There is another one I see sometimes (less often than the one I mentioned before), where the main article area will be shifted just slightly left and overlap the sidebar links a little bit. That one has not been fixed, and I agree it's annoying:(.
Any changes made to the original Mozilla code that are not strictly to the UI go into Firebird too. Firebird has new GUI code, but shares exactly the same back-end with SeaMonkey (the suite). Any enhancements it receives in HTML rendering, networking code, security, etc are automatically picked up by Firebird, so it's somewhat nonsensical to say "most developers should move to Firebird" when the work they are doing right now does, in fact, improve Firebird. The GUI only needs so many coders on it.
That's much easier said than done unfortunately, if you look at why the skins break a lot of the time. Skins are basically just sets of style-sheets and images that are applied to the user-interface widgets (which are defined in XUL, the XML-based user-interface language Mozilla uses). If anything major changes in the XUL definitions, like a new UI element or a renamed UI element, or an element is moved around to a more appropriate place, the CSS might no longer look right. It's not an issue of a binary format changing or something, it's that the skin is saying "put a black line here" (for example), and "here" is no longer where that line should appear. That's not really something it's feasible to provide backward comaptiblity with, unfortunately. That's probably not the only reason, but it is one reason that I've personally experienced while fixing some bugs in Thunderbird's GUI.
You do realize there are people who don't downloaded literally every nightly build from CVS, right? This is the first "official" release of Mozilla to have this feature (1.6 alpha came out on Nov. 1st), do the release notes really need to spell that out for you? I don't mean this to come off as a flame or anything, I'm just confused as to the point of your post.
Gecko still renders some page layouts (like Slashdot) badly first time out
Are you referring to the bug where sometimes the content area would be pushed waaaaay off to the right? If so, that one was fixed a few weeks ago and should be working in 1.6beta. If not, then I'm curious which bug you mean.
The roadmap isn't trying to double-talk its way out of anything. It's out of date, plain and simple. They've chosen to focus on actually delivering a product, rather than making sure their roadmap is 100% accurate which as far as I am concerned is a reasonable choice. I really wish they'd update it though, because literally every time a Mozilla story hits Slashdot a post about "When will Firebird take over? Lying bastards!" gets modded to +5 and results in confusion;).
Basically, as might be obvious by now, they have decided Firebird and Thunderbird are not ready to take over for SeaMonkey (codename for what we know as the Mozilla suite). There isn't an official word on when it will happen now, as far as I know. Logically, when Thunderbird and Firebird are deemed "1.0" releases would be a good time. If you're interested in all this, I direct you to the Firebird roadmap and to a lesser extent the Thunderbird roadmap, they're much more up-to-date and provide a concrete list of the steps remaining until they hit 1.0. I hope this clears things up a little, or at least helps explain why things are confusing at the moment in the first place.
Give them a break, this product IS 100% free to the end-user after all. And if anyone's interested in lending a much-needed hand, there are concrete things even non-programmers can do to help the projects along, like various QA tasks in Bugzilla.
In addition to the other reasons mentioned, I like the default Firebird/Thunderbird themes MUCH better than either one that comes with the suite. Also, the developers are really starting to take advantage of the forked GUI code and add some neat features that aren't in the suite.
It's a little of both, actually. The SeaMonkey back-end code is still used (there is no sense in re-writing stable, proven code for POP, IMAP, preference handling, etc) but it shares the new lighter-weight Firebird GUI code. You'll note that if you compile Thunderbird, the MailNews directory is built (where all the back-end code lives). The one extra directory, mail, is the new GUI and any code specific to the functionality of Thunderbird.
I've been told this is a myth, but not definitively by any of the developers. You might ask over at MozillaZine, although I imagine you'll get conflicting reports there too.
Making a list that includes only successful ports of successful games is a little unfair;) Do you see many games by small studios without huge budgets on that list? Do you see many games that didn't sell VERY well on Windows first, generating enough interest in a point to justify it on that list?
Unless it's a contractor who is already intimately familiar with the Mozilla codebase, you'd be paying for all the time learning it. Depending on the component you're hacking on, there's some hairy stuff in there:). You're paying for the work that got done, not that plus the time the contractor spent learning and messing up before coming up with a workable result.
