DragonWriter, you might want to know the person you are talking to is Boris Zbarsky - a lead Mozilla developer for over a decade, member of multiple W3C working groups and generally one of the smartest and most respected figures in the industry. So yeah, I do think you can trust him:)
Yes, because they believe it is not in people's best interest. All the common problems caused by rapid release schedule are being worked on and will be fixed very soon - silent updates, add-ons compatible by default etc. Disgusting? Chill out.
The point was not whether they make profit but whether their decisions are motivated by profit - they aren't. Mozilla Corporation must not put financial profit above the mission stated in the Foundation's statute.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and look it up? Mozilla is a public benefit foundation first. Mozilla Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, and as such it must work for the Foundation's mission.
They haven't used it yet but they might do it in the future.
Here's how it works. Every extension has to specify which versions of Firefox it's compatible with via the maxVersion field. Security and stability releases, which use only the last digit, are guaranteed not to introduce any backwards-incompatible changes that break extensions. That's why extensions are able to set their maxVersion to 3.0.*, so they won't have to be updated for every minor release.
However, if a security fix introduces incompatible changes then Mozilla will have to bump an earlier digit, so that extensions using the wildcard aren't wrongly considered compatible. You don't want to call a security release Firefox 4, so you need an additional digit.
At the current time, 31 research institutions, universities, and companies have joined the THESEUS program with planned projects. The industrial and public research partners are cooperating closely. They are coordinated by empolis GmbH. Also involved are internationally recognized experts of the Fraunhofer Society, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Research Center for Computer Science (FZI), the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) and Technical University (TU) in Munich, the TU Darmstadt, the University of Karlsruhe, the TU Dresden, and the University of Erlangen. The application scenarios are developed from the immediate research results and utilization interests of the leading partners German National Library, empolis, Lycos Europe, SAP, Siemens, as well as the following additional partners involved: Deutsche Thomson oHG, Intelligent Views, m2any, Moresophy, Ontoprise, Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau e.V. (VDMA), and the Institute of Radio Technology.
The EU has funded a mostly academic research project but the post made it sound as if the direct goal was to create some kind of a competitor to Google. If this post was written differently, everyone here would be praising the EU for being farsighted and investing in science and research. But without some obligatory, flamboyant speculation it wouldn't look controversial enough to be posted on Slashdot, would it?
I know that nobody here reads TFAs but wow, you've just taken it to a whole new level: you didn't even read the post, and one of the shortest at that.
"social networking" Firefox extension
Re:Another organization that wants to be above the
on
ICANN Wants Immunity
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· Score: 2, Insightful
US has developed the Internet, it hosted (and continues to host) the root servers, and so it will be, if whoever is in charge has any sense left in them...
US has developed the Internet? That's taken too far. Internet had its beginnings here. Now it's infrastructure is spread all over the world, owned by thousands of companies and organizations in hundreds of countries. Saying that the US has the right to control the Internet is flat out ridiculous. Internet is common a good of a billion people worldwide and the fact that some of its critical parts are based in the US is our privilege, not some kind of favor we are doing. I am sure more than a few countries would be very happy to take over this "burden".
By the way, the World Wide Web, nowadays the Internet's most important part, was invented in... duh, Switzerland (CERN)
One of the important aspects here is that by ignoring international organizations the US undermine their authority. It has been the same story with the United Nations. USA have long criticized them for their weakness and inefficiency and rightfully so. But guess what: USA (along with other Western countries, of course) have played a major part in leading to this state by bypassing and disrespecting the UN whenever it suited them.
I won't be surprised to see Washington complaining about WTO weakness in a couple of years. It's like the chicken and egg problem. We ignore them, because they lack the authority to get anything done. They lack of authority, because people ignore them. Only this time we can clearly tell which came first.
Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes
on
Gran Paradiso Alpha 3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The new theme for FF3 will look even less like OS X apps, and will continue to have ugly Windows 95-ish form controls. Actually, they'll be switching to Windows 3.1-ish controls.
Quite the opposite. One of the already implemented changes that will make it to Fx3 is enabling native Cocoa widgets.
While everyone keep saying that Firefox's vulnerability record is getting worse and how that's a result of the growing marketshare, it might be a good idea to take a look at the facts. Admittedly there were a couple of widely publicized vulnerabilities due to Zalewski's decision to go with full disclosure. But it's only publicity. The actual number of vulnerabilities fixed in consecutive versions since 1.0 isn't growing. As a matter of fact, 2.0.0.2 has pretty good record as far as amount and seriousness of discovered holes is considered.
nowhere in the said "article" is it clear what "support" is supposed to mean, ( a pat on the back, a blue ribbon perhaps?) so I'll go ahead and stand by my original post
The article doesn't say it? There's a link to a FAQ right at the top of the page, so why don't you make a little effort and go find out yourself instead of making clueless assumptions.
any organization that is pulling in 50 mill usd per year, due in large part to the continued support of its unpaid volunteers, damn well better start thinking about paying those top contributors salaries, because if they don't, there is obviously a market out there that will.
