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?

[palegray.net]

It's a great blueprint to follow. The original scrapping of the Netscape code was a necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft, allowing the developers a clean slate to work from as they developed a great competing browser platform. They kept a lot of the good ideas from the Netscape era, with a focus on standards and community feedback.

A lot of products go through this cycle. The big deal isn't "oh my God, we have to do a rewrite"; this is expected every now and again and needs and technologies change. The important part is the process; how things like a major rewrite are managed. People make the difference, not code.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Tubal-Cain]

This is less about the code and more about properly handling the project.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[larry bagina]

maybe they meant: get bought out by large company (aol) that later realizes they fucked up big time and pays more money to get rid of you. Or maybe they mean: land lucrative paid deals with google, amazon, etc.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[man_of_mr_e]

Not to mention, Losing half your workforce in the process, taking > 5 years before they even shipped a 1.0 version, changing organizational structures half a dozen times and moving around to different non-profits, and oh yeah.. convince everyone around you that you're "standards compliant" when you're not even close. You're just better than the bigger guy.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[urcreepyneighbor]

*cough*OLPC*cough*

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Merusdraconis]

I fail to see how scrapping bugfixes and a perfectly functional framework is considered 'cruft'. Sure, they got a lot of bugs, in the same sort of way that a nuclear explosion is bound to kill a few bad guys somewhere. They also killed a lot of stuff that was perfectly salvageable and they'd have to rewrite, and the only reason Firefox 'caught up' is because IE simply didn't going anywhere for five years.

The Netscape code was a perfect example of how to mismanage a rewrite operation.

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?

[afabbro]

This article is usually referenced whenever the subject turns to complete rewrites. I agree - they're over-rated and done too often. As Joel in the article points out, it's easier and more fun to write code than to read it.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[hdparm]

If shitty IE is the only reason, then why for instance Opera did not catch-up and replaced both, as you and some others imply, crap browsers?

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?

[Merusdraconis]

Probably because for most of its life it was not free. Opera dropped the pricetag when Firefox came along.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

I'm not a huge fan of Firefox (I think IE7 performs better, generally), but I also think the level of "bloat" is simply normal for a web browser in this day and age. Browsers are page layout programs, even worse than that, page layout programs where the layout can be changed with scripting at any second.

What's bugging me more about Firefox isn't the level of "bloat", it's the responsiveness. It shouldn't take over 5 seconds for the download window to display, it doesn't matter how long my download history is. (And the browser shouldn't be entirely locked-up while it's opening!) Hopefully FF3 will take care of some of those issues.

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:The prefect blueprint?

[hdparm]

But isn't this whole story about that - ALL the things that make any project successful?

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[AaronLawrence]

The original scrapping of the Netscape code was a big part of killing Netscape and allowing IE to take the whole market away. Most likely a strong refactoring would have produced results quicker; of course all the egos... I mean programmers involved wouldn't have been able to indulge their "this code is crap lets throw it away" attitude.

Firefox succeeded DESPITE throwing a huge set of functioning code away, not because of it.

All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant.

This is especially true if the people doing the rewrite are not the same people who wrote it the first time. In Netscapes case some of the originals were around but the majority seems to have been new.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

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. I suppose IE7 performs better at providing possible exploits for malicious pages to attack, though. By that metric, IE is the best browser ever. If you write web-driven malware, or engage in phishing.

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

I do really recommend trying either a nightly build or the release candidate for Firefox 3, though; 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.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

1) Opera wasn't free during this period of time. Not being free, it's not really in the same "market."
2) Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use. Back during the era we're talking about, Opera's interface was crap.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[chamont]

Your comment makes me wonder if you're a professional software developer. Maybe you're a manager?

"Cruft" generally means shit code that is somewhere between incomprehensible and don't-touch-it-I-don't-know-what-the-hell-it-does. Code like this is always frail and impossible to maintain, so it tends to hold back any potential new feature that would rely on it. Normally, the author has long since moved on, so it makes sense in the LONG RUN to throw it out (the open source mentality).

Obviously, manager types can't see much past this quarter, so they saddle people with this garbage, and people eventually quit over such trivial things. Sometimes you just have to realize what you did wrong, press delete, and bang out something that you hope will last 3 years or so.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

GRAH! Sorry, nasty typos:

For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "innerHTML."

Supposed to read:

For instance, the property name "innerText" makes a hell of a lot more sense than "textContent."

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Alright buddy, you can keep calling those horrible non-standard implementations of HTML/CSS "niceties" if you want.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Considering that innerHTML can contain HTML and not just text, it makes sense that it is named the way that it is.

Perhaps if you had more familiarity with CSS you'd realize just how broken Internet Explorer is. IE failing to properly render valid HTML/CSS that displays correctly in all other browsers is far too common, and more often than not, IE6 and IE7 can be counted upon to break it in entirely different manners.

Your observations of the speed of Firefox do not mirror mine, and I've installed it on some horribly under-powered Windows machines. Perhaps you should run an operating system that isn't incomplete, or keep your amazingly talented browser-killing cat away from your keyboard.

Seriously, if you're syncing your preferences, why didn't you just revert them? Any changes made go in your profile.

Do you really think that the people writing the W3C specifications know nothing about writing browsers?

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[vivek7006]

I remember that back in 2000 when I was in still school, I took a course on "software engineering". The instructor talked about why rewriting code from scratch was a bad idea and code reuse should be preferred. He cited the example of failed Mozilla project. He was not alone, many others said at that time that Mozilla was dead. Its really funny to now read these insightful articles.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Ilgaz]

Missed which boat?

http://www.opera.com/b2b/

Try to accomplish same thing with thousands of amateurs not caring about real life implementing thousands of lines a day.

Opera is _the standard_ on mobile devices. You know the trend everything moving to non personal computers? Where is Mozilla Symbian S60 version? Where is mini Mozilla runs on a server serving potentially to near billion J2ME powered handsets? Where is Mozilla Win CE? Why Nokia spares millions to their number 1 competitors HTML rendering Webkit? How can Opera sell 2 years old code to Symbian S60 users? How can people bug them 24/7 about the upcoming 9.5 near begging "Give us an Alpha, we will pay for it"

Gnome, KDE, the actual Qt (trolltech) are moving to webkit. Why? Ask them.

Remember Mozilla could fit to a single 1.44 floppy? Who missed the boat I really wonder.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Ilgaz]

I have recently used a horrible celeron M laptop with 512MB RAM.

Here is my non web developer, non developer benchmark. Safari for Windows (current) is the fastest, IE 7 is the next , Firefox current stable is the slowest. I know I will get into trouble because of saying it. :)

If people didn't go into panic when I installed Opera, I would make them a favour but... anyway.

As a long time Apple user, I never buy those 5x 10x faster crap Apple says in every product but they somehow managed to make a very fast, responsive, multimedia friendly browser for Windows.

With the recent amazing progress they made with Webkit, even Gnome opting in for Webkit and Trolltech (now owned by Nokia) chooses Webkit for entire Qt 4.x , I think Webkit could be a great example what would happen if you slightly change your coding style, be friendly to 3rd party developers (and rivals), keep it tidy and consider everyone when developing it. Perhaps it is the good example of open source instead of Firefox.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Ilgaz]

That time they really failed. They finally listened to rude but knowing people like JWZ, said "It became useless junk" and started rm -rf operations, shipped Phoneix.

