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Ask a Mozilla Person About Firefox 2.0
Last week's interview guest was Dean Hachamovitch, formal title "general manager Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp." This week we have Chris Beard, Mozilla's Vice President of Products. (Here's a recent "pre-Firefox 2 release" interview with Chris that you might want to look at to avoid duplicating questions.) Chris will be calling on other Mozilla and Firefox people to help answer your questions, but he's the point man here. Slashdot interview rules apply, as always.
What were you thinking with the changes to the tab UI? Everyone who opens enough tabs to trip it hates the scrolling, yet the justification for the feature was based on those who don't open enough tabs. Will it be changed back, or will we forever need to visit about:config on installing FireFox?
Why do you think this is happening? Do you lack developers who use / know / deal with Linux; is it because something is wrong with Linux; or is it because there are more people out there using Windows?
As an add on to that question, since you can distribute extensions with the installer, why not just make these "official" extensions rather than building them into the app? Then people could easily switch them off or substitute third party ones (think tab management).
You've created a great extension management system, yet aren't using it yourselves.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Missing the point completely. the question was asked because people DO care about rendering speed. I could just as easily say "Who cares about the acceleration speed of my car? It still gets me from point A to point B" People want things to go fast. Fast cars, fast internet, and fast browsers. If people weren't concerned about speed, we'd all be on 9600bps modems.
(Futurama) Fry: "My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?"
the big deal is this. when people get all defensive about FF because someone else voices the opinion that they believe something is lacking or could be better, it only does harm by stunting the betterment of the product. If we actually listened to what each other said, instead of saying, who cares, it's good enough, then innovation gets a helping hand instead of fending off naysayers. Whether FF renders faster than IE is true or not, I have no idea, but it is a good question.
(Futurama) Fry: "My folks were always on me to groom myself and wear underpants. What am I, the pope?"
Good afternoon Mr. Beard,
/. crowd.
/. article titled "Nine Reasons to Skip Firefox 2.0", TFA states "a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser." While there's no doubt that your company has worked hard to bring 2.0 to fruition, what is your company's response to such a backlash? And will such a response prompt a maintenance release to address such issues?
Thanks for taking the time out to field questions from the
1. What is Mozilla's direction with regards to implementing out-of-the-box email security with Thunderbird? Granted, there are extensions like Enigmail that add the functionality after the fact. However, the average user may not be aware of such an extension, or have the knowledge to use it. Perhaps your company could work closely with the folks at GnuPG to include such a functionality into Thunderbird (along with a friendly UI for the initial setup process) and offer secure email to the masses? In doing so, the end user would also have a trusted source for receiving GnuPG updates (only to the extent of Thunderbird functionality of course) by way of automatic updates.
2. While Firefox has come a long way, there are still some issues with rendering certain web pages that use style sheets. While it is mainly due to the use of non-standard web publishing practices, one problematic page load of a website may be enough to deter a newcomer to Firefox. What is your company doing to address such issues?
3. One of the more widely discussed issues with Firefox has been memory leaks. Whatever the cause, this has also been a deterrent for new users, and thereby affected market share. In this recent
Thanks again for your time!
I'm going to ignore the "practically unusable" part, since there are plenty of people who somehow manage to use it anyway without problems, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that memory issues are one huge flaw. They're not. They're a bunch of tiny flaws that add up together. It's not like they can go in, fix one bug, and free up half the memory. They have to track down a whole bunch of these things and fix each of them.
If you look at the release notes, nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."
Since upgrading to FF2, Firefox has gone from crashing approximately "never" to crashing approximately "always." It literally freezes 4 or 5 times per day on me. I've read that this is an iFrame/JavaScript issue and that engineers are aware of it and working on it, but my question is: How could you release something this buggy?
Whether FF renders faster than IE is true or not, I have no idea, but it is a good question.
A good question perhaps, but not a good statement. The original poster was claiming that IE is faster than Firefox at rendering without any proof. Since that is not what benchmarks have shown (search on google, it's pretty much a toss up between the two), and doesn't reflect many people's experiences, it is only natural that his conclusions are being questioned. Of course, it may be that IE is faster than Firefox on his computer, but it could be due to any number of external factors (buggy extensions come to mind).
Can I ask why you leave it run for so long? Do you leave the lights and television on in your house when you aren't using them? Do you complain if the car you're driving runs out of gas after running for dozens of hours?
Have you done similar tests on IE, Konqueror, Opera, etc.? How do they stand up over several days of browsing?
Now that I know this memory leak takes DAYS to show up, I'm actually glad the Moz developers are working on real issues...sure, they can fix them as they find them, but I'm glad they aren't wasting all their time on a couple tiny memory leaks that get magnified after people use the browser for days on end (then complain loudly about it). I close programs when I'm done with them, so I really don't care about minor memory leaks.
Leaving a browser open at all times is a sufficiently common usage pattern that, your glib dismissal aside, the Mozilla developers should at least consider a significant push to find and fix the memory leaks that we're complaining about.
FWIW, Safari is in my experience a little memory-leaky, but nothing like Firefox.
(Hmm, my sig is a little hypocritical this time around...)
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.