Why Mozilla is Alive and Well

primetyme writes "There's been a lot of press recently stating that the Mozilla project is a failure, a waste of time, and a failed open source endeavour. I recently had the chance to talk with Chris Hoffman, one of the lead engineers from Netscape working on the Mozilla project, about why Mozilla is in fact a monumental success for the open source community, Web developers, and end users in general. "

Comments

Well put.

[Amphigory]

Look guys... I'm sick of the "mozilla is dead" stories. And I will tell you why I'm sick of them: IE 6 is supposedly going to be fully standards compliant.

Why does this matter? Because Mozilla is going to fully standards compliant. To wit:

Mozilla = HTML4.0 + CSS = IE6

What that means to us is that the days of having to code for 16 different browsers, while not over, are numbered. And the ability for one browser to try to lock out other browsers with little "Netscape Now" icons will be sharply limited. Yes, there will probably be proprietary add-ons, but developers have already been burned by these in the 4.x browsers: I don't think they will use them again.

So we come to Mozilla. Yes its buggy. But speaking as a professional developer, that's OK at this stage of development. What's more important is that it is well-crafted.

Instead of a hodge-podge of shoddy code (like the old Netscape source base) it is well crafted, well designed code that is going to be extremely maintainable.

This is kind of like early versions of the Linux kernel (I ran 0.95, FTR): they weren't feature complete, weren't anywhere /near/ bug-free. But they were designed well and had a dedicated team of competent coders working on them. It didn't take long at all for Linux to become something to be reckoned with.

What we need to do is the same thing that early Linux adopters did: focus on the technology and give it time to mature. Marketing is /nothing/, technology is /everything/. Oh yeah: have a little loyalty, because its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.

Re:(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource et

[davie]

...it reveals a problem with open source.

Have you looked at the mozilla source? Your argument would some weight if you could cite specific problems with the source--but then, people would only say "Good job, you've found some problems; you're obviously smart enough, so go fix them." If you can't code, then use the nightly builds and report any bugs you find. There are all kinds of ways to help with the development effort. In the Open Source culture, there are complainers and there are contributors (a constructive criticism can be considered a contribution, by the way). Contributors are people who would rather make something happen than just sit back and carp about the state of the project.

Why do you think the mozpeople were so keen on re-designing from the ground up? Ease of maintenance. This means, making it less difficult for developers to dive in and work on the project, among other things like easier cross-platform implementation, i18n, etc. Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.

Mozilla M11 - This is the one

[SurfsUp]

Mozilla milestone M11 is coming out any minute. Here's the open bug list. Obviously, the team is on the green and just about to sink the putt.

This is the one, guys. This is the first mozilla named "mozilla" instead of "apprunner". This is a fully functional browser, with all the trimmings (plus more), and it just could be good enough to browse with. If not, we can make it that way. The source code is only 20~ something meg - it's a reasonable sized project. It's ours. This is the time to jump in and help.

Guys, this is our last chance to claw back the client side of the net from Microsoft.

I agree

[jd]

It's more important for a product to do what it's designed to do, well and reliably, than for it to be marketed well, or even used extensively.

CmdrTaco, please note. Netscape aren't the only people who could benefit from more eyes. Almost certainly everyone on Slashdot would be -more- than happy to help clean tarballs, debug code, and tweak capabilities in the Slash code, but we really can't, unless you put even a rough-cut tarball up. I am very grateful for the code that -is- there, and I wish there was some way of repaying you for your efforts in creating and maintaining the Slashdot code and site. Donating bug-fixes, speed-ups or possible refinements might be one way to do exactly that. All I need, to do so, is fresh code.