Come on, you can come up with a better straw man than that. If a CD included interesting information on the creative process of the album, yes, I would buy it. You know, ocassionally there are actually interesting extras; they're not all stupid outtakes of actors fucking up for you to chuckle at once then never watch again. I happen to be interested in the process of film making, so I really appreciate it when a DVD includes insightful segments on the making of the film or the director's reasoning for doing various things.
Granted, Generic Teen Comedy #52 isn't going to blow you away with its "special behind the scenes footage", but take Lord of the Rings for example. The "Platinum Edition" is literally only a few bucks more than the regular DVD and incldues tons of features on how the movie was made, interviews with actors, etc. which to me are more than worth the price of entry. Maybe it's just me, but when someone goes out of their way to produce a superior product, whether it's a small indie film studio or band (which is usually the case) or a major production company (rare), I try to reward that buy not stealing it.
I think that you are not alone in being unable to master the sheer madness of Boston's streets;) I've lived in Massachusetts my whole life (and in Boston the last 3 years) and still find many sections nightmarish to navigate. I travel via foot, subway or bus whenever possible.
Did you happen to RTFA, or any of the comments in this story for that matter? He was fired for photographing, and (loosely) describing the location of, the loading dock where the macs were delivered. I'll agree that this seems stupid, but the only bullshit here is your claim that MS fired him to avoid embarassment.
Charter schools are different than private schools. For detals, see this description (which is a bit over-optimistic), but basically they're an "alternative" public school. They're funded by local and state taxes, but are not responsible for living up to many guidelines and regulations normal schools have. In my limited experience they don't turn out well; the one near me basically ended up completely occupied by kids who skipped class to do drugs all the time. They were much more open-ended and "free-thinking" than most regular schools I've seen, but to perhaps a dangerous extent since the kids basically didn't have to learn a damn thing if they didn't want to. Then again, maybe I'm just bitter that they had all the fun;).
Yeah, seriously. Everyone knows that this idea was outlined years ago by the excellent technological documentaries Mission Impossible, Get Smart and Inspector Gadget. What do they teach kids in school these days?
I can't remember if it was MapQuest or Yahoo Maps, but one of the two had (has?) some of the street numbers in Boston completely reversed. As in, one place I was trying to find was really down by the waterfront, but according to the site that street number was several miles west of there. As I was going there on foot, finding this out did NOT make me happy;).
I have no idea why I'm bothering to reply to this, but here goes:
No, it does not run non-standard MSIE-only JavaScript. That's their choice, to support web standards over arbitrary monopolies.
I don't even know what you mean by a bloatware installer. But Mozilla still uses an improved version of the same one it always has, which leaves exactly zero "junk files which are only used by the installer" as far as I have ever seen.
It puts them in your user profile directory for a reason...since it also runs on, gasp, OS's other than older versions of Windows, it needs to be multi-user friendly. This also lets you delete older versions without losing your settings and extensions. Why is this bad exactly?
I can't give you a rationale for it, not being a developer, but it looks like the "bug" (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19533 ) will not be fixed.
There was an oversight in early builds and, on Windows only, certain optimization flags weren't getting sent to the compiler. That version was much, much slower than Linux and Mac builds as a result. It's been at least a month since that was fixed though, and I encourage you to try the new build as it's really an incredible improvement over 0.1.
The bug with the Flash installer is fixed in this release (it's actually a problem in their installer, but it's such a deal-breaker than Firebird codes around it for now, until/if Macromedia ever gets their act together). There's also, finally, an installer in the works and the screenshots look quite nice. I believe it's due to land in the next milestone, Firebird 0.8. I'd give you a link, but MozillaZine seems to be slashdotted just now.
Extensions are actually supposed to give you the choice of whether to install to your profile (which is in your home directory, and obviously writable) or to the app dir. Many don't however, so this bug is still relevant unfortunately. If you want to follow its progress, the url is http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204049 (bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot). Cast a vote for the bug!
Composer I know for a fact will still be developed, as outlined in this MozillaZine article. One of the primary authors, Daniel Glazman, has been hired by the Lindows company (seriously) to maintain it and he plans to check the code into the Mozilla CVS. It will be a standalone application like Firebird and Thunderbird, eventually using the shared Gecko backend that's in the works.
As for ChatZilla, it's available as an extension for Firebird, and I've heard talk of making a standalone app version too, although I can't find a link to back it up. But the point is, the developers of these projects haven't randomly abandoned them, they'll still be here in the post-SeaMonkey world. Or as another poster said, you can always just run SeaMonkey, although I happen to prefer the birds.
