Mozilla: News from the front

Point_Blank pointed us to an update on Mozilla.org regarding the state of mozilla written by Mike Shaver. Mainly it refutes some of the arguments that the project isn't "Open" because @netscape.com developers outnumber outside developers. I agree with him- the fact that there are /any/ outside developers is a great thing. Anyway, some interesting stats regarding download numbers and bug submissions and stuff. A nifty piece if you're following the project.

Comments

80%

[IntlHarvester]

Don't forget that 30% of 'the Internet' is on AOL - and AOL only uses IE.

Subtract the AOL user base (I wish we could), and it's more like 50/50. Once AOL starts using Mozilla, Netscape will have the markt lead.

(Despite this post, I think browser market share is one of the most stupid concepts of all time. Who cares about the market share of $0 products. The intention of both Netscape Nav and MSIE from the beginning was mearly free advertising and standards embrace+extend for Netscape's and MS's server products. Which is why the iPlanet brandname is so odd. Oh well...)
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Too many cooks spoil the broth

[Sanity]

Sorry for the cheesy subject, but it makes a point. I am the organiser of a Java opensource project ( see here and despite wide interest (from RMS among others) only one other person has actually made significant contributions to the code, and to be honest, I am not sure if I could handle more than 3 other coders. Some may say that this is as a result of bad management, however I have put much effort into documenting the existing architecture, and even as it is, I find myself distracted from the coding.

It is my observation that on most open-source projects there are a very small number of core developers (often friends in real life), but alot of users who submit bug reports and pester about the next release. Often the process of delegation can be more time-consuming than just doing it yourself. They say that human brains can only really cope with working in groups of up to 7 people anyway. Having to work over the Internet makes this even more difficult.

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Mozilla Suggestions

[Point_Blank]

I think that the Mozilla project is making great progress. I try out the builds daily, often on Linux and NT.

However, I feel that it would be useful if they woeked towards implementing extra functionality so that it could replace Netscape 4.6 for general webbrowsing. For example, there is still no right click on links and the Preferences dialog hasn't been hooked up yet. However, we already have features like Translate which are not used that regularly.

By adding a few basic features, I would use Mozilla as my main browser, I would find more bugs, and contribute more bug reports. If I had more time, I'd look at improving any features that annoyed me and so on.

I think that the number of outside developers contributing to Mozilla will snowball in a few milestones when more features are added. It is already shaping up to be a great product, and I miss its many of its features when I return to Netscape.

Flame me, please - I'm feeling chill.

[Crysgem]

One of the perhaps smaller, but of a certainty significant, aspects of the Mozilla project is apparent to those of us who browse the Bugzilla database. Ergo, it has lain unnoticed by the silent majority, the flamedot minority, and the ha-ha-Netscape-fools gawkers.

Users and programmers have traditionally been the poles of a divide (if I may carelessly mix my metaphors), kinda like boys and girls. (Which of the pairs is analogous to which I leave as an exercise to the reader >:+} ). While other companies or groups have been renowned for their attention to user interface or responsiveness to users, Mozilla, through Bugzilla, more so even than through the newsgroups, stewards a new user/coder frontier: The blessed enhancement request. Pssst - Rob - your code won't permit me to include the necessarily long CGI URL.

Here, in this well-mannered and efficient forum, users make unreasonable requests - and watch with astonishment as they are sometimes granted! The Netscape engineers are for the most part tolerant and polite - even enduring unwarranted abuse - and are open to luser suggestion. If indeed lusers they be. And most proposals are at the very least discussed, for the greater number.

The seeding of this hitherto untapped and rather mangy range of the noosphere (to use your beloved but limited vernacular), the (*scoffing*) user base, is an advanced, or rather advancing, inclusion that makes our trumpeted Open Source method more of a societal, a popular?, phenomenon than before. (*Leaving further such analysis to the grandiose*)

Needless to say, these words apply only to those members of society who are sufficiently interested to linger circa such domains. So should it be. We (or, perhaps, I) mad bastards who think to shape the next Netscape browser toward our ends and in reflection of our method-minds rather like the lack of company >:+)

And there is another aspect of appeal in the Bugzilla milieu. (Milieu being a browsable web database, an ongoing discussion with engineers, a devoted newsgroup set, a sense of comradeship against hostile outside, media, forces, &c) The satisfaction of submitting a bug and awaiting it's speedy repair soon becomes a quite forthright expectation, something akin almost to a human instinct, undiscovered alas until this late march of the Industrial age. It is the desire and expectation that, finding a bug, one reports it, and will soon be using a fresh copy of the software that is bereft of the very flaw. If such a cycle were established in all public domains, many corporations would be afflicted, and many consumers would rejoice. And lo!, the yobbers would owe we "computer hackers". It nearly calls to mind the fabled customer service and quality of vendors such as the Eaton's of the 1960s (to those non-Canadians who do not recognize the reference, *nyyahh* to ye).

Or perhaps I'm foaming verbose again - there was the Great Overboard some time ago, as I recall - but we'll see when it ships, won't we, kiddies?

Opinion of a daily mozilla compiler

[tgd]

Every day my system pulls the tree and builds it for me. I've seen Mozilla progress so much in the last six months, and particularly in the last month.

Used it for several hours today for general browsing, without any crashes. I haven't had that happen in several months, and this was after the Necko code landing (the new fancy-pants networking code... noticably faster, IMHO).

There are still significant bugs, and its important if you're going to pull the CVS tree you know what to expect, because what works and doesn't work depends on the time of day. If it builds and the tests run, then tinderbox will be green even if some glaring feature is missing. (Like menus in the mailreader under Linux on the tree I pulled at 2pm EST today...)

There are people talking on here about how its not beta quality, hardly works, etc. The fact of the matter is ITS NOT beta softare. No one claimed it was. The milestones seem to work relatively well, although I thouht M6 and M7 weren't too good under Linux -- half the systems I tried on wouldn't build them. M8 was great. M9 (real soon now, I think they were mostly waiting on the Necko code becoming the default and stabilizing the problems from that...) should be even better. its definately a useable browser right now for most things, even if some stuff is flaky. (I can't log in on Slashdot for example)

I've said this a few times before on here, but its really worth saying over and over. Mozilla is really coming along. Its running suprisingly well, rendered pages with proper HTML look great on it. It certainly separates the good HTML coders from the bad in that regard. Its *fast*. I noticed that today's build is much faster -- both networking and rendering -- than the last one I actually tried which was on Monday or so.

The better rendering engine, and GTK widgets/menus make it MUCH nicer to look at than Communicator.

I'd suggest the complainers stop complaining and start submitting bug reports if they're having such problems, but people like that aren't likely to give useful bug reports anyway.