As we speak about 2000s, I wonder what would happen if they (AOL) listened to CmdrTaco of this site right time before Netscape actually failed.

If you didn't know, there is a good surprise there (1998):
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113192359/slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=425

CmdrTaco is the guy who said GPL and open it. Imagine the difference if some suit from AOL actually listened it. That would make YEARS of head start. It wouldn't be "They opened source of failed browser". It would be "They finally figured it out"

Things would be really different if Real Networks started Helix years before too. The entire thing is open source now (excluding codecs) and people still wonder around saying it is spyware.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[nywles]

Joel makes some good points but also some very bad ones. I'll give him that a big project takes long to rewrite and gives the competition a chance to leap ahead. You'll have to find a way to deal with that. I'll also give him that many programmers tend to suffer from the NIH syndrome (what he calls "code is harder to read than to write" which is only true if the code really is a big mess that does needs a rewrite or if the developer trying to read it is really inexperienced). I'll also give him old code has been tested and the standing bugs are known (no, they are not fixed because that cannot be done in the old codebase unless you're willing to throw a lot of time/money at it). But that is in no way reason to dismiss a rewrite.

He claims the "hairs are bugfixes". In my experience, they're not. A lot of bugfixes tend to only remove code and leave a cleaner total behind. The "hairs" are features for users that were necessary to implement in order to remain competitive but weren't in the design when programming began. Those features are usually loved the most by users and tend to grow with additions, leaving a big mess. This can only be solved by changing the design fundamentally to enable the features in the core which usually require a rewrite of most components.

He claims code doesn't rust. Well, it does. The features i mentioned above are one way in which code rusts. Another is the platform the code runs on evolves. OS API calls used by the project may become deprecated if a new version of the OS is released. I'll admit that it takes a while before the changes are really pushed through so the rewrite becomes necessary.

Then (i promise i'll stop after this one) he claims "there is absolutely no reason to believe you are going to do a better job than you did the first time". He says there is not "more experience" because the team of programmers changed. Well, maybe the team did change, but all the bug reports from the last version are neatly integrated in the Test Plan. We're talking about a big commercial software project, right?

I'm not saying you should "just" do a rewrite from scratch, the pros and cons should be well considered. But totally dismissing it like Joel does, saying the programmers are wrong and the code is fine, is not considering it very well in my opinion.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[mr3038]

Opera is _the standard_ on mobile devices. [...] Why Nokia spares millions to their number 1 competitors HTML rendering Webkit? [...] Gnome, KDE, the actual Qt (trolltech) are moving to webkit. Why? Ask them.

I agree that Opera is the standard for low end mobile devices such as GSM phones with GPRS connection. Considering that KDE is built on QT (made by Trolltech) and QT is now owned by Nokia, it isn't that big a surprise that Nokia is also spending money on Webkit which is based on KHTML which is built on KDE/QT. I also agree that Mozilla is still too big for Symbian S60 devices. But what wouldn't be too "big" for Symbian?

Nokia is also spending money on Maemo project that is using Mozilla+GTK+Linux. Why? ask them. I'd guess that they're targetting webkit for low end devices and Maemo for high end devices.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Ilgaz]

The issue is, why it is big for Symbian devices? I can't add RAM to Symbian device and I won't upgrade to Nokia E66 which is said to have 256M RAM with paging. Opera's arch allows them to ship same engine for zillions of devices with weird configurations. Mozilla on the other hand?

Webkit is nice but it doesn't have Small Screen Rendering and Nokia can't put $600 pseudo smart things as only option to market with insane DPI displays. I think webkit is a mistake, at least they should promote Opera browser via their "Download!" application built in. As a customer of them, I already said to them that they are being childish hiding Opera option from user.

I remember my first smart phone, the legendary 7650. It had 3.6 MB of RAM and still Opera could work.

Mozilla's another purpose was something else, the "Gecko" thing. We should ask AOL guys why they lost interest in Mozilla project, they may have interesting things to say.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Bogtha]

Considering that KDE is built on QT (made by Trolltech) and QT is now owned by Nokia, it isn't that big a surprise that Nokia is also spending money on Webkit which is based on KHTML which is built on KDE/QT.

I think the causality flows in the opposite direction. Nokia released a Gecko-based browser years before the TrollTech deal was on the table. Nokia don't prefer WebKit because they have a deal with TrollTech, they have a deal with TrollTech because they prefer WebKit.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Ilgaz]

As a device manufacturer, they know the power of Qt on portable applications and the future. It is not like the "Nokia wants to kill Qt!" too. They see the actual future where there is no such thing like "Mobile OS", "Mobile Java (J2ME)".

It won't surprise me if they become the first vendor to implement actual desktop Java to devices. I was expecting such revolutionary moves from Apple but you have seen what they did.

I was giving Webkit example for a simple reason. AOL spent millions to Mozilla primarily the Gecko rendering engine. What happened? They had to take comical decisions like using MSHTML rendering in their flagship products. Why? Gecko didn't deliver what they need.

Why did Apple (and recently Nokia) chosen KHTML? It is clear from beginning.

http://news.cnet.com/Apple-snub-stings-Mozilla/2100-1023_3-980492.html

""Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects.""

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Interesting. I'll have to play with Safari more in VMware. Firefox has always been my primary browser of choice, mostly because of the add-ons (e.g. AdBlock), but I have a few friends who favor Safari (albeit mostly on Mac, where it's the default browser).

I've never cared much for Opera's interface, but unlike IE, it renders pages well, without IE's horde of security holes. If the browser developers actually try to adhere to the standards, choice is a good thing.

Your comment had me reading up on the history of WebKit, though...I remembered reading complaints from the KHTML devs about Apple not returning code changes, etc. a few years ago, but it appears they offer access to their SVN tree currently (and CVS previously), so...they may be a good blueprint, now.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[hey!]

All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant.

I don't think you can discuss the issue so abstractly. Ultimately, refactoring is rewriting. It's just incremental. The line between refactoring and rewriting is fuzzy; if I had to draw it somewhere, it would be around being able to do a functional build more or less any time you want to. If you can do a nightly build, you're definitely "refactoring"; if you go six months without being able build anything, you are definitely "rewriting".

I think the real issue is understanding. The problem isn't programmers wanting to write new code, the problem is programmers not wanting to understand existing code. Once you understand the existing code, then you can make an informed decision about how you want to handle it.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[ardor]

All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant. And how much code qualifies for this? I have rewritten several old libraries with modern C++, and gained a lot. Not because it has shiny new language toys, but because the old stuff was extremely hard to debug, maintain, let alone extend. (Also, they partly relied on stuff that gcc4 no longer ignores, and internally used global variables, making it useless for multithreading.)

It is true that a rewrite is usually not worth the effort, but not because the code is so clever. This "cleverness" often turns out to be one endless heap of ugly hacks. Its the sheer volume of the rewrite that makes it prohibitive; add to it the efforts for testing, and you often have a net loss, not to mention even crappier code, because that rewrite was late already, so everybody rushes it, and the developers only partly understand the old code etc.