The roadmap's a good bit out of date, a new one's been "in the works" for a while, but I think the focus has been on getting these three major milestones out the door. I'd expect an update in the next few weeks, which would be helpful in shutting down the rumor mill. I don't think that bit about 1.5 being the last version of the suite is confirmed or even likely.
Slashdot Mirror
There is another one I see sometimes (less often than the one I mentioned before), where the main article area will be shifted just slightly left and overlap the sidebar links a little bit. That one has not been fixed, and I agree it's annoying :(.
Any changes made to the original Mozilla code that are not strictly to the UI go into Firebird too. Firebird has new GUI code, but shares exactly the same back-end with SeaMonkey (the suite). Any enhancements it receives in HTML rendering, networking code, security, etc are automatically picked up by Firebird, so it's somewhat nonsensical to say "most developers should move to Firebird" when the work they are doing right now does, in fact, improve Firebird. The GUI only needs so many coders on it.
That's much easier said than done unfortunately, if you look at why the skins break a lot of the time. Skins are basically just sets of style-sheets and images that are applied to the user-interface widgets (which are defined in XUL, the XML-based user-interface language Mozilla uses). If anything major changes in the XUL definitions, like a new UI element or a renamed UI element, or an element is moved around to a more appropriate place, the CSS might no longer look right. It's not an issue of a binary format changing or something, it's that the skin is saying "put a black line here" (for example), and "here" is no longer where that line should appear. That's not really something it's feasible to provide backward comaptiblity with, unfortunately. That's probably not the only reason, but it is one reason that I've personally experienced while fixing some bugs in Thunderbird's GUI.
You do realize there are people who don't downloaded literally every nightly build from CVS, right? This is the first "official" release of Mozilla to have this feature (1.6 alpha came out on Nov. 1st), do the release notes really need to spell that out for you? I don't mean this to come off as a flame or anything, I'm just confused as to the point of your post.
The roadmap isn't trying to double-talk its way out of anything. It's out of date, plain and simple. They've chosen to focus on actually delivering a product, rather than making sure their roadmap is 100% accurate which as far as I am concerned is a reasonable choice. I really wish they'd update it though, because literally every time a Mozilla story hits Slashdot a post about "When will Firebird take over? Lying bastards!" gets modded to +5 and results in confusion ;).
Basically, as might be obvious by now, they have decided Firebird and Thunderbird are not ready to take over for SeaMonkey (codename for what we know as the Mozilla suite). There isn't an official word on when it will happen now, as far as I know. Logically, when Thunderbird and Firebird are deemed "1.0" releases would be a good time. If you're interested in all this, I direct you to the Firebird roadmap and to a lesser extent the Thunderbird roadmap, they're much more up-to-date and provide a concrete list of the steps remaining until they hit 1.0. I hope this clears things up a little, or at least helps explain why things are confusing at the moment in the first place.
Give them a break, this product IS 100% free to the end-user after all. And if anyone's interested in lending a much-needed hand, there are concrete things even non-programmers can do to help the projects along, like various QA tasks in Bugzilla.
In addition to the other reasons mentioned, I like the default Firebird/Thunderbird themes MUCH better than either one that comes with the suite. Also, the developers are really starting to take advantage of the forked GUI code and add some neat features that aren't in the suite.
It's a little of both, actually. The SeaMonkey back-end code is still used (there is no sense in re-writing stable, proven code for POP, IMAP, preference handling, etc) but it shares the new lighter-weight Firebird GUI code. You'll note that if you compile Thunderbird, the MailNews directory is built (where all the back-end code lives). The one extra directory, mail, is the new GUI and any code specific to the functionality of Thunderbird.
I've been told this is a myth, but not definitively by any of the developers. You might ask over at MozillaZine, although I imagine you'll get conflicting reports there too.
Making a list that includes only successful ports of successful games is a little unfair ;) Do you see many games by small studios without huge budgets on that list? Do you see many games that didn't sell VERY well on Windows first, generating enough interest in a point to justify it on that list?
Unless it's a contractor who is already intimately familiar with the Mozilla codebase, you'd be paying for all the time learning it. Depending on the component you're hacking on, there's some hairy stuff in there :). You're paying for the work that got done, not that plus the time the contractor spent learning and messing up before coming up with a workable result.
