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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[Merusdraconis]

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

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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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.

"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.