So, in short: usually you have to live with old crappy code because there are is no net gain in rewriting it. Living with it usually is the lesser pain. But old code being excellent is a rare reason.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[krewemaynard]

But isn't this whole story about that - ALL the things that make any project successful?

Mozilla Dev Team On Firefox's Success

No.

I'm starting to see the "What about Opera?" comments as a new meme, akin to "But does it run Linux?" If you're happy using Opera, great. Have fun. But Opera missed the boat and no one else cares. ;)

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[gbjbaanb]

no, often 'garbage' turns out not to be. I'm sure there are lots of legacy code out there that is a nightmare to maintain, but I've seen too many 'rewrite from scratch' (usually using the latest, coolest technology) that turns out to be even worse.

The first recourse for a professional developer is to salvage what he can from the existing code, preferably refactoring to make it less of a maintenance pain - ie get rid of the old hacks that are no longer needed, convert some individualistic areas to use a common method, etc. If that cannot be done (and I doubt if that can never be done), then a rewrite of core areas should be written woth as much of the existing code salavaged and reused.

A total rewrite should only be done when the technology cannot solve the new problems, or the code has evolved over time to be total nightmare. that is not an excuse to take a 10 second scan of the code, say "I don't understand it, it needs a rewrite", and start deciding what cool tech you'll use this week.

Incidentally, in the long run, rewrites are never the answer. They'r a short term solution, because pretty quickly your new shiny code will become legacy itself and someone will look at it, say "that's so crufty... we need a rewrite"!

(or to put it in the context of my company: go "hey! Wow. Biztalk! And look, you can create lots and lots and lots of objects in C#, wow that's so cool. Look! LINQ, we must use that too 'cos the old DB access is just so crap and slow and legacy." sigh, so now we have a .NET framework that has more issues than the existing code ever had, and parts of which are *currently* being rewritten again. Its quite sad.)

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[jorgevillalobos]

It shouldn't take over 5 seconds for the download window to display, it doesn't matter how long my download history is. (And the browser shouldn't be entirely locked-up while it's opening!) Hopefully FF3 will take care of some of those issues.

Actually, Firefox 3 has a new Download Manager, designed with this specific issue in mind. The download list is loaded in "chunks", to prevent the UI from freezing.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Nicolay77]

I respectfully and totally disagree with you on Opera usability. To me the others are the ones with crappy usability.

I can't use middle click scrolling with pixel accuracy in the others as I can with Opera.

I can't switch tabs holding the right mouse button and moving the wheel in the others as I can with Opera.

I can't use mouse gestures to reload a page, or duplicate a tab (with full back and forward history), or going to the parent directory of a URL, or minimize or open or close tabs in the other browsers as I can with Opera.

All this features were in Opera in that time period AFAIR. Opera is not perfect, but you saying that it has/had crappy usability is pure bullshit.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[menace3society]

Actually, what's important is that the project embraced potentially competing objectives in order to reach their goal, which was to make a browser that could beat Internet explorer in performance, functionality, and market share. Even though it seemed silly at the time to fork the Mozilla suite into a couple of smaller, dedicated apps, once it became clear that this was the way forward they gave it their blessing instead of allowing acrimony and bad blood force Firefox, Thunderbird, et al. into formal project separation.

It proves once again that open source is all about plurality, and that small teams make thing happen that larger groups cannot (like, enormous speed improvements in Gecko).

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

Considering that innerHTML can contain HTML and not just text, it makes sense that it is named the way that it is.

That was a typo. I corrected it. I meant to compare "innerText" with "textContent", which is an apples-to-apples comparison.

Perhaps if you had more familiarity with CSS you'd realize just how broken Internet Explorer is. IE failing to properly render valid HTML/CSS that displays correctly in all other browsers is far too common, and more often than not, IE6 and IE7 can be counted upon to break it in entirely different manners.

And that affects the user experience... how?

Look, the beginning and the end of the matter is that making a browser more compliant to standards only helps web developers. Users don't care, will never care, and shouldn't have to care. This is the point I want to hammer into the head of every single person who goes on and on about web standards-- only (some) web developers care!

And since web developers still need to maintain their sites for older browsers, and browsers still have to keep older non-compliant rendering modes (both IE and Firefox have "quirks mode"), then I don't see it as a huge feature. I'd rather than focus on features that directly help the user, and let web developers handle themselves. (After all, they're developers, they should be able to handle the complexity.)

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

As long as the programmers are completely, entirely, aware of the psychological and strategic importance of the decision, I'm fine with it. The problem is, most people don't recognize NIH when they see it-- they really do think the code is a total mess, and that there's no way out other than a total rewrite. I've refactored some relatively large programs from C into C++ (about 100,000 lines) without ever creating a broken version in the process. It takes a long time, but it's a lot shorter than it takes to re-write and it maintains all those "hairs" that represent bug fixes as well.

If you read Joel's review of Netscape 6: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html you'll see that in this case, he was entirely right. If Mozilla/Netscape used their existing test-cases, it sure didn't show in the final product which was more of a flaming pile of shit than Netscape 4 was, regardless of how much "cleaner" the code was.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

I can't use middle click scrolling with pixel accuracy in the others as I can with Opera.

And... when would I ever want to do that?

That said, the middle-click scrolling in Firefox definitely goes one pixel at-a-time, at least in Windows. So it sounds like Opera doesn't have an edge there. (Of course, I use the good ol' scrollwheel anyway.)

I can't switch tabs holding the right mouse button and moving the wheel in the others as I can with Opera.

Ok, but you could also just left-click the tab you want. And the tabs are hideously ugly in Opera, at least in the version I tried about a year ago.

All this features were in Opera in that time period AFAIR. Opera is not perfect, but you saying that it has/had crappy usability is pure bullshit.

Ah, but you're confusing "usability" with "fancy features." A lot of applications have dozens of fancy features, and yet aren't usable at all-- take Azureus as an example. Or the current bane of my existence, VLC. On Macintosh at least, Opera loved to use its own mutant widgets that looked, but didn't act, like the OS default ones in an infuriating manner. That's not good usability in my book.

I'm glad you like Opera, and I have no problem with it. Even if I concede the fact that Opera is very usable, there's still the matter of its costing $$$ when IE and Firefox don't.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

I know I'm just griping at this point, but that really really should have been addressed before the last release. Didn't anybody at Mozilla try using the browser with a lot of downloads listed? Did they just not care that it took forever for the tiny window to display, and while it was doing that the whole app was locked-up? Nothing against the development, but the testing needs some major work if the testers weren't able to get that fixed before release.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[jorgevillalobos]

Just like any other big project, Mozilla needs to prioritize their tasks. Quite frankly I had no idea about this problem until I read that they had resolved it, and I'm sure there are a *lot* of users that don't find much need for the download window.

Evidently there were lots of users complaining about this problem and that is why they decided to fix it for this release, but I think it's reasonable to see that one's requests aren't always on the top of their list.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[ISoldat53]

You should see someone about that cough.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[BZ]

The basic issue, as usual, is lack of manpower and the resulting triage and prioritization. The download window was implemented as a quick thing, then the guy who did it stopped working on the project, and the whole mess went back to the normal state of the download UI for most of the time between 2001 and now: no one responsible for it.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Nicolay77]

And... when would I ever want to do that? I do! that's enough for me. And if Opera forums are representative of a group of users, I'm not the only one.