Come on, you can come up with a better straw man than that. If a CD included interesting information on the creative process of the album, yes, I would buy it. You know, ocassionally there are actually interesting extras; they're not all stupid outtakes of actors fucking up for you to chuckle at once then never watch again. I happen to be interested in the process of film making, so I really appreciate it when a DVD includes insightful segments on the making of the film or the director's reasoning for doing various things.
Granted, Generic Teen Comedy #52 isn't going to blow you away with its "special behind the scenes footage", but take Lord of the Rings for example. The "Platinum Edition" is literally only a few bucks more than the regular DVD and incldues tons of features on how the movie was made, interviews with actors, etc. which to me are more than worth the price of entry. Maybe it's just me, but when someone goes out of their way to produce a superior product, whether it's a small indie film studio or band (which is usually the case) or a major production company (rare), I try to reward that buy not stealing it.
I think that you are not alone in being unable to master the sheer madness of Boston's streets ;) I've lived in Massachusetts my whole life (and in Boston the last 3 years) and still find many sections nightmarish to navigate. I travel via foot, subway or bus whenever possible.
Did you happen to RTFA, or any of the comments in this story for that matter? He was fired for photographing, and (loosely) describing the location of, the loading dock where the macs were delivered. I'll agree that this seems stupid, but the only bullshit here is your claim that MS fired him to avoid embarassment.
Charter schools are different than private schools. For detals, see this description (which is a bit over-optimistic), but basically they're an "alternative" public school. They're funded by local and state taxes, but are not responsible for living up to many guidelines and regulations normal schools have. In my limited experience they don't turn out well; the one near me basically ended up completely occupied by kids who skipped class to do drugs all the time. They were much more open-ended and "free-thinking" than most regular schools I've seen, but to perhaps a dangerous extent since the kids basically didn't have to learn a damn thing if they didn't want to. Then again, maybe I'm just bitter that they had all the fun ;).
Yeah, seriously. Everyone knows that this idea was outlined years ago by the excellent technological documentaries Mission Impossible, Get Smart and Inspector Gadget. What do they teach kids in school these days?
For some reason it amuses me greatly that this post got moderated "Insightful" :)
I can't remember if it was MapQuest or Yahoo Maps, but one of the two had (has?) some of the street numbers in Boston completely reversed. As in, one place I was trying to find was really down by the waterfront, but according to the site that street number was several miles west of there. As I was going there on foot, finding this out did NOT make me happy ;).
I can't give you a rationale for it, not being a developer, but it looks like the "bug" (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19533 ) will not be fixed.
There was an oversight in early builds and, on Windows only, certain optimization flags weren't getting sent to the compiler. That version was much, much slower than Linux and Mac builds as a result. It's been at least a month since that was fixed though, and I encourage you to try the new build as it's really an incredible improvement over 0.1.
The bug with the Flash installer is fixed in this release (it's actually a problem in their installer, but it's such a deal-breaker than Firebird codes around it for now, until/if Macromedia ever gets their act together). There's also, finally, an installer in the works and the screenshots look quite nice. I believe it's due to land in the next milestone, Firebird 0.8. I'd give you a link, but MozillaZine seems to be slashdotted just now.
Extensions are actually supposed to give you the choice of whether to install to your profile (which is in your home directory, and obviously writable) or to the app dir. Many don't however, so this bug is still relevant unfortunately. If you want to follow its progress, the url is http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204049 (bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot). Cast a vote for the bug!
Composer I know for a fact will still be developed, as outlined in this MozillaZine article. One of the primary authors, Daniel Glazman, has been hired by the Lindows company (seriously) to maintain it and he plans to check the code into the Mozilla CVS. It will be a standalone application like Firebird and Thunderbird, eventually using the shared Gecko backend that's in the works.
As for ChatZilla, it's available as an extension for Firebird, and I've heard talk of making a standalone app version too, although I can't find a link to back it up. But the point is, the developers of these projects haven't randomly abandoned them, they'll still be here in the post-SeaMonkey world. Or as another poster said, you can always just run SeaMonkey, although I happen to prefer the birds.
The roadmap's a good bit out of date, a new one's been "in the works" for a while, but I think the focus has been on getting these three major milestones out the door. I'd expect an update in the next few weeks, which would be helpful in shutting down the rumor mill. I don't think that bit about 1.5 being the last version of the suite is confirmed or even likely.