Actually, given the increasing number of broadband users in the USA, the difference in download times for FireFox and Mozilla 1.7.3 is no longer significant.
The difference between 4.5 MB and 11MB is dramatic for the 60 million (49%) US internet users who still don't have broadband.
I'm not sure how a figure like "half" isn't significant. Half of the US still isn't on broadband and for them, Firefox downloading much easier than Mozilla. Firefox is about the size of an MP3. People can relate to downloading something that size.
But Mozilla has a few things that FireFox lacks right now: 1) better page-rendering accuracy and 2) a very good mail and newsgroup reader.
Mozilla and Firefox share the same Gecko rendering engine so I'm not sure where you get the "better page-rendering accuracy" from. Firefox has a powerful companion e-mail application called Thunderbird for anyone who needs a great (not "good") email and newsgroup reader. Thunderbird is to Mozilla email what Firefox is to Mozilla browser.
But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
Unfortunately not. We miss a lot of downloads. Right now we're just looking at our primary FTP mirrors. We're not taking into account all of the not Mozilla FTP mirror download locations or mechanisms.
If you have suggestions about how to get a more inclusive count, please let me know.
The good news is that this is probably a conservative estimate and our real number of 1.0PR downloads are probably higher than what we're reporting.
1 million is great, and like every poster here has said. The count isn't close to accurate. So let us now aim for 2 million!
See SpreadFirefox.com where we're already looking for that second million:-)
1,000,000? Why stop there? I'll bet they'll have another million in a week or two. We're not going to fight IE if we keep setting our sights in the one million range. Let's try to get 10,000,000 new ones in the next year.
We're not stopping at all. I think we'll make 2 million by the end of our original 10 day campaign.
And 10M isn't nearly ambitious enough for the next year:) To make a real dent, we need 10M downloads a month the next year:) We're gonna take back the web. This is only the beginning:)
With almost every release of Mozilla based products, we fix security bugs. We announce those security bugs when we release, that's our standard operating procedure. See http://www.mozilla.org/security/ and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html.
We're very proud of our new Security Bug Bounty program which went into effect well before the Firefox PR shipped. That program helped us identify and fix several more security bugs than might have otherwise been fixed in this release.
The PR was actually release a couple of weeks behind schedule, in part due to our being busy working on fixing a couple of security and privacy issues. We certainly didn't "throw together a preview for the sake of not having to announce it as a fix for major exploits." What actually happened was that we announced the security fixes to the public and to security research firms like Secunia when we shipped PR. They found out about the problem because we shipped and we disclosed the bugs -- our normal process.
You seem to have the misconception that the security issues were about to be disclosed so we rushed a release out. That's just not the case. It was the Mozilla Foundation that made the security disclosures. We do that each time we ship a new release that has security related bug fixes.
Most of the people who suddenly downloaded the update were probably already using a prior version of Firefox. I would seriously doubt that this represents anything like 1 million new users.
Based on my reading of the referrer stats, a significant portion of those downloading Firefox 1.0 PR were using IE to perform that download.
"So Firefox doesn't ever save an image file that was HTTP'd off the network to a cache directory and load it from disk as needed?"
It uses libpr0n, Gecko's cross-platform rendering engine to load those images from disk. gdkpixbuf is not used for displaying remote content, even cached remote content.
Firefox doesn't use gdk-pixbuf for drawing it's images. The only places using gdk-pixbuf in Firefox are loading a couple of images from your hard drive into the browser UI -- like the little Windows desktop icon that shows up in the download manager UI. This isn't remotely exploitable in Firefox.
Firefox 0.10 (PR) can now check for critical security updates and install them. This is our first release with that feature working as expected. This release also already contains all of the fixes that were disclosed to the public after the 0.10 release.
If a new vulnerability is found and patched, Firefox 0.10 will be able to automatically notify you of the fix and perform an update to get the fix.
We'll stay ahead of the pop-up creators until pop-ups are a thing of the past. We've just taken another fix (post RC) that blocks the last of the known major category of pop-ups. We can beat them.
You can find all the tools you need (and if you can't then help us build them) at the new Firefox community marketing websote, SpreadFirefox.com
We don't have the marketing budget the other guys have so we depend on word of mouth (and word of blog) to turn people on to Firefox. Help us spread the word at SpreadFirefox.com.
We are going to have our Firefox 1.0 Preview Release early this week, probably Tuesday. These builds are candidates for that release. We don't expect to take further changes into Firefox between now and 1.0 PR unless we find major regressions or new problems in these candidate builds.
