"When a for-profit company is founded with an ambiguous relationship with the original organization, the role of the development community comes into question."
What exactly is ambiguous about this relationship. Mozilla has been building search into the browser for about 8 years now. Google has been the default for almost as long. Google, along with other search companies, recently (a couple of years ago) started paying Mozilla for this feature. Mozilla discloses its full financials each year. Mozilla has said, repeatedly, that the bulk of revenue comes from search partners and that the majority of search revenue comes from (obviously) the default search service. Where's the ambiguity?
"By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent."
And this follow from what? There is nothing about the existence of the Mozilla Corporation that commits us to being less transparent. That's just bunk and it makes no sense given how transparent we are from our development process and planning to our financials.
As far as the details of specific financial relationships with search partners, those were never disclosed in detail (long before the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, in Mozilla Foundation days) and probably won't be since our various partners weren't then aren't now willing to divulge the specifics of their financial relationships with anyone. Mozilla is as transparent as we can be around those relationships, releasing our annual financials and explaining that the bulk of it comes from relationships with various search partners including our default search, Google.
The article overall is fine, but that line is just fiction.
Maybe slashdotters are the only ones who see a difference between the desktop and the web, but even two-year olds see a difference between mine and theirs.
Yep. But the difference between mine and theirs is orthogonal to the issue of local or remote, or PC or the Web. I can care deeply about what's mine and what's not and still not have to care about the difference between local or remote applications or storage.
To tell you the truth, I think what we have already - meaning various file keeping and sharing web applications - is all people would want out of a "Web OS."
Yep. I just love having one account for my image hosting, a different account for my weblog, a third account for my video uploading, another account for my webmail. I love that it takes magic to make any of them talk to each other. I love that it takes magic to get any of them to actually know what's on my machine or for my machine to know what's up at those servers.
"What we have already" is just perfect. Don't change a thing.
There is a major distinction between MY computer and the rest of the world. One is mine; the rest belongs to others. I treat them differently. I want my desktop to reflect it.
You're a slashdot reader. Of course you see a distinction there. You're atypical. You will see and treat these two as different because you understand the internals of the system. My little sister who wants to share her travel photos with me doesn't. The highschool english teacher that lives next door to me and wants to get in invitation to our upcoming barbecue doesn't. The Montana farmer getting his first computer to manage his heavy equipment doesn't. My grandmother who wants to see how my cat is recovering from surgery doesn't.
When we designed Firfox with built in search features, you understood that there was a browser and there was a search providing website. Those people I just mentioned probably doesn't even know what a browser is and they certainly don't consider the browser and the Google search to be two different products.
You're atypical. You're also a minority -- a shrinking one. Why should the rest of the web population be forced to think about these kinds of distinctions. My answer, and what I've seen of Blake and Joe's work on both Firefox and Parakey, is that users shouldn't have to understand how it works, especially if that costs in terms of how well it works.
I remember slashdot criticism of early versions of Firefox fondly. I'm glad we stuck to our guns and built a browser for the not-slashdot audience. With tens of millions of users today, a reinvigorated internet, new browser releases from a company that had abandoned the browser half a decade ago, it was clearly the right decision.
I work with Blake on Firefox. As one of the few people who's actually seen and used Parakey, I can tell you that the assumptions being made here are misguided. It's a unique product that surpasses anything similar I can find out there today.
The article referenced does a poor job of explaining what Parakey is about and an even worse job of describing how it works. It won't be long before you all can see for yourself.
The auto-update system will automatically apply security and stability updates. We're planning on providing an "optional" update to Firefox 2 through this system, and that will likely happen in a few weeks. In the meantime, please do download through getfirefox.com. As long as you do not use a direct ftp.mozilla.org or releases.mozilla.org, we're pretty confident in our ability to handle demand, thanks to our volunteer mirror network.
"Actually, the Mozilla website and all that is hosted by the Oregon State University's Open Source Labs. So from Mozilla's point of view, the bandwidth and all that *is* free indeed."
Really? You're familiar with the terms of the Mozilla/OSU agreement and so you can say with authority that Mozilla pays no bandwidth costs? Care to tell us where you get your information?
If you can't take the time to register with Bugzilla, feel free to use our general feedback tool, Hendrix. Just go to http://hendrix.mozilla.org/ and submit your feedback. A real human being (me) reads all of the feedback that comes in from Hendrix.
Firemonger is an amazing community project and it's good to see them getting more widespread coverage. Firemonger is and will continue to be a key driver of Firefox adoption. Congratulations to the whole team!
Do you get mad at Microsoft for this IE broken-ness? Or do you get mad that the braindead web "developers" who insist on using px for their font sizes?
