We're still working out the details. keep an eye on n.p.m.license to monitor the progress. With a project of this size (with many files contributed under a number of different licenses) it takes a little time to make these kinds of changes.
-Asa
If you had been actually watching (or better yet, participating in) the development process then you would know that any non-bandaid fixes that happened in the branch were contributed (subject to reviewers@mozilla.org) back to the Mozilla trunk. There won't be a big merge of branch to trunk since it was happening with almost every checkin for the last 6 weeks. One of the reasons that Mozilla nightly builds are as strong as they are is because of all the work that happened on the Netscape push to 6.0
" That tells me that for this product, the poor developers branched their code and started adding all that AOL fluff. As far as most of us are concerned, that effort would have been better used fixing bugs on that branch."
If you had really been keeping up to date with the mozilla code as well as the development process (or looked at even one of the preview releases or even read a slashdot thread about them) then you would know that the Netscape developers did not branch and _start_ adding all that AOL fluff. TFrom the beginning there have always been two CVS trees, one for Mozilla and one for Netscape which pulls the Mozilla CVS tree and overlays all it's proprietary code. This parallel track has been going on since the beginning. The branch that did happen, (if you were paying attention you would have seen this in the nightly build directories starting on 9/22) _was_ a bug fixing and stability push branch. It was NOT a start "adding all that AOL fluff" branch. I repeat, that work has been going on in parallel since the beginning. I have been keeping up to date. It looks as if you haven't.
-Asa
If you had been following Mozilla development with even a casual ear you would know that themeability is developed as a feature. It was the happy byproduct of the decision to make Mozilla a cross platform product. Mozilla was faced a resource crunch and decided that the rendering engine was powerful enough to lay out the UI. An XML based User Interface language was created to allow for XP UI development. This just happens to bring UI development into the same world as Web development, lowering the barrier to entry for many and lowering the time to market on UI redesign and improvement. I think that most slashdot readers expect at least a casual knowledge about the topic you're posting on. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
Standards compliance bugs important to web developers will be fixed in Mozilla. 6 of the 9 cited are already fixed or very close in Moizilla, one is likely a bug in the spec and not in Mozilla. Are you confuesed about what Mozilla is? Did you miss the last three years of slashdot posts that tried to explain that Netscape6 is a browser based on mozill technologies but it is NOT Mozilla?
Right now (and probably most of this year) Mozilla has had stronger standards support than IE on win32. And it's available for about a dozen platforms. Right now IE is not the better browser when it comes to standards support, platform availabilty and source availability. IE isn't even close.
this articel was about standards support and Mozilla/Netscape6/Galeon (a mozilla technology based browser) are all great places to look for strong standards support
"or the lack of conformity to standards"
um, WRONG! Mozilla (and Netscape's product based on the Mozilla codebase) is considerably more compliant than IE on win32.
you didn't read it right! The article is about a few bugs in Netscape 6's standards support. If you ahd read it carefully you would have seen that some of these bugs are already or soon to be fixed in Mozilla.
-Asa
(and netscape 6 for that matter) is the most standards compliant browser on the planet. Weren't you all bandwaggoning with the WaSP's demands for a browser NOW just a couple months ago. Perfect and Now are mutually exclusive. I happen to think that damn good and now is better than perfect and never. Get a copy of the latest Mozilla build and then complain but don't flame the project without geting informed first.
-Asa
I've been following this project for a long time and directly involved with it for some time now. I can't recall any time when Mozilla (the browser suite, or even just the browser) fit on a floppy. The layout engine, yes, it did fit on a floppy and I susupect that it could be made to do so again.
Sounds like Mozilla:)
We have a growing community of QA and testing volunteers who have been working and learning QA process on one of the largest open source projects out there.
mozilla.org provides daily Mozilla builds for 3 to 4 platforms here. We provide an open (and kickass) bug reporting and tracking tool Bugzilla Our QA and testing docs are getting better all the time (Mozilla QA) with published daily smoketests as well as detailed functional test suites for all areas of the product.