"Security-wise, the 0.9 series are worse as well. Enough so that the port maintainers at OpenBSD will not yet upgrade from 0.8 to 0.9.x until later."
Now that's just crazy! Seriously. Security didn't regress in 0.9, many existing issues were discovered in 0.9 and fixed in 0.9.1, 0.9.2. 0.9.3. thanks to our great testing community and the increased press (not to mention the bug bounty). Not moving from 0.8 to 0.9.3 is a serious disservice to OpenBSD users.
Who at OpenBSD should I be talking with. I can't believe they'd really leave their users at risk to the many serious security issues that were resolved since Firefox 0.8. Can some one please email me with contact information for the OpenBSD Firefox maintainer. This is very concerning.
A decent list of unsung heros would be thousands of people long and still miss contributors that play(ed) very important roles in all of the open source software we use today.
I don't know nearly as many people as I should and I certainly haven't done enough to thank or otherwise praise many of the open source contributors who have been giving to projects, large and small, that I use every day. This topic has prompted me to start looking a little bit closer.
There is one person I do know who has had a huge impact on the entire open source world as well as my open source continent (Mozilla) that doesn't get the recognition she deserves.
Michell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation is definitely a hero. The author of the MPL and the Chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla project, she has been a driving force behind the Mozilla projects since the beginning. Without Mitchell, Mozilla just wouldn't be where it is today.
So when an IE user goes to the site, some stuff appear to be broken (like the green box that says "Free Download" doesn't have rounded corners on IE)... Small details, but still...
"broken"? What's broken? Everything degrades well. Different is not "broken".
There is auto-install of plug-ins, there is auto-install of skins - i kind of have a hard time believing that all of these were written by people wrecking their brains about possible exploits. [if you know different, let me know]
I know better. I've been involved with the Mozilla and Firefox development process for years and I can tell you with great confidence that we've considered security at every step of the way, from design, to implementation, to testing. We've got some of the top minds in the business constantly trying to find holes in our security story. They find 'em and we fix 'em.
If you don't believe me, then ask Bugzilla about it, or take a look at the code. Maybe then you won't have such a hard time believing it.
With IE, we know it's broken beyond fixing. With FireFox, we don't know. It has not been tested
Um, hasn't been tested? We've got tens of thousands of people who have tested and reported bugs (including security bugs) on Firefox and the rest of the Mozilla code base. We've got millions of users using it. We've been the target of malware writers and we are beating them with a strong security ethos that defines almost everything we do.
Imagine - unlikely as it may be - FireFox wins the new browser war. Will it still be safe? IMHO, only a real security model like the one built into Java can really protect users.
You're suggesting that Firefox and the Mozilla codebase don't have "a real security model"? I'm guessing you really haven't even looked.
Do yourself a bit of a favor and actually look at the code, the bugs, the process, etc. before you start talking about security.
Along with it's drilling tools and such, it carried a spectrometer (or something of the sort) to detect mineral and chemical composition.
Actually, several spectrometers. There's the Mossbauer spectrometer, designed to identify iron-bearing minerals. There's the APXS (alpha particle x-ray spectrometer.) which performs elemental chemistry analysis. And there's the Mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) which studies infra-red spectra to help determine type and abundance of minerals.
Then there's the arsenal of 9 cameras on each rover, including the stereo panoramic cameras which have filters from far IR to near UV (980 nm, 930 nm, 900 nm, 860 nm, 800 nm, 750 nm, 670 nm, 600 nm, 530 nm, 480 nm, 440 nm, and 430 nm).
Yes, we've got spectrometers:-)
Are they likely to be the required tools for confirming the existence of life? No. These are geologic and rock chemistry tools.
Is it possible that we've got MI pictures that suggest life? Yeah, it's possible. Is it possible that our wider-angle cameras spotted some Martian beast moving across nearby terrain? Yeah, possible, I suppose. Is it likely that they've got anything close to definitive proof of life on Mars? I don't think so.
I'm going to take a guess and say that they're likely to tell us that they've got a pretty good handle on the local geology at Opportunity's crater in Meridiani Planum and that the rocks they've analyzed most likely formed in large bodies of standing liquid water.
As a bonus, it would be nice if they also announced that they've found more than trace amounts of liquid water just under the surface or large amounts of water, frozen above the surface (could those spherules be ice cubes? Ray did say that they were the "grayest" think they'd ever seen on Mars, though that could be a signal that they were the coarse gray hematite they're looking for.)