There are plenty of legitimate cases where a designer builds to pixels. There is no reason that a feature in a browser which tells the user it can scale or zoom fonts shouldn't do that to all fonts.
Browsers determine what to do with web content, not the other way around.
We actually had the patch and workaround up yesterday.
It's unfortunate that the bug reporter gave us so little time to respond to the issue before going public. He filed the confidential security bug on the afternoon of the 6th, and then went highly public (to c|net) in less than 72 hours.
As anyone can see now that the bug is no longer confidential, we were hard at work diagnosing the problem when he went public. Not only that, but the public release he made was based on our developer's analysis of the problem, not his -- which happened to be wrong.
This workaround that we posted (on the same day as the problem was made public) is only temporary and causes some of our users a loss of functionality (IDN). We will be issuing a full browser update for our stable Firefox 1.0.x and Mozilla 1.7.x releases which contains the real fix (also available as a patch to both 1.0.6 and 1.5 Beta yesterday) that avoids the security issue without disabling IDN.
The bug report is now open and you can see that he reported it to Mozilla on the afternoon of the 6th. There was quite a bit of activity from top Mozilla developers and then the reporter posted the exploit publicly on the 8th.
We've determined that disabling IDN is a safe workaround and are working on supplying a small download that will take care of that configuration for the user.
"I'm patient, but will all of the developers make and re-make their extensions for every version?"
No. Developers will only have to test their extensions to make sure they're not broken by the latest Firefox release. All they have to do if their extension still works is tweak a version field at addons.mozilla.org (or wherever their extension checks for updates) and Firefox will allow the extension to run.
We're still at beta and that gives developers quite a bit of time to get their extensions certified against the upcoming Firefox 1.5 release.
If the extension author was relying on Firefox application code that changed, and broke the extension, then the extension will have to be updated.
I'm hopeful that most of the popular extensions will have certified against 1.5 or made updates available by the time 1.5 final ships.
They need to make widely-available release candidates, even if just for a day or two before the official release. Then many more users (and the developers of the extensions) would test them out
We do make release candidates available several days before the release. Keep an eye on the Mozilla Quality blog for notices. You can also find notices on MozillaZine fairly consistently.
Or, rather, is it that the extensions are now broken? Let's not make the mistake of sacrificing progress for compatibility.
Actually, the most popular Thunderbird extension and at least one Firefox extension were broken by changes to our code that were not strictly necessary. Let's not make the mistake of sacrificing compatibility for expedience. The 1.0 branch is a long-lived stable branch and we care about people who are developing for that branch. Breaking our developers on a stable branch should not be done without serious consideration (if at all) and certainly not as the result of time pressures.
Even worse is that the ubercomplex translation scheme used in the mozilla software is driving crazy the translators.
Firefox 1.0.x translations are not ubercomplex and require little more of the translators than to test and sign off on the translated builds that Mozilla produces. Thunderbird 1.0.x is not as good because we do not have the translations in our CVS repository (which means we can't produce continual builds like we do for Firefox) so the translators have to hand package their translations.
On the development trunk (the road to the next major Firefox release) we have both Firefox and Thunderbird translations in CVS so this will not be an issue there.
Still... it's easy for Asa to criticise now. But think about all those years that Mozilla lumbered on with essentially zero popularity outside of the geek world. It wasn't until Firefox (which took years to develop) reached version 1 that things really took off. Linux is still in the Mozilla Seamonkey stage: cute features are being developed but that last stretch hasn't been reached yet. Arguably, it hasn't even been started.
Ahh, friend. You've hit on exactly my point: It is _the_ right time for Linux to try to do for itself what Firefox did for Mozilla.
How did we do that with Firefox? Well, there were four things.... (did you read my blog post?)
Migration is a red hearing. Windows users usually lose all of their settings when they buy a new computer.
Have you used Windows recently? Windows XP comes with a quite capable Files and Settings Transfer Wizard that is prominently featured on new systems. Recent Mac systems do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
"Apparently its ok for Google to chuck cash at Mozilla to default to them,"
Actually, we've been defaulting to Google as the default search engine for about 8 years, long before there was a financial relationship.
"When a for-profit company is founded with an ambiguous relationship with the original organization, the role of the development community comes into question."
What exactly is ambiguous about this relationship. Mozilla has been building search into the browser for about 8 years now. Google has been the default for almost as long. Google, along with other search companies, recently (a couple of years ago) started paying Mozilla for this feature. Mozilla discloses its full financials each year. Mozilla has said, repeatedly, that the bulk of revenue comes from search partners and that the majority of search revenue comes from (obviously) the default search service. Where's the ambiguity?
