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

The prefect blueprint?

[Tacvek]

The original Netscape code was abandoned in favor of a complete rewrite. Eventually the main product was considered so bloated that a lightweight version was needed. Eventually the main product was dropped in favor of the lightweight system, which had to have not one but two name changes, and is now fairly widely considered bloated, despite its original goal.

I'd say that while Mozilla has done quite well overall, it could hardly be considered a good blueprint to follow.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Anonymous Coward]

They kept a lot of the good ideas from the Netscape era... I wish they'd kept the good idea of leaving a half-loaded image viewable when it's Stopped, instead of blanking it out (Bug 58880). If Firefox had the same boneheaded behavior for Stopped web pages, it never would've gotten anywhere.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Daengbo]

Not to mention that they seem to be taking credit for what was originally a fork. FF wasn't even a Mozilla project. the use of the name Phoenix was implying that Mozilla was dead and there was a new browser rising from the ashes. For those of you that don't remember, Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox.

I agree that Mozilla's branding of FF and promotional deals were great for them, and that everyone is copying that, but let's not pretend it was all planned from the beginning.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[gaspyy]

You probably don't know Netscape's history.
Netscape's engine couldn't scale -- it was such a horrific mess that probably very few things could be salvaged.

Netscape 3 was great for its days. Then Netscape 4 came and it was simply a pile of shit in terms of stability and bugs (I'm not even mentioning standards compliance - remember the layer and ilayer tags?). There were so many rendering bugs it woulld make IE6 seem immaculate. It's been 10 years since I've had the displeasure of developing for it, but I still remember how I needed to add an invisible border to a div in order for it to be positioned correctly.

So in this respect, they got it right by creating a new, modern rendering engine, one that can scale in the future.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

It's kind of a weird feedback loop. The only reason Firefox is competitive now is because IE didn't get worked on for several years; the reason IE didn't get worked on is that it had no competitive browsers.

BTW, I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Joel Spolsky wrote an article about rewriting software from scratch, titled "Things You Should Never Do": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Personally, I'm with you, I agree with every word he says.

(He also writes a later article, I can't find it at the moment, where he describes Netscape release schedule:
* Release whatever you have with no cleanup or testing, call it version x.0
* Whenever there's a bug severe enough to get covered in the New York Times, bump the version number up a point
Sadly, far too many open source projects use that same release philosophy.)

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[asa]

Firefox was already the most widely used open source consumer product in the world before the Google revenue existed.

Re:Yea right.

[linuxci]

I agree too, but it's hardly reason to ignore the fact that Firefox does have it's own problems. Look at FF's memory footprint and where Firefox came from and you'll see it's simply a very oversimplified and blunt statement about the ugliest bits that no one likes to focus on. A lot of the memory issues have been fixed in Firefox 3 as well as improving JavaScript performance.

Re:Yea right.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

I'm on an old Gateway VTX400 laptop. It's got a 2.2GHz processor with 256 megs of ram. I've got four FF tabs open and it's using ~75MB of memory. I've also got uTorrent open and Windows Media Player and it runs fine for the most part. It stutters every now and then, but it's never crashed because of Firefox. (or any other reason now that I think of it.) Basically what I'm trying to say is that the foot might be wearing a bigger shoe these days but honestly is that a problem? In the day and age of 2/4/8 GB RAM setups, is a few more MB used up that big of a deal?

Regarding Standards Compliance

[Anik315]

I don't know whether Mozilla is more standards compliant than other browsers in the technical sense, but from a web developers standpoint it has lots of little things that other browsers don't have and some big things as well, such as XPCOM. It's web developers web browser, and I expect that with Firefox 4 release which will introduce JavaScript 2, it will be conclusively be the best browser out there and will perhaps regain a majority market share

Re:Yea right.

[compro01]

AFAICT, pretty much all the FF2 memory issues have been fixed up in FF3, though i'm staying with 2 until google makes their toolbar work on 3.

Re:Yea right.

[mixmatch]

Now there's a fubared set of "standards" for you. I just laugh my arse off that everytime firefox gets updated (for those non-existant security holes) that their application breaks. Kind of like all those websites to broke when IE 7 came out?
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200611/three_reasons_sites_break_in_internet_explorer_7/
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/10/why_internet_ex.html

Re:Not our experience

[Merusdraconis]

I'm reminded of that infamous bug amongst webcomic creators where alt text on images wouldn't go to a new line when it needed to. It was identified in something like 0.8, and finally got fixed in 3.0, with Firefox developers mocking those stupid webcomic people the entire time and continually refusing to allow someone else to fix the bug.

They make a pretty good browser, but man those developers are a buncha dicks.

Re:Not our experience

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how often is this happening to other people contributing to "open" source projects Well, if you're talking about Pidgin/Gaim, it happens just about every goddamn time anyone submits anything. Personal preference takes precedence over the good of the project, and those jackasses' egos grow ever larger.

Re:Not our experience

[roca]

What was this? Bug 388547?

If so:
-- I'm sorry.
-- Looks like Robert Longson slipped up by not copying over contributor information. But I don't see any complaints from your people about that in the bugs. (Note, he's a volunteer, not paid by Mozilla or anyone else.) Would be easy to fix.
-- Tim Rowley got taken off Firefox SVG work by IBM which partly explains why the patch never got final review.
-- Looks like "25% no longer required", not 80%.
-- I don't see any sign of your displeasure anywhere in these bugs. People are busy, timely hurry-up gripes usually help prioritize things.

Re:Not our experience

[pizzach]

I don't know about the Pidgin guys. I think empathy is going to be stealing the place of pidgin in many linux users desktops if they aren't careful. It already has a form of video/voice chat built in and has been proposed for inclusion in Gnome.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[sulfur]

No, it was removed in 3.0b3. The problem is that it is not available through about:config or any other option. You can install Oldbar extension, but it only changes appearance of the address bar, not the sorting algorithm. You will still have results from your bookmarks and random pages.

Re:Not our experience

[wombatmobile]

It's not clear exactly what you did here, but it sounds like what you did is just start coding, then come to Mozilla a few months later and say, "hey! we have code for you!"

No that isn't what we did.

We consulted with the module owner first before contributing any code. And then we participated in half a dozen reviews after we submitted code, each time adjusting minor stylistic coding practices to match the reviewers arbitrary directives.

And then the reviewer guy lifted 6 other bug fixes from our code body, submitted them in his name without acknlowedging our coders.

And then the reviewer said we have to rewrite our patch to get it considered since it now contains redundant code.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[j_sp_r]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

It's just a different setting now!

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[Ilgaz]

Governments, universities (I think Berkeley too) can have access to source code. They went into panic when governments, armies made Linux switch because they know "what is there" so they started some program.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/default.mspx

You can also have BSD in a closed source, commercial OS/Software. That is why BSD is the choice for companies like Apple or originally Microsoft.

MS is a evil company, not like they can't code a TCP/IP stack. They didn't see TCP/IP and Internet coming though.

Re:Not our experience

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

I'm reminded of that infamous bug amongst webcomic creators where alt text on images wouldn't go to a new line when it needed to.

FYI, that bug affected the title text (which is supposed to be displayed in addition to the element it's attached to), not the alt text (which is meant to be displayed instead of the element it's attached to). xkcd is frequently cited as a good example of this bug in action, you can examine the page source to see where the title and alt attributes are used.

Re:Fix the GUI

[BZ]

This is fixed in Firefox 3. Not that any browsers on Mac actually use the built-in widgets; they use the OS theming engine to draw bitmaps that look like the built-in widgets.