There's already a patch for this that's been in Bugzilla for quite a while (contributed by Sun Microsystems engineers in Beijing). Someone might be able to start there and make it to this bounty in short order.
ever since the support was pulled for Netscape, things have rather been free floating
I'm sure the 100+ contributors who fixed over 1,000 bugs for Mozilla 1.5 and the 70+ people who have already fixed 950 bugs in the Mozilla 1.6 Alpha and Beta cycles all enjoy your oh so informed commentary.
There's little doubt that the thousands of bug reporters that have filed more than 15,000 issues in the last 5 months, and the hundreds of active bug investigators, testcase writers, and other helpful folk are all pleased to have their work characterized as "free floating".
I know that people like me who have spent literally thousands of hours working to make recent Mozilla releases the best we've ever had really, really appreciate your valuable commentary contribution here at slashdot.
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.
No it's not. Firebird is a completely different application based the Mozilla Gecko core technologies. It shares much of the Mozilla backend but it is not "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client." If you want to use "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client," then select Navigator only in the Mozilla installer. Compare that to firebird and you'll see how they're quite different applications.
--Asa
Re:Contributions not yet tax-deductible.
on
The Mozilla Foundation
·
· Score: 3, Informative
V.3 is the clause under which AOL is licensing all NPLed code to the Foundation under the MPL (and it'll get tri-licensed in the fullness of time), so be glad that it's there:-)
I am glad its there.:) And I'm not trying to pick on AOL / Netscape. Just issue spotting.
Let's look at V.3:
What Gerv was saying (I think) is that AOL is using v.3 to relicence _to_ the Mozilla Foundation any reamaining NPL code under the MPL so that going forward all of Mozilla will be MPL/GPL/LGPL (no NPL) so that if AOL uses future versions of these files they will have no NPL special rights. They will be able to use code from the Mozilla Foundation under the terms of any of the MPL, GPL or LGPL.
I don't deal much with licensing issues (not nearly as much as Gerv) so I could be totally wrong but I think that's what he was trying to say.
[...]I would be surprised if people still didn't continue to develop Mozilla (even if it's at a slower pace).
Even slower? Molasses on a cold day comes to mind;)
I didn't miss the wink but it still sounds like you were agreeing with the "slow" pace of development comment. I don't really think it's very slow. Even just comparing features (including support for emerging web standards) with the popular IE browser, I don't think our development pace is slow.
But beyond just new features, if you look at the actual code change (about 80,000 lines changed in the last year) and the bugs fixed (about 9,000 bugzilla records resolved as fixed in the last year,) it's seems wrong to call that slow.
I think we've been moving at a pretty good clip this last year with the addition of great new features like junk-mail controls, NTLM auth, find as you type, link pre-fetching, download manager, major improvements to usability of killer features like pop-up blocking, and tabbed browsing, much improved look and feel, more complete support for web standards, much better website compatibility and big gains in performance.
If you don't think much has changed or that we're moving too slow, then go download Mozilla 1.0 (from about a year ago) and use it side by side with the latest release, Mozilla 1.4. Compare that to the improvements that Microsoft has made in the last year.
I've brought this up before, but where's the professional looking attractive banner ad graphics for Mozilla? I'd slap one of those up on my website (I've got pages that attract more than just slash-geeks) and get the word out that way...
I'm not so artistically minded, so I don't want to create it, but I'll certainly display it!
We will be ramping up our marketing efforts over the coming months. In the mean time you could always use plain text and link to http://www.mozilla.org/releases
I've been using Mozilla's Bayesian junk-mail filtering for several months now. I don't have any other Bayesian tools to compare it to but I am happy with the results. Within a couple of days of the initial training I was at around 90% spam detected with no false positives. Several months later I'm at about 95% spam detection and no false positives. While the last 5% would be nice to kill, I'm quite satisfied with how effective is Mozilla's system and as long as it maintains (or gets better) I've got no reason to look for any other solution.
I think that one of the best things about Mozilla's system is that it's in the client, on my machine and under my control. While server-side solutions, distributed corpus tools, etc. might be more accurate, not ever having to install or update any 3rd-party apps is really nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, given the increasing number of broadband users in the USA, the difference in download times for FireFox and Mozilla 1.7.3 is no longer significant.
The difference between 4.5 MB and 11MB is dramatic for the 60 million (49%) US internet users who still don't have broadband.