If you're intererested in getting involved with a one of a kind open source QA and testing project please take a look at our Getting Involved pages or stop in to #mozillazine or #qa on irc.mozilla.org We have a weekly help session (BugDay) every Tuesday for new folks interested in getting involved. So if all this talk about open source quality has sparked your interests let us know.
Netscape 6 is based Mozilla. Mozilla is a lot more than gecko (the rendering engine). Mozilla is also a new and improved networking library, an FE built out of a new XP UI language called XUL and javascript, a cross platform COM called XPCOM, and much more. Netscape is going to be using all of these technologies developed by mozilla.org. Netscape is going to be adding some of their own proprietary technology to the 6.0 release. They are adding AIM (but Aim's FE will be built out of mozilla's XUL though), they're adding Sun's JRE, security, they're adding Net2Phone, and Flash and some other stuff but basically if you just look at the base install (which you will be able to download seperately) then you have a mozilla M15 build with some stability tweaks.
If you don't like the plans that mozilla.org and it's contributers come up with for handling certain security issues there are a couple of things you can do about it. You can grab the Bugzilla code (or some similar open source tool) and set up your own system. If you build something with enough value over the current BugZilla maybe people will start using it and you can admin it and set the rules about how to mark certain bugs in certain ways. The Mozilla community has been holding very public discussions about how to deal with bug reports, from issues like security bugs to issues like what to do with personal ads that find there way into Bugzilla. Most of these discussions are still ongoing. If you contribute to Mozilla (in any way) then I think your input to these discussions is valuable. I participate. I voice my opinions. Bugzilla and Mozilla are the way they are in part because I participated in the process.
If you're unhappy with the direction Mozilla is going on any issue the place to make it better is not on/. The place to make Mozilla better is Mozilla. This project is being developed by people who care about making something great. Even the people getting paid to work on it care. Tough decisions are made every day and they are made in a fishbowl world. If you don't like what Mozilla is then fix it.
Asa
(posted with a damn nice Mozilla nightly build 032708)
If you've got Netscape profiles already, you can migrate them to Mozilla. Just make sure you've deleted your mozregistry.dat file and then run mozilla -installer or mozilla -ProfileManager. Mozill will present you with a profile manager and you just select the 4.x profile from the list and start it. It will prompt you with a migrate dialog. Agree. Then you can run mozilla with all your 4.x bookmarks, preferences and mail-news settings. Have fun.
Mozilla releases these milestone checkpoints with the hopes that lots of people will take a look and give some feedback. Bug reports are the best way to give this feedback. Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla (located at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org ) provides some really nice tools for reporting bugs and feature requests. Before reporting any bugs it is a good idea to give the database a query to see if your bug has already been reported. This will save mozilla QA a lot of time weeding through duplicate bug reports. You can search the database at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi . Start off with simple searches in the Description field. If that yields too many bugs to weed through you might add more to the search. If you find your bug reported please add any relevant comments to that bug report. If you find that your bug is not reported then please take a quick glance at the bug reporting guidelines before making your report. These guidelines will help you report a bug that developers and QA can track down and fix more swiftly. The bug reporting guidelines ca be found at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guideli nes.html . If you are new to the process you might try the new Bugzilla Helper which will guide you through the process. Remember that the better the report the more quickly it will get confirmed, assigned and fixed. Thanks, and enjoy M14 (for those that like to stay on the bleeding edge, M15 cycle nightly builds have been available for a few days now.)
Ot most certainly WILL run on 16 MB of RAM. I run it on a P100 with 16 MB RAM _AND_ Windows 98 and it's not the fastest browser but it does run. Hell I run it side by side with Netscape Communicator on this slow system with win98 and it does run. There are many non windows systems that I'm sure would support it even better. I also run it on a P90 with 32 MB RAM and am completely satisfied with its performance. It simply rocks on my PII 350 with 64 MB RAM. Don't count this one out for slower systems just yet.
