Mozilla Dev Team On Firefox's Success

Titus Germanicus writes "If you're thinking about open sourcing a project in the near future, Mozilla might be the perfect blueprint to follow. At last week's Mesh 2008 conference in Canada, Mike Shaver, chief technology evangelist and founding member at Mozilla, and John Resig, a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla — two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser — listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project. Shaver said in this interview that because the Web is intended for everybody, the level same openness should be shared with Firefox's open source contributors."

Comments

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

Obviously, you're not a web developer, because "performs better" and IE really don't fit together, especially when it comes to rendering web pages in a standards-compliant manner.

Actually, I am a web developer. My script runs the exact same speed in both browsers, I think IE "performs better" in that the IE team made some better decisions when differing from the standards. (For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "innerHTML." The fact that Firefox won't just swallow its pride and alias "innerText" to do the same thing it does on IE is a constant thorn in my paw. "Object" tags with IDs are a better solution for Flash than Firefox's "Embed" tags, although now more and more sites are using Object in FF which is nice.)

I might be biased from my history, but IE also had a lot of little niceties it does with Javascript that Firefox doesn't reproduce. For instance, you can easily and automatically refer to tables as a 2-dimensional array. Firefox does have better development tools, though.

As for rendering webpages in a standards-compliant manner, as soon as there's a reference implementation, I might buy that. For the moment, the standards are vague, there's no reference implementation, and the standards body primarily seem to be of the extremely foolish mindset that webpages never become un-maintained, and everybody will instantly adopt your shiny new standard the instant its improved. ("Fixing" HTML by creating XHTML just makes two mostly-but-not-quite-identical standards that all browsers and devices have to support for eternity instead of one. Good work.)

In fact, without a reference implementation, I don't think there even should be a standard. It's easy to sit up in an ivory tower and think up shit to put in HTML/XHTML, but without actually writing the software you'll end up with shit that can't be implemented, or you'll miss the three dozen holes and vagaries in your spec. Let's see the reference implementation, then maybe the standards will get some respect.

(Oh, and hey guys, my web sites already do separate content and presentation-- it's called a "CMS"! I appreciate the bandwidth savings of CSS, but that whole content and presentation separation thing was already taken care of.)

For the time-being, the standard is "whatever you have to do to make the page look good in all browsers," and that work is taken care of by the web designer, not the consumer. I don't see anything on the horizon that will make that change significantly. Sure, the job gets easier for the web designer as older browsers fall out of use (at a glacial page; even today you'd be a fool to break IE 5 compatibility), but the end-user isn't going to see any kind of holy grail of improvement from using a "standards-compliant" browser.

I've not seen Firefox behave as badly as you describe; are you using Vista with less than 2GB of RAM? ;)

I dunno if you were trying to make an extremely lame "Vista sucks" joke or not with that smiley. The download window in Firefox is slow on my home computer (Vista with 2GB of RAM, if you must know) and my work computer (XP Pro with 2GB), so it's not the computer.

Recently, I had to re-install Firefox because of a bug my cat triggered while sleeping on the keyboard; somehow I got FF into a mode where every time I clicked on page content, it gave me an insertion cursor, even for non-editable text. I browsed around in about:config for awhile, but I couldn't find jack, so I eventually just gave up and re-installed. That's a sign of quality right there. (Thank God for Google Browser Sync.)

I've been using the nightly builds as my primary browser for over four months, and they've worked great. 3.0 is definitely faster and more responsive than 2.0, and the improvements to the location bar are very welcome, to the point where I can't imagine wanting to browse the web without them.

Good, I like having good browsers. I'd love it if Firefox spent a little time implementing the nice touches that IE has, or at least making the property names consistent.