"By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent."
And this follow from what? There is nothing about the existence of the Mozilla Corporation that commits us to being less transparent. That's just bunk and it makes no sense given how transparent we are from our development process and planning to our financials.
As far as the details of specific financial relationships with search partners, those were never disclosed in detail (long before the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, in Mozilla Foundation days) and probably won't be since our various partners weren't then aren't now willing to divulge the specifics of their financial relationships with anyone. Mozilla is as transparent as we can be around those relationships, releasing our annual financials and explaining that the bulk of it comes from relationships with various search partners including our default search, Google.
The article overall is fine, but that line is just fiction.
Maybe slashdotters are the only ones who see a difference between the desktop and the web, but even two-year olds see a difference between mine and theirs.
Yep. But the difference between mine and theirs is orthogonal to the issue of local or remote, or PC or the Web. I can care deeply about what's mine and what's not and still not have to care about the difference between local or remote applications or storage.
- A
To tell you the truth, I think what we have already - meaning various file keeping and sharing web applications - is all people would want out of a "Web OS."
Yep. I just love having one account for my image hosting, a different account for my weblog, a third account for my video uploading, another account for my webmail. I love that it takes magic to make any of them talk to each other. I love that it takes magic to get any of them to actually know what's on my machine or for my machine to know what's up at those servers.
"What we have already" is just perfect. Don't change a thing.
- A
There is a major distinction between MY computer and the rest of the world. One is mine; the rest belongs to others. I treat them differently. I want my desktop to reflect it.
You're a slashdot reader. Of course you see a distinction there. You're atypical. You will see and treat these two as different because you understand the internals of the system. My little sister who wants to share her travel photos with me doesn't. The highschool english teacher that lives next door to me and wants to get in invitation to our upcoming barbecue doesn't. The Montana farmer getting his first computer to manage his heavy equipment doesn't. My grandmother who wants to see how my cat is recovering from surgery doesn't.
When we designed Firfox with built in search features, you understood that there was a browser and there was a search providing website. Those people I just mentioned probably doesn't even know what a browser is and they certainly don't consider the browser and the Google search to be two different products.
You're atypical. You're also a minority -- a shrinking one. Why should the rest of the web population be forced to think about these kinds of distinctions. My answer, and what I've seen of Blake and Joe's work on both Firefox and Parakey, is that users shouldn't have to understand how it works, especially if that costs in terms of how well it works.
I remember slashdot criticism of early versions of Firefox fondly. I'm glad we stuck to our guns and built a browser for the not-slashdot audience. With tens of millions of users today, a reinvigorated internet, new browser releases from a company that had abandoned the browser half a decade ago, it was clearly the right decision.
- A
I work with Blake on Firefox. As one of the few people who's actually seen and used Parakey, I can tell you that the assumptions being made here are misguided. It's a unique product that surpasses anything similar I can find out there today.
The article referenced does a poor job of explaining what Parakey is about and an even worse job of describing how it works. It won't be long before you all can see for yourself.
- A
The auto-update system will automatically apply security and stability updates. We're planning on providing an "optional" update to Firefox 2 through this system, and that will likely happen in a few weeks. In the meantime, please do download through getfirefox.com. As long as you do not use a direct ftp.mozilla.org or releases.mozilla.org, we're pretty confident in our ability to handle demand, thanks to our volunteer mirror network.
We have not yet released Firefox 2 Beta 2. This story is incorrect.
- Asa
We're working on it. In the mean time, you can see many of the flicks here and the winners here:
First Place - "Daredevil"
Second Place - "Wheee!"
Third Place - "Fox Fever"
Honorable Mention - "This is Hot"
Honorable Mention - "Give Me the Soap"
- Asa
"and guess who owns the browser?"
;-) Yep, you guessed it. The Mozilla Corporation has one owner. It's is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation.
And guess who owns the Corporation
- A
"Actually, the Mozilla website and all that is hosted by the Oregon State University's Open Source Labs. So from Mozilla's point of view, the bandwidth and all that *is* free indeed."
Really? You're familiar with the terms of the Mozilla/OSU agreement and so you can say with authority that Mozilla pays no bandwidth costs? Care to tell us where you get your information?
- A
If you can't take the time to register with Bugzilla, feel free to use our general feedback tool, Hendrix. Just go to http://hendrix.mozilla.org/ and submit your feedback. A real human being (me) reads all of the feedback that comes in from Hendrix.
- A
Firemonger is an amazing community project and it's good to see them getting more widespread coverage. Firemonger is and will continue to be a key driver of Firefox adoption. Congratulations to the whole team!
