns, relating to plugins and Javascript. Any one of the page
Sounds like someone wasn't earning their keep when doing due diligence.
Now that seamonkey has being discontinued are there any plans to release a libgecko/libgre type package that the aviary products can link against and that the embedders (e.g. yelp/galeon/epiphany) can link agianst?
Sorry, I meant to say that it was answered in the documents linked to from her blog, especially this ("We probably won't use the same naming conventions, as we need to be clear that this is not a Mozilla Foundation product release"), and this, which has release plans and project planning info, and notes in several places that the naming and versioning will change.
Sorry for the tone of my previous post.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Absolutely not. Do they support 1.5 and 1.6? No. They supported 1.4 and 1.7. They waited till they decided to kill the suite (after it was brought to people's attention that they weren't planning a final release of 1.8) to tell people "oh, the alphas and betas were just a big joke". For some reason I think this was a snap decision resulting from the flaming they were getting for such dubious practices as inserting extra alphas to delay 1.8 to keep Firefox in the spotlight and the seemingly open verbal warfare between the Aviary and Suite factions. I imagine it burnt their asses that people constantly pointed out that Firefox lacked USEFUL features that were in Seamonkey and that Firefox wasn't really any better than the Suite's browser. The claims of increased speed are commonly regarded as being complete bullshit by suite users that have tried FF and went back.
Why do you think it is that so many people continue to claim that the Mozilla suit was "cancelled" when the Mozilla foundation has just spent several years upgrading the suite to a new code-base which breaks the suite from a single executable into stand-alone applications?
Why do you think this caught people so off-guard, given that the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to do so several years ago, and it has been clearly stated on the development roadmap for 2 or 3 years? What could you have done to be more clear?
> and the roadmap has said so all the time.
If you can point to one roadmap that says one consistent thing I would be obliged! The roadmaps I have seen over the last 3 years have said 29 contradictory things, often within the same document.
sPh
Actually, the usage is not flattening. The growth curve used to be exponential, and now it is nearly linear. That's a slowdown in the growth, but the number of new users the browsers are attacting per month has been nearly constant since around the time Firefox 1.0 was released.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If it was stated on the roadmap 2 or 3 years ago that there would be no Mozilla 1.8, then why was it a discussion issue just a month or so back? It certainly seems like someone in the Mozilla dev crew didn't know as an absolute fact that there'd be no Mozilla 1.8, and if their own developers didn't know, how can you fault average users for not realizing it?
Yeah, people knew it would stop being supported, but I think they just thought they'd get a little warning beforehand. After all, what were all those people testing, then? The "backend" of Mozilla? Was this made clear to them? Did they realize they were testing software that would never be officially released? If they DID realize it, would they have still spent time testing it? I read about one poor guy who actually went through and updated language translations for Mozilla 1.8, only to find it was pointless of him to do so. A little communication earlier on in the process would have avoided all this.
Criticize all you want, but big organizations would be eaten alive by their customers if they pulled something like this. Microsoft has trouble discontinuing Win98 support YEARS in advance. Mozilla is growing, and open source is a give and take strategy. If the project wants the support of the community, they've got to be willing to accomodate the needs and concerns of the community as well. I don't think it's fair to simply bash Mozilla for their mistakes, but I believe they could have dealt with the situation better than they did, and it would benefit the project if they learned how to handle these situations better, especially now that they're getting the attention of the public in general.
"I understand you experienced some problems because you didn't understand the install procedure but that's not the fault of Mozilla or Firefox.
The custom install option states it is for experienced users, if you managed to install to the root of the program folders you certainly are not such a user."
So, is the problem that if you install the software to your root directory it deletes your entire drive on uninstall?
That sounds like a major friggen bug to me. I don't care if you install it into your windows directory, the uninstaller should know to delete its own files only. Sure there are going to be cache directories that it creates on install and then will have to empty somewhat indiscriminantly, but it seems pretty stupid to just wipe everything in the root directory of the install when you know EXACTLY which files you put there.
...
Because, somehow, I was aware of this without being a Mozilla developer, by only reading public statements and the development roadmap. So is the problem that developers don't read the roadmap and don't read the Mozilla Foundation's public statements?
I think where we're getting hung up is that you're saying that developers/users should have known that "the end of suite development was coming" and suggesting that people didn't realize this (obvious) fact. I think they did know that, and thus the question of "why didn't they realize it" already has an answer - they did. I think it's fair to say that most people did realize that, one day, Mozilla would no longer actively develop the suite.
What bothered many people (including me, particularly) is that the 1.8 release cycle mislead many people into thinking there would be a 1.8 release. In other words, that this wasn't *yet* the end of the suite. What people saw up until a few weeks ago was the normal alpha/beta/release cycle that Mozilla has done for years. They had no real evidence from Mozilla to show that this was in fact *not* such a normal cycle, or that they should react any differently than they did in the past. (i.e. bug test, tweak, update translations, etc. for the new release and prepare it for official release) There was no concrete evidence showing that 1.7 was the end of the suite.
Furthermore, this form of decision making projects the image that the Mozilla project simply makes decisions like this out of the blue. Everyone just got together one day and said "okay, let's stop developing this now". To businesses, that looks *very* reactionary, and it suggests that Mozilla doesn't have a plan. It would make them think - do we want an organization like that being part of our infrastructure? Are they preparing for the future, or just taking it day by day?
What could have been done to smooth things out considerably and avoid wasted effort was simply to make an official statement at the start of the 1.8 development cycle that there would be no 1.8 public release and that the 1.8 testing cycle was specifically for testing Mozilla's backend technologies. No confusion, no fuss, the future of Mozilla is laid out right after 1.7, the perfect time to do so. The core question, in my mind, is why didn't this happen? IMHO, that's the real question that ought to be asked.
The GNU project was around for years even before the linux kernel. Here's a little timeline of when some prominent open source projects started:
GNU Emacs: 1984
GNU C compiler (gcc): 1987
Linux Kernel: 1991
KDE: 1996
Gnome: 1997
Mozilla: 1998
Admittedly, Mozilla had a head start by being based on Netscape, but it wasn't -open source- until 1998.
I'll agree with your point about the ending of the core suite having potential effects on the reputation of OSS (though I think it's very unlikely), but the first statement you made is just... off by many years.