I'm not sure how a figure like "half" isn't significant. Half of the US still isn't on broadband and for them, Firefox downloading much easier than Mozilla. Firefox is about the size of an MP3. People can relate to downloading something that size.
But Mozilla has a few things that FireFox lacks right now: 1) better page-rendering accuracy and 2) a very good mail and newsgroup reader.
Mozilla and Firefox share the same Gecko rendering engine so I'm not sure where you get the "better page-rendering accuracy" from. Firefox has a powerful companion e-mail application called Thunderbird for anyone who needs a great (not "good") email and newsgroup reader. Thunderbird is to Mozilla email what Firefox is to Mozilla browser.
--Asa
But what about people like me who emerge -u firefox? Do we get counted?
:-)
Unfortunately not. We miss a lot of downloads. Right now we're just looking at our primary FTP mirrors. We're not taking into account all of the not Mozilla FTP mirror download locations or mechanisms.
If you have suggestions about how to get a more inclusive count, please let me know.
The good news is that this is probably a conservative estimate and our real number of 1.0PR downloads are probably higher than what we're reporting.
1 million is great, and like every poster here has said. The count isn't close to accurate. So let us now aim for 2 million!
See SpreadFirefox.com where we're already looking for that second million
--Asa
1,000,000? Why stop there? I'll bet they'll have another million in a week or two. We're not going to fight IE if we keep setting our sights in the one million range. Let's try to get 10,000,000 new ones in the next year.
:) To make a real dent, we need 10M downloads a month the next year :) We're gonna take back the web. This is only the beginning :)
We're not stopping at all. I think we'll make 2 million by the end of our original 10 day campaign.
And 10M isn't nearly ambitious enough for the next year
With almost every release of Mozilla based products, we fix security bugs. We announce those security bugs when we release, that's our standard operating procedure. See http://www.mozilla.org/security/ and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html.
We're very proud of our new Security Bug Bounty program which went into effect well before the Firefox PR shipped. That program helped us identify and fix several more security bugs than might have otherwise been fixed in this release.
The PR was actually release a couple of weeks behind schedule, in part due to our being busy working on fixing a couple of security and privacy issues. We certainly didn't "throw together a preview for the sake of not having to announce it as a fix for major exploits." What actually happened was that we announced the security fixes to the public and to security research firms like Secunia when we shipped PR. They found out about the problem because we shipped and we disclosed the bugs -- our normal process.
You seem to have the misconception that the security issues were about to be disclosed so we rushed a release out. That's just not the case. It was the Mozilla Foundation that made the security disclosures. We do that each time we ship a new release that has security related bug fixes.
--Asa
Most of the people who suddenly downloaded the update were probably already using a prior version of Firefox. I would seriously doubt that this represents anything like 1 million new users.
Based on my reading of the referrer stats, a significant portion of those downloading Firefox 1.0 PR were using IE to perform that download.
--Asa
"So Firefox doesn't ever save an image file that was HTTP'd off the network to a cache directory and load it from disk as needed?"
It uses libpr0n, Gecko's cross-platform rendering engine to load those images from disk. gdkpixbuf is not used for displaying remote content, even cached remote content.
--Asa
Firefox doesn't use gdk-pixbuf for drawing it's images. The only places using gdk-pixbuf in Firefox are loading a couple of images from your hard drive into the browser UI -- like the little Windows desktop icon that shows up in the download manager UI. This isn't remotely exploitable in Firefox.
--Asa
Firefox 0.10 (PR) can now check for critical security updates and install them. This is our first release with that feature working as expected. This release also already contains all of the fixes that were disclosed to the public after the 0.10 release.
If a new vulnerability is found and patched, Firefox 0.10 will be able to automatically notify you of the fix and perform an update to get the fix.
--Asa
If you look around some, you'll see that people are already doing exactly what you are concerned about. See this Zenworks example
--Asa
We'll stay ahead of the pop-up creators until pop-ups are a thing of the past. We've just taken another fix (post RC) that blocks the last of the known major category of pop-ups. We can beat them.
--Asa
You can find all the tools you need (and if you can't then help us build them) at the new Firefox community marketing websote, SpreadFirefox.com
We don't have the marketing budget the other guys have so we depend on word of mouth (and word of blog) to turn people on to Firefox. Help us spread the word at SpreadFirefox.com.