Most of those compatability problems were cleared up with BIOS changes and the few that weren't were cleared up with the second generation chipset from AMD which has been avaiable for some time. The Via chipset will hopefully take the burden off of AMD (who incidentally doesn't want to be in the chipset business) but don't believe the Dell crap. Dell is little more than an Intel distributor so I wouldn't believe a word tehy say about AMD. 9 ot the top 10 PC manufacturers have all put forth AMD based sytems. Somehow, I doubt that they are all wrong and Dell is right.
NASA needs more money, failure is not for lack of commitment, it's because of extreme shortages of money. The Federal Government has gutted NASA's budget again this year. No one bats an eyelash when a coulple of 50 million dollar apache helicoptors crash in the Kentucky dirt but everyone jumps to cut NASA's funding because a 100 million dollar spacecraft that flew uncountable miles to another planet didn't work when it got there. I say take the budget for a couple of B2 bombers and send a dozen more mars missions this year, or a few really expensive ones. NASA needs more money.
If you have problems with Mozilla or you'd like to report a bug but don't know how drop in to BugDay! on #mozillazine irc.mozilla.org every Tuesday afternoon into evening. There are lots of people there to help. If you don't know where to start ask me.
BugDay is a weekly collaborative bug hunting and reporting event hosted by mozillaZine (check out http://www.mozillazine.org if you haven't yet) on IRC. If you'd like to see Mozilla get better faster, then be a part of it.
--But I have a hard time understanding why Mozilla takes so long to take off when something like Linux or Free BSD, whose source code size is probably bigger than Mozilla's (correct me if I'm wrong), are still very active. It's definitely not the lack of people, or the lack of skills, but I'd like to understand where it comes from.--
Mozilla isn't taking so long to take off. Keep in mind that linux was not started last year. The world may have started to catch on last year but Torvalds built the kernal nearly a decade ago. Mozilla is moving at an extremely fast pace. Its early development (since they dropped the classic code base thru the present) has been sheer lightning paced. Do this for me. Go to the ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases directory ans download an M3 build. Open it and give it a spin. Then go to ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly and download yesterday's build. Open it up and give it a try. Now tell me that nothing's been accomplished in the last year, or tell me how it's not taking off. Mozill is moving. If you want it to move faster help out. You don't have to code to help. I made Mozilla better without coding one bit. Use it, report bugs, talk to the developers in the newsgroups and IRC about what works and what doesn't. There is plenty of QA work that needs doing from filing bugs and making test cases to doccumenting the current state of the project.
Try a nightly build, M12 is a dinosaur. If you feel like Mozilla is the property of AOL and so contributing to the project is contributing to AOL then I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Mozilla is. Mozilla is the property of mozilla.org. AOL/Netscape will distribute a branded version of Mozila under the Netscape brand (and possibly others) but no one is asking you to work on that branded version. If you're interested in contributing to Mozilla but not AOL then look for peripheral projects that are using mozilla like some of the other web browsers or HTML editors that are utilizing pieces of the mozilla project. Maybe the MathML folks need some help in documentation. Maybe Adam Locke could use some help in his Active X wrapper. There are many places to contribute to the project and many good reasons (I believe) to do so. If you would like some of my reasons, here they are:
1. Mozilla will run on just about any platform and you can't say that for most other browsers. 2. Mozilla is open source so you can expect it to get better faster than conventional proprietary software. 3. Mozilla will be the leader in standards support which means that we'll all have an easier time developing for the web. 4. Mozilla is forcing others (including MS IE) to make standards support a key feature. 5. It's fun.
I hope that you don't decide to withhold your help because some large corporation is spending its money to help develop an open source project.
Slashdot Mirror
We're still working out the details. keep an eye on n.p.m.license to monitor the progress. With a project of this size (with many files contributed under a number of different licenses) it takes a little time to make these kinds of changes.
-Asa
Um wrong. Netscape does not own Mozilla.
