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

Yea right.

[fluffy99]

They started with a piece of crap code base, banged on that, did a mediocre re-write, and in the end still have a buggy, unstable, bloated browser. The developers frequently stick their fingers in their collective ears and insist that problems like memory hogging and instability don't exist. Instead, they keep forging ahead and adding more feature bloat. The only reason they had any success on the windows platform was the IE6 insecurities and people wanted a lightweight replacement browser. It's too bad that firefox has become a heavyweight, slow hog that isn't really much more secure than IE7.

Re:Yea right.

[fluffy99]

Certainly not in stability, or even being able to properly work with 100% of the websites out there. Compliance with standards is pointless if it doesn't work on 100% of sites. If FireFox wants better acceptance, they need to fix a lot of the corporate network support issues like centralized updates, configuration management that integrates with AD instead of some abortion scripting setup, properly implementing the proxy.pac file (which netscape invented, btw), etc.

I normally remove Firefox from my users computers as it causes more helpdesk calls, and the fact that it doesn't always automatically update itself is a security vulnerability. At least with IE7 I can control via AD and update via WSUS. I was pretty pissed to discover that one of our developer teams wrote a critical web gui that requires the chrome extensions. 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.

Re:Yea right.

[TheSeer2]

Well, with the Firefox betas I've tried to now, and continuing with the latest release candidate, Firefox 3 /collapses/ on pages with lots of HTML (large lists and tag lists and so forth) where Firefox 2 did not.

Re:Regarding Standards Compliance

[Rockoon]

Web developers use more than 2 browsers, including Safari and Opera we've already got 4. Web developers do this because they know that "Standards Compliance" is a bullshit term.

There is no reference renderer is which to compare to. All there is is a bullshit specification intentionally worded in bizarely ambiguous language.

Web developers use more than one browser because the most important thing is that their shit works for the end user. They dont sit on top of a pedestal telling the end user to fuck off if they use IE, because the end user is the commodity they are trying to sell.