For the record, I am my own management, so now I'm not sure if working for myself is the right thing to do.:-)
Hiding behind this notion that something is "non-standard" is really, really lame. You can't implement something and then come along a year later and say "Well, this was non-standard anyway so we've decided to stop supporting it". If I can't count on the platform to stay stable for any length of time then why bother supporting it at all? I've got a lot better places to allocate my limited resources than in trying to chase down a moving target. (We've been getting a lot of requests lately for Safari support.)
I'm not sure why you think my comments in 251494 were silly. (For what it's worth, I didn't realize that jst's question was addressed to me. He refers to "scope chain" which Boris talks about in #9. I was waiting to see what Boris said.) I'm just some poor schmuck trying to support Mozilla, and I don't have hours and hours to dedicate to learning about Bugzilla ettiquite and about whether or not you use the term "final release" to describe the 1.0 version. Apparently Brendan Eich (comment #4) even felt that I had gone out of my way to file the bug in the wrong component because he spends his valuable time to point out my mistake. The bottom line is that if 1.0 ships with this still broken then it has impact on us, and I don't know why someone can't take 30 seconds out of their life to say if it's going to be fixed.
I guess the question here is whether I need to be a professional developer to participate in the project. Do I need to spend 40 hours on training before I can file a bug? That's the perception you leave me with when you tell me that my comments were "silly" and "nonsensical". If you don't value bug reports that are filed in a spirit of trying to improve the product then that's fine. But then you shouldn't be surprised when people bail out on the project.
My point exactly. There are huge numbers of bug reports and they're not being cleaned up. Maybe you can explain why #16360 is still open after five years. Can't volunteers make the hard choices? Or how about #251494? After 3 months I haven't gotten a response on whether this is blocking or not. If it's not getting fixed then somebody should step up and say so, because then we'll have time to work around the issue on our end. But I'm not going to implement any workaround without a dang good explanation as to why this can't be fixed because it's going to affect several pages on my site and it works on Mozilla 1.x, IE, and Opera today. As it stands now, if Firefox is released with broken code then our response to our Mozilla customers will be to tell them not to upgrade to the new browser because it won't play well with our site.
I totally gave up reporting bugs on Mozilla, not so much because I was flamed but rather because I was ignored. Now before you go thinking that I'm just too sensitive and I should get a life, it's not that at all. Any response or lack thereof from a company gives a clear indication of what they think of their customers, and whether Mozilla likes it or not they need our support to make their product go. I'm happy to add support to my web site to make it run with Mozilla, but I also expect them to step up and fix bugs when I report them, especially when something stopped working in Firefox that worked before in 1.x. After reading this article it makes me think all that much more that working with Mozilla is a waste of time. If they can't handle the big stuff then how are they going to handle the little stuff.
I've lamented before in my bug reports that too much effort is going into new feature development and not enough into bug fixing. Yeah, they'd rather do cool new stuff than work on fixing bugs, just like any other developer. But I've just gotten kind of tired of coddling the Mozilla developers because I get something for free. I'd rather pay a couple of bucks for a good product than waste my time reporting bugs that go unfixed.
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For the record, I am my own management, so now I'm not sure if working for myself is the right thing to do. :-)
Hiding behind this notion that something is "non-standard" is really, really lame. You can't implement something and then come along a year later and say "Well, this was non-standard anyway so we've decided to stop supporting it". If I can't count on the platform to stay stable for any length of time then why bother supporting it at all? I've got a lot better places to allocate my limited resources than in trying to chase down a moving target. (We've been getting a lot of requests lately for Safari support.)
I'm not sure why you think my comments in 251494 were silly. (For what it's worth, I didn't realize that jst's question was addressed to me. He refers to "scope chain" which Boris talks about in #9. I was waiting to see what Boris said.) I'm just some poor schmuck trying to support Mozilla, and I don't have hours and hours to dedicate to learning about Bugzilla ettiquite and about whether or not you use the term "final release" to describe the 1.0 version. Apparently Brendan Eich (comment #4) even felt that I had gone out of my way to file the bug in the wrong component because he spends his valuable time to point out my mistake. The bottom line is that if 1.0 ships with this still broken then it has impact on us, and I don't know why someone can't take 30 seconds out of their life to say if it's going to be fixed.
I guess the question here is whether I need to be a professional developer to participate in the project. Do I need to spend 40 hours on training before I can file a bug? That's the perception you leave me with when you tell me that my comments were "silly" and "nonsensical". If you don't value bug reports that are filed in a spirit of trying to improve the product then that's fine. But then you shouldn't be surprised when people bail out on the project.
My point exactly. There are huge numbers of bug reports and they're not being cleaned up. Maybe you can explain why #16360 is still open after five years. Can't volunteers make the hard choices? Or how about #251494? After 3 months I haven't gotten a response on whether this is blocking or not. If it's not getting fixed then somebody should step up and say so, because then we'll have time to work around the issue on our end. But I'm not going to implement any workaround without a dang good explanation as to why this can't be fixed because it's going to affect several pages on my site and it works on Mozilla 1.x, IE, and Opera today. As it stands now, if Firefox is released with broken code then our response to our Mozilla customers will be to tell them not to upgrade to the new browser because it won't play well with our site.
I totally gave up reporting bugs on Mozilla, not so much because I was flamed but rather because I was ignored. Now before you go thinking that I'm just too sensitive and I should get a life, it's not that at all. Any response or lack thereof from a company gives a clear indication of what they think of their customers, and whether Mozilla likes it or not they need our support to make their product go. I'm happy to add support to my web site to make it run with Mozilla, but I also expect them to step up and fix bugs when I report them, especially when something stopped working in Firefox that worked before in 1.x. After reading this article it makes me think all that much more that working with Mozilla is a waste of time. If they can't handle the big stuff then how are they going to handle the little stuff. I've lamented before in my bug reports that too much effort is going into new feature development and not enough into bug fixing. Yeah, they'd rather do cool new stuff than work on fixing bugs, just like any other developer. But I've just gotten kind of tired of coddling the Mozilla developers because I get something for free. I'd rather pay a couple of bucks for a good product than waste my time reporting bugs that go unfixed.