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Firefox Losing Its Way?
An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has a recap on Firefox 2.0 and its shortcomings. Aside from the technical aspects, the article raises some good questions about the Firefox 'community,' it's future, and what it's goals are at the end of the day. Their conclusion? Firefox 1.5 was a much better open-source project/community model than 2.0 ever will be, and that 'It seems Firefox has lost its way somewhere along the passage to fame.'"
Life is too short to spend very much of your time fixing things. One of the reasons I use KDE today is the butt ugly monkey paw icon the juvenile coders at Gnome(childishness is a state of mind, not of age) placed all over everything. You simply cannot expect professional results from such people who are so disconnected with the real world. I could have changed the image to something else--but who in their right mind is going to spend the time eleminating such an eyesore from a UI when the very presence of such a butt ugly image is itself a denunciation of the capabilities of the coders. Gnome has apparently grown up considerably, but I will stick with KDE when I use Linux. Yet KDE in its rush to be compatable with Microsoft broke to unuseability the calendar tool I used for years, and it is remains unuseable after a year. Firefox just went through a transition with the typical lack of grace I have increasingly noted as characteristic of all free/open software products over the past few years--they seem unable to manage transitions as gracefully as the commercial outfits when the project reaches a certain size. Oh for the days of Red Hat 4.2 and the clean crisp AfterStep GUI where there weren't a lot of bells and whistles, but dammit everything worked: there is a lot to be said for simple, even austere, working environments, without the endless list of skins designed by juveniles and the crufty changes made to software to accomodate them. Maybe I am a dinosaur (I learned Fortran IV back in '64), and I haven't done much coding for years (I am a physicist), but I bought a MacBook Pro 17" (now that it is 64 bit) as my step away from the crap in free/oss software projects the past few years; when Leopard comes out with its VM in the Spring I will probably install Red Hat Enterprise or SUSE, and probably with a custom kernel, just to keep my hand in Linux, but it will be decidedly my secondary platform. (I still have a Linux desktop at the office.) I have Firefox, Mozilla and SeaMonkey (another dubious name which suggests juveniles again), and am writing this from Camino; I like Mozilla mostly for its web composer feature, for minimal mostly tombstone type web pages for classes I teach these days. Like the old .0 Red Hat releases, I will wait a bit before trying out Firefox 2.0. I actually feel more use for the all-in-one like Mozilla or Sea Monkey, but Firefox+Thunderbird works well in Linux, and probably will on my Mac.
Far more important for the future of free/open software is the development of models for creating and maintaining large projects, like Firefox--forget the pouty adults and their GPL3, which is and can only be a source of divisiveness. You need the ability to create and maintain large projects, and frankly that will probably take more discipline than most free/open software is capable of maintaining these days!
My two bits.