So they should start paying contributors salaries... wait, then why not just hire them full-time if possible? That'd be even better, no? Then guess what: that's the whole point of Mozilla Corporation. The revenues are spent for the most part for hiring employees for the Mozilla Corporation. Many of the MC employees had been voluntary contributors before they were eventually offered a job. The Mozilla Corporation employees are nothing but paid contributors.
There's of course a large group of part-time contributors that aren't hired and for those the community giving program was launched.
I could have sworn the reason that Firefox came into existence was that the codebase of the Mozilla Suite was bloated, and had too many features that a lot of people didn't want in a web browser. And here they go repeating the past.
What makes you think so? If you look at it closely, Firefox sticks to its assumptions. The new features are either supplementing or replacing previous ones, like the improved bookmarks system, or are mostly about streamlining the already existing usage paths.
It's hard to relate to your statement since you provided no concrete arguments or examples. In fact, it sounds as if you were implying that the sheer fact that there's a new release and therefore new stuff coming up means that the application is getting bloated. Perhaps they should halt the development, so not to introduce more bloat, huh?
I don't really see the problem. If don't want multithreading then you just don't use it. Multithreading doesn't mean that every function you call returns immediately and is processed in in it's own thread. Now that would not only be silly - it would make the processing s language virtually unusable. You must specifically request the new thread to be created.
And btw, Mozilla's JavaScript implementation does support multiple threads.
No, it isn't. Gecko is a rendering engine. The part of Mozilla platform responsible for JS interpreting is called Spidermonkey and it's quite a different component.
Secondly, ECMAScript != JavaScript. JavaScript language is based on and compatible with ECMA specification but they are not the same. There are many different implementations of ECMAScript including Microsoft's JScript and Adobe's ActionScript.
Obviously, mirrors should get different access than the public. You can't put something in plain sight and then complain if people notice. This is stupid.
You're missing the point. People are going to notice and download these files prematurely, fine. But it doesn't mean that websites should encourage people to do it by spreading misleading information that it's already an official release.
And that's why Mozilla is complaining: not because some random people came across that stuff and are downloading it but because websites are encouraging them to do it.
This and the God-damned copy and pasta bug!!! Firefox devs fix this one long term bug and I will sacrafice some cattle. I swear. Its driving me nuts..
Then help them out and find a reliable way to reproduce the problem. The reason why it hasn't been fixed for such a long time (which isn't entirely true as at least some variations of it were) is because nobody has been able to do the above. On some machines/installations it happens all the time, on others it doesn't. If you can figure out the exact circumstances under which this bug occurs, than the devs can trace the code path and you can be sure it will be fixed ASAP. It's that simple.
Why? This is a comparison of features, not stability, compliance or even speed. Betas are supposed to be feature complete.
That depends on what you understand by features. The features may be already there but it doesn't mean they won't be any significant improvements. IE7 went through major UI changes from beta to beta. It's not a feature per se but it still makes a big difference, doesn't it?
Similarly, a couple of improvements are expected to be included in Firefox 2 but haven't made it to beta 1.
It's not unfair to compare the final and beta versions as long as we explicitly warn about the potential inaccuracies. TFA did do it, so it's aight with me.
I'd like to see XForms support. It's a great technology for Ajax-ish websites which has tremendous capabilities and allows to drastically reduce the amount JS required for many types of web applications.
Mozilla is already at an advanced stage in working on an implementation. The current progress is available via an extension.
(errr.. Add Ons... Change the name only because Microsoft copies the feature under a different name...?)
Where did you get this one from? They didn't rename extensions to add-ons. Add-ons is just a common name for both extensions and themes and it's nothing new (addons.mozilla.org has existed for quite a while, you know).
But... my experiences with the latest iterations of Firefox (both the 1.5 series as well as the 2 and 3 development series) have left much to desire. The biggest complaint is the incredible amount of memory the browser consumes - even without any extensions [...] and with a clean profile. If a browser manages to bring a 2 Ghz system with 768 MB to its knees in a mere half hour of browsing there is something wrong. Unfortunately this often-heard complaint does not seem to get the attention it deserves.
Quite the opposite, fixing existing memory leaks has been one of the priorities of the development process recently - take a look a the following tracking bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32091 5. You can be sure that you report will get plenty of attention if you can provide reliable steps to reproduce you problems. However, to my knowledge nobody has been able to do that.