Ok, but you could also just left-click the tab you want. I can't see the damn texts when I have 50+ tabs open.

Ah, but you're confusing "usability" with "fancy features." I can use almost all features with the mouse.

I don't need to use the keyboard to browse the Web unless I'm writing a slashdot response or something like that. Never. That's both more comfortable and faster than having to use both keyboard and mouse because I don't have 3 hands. And that's usability.

On Macintosh at least, Opera loved to use its own mutant widgets that looked, but didn't act, like the OS default ones in an infuriating manner. Yes, they use the Qt toolkit that I don't like because it's not really native, instead of wxWidgets that's truly native. But both companies are in the same building, so, fat chance. That's the same thing I hate about flash. Never seen two flash animations having the same scrolling. I feel your pain there.

there's still the matter of its costing $$$ when IE and Firefox don't. Opera doesn't cost money to use in the desktop (anymore). And Opera will never cost money again in the desktop. No company is that suicidal. They survive by google search profits, just as firefox does.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Blakey Rat]

Opera doesn't cost money to use in the desktop (anymore). And Opera will never cost money again in the desktop. No company is that suicidal. They survive by google search profits, just as firefox does.

Christ. But we were TALKING about the long period of time between Netscape 4 and Netscape 6, and Opera did cost money then. Make sure you keep the context in-mind when you reply. :P

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[Nicolay77]

Doh!

Another Epic Fail for me.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[jc42]

Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use.

Oh, I dunno about that. On both my linux and OSX machines, I keep stumbling across a common situation where I've discovered that the simple solution is to copy the URL to opera and continue from there. The situation? There are a lot of web sites that like to use buttons rather than text links to navigate. Within a single site, I often want to open new pages in a new tab, so I can switch among several pages easily. Opera uses middle-click (linux) or CMD-click (OSX) to "open in new tab". With most other browsers, if you use middle-click or CMD-click on a button, the new page opens in the same tab.

I've looked around in various browsers' Help stuff, but as far as I can tell, the only other browser that makes "open in new tab" easy with buttons is Safari, but that doesn't run on my linux box. I have a dozen browsers on the Mac (because I do lots of web-page testing), and Opera and Safari are the only ones where I can do "open in new tab" easily.

You'd think that firefox and seamonkey would also have picked up on this, but if they have the capability at all, they've hidden it too well for my feeble brain to find. So, although I like them for a lot of things, extended work with a single site usually means that I switch to Opera.

Of course, slashdot is an exception here, because it seems to do most everything with plain links. So I'm typing this into a seamonkey window which has 7 tabs open right now.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[moresheth]

Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, Firefox has done this for a long time.

If you're on OSX, Command-click a link to open in a new tab. If you're on Windows or Linux, Ctrl-click to open in a new tab. You can also always right-click any link and select "open in a new tab".

The Ctrl key often interacts with the tabs. Like Alt-TAB will make you switch windows, Ctrl-TAB will make you switch tabs in Firefox.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[aftk2]

He's talking about submitting a form to a new tab.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[jc42]

He's talking about submitting a form to a new tab.

Exactly. I carefully used the term "button" several times, and contrasted it with "[plain-]text links" as clearly as I knew how. You'd think it would have been impossible for someone to understand that I was talking about buttons, not text links. I also stated fairly clearly that I knew about middle-click or CMD-click on text links, to show redundantly that I wasn't asking how to do that.

But, of course, the only answer told me how it works with text links, and totally missed all my (perhaps overly-subtle? ;-) clues that I was asking about buttons.

If a form uses an input button, clicking on text links doesn't quite do the job; you have to click on the button to trigger the form that delivers the page. And apparently nobody here knows how to do that so that the new page opens in a new tab.

Actually, I'd guess that it is possible. But it isn't documented anywhere that I've stumbled across. One thing that seems equally poor in all the browsers is the documentation on how to configure anything but the default setup. You just have to stumble around, poke at things, and try to figure out how they work. It's as if it's all so obvious that nobody needs an explanation.

Opera is actually a bit better here, but that's not high praise. Their documentation is just the slightly best of a bad lot. A lot of opera's behavior is as inexplicable as the others', and not documented anywhere that I've been able to find (and understand).

Of course, it's so simple!

[Jacques Chester]

Good community projects need inclusivity and transparency, there's no doubt.

Though getting millions and millions of dollars from Google probably helps. You know. A bit.

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:Of course, it's so simple!

[larry bagina]

only if you ignore all the BSD code in Windows.

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[bcat24]

IIRC, there is almost no BSD-licensed code (maybe none) in modern versions of Windows.

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[mixmatch]

You know this because you have the source code. Right?

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[asa]

Windows is not an open source consumer product, no matter if it contains bits of open source code or not.

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, there is almost no BSD-licensed code (maybe none) in modern versions of Windows. You say that like people use modern* versions of Windows.

*(and I use "modern" to mean "released recently" here)

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yes indeed, all 10 users...

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[Orange Crush]

Isn't the whole (pre-Vista) network stack cribbed from BSD?

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[AaronLawrence]

That's right, thanks to Netscape and AOL.
Mozilla/Firefox has never existed as a purely non-commercial, grassroots effort. It has always had massive funding and resourcing from companies.

Whodda thunk? Massive funding and resourcing can produce a successful product?

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[Auckerman]

With the big exception of the TCP/IP stack and basic command line tools (FTP, telnet, etc). Remember, we know these because the BSD license specifically requires the original authors copyright to be shipped with the modified binaries.

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:Of course, it's so simple!

[Ilgaz]

It really bothers me that people ignore AOL's part. They gave their high end developers to Mozilla project. At one time, lots of developers were paid by AOL. You can't make such high end people work for free on a such a massive project.

It is not like mozilla.org site opened up and people all over the planet started to code for free.

Google is another deal. Pay $ millions and new version of browser defaults to ON for "Anti phishing", sending every URL to Google Inc. Imagine if AOL did such thing.

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[AaronLawrence]

Indeed.
With some honesty, we could truly say: Thanks, AOL, for helping to save the internet!

Re:Of course, it's so simple!

[jonasj]

Google is another deal. Pay $ millions and new version of browser defaults to ON for "Anti phishing", sending every URL to Google Inc.

Except that Firefox doesn't send anything to Google. It checks your urls against a locally stored blacklist, which it periodically updates from Google's servers.

Not our experience

[wombatmobile]

"two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser â" listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project."

That sure wasn't our experience with contributing to FireFox. My company contributed several person months of code to FireFox 3 to build out a text placement capability. Our patches were never accepted; However, they took 80% of the code and reused it to fix half a dozen incidental issues that we had had to fix in order to implement the character placement issue that we were addressing.

All of which is OK, except that our authors were not given any acknowledgement or attribution.

But then they turned around and said we'd have to rework our original patch because now "80% of the code is redundant".

We are not contributing to FireFox any more. I thought about point out our experiences to Brendan Eich and asking him if he's OK with his people's behaviour. But it was easier just to walk away. We've now changed our focus to WebKit.

