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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.
How was the cake from MS?
Dear Chris Beard, I have used Firefox since before 1.0, and one thing that Internet Explorer has always beaten FF on is rendering speed. With the release of IE7, Microsoft has made IE at least feel faster than before, and it certainly has adopted many features that made FF such a stand-out, security not withstanding. I would like to know if Mozilla has made it a priority in the past to give FF a rendering speed competitive with or faster than IE, and if we will see FF becoming competitive with or faster than IE in rendering web pages in future releases? Thanks.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Opera?
What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?
What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)
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With the continued growth of Firefox, there are still a lot of users out there that do not even know they have a choice as far as browsers go. Is there any effort to reach the average joe consumer, other than word of mouth, and if so what would that strategy be.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
What does the long-term future have in store for Firefox? Is the web browser going to become more feature rich, or is the Mozilla team going to aim at keeping Firefox very minimalist and optimized? If the former, what features do you think will help advance the user experience of the web? If the latter, how will you differentiate Firefox from its competitors and maintain the brand in absence of flashy new features?
With the most recent releases of FF 2.0 and IE7 almost simultaneously, from a person who does QA for a web deliverable software company, trying to debug and locate the source of inconsistencies in the way that FF 2.0 and IE7 handles DOM - what steps is the Mozilla foundation taking to help blaze the trail for some kind of standardization in DOM? I realize that IE has its own version of DOM, but is there hope that 1) Mozilla will better respond to erratic DOM programming from those that develop for IE or that 2) Mozilla will somehow influence the Microsoft camp to come over to standards?
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Firefox was created partly as an alternative to the bloated Mozilla suite. Now as Firefox matures, it too is gaining features. While all of them are fairly useful, some, such as spell check, web feed previews, and session restoration, might be better implemented as extensions. Firefox is still a fairly lightweight browser, and I appreciate Firefox 2.0's improved response speed, but I still worry that Firefox is becoming the kind of software that I hate.
How committed is the team to keeping Firefox's core as small as possible, and what, if any, features might be turned into extensions in the future?
Chris;
Does FF worry that an unscrupulous add-on developer could produce what could be a click-fraud capable bot net hidden in an add-on that could be promoted and distributed by FF team? What steps are taken to prevent it given the add-ons are no signed or hosted by FF?
Thanks
Paul
Has the Mozilla team considered adopting timeframes to the resolution of bugs, no matter what the severity. I've seen bugs on Bugzilla that while minor, have been open since before the browser was named Firefox, some without any comment besides the initial confirmation they exist. Why do issues stay unaddressed after multiple major releases?
Many of us first switched to Firefox because it was so much smaller and faster than Internet Explorer. In fact, much of the early progress was directed at removing unnecessary code. Now it seems as though Firefox is following in the steps of Netscape Navigator by including many more features, some which everyone will use (spell check) and some which many may not (better RSS handling). The result is a larger download.
How does the Firefox team choose which features are going to be included and which ones should be left as add-ons? From a marketing aspect, is it possible to promote a product for being small and compact, or is a long feature list necessary?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
The Tab Mix Plus extension is widely considered to be greatly enhancing to any Firefox experience, alongside extensions like AdBlock Plus and All-In-One Gestures (and similar gesture extensions). Are these 3 features - enhanced tab manager, advert blocker, and gestures - going to be included in the initial Firefox package at any point?
And along the same lines, what would you rather do - streamline Firefox by removing features and making them optional add-ons, or enhance Firefox by building in more features which can be enabled and disabled without the need for extra installations?
I know I'm not meant to ask multiple questions, but it's all on the same theme - would you consider creating two major download versions for Firefox, one which is "barebones" and the other preloaded with the most popular extensions?
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."
Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.
Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?
When will Firefox get some much needed love on Mac OS X? The toolbars look hideous, the form widgets don't look aqua like, and there is no integration into OS X services (like the dictionary). Plus there is always a need for speed improvements.