--Asa
We are going to have our Firefox 1.0 Preview Release early this week, probably Tuesday. These builds are candidates for that release. We don't expect to take further changes into Firefox between now and 1.0 PR unless we find major regressions or new problems in these candidate builds.
--Asa
"Security-wise, the 0.9 series are worse as well. Enough so that the port maintainers at OpenBSD will not yet upgrade from 0.8 to 0.9.x until later."
Now that's just crazy! Seriously. Security didn't regress in 0.9, many existing issues were discovered in 0.9 and fixed in 0.9.1, 0.9.2. 0.9.3. thanks to our great testing community and the increased press (not to mention the bug bounty). Not moving from 0.8 to 0.9.3 is a serious disservice to OpenBSD users.
Who at OpenBSD should I be talking with. I can't believe they'd really leave their users at risk to the many serious security issues that were resolved since Firefox 0.8. Can some one please email me with contact information for the OpenBSD Firefox maintainer. This is very concerning.
--Asa
A decent list of unsung heros would be thousands of people long and still miss contributors that play(ed) very important roles in all of the open source software we use today.
I don't know nearly as many people as I should and I certainly haven't done enough to thank or otherwise praise many of the open source contributors who have been giving to projects, large and small, that I use every day. This topic has prompted me to start looking a little bit closer.
There is one person I do know who has had a huge impact on the entire open source world as well as my open source continent (Mozilla) that doesn't get the recognition she deserves.
Michell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation is definitely a hero. The author of the MPL and the Chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla project, she has been a driving force behind the Mozilla projects since the beginning. Without Mitchell, Mozilla just wouldn't be where it is today.
--Asa
So when an IE user goes to the site, some stuff appear to be broken (like the green box that says "Free Download" doesn't have rounded corners on IE)... Small details, but still...
"broken"? What's broken? Everything degrades well. Different is not "broken".
--Asa
There is auto-install of plug-ins, there is auto-install of skins - i kind of have a hard time believing that all of these were written by people wrecking their brains about possible exploits. [if you know different, let me know]
I know better. I've been involved with the Mozilla and Firefox development process for years and I can tell you with great confidence that we've considered security at every step of the way, from design, to implementation, to testing. We've got some of the top minds in the business constantly trying to find holes in our security story. They find 'em and we fix 'em.
If you don't believe me, then ask Bugzilla about it, or take a look at the code. Maybe then you won't have such a hard time believing it.
With IE, we know it's broken beyond fixing. With FireFox, we don't know. It has not been tested
Um, hasn't been tested? We've got tens of thousands of people who have tested and reported bugs (including security bugs) on Firefox and the rest of the Mozilla code base. We've got millions of users using it. We've been the target of malware writers and we are beating them with a strong security ethos that defines almost everything we do.
Imagine - unlikely as it may be - FireFox wins the new browser war. Will it still be safe? IMHO, only a real security model like the one built into Java can really protect users.
You're suggesting that Firefox and the Mozilla codebase don't have "a real security model"? I'm guessing you really haven't even looked.
Do yourself a bit of a favor and actually look at the code, the bugs, the process, etc. before you start talking about security.
--Asa
Compare March and May and you'll see that Gecko was trending up.
w se rs.gif0 4_browse rs.gif
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/mar04_bro
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/may
Along with it's drilling tools and such, it carried a spectrometer (or something of the sort) to detect mineral and chemical composition.
:-)
Actually, several spectrometers. There's the Mossbauer spectrometer, designed to identify iron-bearing minerals. There's the APXS (alpha particle x-ray spectrometer.) which performs elemental chemistry analysis. And there's the Mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) which studies infra-red spectra to help determine type and abundance of minerals.
Then there's the arsenal of 9 cameras on each rover, including the stereo panoramic cameras which have filters from far IR to near UV (980 nm, 930 nm, 900 nm, 860 nm, 800 nm, 750 nm, 670 nm, 600 nm, 530 nm, 480 nm, 440 nm, and 430 nm).
Yes, we've got spectrometers
Are they likely to be the required tools for confirming the existence of life? No. These are geologic and rock chemistry tools.
Is it possible that we've got MI pictures that suggest life? Yeah, it's possible. Is it possible that our wider-angle cameras spotted some Martian beast moving across nearby terrain? Yeah, possible, I suppose. Is it likely that they've got anything close to definitive proof of life on Mars? I don't think so.
I'm going to take a guess and say that they're likely to tell us that they've got a pretty good handle on the local geology at Opportunity's crater in Meridiani Planum and that the rocks they've analyzed most likely formed in large bodies of standing liquid water.