Re:Not our experience

[zappepcs]

I feel for you in the lack of acknowledgment, but I have to say that in 20+ years of managing technical projects, these two simple things help make ANY project work better: inclusivity and transparency.

I've done projects almost picture perfect only to later see someone attempt same or similar that fails miserably because of the lack of one or both of these.

Openness: It's not just for F/OSS

Treat everybody like mushrooms and dank musty smelling product is what you end up with.

Re:Not our experience

[QuantumG]

I don't know where *you* work, but being "inclusive and transparent" around here means inviting idiots who don't know anything about software engineering to come change the direction of your project the month before you hit important milestones. In many companies the only way to get stuff done is to congregate in secret and hope you can get the code written before some bozo manager starts telling sales and marketing that you're working on a high powered toaster.

Re:Not our experience

[HalAtWork]

Is it possible to work the functionality in with an extension?

Re:Not our experience

[phantomfive]

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!" IF that is what you did, then next time you should probably get in contact with the developers and discuss the feature you want to add and how it should be done. It's hard to be coordinated when everyone is just giving stuff, and more importantly, it can be hard to change the way you were planning on organizing things suddenly, even if the new way is better.

Not sayin' you're wrong, just addin' my thoughts

Re:Not our experience

[Anonymous Coward]

AC so I don't lose what little "street cred" I have.

I had this exact same experience with Pidgin back in the Gaim days. Patches submitted, never accepted, code used to fix bugs, and contributions never acknowledged. It became obvious that I just wasn't in the clique of core contributors; and I just took my expertise elsewhere.

So, how often is this happening to other people contributing to "open" source projects

Re:Not our experience

[tyrione]

"two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser â" listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project."

That sure wasn't our experience with contributing to FireFox. My company contributed several person months of code to FireFox 3 to build out a text placement capability. Our patches were never accepted; However, they took 80% of the code and reused it to fix half a dozen incidental issues that we had had to fix in order to implement the character placement issue that we were addressing.

All of which is OK, except that our authors were not given any acknowledgement or attribution.

But then they turned around and said we'd have to rework our original patch because now "80% of the code is redundant".

We are not contributing to FireFox any more. I thought about point out our experiences to Brendan Eich and asking him if he's OK with his people's behaviour. But it was easier just to walk away. We've now changed our focus to WebKit.

There is intelligence that walks amongst Us.

Re:Not our experience

[dubbayu_d_40]

So true - but I don't think most programmers are in the product development biz.

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

[mrbluze]

Patches submitted, never accepted, code used to fix bugs, and contributions never acknowledged.

It's sad but true. Open Source is kind of like a religion some how. People think it means the guys involved are good and fair and nice. But they are no different from anyone else. Most people are petty, selfish, poor managers (of themselves and others).

A good Open Source project requires a good manager who can coordinate and delegate and so forth. The problem is that programming is a creative activity and you can't just tell people what to do and expect them to slavishly obey. Especially if you're not paying them money. It's like herding cats.

Big projects like Mozilla's Firefox are not really a good example of anything except how big companies have seen fit to fund something 'free' in the hope that some financial gain comes to them in the end.

Your example of Pidgin (Gaim) is much closer to the real problem where, without money, human nature can be very disappointing.

The big question we should be asking is how should we organize projects to make sure good code doesn't get rejected?

Re:Not our experience

[pmee]

Maybe you should include these "idiots" earlier in the process so you can ship something people actually want and not what the specs said they might want.

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

[zappepcs]

Actually, part of the reason that you pay a project manager big bucks is that s/he will avoid such scope creep, and use big hammers to ensure that there is none.

When you invite such creatures as you describe, limiting their input to a choice of two limited options is one way to keep them in check. There are others, but you NEVER let anyone have that much control, ever. Once you do, you are no longer managing the project, just taking orders.

I am very quick to throw the yellow or red cards in meetings when scope creep is showing. I've been known to repurpose meetings entirely on the spot to deal with the fact that there are one or two who think the project goals and schedule are not suitable to 'their' needs. If done right, this clearly defines not only what is supposed to be happening, but who is actually in charge. It's definitely a game of socio-political chess, but to get things done it is necessary. A good PM never ever loses sight of project goals and scope, and keeps the project reigned into those parameters. period. or fail results.

Not just anyone with PMP is going to be able to do that though. It takes skills developed over years of working projects, and the ability to efficiently use positional authority, as well as the ability to simply walk away and wish them luck on their project when they don't want to listen.

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:Not our experience

[chromatic]

I've been known to repurpose meetings entirely on the spot to deal with the fact that there are one or two who think the project goals and schedule are not suitable to 'their' needs.

If their needs don't affect the project, why are they in the meeting?

If their needs do affect the project, why are the project's goals different from their needs?

Re:Not our experience

[zappepcs]

That was in reference to the other poster's comment:

....means inviting idiots who don't know anything about software engineering to come change the direction of your project the month before you hit important milestones.... When the project scope is being redirected, or attempts to do so, in such fashion, then those people did not participate as they should have at the beginning, and the PM did not do their job right to start with. With transparency and inclusivity, the project should already have accounted for their needs. Any derivation from the agreed goals/schedules etc. requires that everything be reviewed, and any change in scope be either shut down asap or the project re-aligned to meet these hidden agenda goals, including reshaping the timeline, milestones, and scope of the project. Read that as a do-over agreed to by all the principles. In effect, stopping the current project cold, then starting a new project that covers the newly agreed goals.

Re:Not our experience

[FishWithAHammer]

-- 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. You're missing the point. The fact that it would be "easy to fix" means nothing. The fact that it wasn't done does. If a volunteer sucks at it--somebody should be being paid to do it. Mozilla's hugely profitable. They have no excuse.

-- Tim Rowley got taken off Firefox SVG work by IBM which partly explains why the patch never got final review. An explanation is nice, but it doesn't solve the problem of it not getting done.

-- I don't see any sign of your displeasure anywhere in these bugs. People are busy, timely hurry-up gripes usually help prioritize things. This is irrelevant, and should be unnecessary.

The Firefox project wants to be treated like a big boy, it needs to act like one.

Re:Not our experience

[hdparm]

This is on Fedora 9 computer:

yum info empathy
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Available Packages
Name       : empathy
Arch       : i386
Version    : 0.22.1
Release    : 1.fc9
Size       : 500 k
Repo       : fedora
Summary    : GNOME Instant Messaging Client
URL        : http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
License    : GPLv2+
Description: Empathy provides a powerful multiple protocol instant messaging
           : client using the Telepathy framework.

Re:Not our experience

[xant]

You're missing the point. The fact that it would be "easy to fix" means nothing. The fact that it wasn't done does. If a volunteer sucks at it--somebody should be being paid to do it. Mozilla's hugely profitable. They have no excuse. Good god, do you have any idea how much code is in Firefox? How many people contributing? The entire point of open source is that lots of people can do more work than a single proprietary organization. The downside, of course, is there's too much for a single organization to oversee. Shit happens. You get things fixed by asking for them to get fixed, that includes accidental omissions of credit. It should have been done, but the fact that it wasn't is not a failing of the Mozilla organization.