If you had been actually watching (or better yet, participating in) the development process then you would know that any non-bandaid fixes that happened in the branch were contributed (subject to reviewers@mozilla.org) back to the Mozilla trunk. There won't be a big merge of branch to trunk since it was happening with almost every checkin for the last 6 weeks. One of the reasons that Mozilla nightly builds are as strong as they are is because of all the work that happened on the Netscape push to 6.0
-Asa
" That tells me that for this product, the poor developers branched their code and started adding all that AOL fluff. As far as most of us are concerned, that effort would have been better used fixing bugs on that branch." If you had really been keeping up to date with the mozilla code as well as the development process (or looked at even one of the preview releases or even read a slashdot thread about them) then you would know that the Netscape developers did not branch and _start_ adding all that AOL fluff. TFrom the beginning there have always been two CVS trees, one for Mozilla and one for Netscape which pulls the Mozilla CVS tree and overlays all it's proprietary code. This parallel track has been going on since the beginning. The branch that did happen, (if you were paying attention you would have seen this in the nightly build directories starting on 9/22) _was_ a bug fixing and stability push branch. It was NOT a start "adding all that AOL fluff" branch. I repeat, that work has been going on in parallel since the beginning. I have been keeping up to date. It looks as if you haven't. -Asa
If you had been following Mozilla development with even a casual ear you would know that themeability is developed as a feature. It was the happy byproduct of the decision to make Mozilla a cross platform product. Mozilla was faced a resource crunch and decided that the rendering engine was powerful enough to lay out the UI. An XML based User Interface language was created to allow for XP UI development. This just happens to bring UI development into the same world as Web development, lowering the barrier to entry for many and lowering the time to market on UI redesign and improvement. I think that most slashdot readers expect at least a casual knowledge about the topic you're posting on. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
Standards compliance bugs important to web developers will be fixed in Mozilla. 6 of the 9 cited are already fixed or very close in Moizilla, one is likely a bug in the spec and not in Mozilla. Are you confuesed about what Mozilla is? Did you miss the last three years of slashdot posts that tried to explain that Netscape6 is a browser based on mozill technologies but it is NOT Mozilla?
Right now (and probably most of this year) Mozilla has had stronger standards support than IE on win32. And it's available for about a dozen platforms. Right now IE is not the better browser when it comes to standards support, platform availabilty and source availability. IE isn't even close.
this articel was about standards support and Mozilla/Netscape6/Galeon (a mozilla technology based browser) are all great places to look for strong standards support
"or the lack of conformity to standards"
um, WRONG! Mozilla (and Netscape's product based on the Mozilla codebase) is considerably more compliant than IE on win32.
you didn't read it right! The article is about a few bugs in Netscape 6's standards support. If you ahd read it carefully you would have seen that some of these bugs are already or soon to be fixed in Mozilla.
-Asa
(and netscape 6 for that matter) is the most standards compliant browser on the planet. Weren't you all bandwaggoning with the WaSP's demands for a browser NOW just a couple months ago. Perfect and Now are mutually exclusive. I happen to think that damn good and now is better than perfect and never. Get a copy of the latest Mozilla build and then complain but don't flame the project without geting informed first. -Asa
I've been following this project for a long time and directly involved with it for some time now. I can't recall any time when Mozilla (the browser suite, or even just the browser) fit on a floppy. The layout engine, yes, it did fit on a floppy and I susupect that it could be made to do so again.
-Asa
Sounds like Mozilla :)
We have a growing community of QA and testing volunteers who have been working and learning QA process on one of the largest open source projects out there.
mozilla.org provides daily Mozilla builds for 3 to 4 platforms here. We provide an open (and kickass) bug reporting and tracking tool Bugzilla Our QA and testing docs are getting better all the time (Mozilla QA) with published daily smoketests as well as detailed functional test suites for all areas of the product.
If you're intererested in getting involved with a one of a kind open source QA and testing project please take a look at our Getting Involved pages or stop in to #mozillazine or #qa on irc.mozilla.org We have a weekly help session (BugDay) every Tuesday for new folks interested in getting involved. So if all this talk about open source quality has sparked your interests let us know.