- A
Apparently taking yet another percentage point of market share from the strongest monopoly in the desktop space is a sign of failure. OK. Whatever.
- A
Do you get mad at Microsoft for this IE broken-ness? Or do you get mad that the braindead web "developers" who insist on using px for their font sizes?
There are plenty of legitimate cases where a designer builds to pixels. There is no reason that a feature in a browser which tells the user it can scale or zoom fonts shouldn't do that to all fonts.
Browsers determine what to do with web content, not the other way around.
- A
We actually had the patch and workaround up yesterday.
It's unfortunate that the bug reporter gave us so little time to respond to the issue before going public. He filed the confidential security bug on the afternoon of the 6th, and then went highly public (to c|net) in less than 72 hours.
As anyone can see now that the bug is no longer confidential, we were hard at work diagnosing the problem when he went public. Not only that, but the public release he made was based on our developer's analysis of the problem, not his -- which happened to be wrong.
This workaround that we posted (on the same day as the problem was made public) is only temporary and causes some of our users a loss of functionality (IDN). We will be issuing a full browser update for our stable Firefox 1.0.x and Mozilla 1.7.x releases which contains the real fix (also available as a patch to both 1.0.6 and 1.5 Beta yesterday) that avoids the security issue without disabling IDN.
Expect that new release shortly.
- A
The bug report is now open and you can see that he reported it to Mozilla on the afternoon of the 6th. There was quite a bit of activity from top Mozilla developers and then the reporter posted the exploit publicly on the 8th.
We've determined that disabling IDN is a safe workaround and are working on supplying a small download that will take care of that configuration for the user.
- A
"I'm patient, but will all of the developers make and re-make their extensions for every version?"
No. Developers will only have to test their extensions to make sure they're not broken by the latest Firefox release. All they have to do if their extension still works is tweak a version field at addons.mozilla.org (or wherever their extension checks for updates) and Firefox will allow the extension to run.
We're still at beta and that gives developers quite a bit of time to get their extensions certified against the upcoming Firefox 1.5 release.
If the extension author was relying on Firefox application code that changed, and broke the extension, then the extension will have to be updated.
I'm hopeful that most of the popular extensions will have certified against 1.5 or made updates available by the time 1.5 final ships.
- A
They need to make widely-available release candidates, even if just for a day or two before the official release. Then many more users (and the developers of the extensions) would test them out
We do make release candidates available several days before the release. Keep an eye on the Mozilla Quality blog for notices. You can also find notices on MozillaZine fairly consistently.
- A
Or, rather, is it that the extensions are now broken? Let's not make the mistake of sacrificing progress for compatibility.
Actually, the most popular Thunderbird extension and at least one Firefox extension were broken by changes to our code that were not strictly necessary. Let's not make the mistake of sacrificing compatibility for expedience. The 1.0 branch is a long-lived stable branch and we care about people who are developing for that branch. Breaking our developers on a stable branch should not be done without serious consideration (if at all) and certainly not as the result of time pressures.
- A
Even worse is that the ubercomplex translation scheme used in the mozilla software is driving crazy the translators.
Firefox 1.0.x translations are not ubercomplex and require little more of the translators than to test and sign off on the translated builds that Mozilla produces. Thunderbird 1.0.x is not as good because we do not have the translations in our CVS repository (which means we can't produce continual builds like we do for Firefox) so the translators have to hand package their translations.
On the development trunk (the road to the next major Firefox release) we have both Firefox and Thunderbird translations in CVS so this will not be an issue there.
- A
Still ... it's easy for Asa to criticise now. But think about all those years that Mozilla lumbered on with essentially zero popularity outside of the geek world. It wasn't until Firefox (which took years to develop) reached version 1 that things really took off. Linux is still in the Mozilla Seamonkey stage: cute features are being developed but that last stretch hasn't been reached yet. Arguably, it hasn't even been started.
Ahh, friend. You've hit on exactly my point: It is _the_ right time for Linux to try to do for itself what Firefox did for Mozilla.
How did we do that with Firefox? Well, there were four things.... (did you read my blog post?)
- A
If anything, that is why FF is so wildly more popular than GNU/Linux desktop. It's damm easy to switch
And that's my point. Linux needs to be easier to switch! The more you can improve this, the more users you'll get.
- A
Migration is a red hearing. Windows users usually lose all of their settings when they buy a new computer.
Have you used Windows recently? Windows XP comes with a quite capable Files and Settings Transfer Wizard that is prominently featured on new systems. Recent Mac systems do the same.
- A