[..] People are busy, timely hurry-up gripes usually help prioritize things. This is irrelevant, and should be unnecessary. Yet, isn't. In the real world, people do not magically know what they have to do. They do things when asked to do them.

Re:Not our experience

[xant]

IME, it's perfectly normal to ask patch contributors to re-submit patches, frequently, until they're right. The patch contributor is the one benefiting most directly from the patch, and is the one with the most knowledge about the patch, and is the one with the most motivation to fix the patch. That makes the contributor the only party who can be asked to fix the patch.

So they used some code from it, and then asked you to resubmit it built against the new codebase. This is perfectly normal and reasonable. They can't use the patch as-is when it has been mangled to death; and in the final analysis they don't really care whether it gets used, even though they did care about selected parts of it. You care whether it gets used. So you are the one who should remake the patch.

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:Not our experience

[phantomfive]

That stinks. I would have been annoyed.

Re:Not our experience

[mw22]

Wombatmobile, what is the bug number where you were working on this text placement thing? Just curious.

Re:Not our experience

[worthawholebean]

I've actually had really good experiences contributing for GNOME. The people were nice and helpful.

Re:Not our experience

[gbjbaanb]

Pull copyright on their ass. Get your lawyers to insist that the code is removed or they pay you compensation (that you can obviously donate to whatever other OSS project you like).

Unless you explicitly gave away your code, it belongs to you. The mozilla licence doesn't apply until your code is accepted by them - I'm sure you have a case to say that your code was never submitted under any OSS licence until it became part of the FF project, and even if it was then you must get credited for the work.

It sounds like you can prove your claims, so go for it. Its not just for you, but for all the other contributors who may come after you.

Re:Not our experience

[gbjbaanb]

I'm reminded of a famous memory leak bug that was most definitely not a bug, until it was fixed in FF3 :-)

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:Not our experience

[bluephone]

Still isn't a "bug". It was never, "Oh shit, here, fix that line and poof, we're better with memory!" It was an entire set of circumstances that caused various paths to use memory in suboptimal ways, memory fragmentation, and a whole host of issues that took a lot of work in many areas to help make the code better with mem use. Further, it's not that Fx no longer "leaks" memory (which wasn't the root issue to start with), it's that Fx is all around more efficient with memory, and doesn't use as much to START with.

Re:Not our experience

[chromatic]

With transparency and inclusivity, the project should already have accounted for their needs.

Have you ever seen that work?

Me neither.

Re:Not our experience

[FishWithAHammer]

Good god, do you have any idea how much code is in Firefox? How many people contributing? The entire point of open source is that lots of people can do more work than a single proprietary organization. The downside, of course, is there's too much for a single organization to oversee. Shit happens. You get things fixed by asking for them to get fixed, that includes accidental omissions of credit. It should have been done, but the fact that it wasn't is not a failing of the Mozilla organization. If it's not happening, then Mozilla needs to be hiring managers and coordinators to make it happen. I'll cut a lot of slack for open-source projects that aren't having wheelbarrows full of money trucked to their door. Mozilla has no excuse.

Yet, isn't. In the real world, people do not magically know what they have to do. They do things when asked to do them. Another reason for Mozilla to put on the big boy pants and improve their administration of their project.

Re:Not our experience

[kelnos]

Yet, isn't. In the real world, people do not magically know what they have to do. They do things when asked to do them. Another reason for Mozilla to put on the big boy pants and improve their administration of their project. The Mozilla Corp/Foundation is made up of people. People just like us. I don't know about you, but in my professional life, sometimes I do forget to do something that someone has asked me to do. And sometimes someone else forgets to do something that I've asked them to do. It just happens.

After you noticed you weren't acknowledged as a contributor, did you say "hey, we're missing from the credits; here's a patch to fix that"? If not, what are you complaining about? I don't care if you think you shouldn't have to do this. An oversight happened, and if you don't even point it out, how can you expect anyone to know about it? Perhaps you should put on your "big boy pants" and learn how to communicate with people in the real world.

Also, as roca pointed out above, the parts of your patch that were accepted made only 25% of the original patch redundant, not 80% as you claimed. Why should we take you seriously if you're going to grossly exaggerate the facts?

It's a big project, and their priorities may not necessarily match with yours. If the feature you submitted was a "nice to have" feature but not something on the roadmap (or even was on the roadmap but not a "must have" feature), it's no surprise it wasn't given 100% attention, especially considering it looks like it was within a few months of feature freeze when the bug was opened.

I'm sorry you don't think your experience was that great, but it looks like you also did nothing to try to resolve the issues you had, and failed to take into account the fact that the people working with you also had other things on their plates.

Re:Not our experience

[Your.Master]

It may not technically be a memory leak, but it was most definitely a bug, even if it wasn't a quick fix.

Re:Not our experience

[FishWithAHammer]

Way to mistake me for the person who had the problem. Learn to read.

Re:Yea right.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Say what you want but Firefox is still light years ahead of IE. If there's only one thing it has over IE, it's that it follows web standards much, much better.

Re:Yea right.

[SiegeTank]

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.

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.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Certainly not in stability, or even being able to properly work with 100% of the websites out there.

Moot point since there's not a browser out there that will display _everything_ correctly 100% of the time. At least Firefox tries to follow the standards, versus IE which seems to purposely ignore the standards that they supposedly "adhere" to. IE has broken more of the stylesheets I've been working on than I care to count. I shouldn't have to have two or three different stylesheets because MS doesn't like standards.

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:Firefox devs, please fix these two issues for m

[Slashdot Suxxors]

and the system will "resurrect" or come to life with 48 Internet Explorer windows open.

Come on man! Some of us plan on trying to sleep tonight. That thought is going to keep me up all night...

Re:Yea right.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Opera is great as well, but it lacks the customization of Firefox that I've grown to love. I used to use Opera all the time, but then I started using Firefox and these little things called add-ons kept me coming back.

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

Firefox is a unique project.

[Renderer of Evil]

I feel that the browser arrived at the right time, with the right idea and bunch of external factors created a perfect storm - most notable of which was Microsoft's abandonment of its browser innovation once it had reached critical mass. If there is credit to be given to management I'd say it was the decision to keep it modular. Instead of including every known feature on the market they gave users the option of customizing the browser with plugins and kept the code uncluttered and very robust. An unintended consequence of that was user dependency. It took me about 2 weeks to quit Firefox and go to Safari 2. I kept going back because of all the cool extensions I got attached to over the years. Having a propaganda arm to spread the word is helpful as well (see: spreadfirefox.com). Those guys were instrumental in making Firefox a success. Of course, none of this would have happened if it was just hype - the product behind it was pretty solid (not counting the horrendous memory management).

First rule of project management

[FranTaylor]

You are going to throw the first one away, whether you want to or not. Plan on it and take advantage of the opportunities this gives you.

Re:Yea right.

[LeafOnTheWind]

I was being facetious, sorry ;)

slaps head

[nguy]

How could I have been so stupid? I just forgot about enabling the "get multi-million dollar revenue stream for my open source project" option on Sourceforge.

Don't get me wrong, I use the Mozilla and Firefox products, but given the amount of money that has gone into Mozilla (and Apache), I think the results are actually not all that great.