-Asa
Mozilla QA and Stuff
mozilla has it, along with SVG support
http://www.mozillazine.org/chromezone
the quick and dirty:
Netscape 6 is based Mozilla. Mozilla is a lot more than gecko (the rendering engine). Mozilla is also a new and improved networking library, an FE built out of a new XP UI language called XUL and javascript, a cross platform COM called XPCOM, and much more. Netscape is going to be using all of these technologies developed by mozilla.org. Netscape is going to be adding some of their own proprietary technology to the 6.0 release. They are adding AIM (but Aim's FE will be built out of mozilla's XUL though), they're adding Sun's JRE, security, they're adding Net2Phone, and Flash and some other stuff but basically if you just look at the base install (which you will be able to download seperately) then you have a mozilla M15 build with some stability tweaks.
Asa
If you don't like the plans that mozilla.org and it's contributers come up with for handling certain security issues there are a couple of things you can do about it. You can grab the Bugzilla code (or some similar open source tool) and set up your own system. If you build something with enough value over the current BugZilla maybe people will start using it and you can admin it and set the rules about how to mark certain bugs in certain ways. The Mozilla community has been holding very public discussions about how to deal with bug reports, from issues like security bugs to issues like what to do with personal ads that find there way into Bugzilla. Most of these discussions are still ongoing. If you contribute to Mozilla (in any way) then I think your input to these discussions is valuable. I participate. I voice my opinions. Bugzilla and Mozilla are the way they are in part because I participated in the process.
/. The place to make Mozilla better is Mozilla. This project is being developed by people who care about making something great. Even the people getting paid to work on it care. Tough decisions are made every day and they are made in a fishbowl world. If you don't like what Mozilla is then fix it.
If you're unhappy with the direction Mozilla is going on any issue the place to make it better is not on
Asa
(posted with a damn nice Mozilla nightly build 032708)
If you've got Netscape profiles already, you can migrate them to Mozilla. Just make sure you've deleted your mozregistry.dat file and then run mozilla -installer or mozilla -ProfileManager. Mozill will present you with a profile manager and you just select the 4.x profile from the list and start it. It will prompt you with a migrate dialog. Agree. Then you can run mozilla with all your 4.x bookmarks, preferences and mail-news settings. Have fun.
Asa
Mozilla releases these milestone checkpoints with the hopes that lots of people will take a look and give some feedback. Bug reports are the best way to give this feedback. Mozilla's bug database Bugzilla (located at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org ) provides some really nice tools for reporting bugs and feature requests. Before reporting any bugs it is a good idea to give the database a query to see if your bug has already been reported. This will save mozilla QA a lot of time weeding through duplicate bug reports. You can search the database at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi . Start off with simple searches in the Description field. If that yields too many bugs to weed through you might add more to the search. If you find your bug reported please add any relevant comments to that bug report. If you find that your bug is not reported then please take a quick glance at the bug reporting guidelines before making your report. These guidelines will help you report a bug that developers and QA can track down and fix more swiftly. The bug reporting guidelines ca be found at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guideli nes.html . If you are new to the process you might try the new Bugzilla Helper which will guide you through the process. Remember that the better the report the more quickly it will get confirmed, assigned and fixed. Thanks, and enjoy M14 (for those that like to stay on the bleeding edge, M15 cycle nightly builds have been available for a few days now.)
Asa
external QA on the Mozilla project
Ot most certainly WILL run on 16 MB of RAM. I run it on a P100 with 16 MB RAM _AND_ Windows 98 and it's not the fastest browser but it does run. Hell I run it side by side with Netscape Communicator on this slow system with win98 and it does run. There are many non windows systems that I'm sure would support it even better. I also run it on a P90 with 32 MB RAM and am completely satisfied with its performance. It simply rocks on my PII 350 with 64 MB RAM. Don't count this one out for slower systems just yet.