As a bonus, it would be nice if they also announced that they've found more than trace amounts of liquid water just under the surface or large amounts of water, frozen above the surface (could those spherules be ice cubes? Ray did say that they were the "grayest" think they'd ever seen on Mars, though that could be a signal that they were the coarse gray hematite they're looking for.)
There's already a patch for this that's been in Bugzilla for quite a while (contributed by Sun Microsystems engineers in Beijing). Someone might be able to start there and make it to this bounty in short order.
ever since the support was pulled for Netscape, things have rather been free floating
I'm sure the 100+ contributors who fixed over 1,000 bugs for Mozilla 1.5 and the 70+ people who have already fixed 950 bugs in the Mozilla 1.6 Alpha and Beta cycles all enjoy your oh so informed commentary.
There's little doubt that the thousands of bug reporters that have filed more than 15,000 issues in the last 5 months, and the hundreds of active bug investigators, testcase writers, and other helpful folk are all pleased to have their work characterized as "free floating".
I know that people like me who have spent literally thousands of hours working to make recent Mozilla releases the best we've ever had really, really appreciate your valuable commentary contribution here at slashdot.
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.
No it's not. Firebird is a completely different application based the Mozilla Gecko core technologies. It shares much of the Mozilla backend but it is not "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client." If you want to use "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client," then select Navigator only in the Mozilla installer. Compare that to firebird and you'll see how they're quite different applications.
--Asa
V.3 is the clause under which AOL is licensing all NPLed code to the Foundation under the MPL (and it'll get tri-licensed in the fullness of time), so be glad that it's there :-)
:) And I'm not trying to pick on AOL / Netscape. Just issue spotting.
I am glad its there.
Let's look at V.3:
What Gerv was saying (I think) is that AOL is using v.3 to relicence _to_ the Mozilla Foundation any reamaining NPL code under the MPL so that going forward all of Mozilla will be MPL/GPL/LGPL (no NPL) so that if AOL uses future versions of these files they will have no NPL special rights. They will be able to use code from the Mozilla Foundation under the terms of any of the MPL, GPL or LGPL.
I don't deal much with licensing issues (not nearly as much as Gerv) so I could be totally wrong but I think that's what he was trying to say.
--Asa
[...]I would be surprised if people still didn't continue to develop Mozilla (even if it's at a slower pace).
;)
Even slower? Molasses on a cold day comes to mind
I didn't miss the wink but it still sounds like you were agreeing with the "slow" pace of development comment. I don't really think it's very slow. Even just comparing features (including support for emerging web standards) with the popular IE browser, I don't think our development pace is slow.
But beyond just new features, if you look at the actual code change (about 80,000 lines changed in the last year) and the bugs fixed (about 9,000 bugzilla records resolved as fixed in the last year,) it's seems wrong to call that slow.
I think we've been moving at a pretty good clip this last year with the addition of great new features like junk-mail controls, NTLM auth, find as you type, link pre-fetching, download manager, major improvements to usability of killer features like pop-up blocking, and tabbed browsing, much improved look and feel, more complete support for web standards, much better website compatibility and big gains in performance.
If you don't think much has changed or that we're moving too slow, then go download Mozilla 1.0 (from about a year ago) and use it side by side with the latest release, Mozilla 1.4. Compare that to the improvements that Microsoft has made in the last year.
--Asa
I've brought this up before, but where's the professional looking attractive banner ad graphics for Mozilla? I'd slap one of those up on my website (I've got pages that attract more than just slash-geeks) and get the word out that way...
I'm not so artistically minded, so I don't want to create it, but I'll certainly display it!
We will be ramping up our marketing efforts over the coming months. In the mean time you could always use plain text and link to http://www.mozilla.org/releases
--Asa
I've been using Mozilla's Bayesian junk-mail filtering for several months now. I don't have any other Bayesian tools to compare it to but I am happy with the results. Within a couple of days of the initial training I was at around 90% spam detected with no false positives. Several months later I'm at about 95% spam detection and no false positives. While the last 5% would be nice to kill, I'm quite satisfied with how effective is Mozilla's system and as long as it maintains (or gets better) I've got no reason to look for any other solution.
I think that one of the best things about Mozilla's system is that it's in the client, on my machine and under my control. While server-side solutions, distributed corpus tools, etc. might be more accurate, not ever having to install or update any 3rd-party apps is really nice.
--Asa