Re:slaps head

[justinchudgar]

As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams? I have no real knowledge of the how much revenue the Apache Foundation has gotten over the years; but, if you compared the quantity and quality of their code with that of MS or Oracle, I'd bet that Apache does a lot more for the dollar.

Re:slaps head

[nguy]

As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams?

No; as opposed to projects with no or little revenue streams.

In fact, above some threshold, software quality seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of money available for developing the software.

Re:slaps head

[felipekk]

Don't get me wrong, I use Windows and Microsoft products, but given the amount of money that has gone into Windows (Vista), I think the results are actually not all that great. There, fixed.

Re:slaps head

[justinchudgar]

As opposed to the results from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle, etc. with the multi-billion dollar revenue streams?

No; as opposed to projects with no or little revenue streams.

In fact, above some threshold, software quality seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of money available for developing the software.

I wonder if the ratio is to the number of management/marketing types to number of actual developers that causes this quality drop? I remember reading on kerneltrap.org that an insanely large number of individual contributers had shown up in Linus' git reports. Something like ~3500-4000 individuals. Other than Linus and the various subsystem maintainers, I am not aware of any marketing types or PHBs involved.

Any guesses as to what the dollar or PHB count threshold actually is? When does success become toxic, on average?

Too much success?

[Waccoon]

It's nice when a project gets recognition for doing something well, but when Firefox started getting more popular, largely due to the loud self-congratulation of the open source community, it started getting slower and buggier. I've been toggling between Firefox and Opera within the last year, largely due to the horribly sluggish performance when using multiple windows. If it weren't for the excellent Web Developer extension, I'd use Opera all the time.

The plug-ins are nice, but most of the ones I use are not for clever hacks, like stripping out ads, but for getting functionality that really should be in the browser in the first place, like the ability to easily edit cookies. How come I can't switch between quirks mode and strict mode on the fly? Why can't I resume stopped downloads, instead of having to re-download them from the beginning? How can a browser get so bloated when blocking web sites from setting cookies requires you to type in the URLs, instead of just clicking a button that says "block"? I still like Firefox more than IE, but I can't say the design of the browser really stacks up well against other browsers unless you add a lot of 3rd-party software. Can you really praise the browser in that case?

Don't even get me started about stability. Update Firefox, and the browser might refuse to start. I have to dig around in my profile folder to delete plug-ins one at a time to get the browser just to get a window open. Just re-installing the browser doesn't fix plug-in issues. Doesn't Firefox keep a log, so it knows when it tries to start and a plug-in doesn't work? That's a must when you depend on 3rd-party software so heavily.

I'm almost hoping that Opera doesn't get too popular. That will keep it fast, lightweight, and low on bugs.

Yes, I know I sound angry given that I get the software for free, but Firefox gets just a bit too much praise. Firefox is what got Microsoft in line and fixing some longstanding problems with IE, but it's easy to hate Microsoft. I'd hate to see Firefox continue getting praise because 3rd-party developers have the ability to patch the browser's design issues.

Re:Too much success?

[Ilgaz]

Opera is a huge player in business especially after 2006 when first really usable devices, smart phones begun to ship with sane prices (iPhone doesn't count unless Apple opens it).

Their model is closed source, strictly professionally coded, strictly platform neutral, just the needed features implemented on a web type language. E.g. IRC and mail is actually couple of DHTML/CSS pages. The core html renderer is insanely portable. People doesn't believe the Opera Mobile (not Mini) is using the exact same engine as desktop one but it is a fact.

The benchmark is in fact easy. If Mozilla shipped Firefox for Symbian S60 (why not?), can they sell it for $20 to people like me using Nokia E65 with Webkit based browser? Opera can do it with 2 years old version (8.65). Why I bothered? Because it WORKS. You know there are some guys out there not being part of a billion dollar company depends on my $20. It is not the case with Webkit, Firefox or IE. For Nokia, it is like having "XHTML browser built in" as a line on their specs. Does it work on that weird screen without the high res display of iPhone? They don't care.

While speaking of Webkit, I am type of a person that thinks Safari should NEVER have Mozilla like extensions. My concern is security. The OS default browser should be exactly the same, features implemented in the core and there shouldn't be any 3rd party "click and install" extensions which can change the browsers behaviour, private data of user, send private data to third parties. Security alerts, signed thing, timer, they don't work. Other option is "Apple certified". It won't work too, creating more security issues as people will "jail break" it.

The Opera 9.5 Mobile will ship to every kind of device on market, its NDA betas are already in device vendor hands. It uses the same html/javascript renderer as desktop version. Do you know the free memory on my Nokia E65 when device booted? 24 MB! Opera doesn't have an option to code memory flooding , "because I can" type of geek fantasies. They are caring about Nintendo, Symbian, Win CE, Airliners, high end multimedia devices, TV set top. On such things you don't have an option. If your app uses too much memory, it is closed by OS. Basic as that. No excuses. Especially Symbian single core devices are more strict since single CPU handles the telephony too (it is safe BTW).

Go the "Evangelists"?!

[syousef]

Apart from being a term from the late 90s, I don't feel comfortable listening to anyone that describes themself as an evangelist, let alone use it as a job title. It makes me think of irrational religious quackery which is not a method I like to make my tech decisions. Kinda reminds me of RMS dressed in his Saint robe garb too. *shudder*

Re:Yea right.

[Kopiok]

Well, if everyone thought like that you'd never get more performance out of your 4GB setup. You'd get the exact same performance, just with larger memory footprints.

"Awesome" Bar

[sulfur]

It looks like Mozilla developers are going Pidgin's way by ignoring their users. Many of us don't like new "smart" address bar that uses some arcane algorithm to sort suggested results. Unfortunately, there is no way to change address bar behavior to Firefox 2 style (when I type sl in the address bar, I want to see slashdot.org as my first result instead of some combination of my bookmarks and random pages). The worst thing about it is that there is no way to disable this "feature". I don't really mind when they bloat Firefox with some features that might appeal to some users, but I *do* mind when they make no option to turn them off.

I would probably go crazy if there was no way to change default Windows theme to Classic.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[BruceCage]

I don't yet use Firefox 3, but does this help? For pretty much anything in Firefox you can think up of there's usually some kind of configuration option available through about:config.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[SlashJoel]

I happen to love the new address bar. Well, except for the fact that it assumes I'm blind and takes up 80% of the screen displaying the results. But that's why I use the 'oldbar' plugin. If there really are 'many of us' that prefer a different algorithm, one of you can write a plugin to display porn first or whatever suits your fancy. There is "no way" to disable the feature? Just like there's "no way" to block ads and "no way" to view Flash? But you're right, it's more fun to complain about how Mozilla is ignoring you, just like Pidgin. Maybe you should write a fork or perhaps you should just shut the fork up.

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:"Awesome" Bar

[j_sp_r]

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

It's just a different setting now!

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[pizzach]

Actually I think it's the bookmarks that might drive me crazy. There is no damn way to bookmark a page by putting a address in manually in IE7 from what I saw. I noticed that Firefox is emulating the star thing to a degree, but when some one is mimicing something that feel horrible...blarg. I prefer the bookmarks to be stored under a menu safe from accidental clicking. Why are bookmarks now *stars* instead of bookmark icons btw?