Most of those compatability problems were cleared up with BIOS changes and the few that weren't were cleared up with the second generation chipset from AMD which has been avaiable for some time. The Via chipset will hopefully take the burden off of AMD (who incidentally doesn't want to be in the chipset business) but don't believe the Dell crap. Dell is little more than an Intel distributor so I wouldn't believe a word tehy say about AMD. 9 ot the top 10 PC manufacturers have all put forth AMD based sytems. Somehow, I doubt that they are all wrong and Dell is right.
Asa
(posted with a Mozilla M14 build from 2/7/00)
NASA needs more money, failure is not for lack of commitment, it's because of extreme shortages of money. The Federal Government has gutted NASA's budget again this year. No one bats an eyelash when a coulple of 50 million dollar apache helicoptors crash in the Kentucky dirt but everyone jumps to cut NASA's funding because a 100 million dollar spacecraft that flew uncountable miles to another planet didn't work when it got there. I say take the budget for a couple of B2 bombers and send a dozen more mars missions this year, or a few really expensive ones. NASA needs more money.
If you have problems with Mozilla or you'd like to report a bug but don't know how drop in to BugDay! on #mozillazine irc.mozilla.org every Tuesday afternoon into evening. There are lots of people there to help. If you don't know where to start ask me.
BugDay is a weekly collaborative bug hunting and reporting event hosted by mozillaZine (check out http://www.mozillazine.org if you haven't yet) on IRC. If you'd like to see Mozilla get better faster, then be a part of it.
Asa
(posted with today's build of mozilla)
--But I have a hard time understanding why Mozilla takes so long to take off when something like Linux or Free BSD, whose source code size is probably bigger than Mozilla's (correct me if I'm wrong), are still very active. It's definitely not the lack of people, or the lack of skills, but I'd like to understand where it comes from.--
Mozilla isn't taking so long to take off. Keep in mind that linux was not started last year. The world may have started to catch on last year but Torvalds built the kernal nearly a decade ago. Mozilla is moving at an extremely fast pace. Its early development (since they dropped the classic code base thru the present) has been sheer lightning paced.
Do this for me. Go to the ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases directory ans download an M3 build. Open it and give it a spin. Then go to ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly and download yesterday's build. Open it up and give it a try. Now tell me that nothing's been accomplished in the last year, or tell me how it's not taking off.
Mozill is moving. If you want it to move faster help out. You don't have to code to help. I made Mozilla better without coding one bit. Use it, report bugs, talk to the developers in the newsgroups and IRC about what works and what doesn't. There is plenty of QA work that needs doing from filing bugs and making test cases to doccumenting the current state of the project.
Asa
(posted with mozilla nightly build from 1/11/00)
two quick comments:
Try a nightly build, M12 is a dinosaur.
If you feel like Mozilla is the property of AOL and so contributing to the project is contributing to AOL then I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Mozilla is. Mozilla is the property of mozilla.org. AOL/Netscape will distribute a branded version of Mozila under the Netscape brand (and possibly others) but no one is asking you to work on that branded version. If you're interested in contributing to Mozilla but not AOL then look for peripheral projects that are using mozilla like some of the other web browsers or HTML editors that are utilizing pieces of the mozilla project. Maybe the MathML folks need some help in documentation. Maybe Adam Locke could use some help in his Active X wrapper. There are many places to contribute to the project and many good reasons (I believe) to do so. If you would like some of my reasons, here they are:
1. Mozilla will run on just about any platform and you can't say that for most other browsers.
2. Mozilla is open source so you can expect it to get better faster than conventional proprietary software.
3. Mozilla will be the leader in standards support which means that we'll all have an easier time developing for the web.
4. Mozilla is forcing others (including MS IE) to make standards support a key feature.
5. It's fun.
I hope that you don't decide to withhold your help because some large corporation is spending its money to help develop an open source project.
Asa
(posted with a 1/11/00 nightly build of Mozilla)