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Firefox 3 RC1 displays slashdot as the first result when I type 'sl'. Perhaps you should bookmark the sites you visit regularly? Bookmarks definitely have a higher priority to the awesomebar algorithm.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[Briareos]

Setting the preference to 0 effectively disables the Location Bar dropdown entirely. I don't think removing the dropdown alltogether is what everyone is looking for...

np: Lali Puna - 6-0-3 (Tridecoder)

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[Cyvros]

There is no damn way to bookmark a page by putting a address in manually in IE7 from what I saw. There is, but you need to go into the Places "Library" (Ctrl+Shift+B). It's in the context menu and also in the first of the three menu buttons in the toolbar.

Why are bookmarks now *stars* instead of bookmark icons btw? Possibly because stars scale better to small sizes. I haven't once seen a decent bookmark icon that scales down well. I don't often even seen one standardised bookmark icon 'style' used across more than two apps.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[Cyvros]

Firefox 3 RC1 displays slashdot as the first result when I type 'sl'. Perhaps you should bookmark the sites you visit regularly? Bookmarks definitely have a higher priority to the awesomebar algorithm. Also, the awesomebar has its own history separate from browsing history that places the most visited places up top in the results (which is useful because I turn off browsing history). It's been that way since beta 3 or 4, I think.

Even if you don't bookmark the sites you visit regularly, if you leave browsing history on, the most visited sites should be at the top of the results list. Also been there at least since beta 3 or 4.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[pizzach]

There is, but you need to go into the Places "Library" (Ctrl+Shift+B). It's in the context menu and also in the first of the three menu buttons in the toolbar. I managed to get a sidebar with favorites in it if that is what you mean. But I then got stuck because I didn't see a button to add a new favorite or an applicable looking option in the context menu when I right clicked inside of the favorites sidebar.

Possibly because stars scale better to small sizes. I haven't once seen a decent bookmark icon that scales down well. I don't often even seen one standardised bookmark icon 'style' used across more than two apps. I think the Moz folks did it for two major reasons. On windows, it makes IE switchers more comfortable. I do think a star was chosen for anesthetic value in the URL bar too. On the other hand, as a linux user 90% of the time, the largest thing that hits me the strongest is the lack of consistency. I will try your tip on IE the next time I'm confronted with it! Thanks for helpful reply.

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[Cyvros]

I managed to get a sidebar with favorites in it if that is what you mean. But I then got stuck because I didn't see a button to add a new favorite or an applicable looking option in the context menu when I right clicked inside of the favorites sidebar. Ah, my apologies for not clarifying. What I mean is what used to be the Bookmarks Organiser (so Bookmarks menu, Organise Bookmarks) - they've renamed it to the Places Library and I possibly gave you the wrong keyboard shortcut. :\

I will try your tip on IE the next time I'm confronted with it! Thanks for helpful reply No problem, but, uh... what IE tip?

Re:"Awesome" Bar

[pizzach]

There is, but you need to go into the Places "Library" (Ctrl+Shift+B).

I haven't tried it yet.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

John Resig == JavaScript Evangelist

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to disregard John Resig's work at Mozilla, but I wouldn't consider him key figure in the success of Firefox, as the summary states.

He started at Mozilla in January 2007, after Firefox 2 was released.

The article states he's a JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. His work on Firefox 3 is certainly important though.

Re:Yea right.

[Blakey Rat]

Maybe he's a troll, but he makes a good point. The standards body seems to be entirely unaware that there are thousands, if not millions, of unmaintained websites out there that will never be upgraded from what they are now, whether they are bog-standard HTML 4 or some browser-detection-script mess of crap from the 4.0 era. Blindly following standards is a waste of effort if it significantly breaks websites... look at the current builds of IE8 if you want to get an idea of how much the web sucks when all sites are in "standards mode".

Both browsers, IE and FF alike, have to draw a balance between supporting standards and supporting existing websites. Some websites will break, undoubtedly. You also need to be aware that the point of the standards are for making better websites... if the user's favorite site breaks, that's extremely counter-productive. Sometimes I think web developers forget the user focus... Firefox being more "standards-compliant" doesn't help you or the user if your site doesn't work in IE6.

Re:Yea right.

[renoX]

>A lot of the memory issues have been fixed in Firefox 3 as well as improving JavaScript performance.

Great! Now they just have to fix their threading issues (one 'frozen' tab shouldn't be able to freeze the whole browser), their stability issue (as much as possible a crash of a plugin shouldn't be able to crash the browser) and it could be considered as a solid browser..

Until then it *isn't* an example to follow!

Self signed SSL handling = Balls

[dasmoo]

Can anyone agree that the Self Signed SSL handling in firefox 3 is complete balls?

There's a line between security and retardation, and they're on the big bus side of the line. If I'm stupid, make the default for me. If I'm not stupid, hide settings in about:config for me to tell you to fuck off because it's complete balls that I need to add an exception for every single self signed certificate I come into contact with. Especially the 300 odd servers I have with self signed certs.

Re:Self signed SSL handling = Balls

[BZ]

The problem is that as far as SSL is concerned, a self-signed cert and a forged cert are the same exact thing.

It seems like the right solution for you is to sign all the certs with a single root and then import the root into your trusted store. That's how organizations that need a lot of self-signing usually handle the situation.

Fix the GUI

[Yvan256]

If you use Firefox on a Mac, all you get is Windows 95-style HTML form widgets. What's up with that? Why isn't Firefox using the built-in OS widgets?

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.

Re:Yea right.

[fluffy99]

I'm laughing because these developers so loved their precious Firefox that they wrote a gui that won't work with anything else, and breaks if it's not on the exact firefox version and chrome version they wrote it for. They get pissed when I point out that version has known security holes and they have to at least upgrade to the latest version (breaking their code). The exact same complaint people had with IE. Yes IE7 broke a bunch of webpages, but it still worked with more webpages than firefox.

Re:Yea right.

[Nicolay77]

That sounds problematic, I sometimes open web pages that are 5MB (or more) of text.

So far only Opera can handle them.

Re:Yea right.

[Nicolay77]

100% is pointless, simply because as soon as a browser has enough marketshare, webmasters will code to that browser and fuck the rest. Right now we are in a transition where any coder worth they pay has to code sites compatible with several browsers, at least IE and FF.

However, you have a point about corporate stuff. If firefox doesn't provide compatibility with WSUS, then it's harder to manage in a corporate environment. And by harder I mean impossible.

And that coder that used chrome, should be shot on sight, just like the ones that use ActiveX.

That said, if you ever removed Opera from my computer I would have to go and break your knees with a baseball bat.

The Internet is a Passing Fad

[SgtChaireBourne]

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.

Given the quality the company's so-called products, it's rather apparent that they can't code, especially not a TCP/IP stack. There are numerous problems from the latest version.

W95 only shipped with TCP/IP over Bill's vociferous objection. Later he was still going on about the Internet being just a http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=443">passing fad. They've missed the boat with IPv6, but been able to compensate todate by encourging ill-informed articles that disparage or trivialize the technology and the security and networking problems it addresses.