So what is your point exactly? That we can't talk about any statistics or adoption rates whatsoever, because they are inherently inaccurate? That'd be absurd, of course we can as long as we remember to take them with a pinch of salt. The margin of error can be calculated and it doesn't make the statistic useless.
We're talking about advertisements here and no one sane complains about inaccuracies this big in advertisements. The 100-million-downloads claim isn't that far off, anyway.
Last but not least, don't know about you but I'd rather see more Firefox users making the web more open place than break my head over poor users, tricked into using the program by deceptive statistic.
Slashdot Mirror
DragonWriter, you might want to know the person you are talking to is Boris Zbarsky - a lead Mozilla developer for over a decade, member of multiple W3C working groups and generally one of the smartest and most respected figures in the industry. So yeah, I do think you can trust him :)
Yes, because they believe it is not in people's best interest. All the common problems caused by rapid release schedule are being worked on and will be fixed very soon - silent updates, add-ons compatible by default etc. Disgusting? Chill out.
Well, in that case the bug should be WONTFIXed instead of hanging in limbo. Perhaps dbaron, Hixie and you could sit down and make a decision?
The point was not whether they make profit but whether their decisions are motivated by profit - they aren't. Mozilla Corporation must not put financial profit above the mission stated in the Foundation's statute.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and look it up? Mozilla is a public benefit foundation first. Mozilla Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, and as such it must work for the Foundation's mission.
Latest version of Brief is fully compatible with Firefox 3. The speed has been improved, too.
They haven't used it yet but they might do it in the future. Here's how it works. Every extension has to specify which versions of Firefox it's compatible with via the maxVersion field. Security and stability releases, which use only the last digit, are guaranteed not to introduce any backwards-incompatible changes that break extensions. That's why extensions are able to set their maxVersion to 3.0.*, so they won't have to be updated for every minor release. However, if a security fix introduces incompatible changes then Mozilla will have to bump an earlier digit, so that extensions using the wildcard aren't wrongly considered compatible. You don't want to call a security release Firefox 4, so you need an additional digit.
US has developed the Internet? That's taken too far. Internet had its beginnings here. Now it's infrastructure is spread all over the world, owned by thousands of companies and organizations in hundreds of countries. Saying that the US has the right to control the Internet is flat out ridiculous. Internet is common a good of a billion people worldwide and the fact that some of its critical parts are based in the US is our privilege, not some kind of favor we are doing. I am sure more than a few countries would be very happy to take over this "burden".
By the way, the World Wide Web, nowadays the Internet's most important part, was invented in... duh, Switzerland (CERN)
One of the important aspects here is that by ignoring international organizations the US undermine their authority. It has been the same story with the United Nations. USA have long criticized them for their weakness and inefficiency and rightfully so. But guess what: USA (along with other Western countries, of course) have played a major part in leading to this state by bypassing and disrespecting the UN whenever it suited them.
I won't be surprised to see Washington complaining about WTO weakness in a couple of years. It's like the chicken and egg problem. We ignore them, because they lack the authority to get anything done. They lack of authority, because people ignore them. Only this time we can clearly tell which came first.
While everyone keep saying that Firefox's vulnerability record is getting worse and how that's a result of the growing marketshare, it might be a good idea to take a look at the facts. Admittedly there were a couple of widely publicized vulnerabilities due to Zalewski's decision to go with full disclosure. But it's only publicity. The actual number of vulnerabilities fixed in consecutive versions since 1.0 isn't growing. As a matter of fact, 2.0.0.2 has pretty good record as far as amount and seriousness of discovered holes is considered.
There's of course a large group of part-time contributors that aren't hired and for those the community giving program was launched.
It's hard to relate to your statement since you provided no concrete arguments or examples. In fact, it sounds as if you were implying that the sheer fact that there's a new release and therefore new stuff coming up means that the application is getting bloated. Perhaps they should halt the development, so not to introduce more bloat, huh?
I don't really see the problem. If don't want multithreading then you just don't use it. Multithreading doesn't mean that every function you call returns immediately and is processed in in it's own thread. Now that would not only be silly - it would make the processing s language virtually unusable. You must specifically request the new thread to be created.
And btw, Mozilla's JavaScript implementation does support multiple threads.
No, it isn't. Gecko is a rendering engine. The part of Mozilla platform responsible for JS interpreting is called Spidermonkey and it's quite a different component.
Secondly, ECMAScript != JavaScript. JavaScript language is based on and compatible with ECMA specification but they are not the same. There are many different implementations of ECMAScript including Microsoft's JScript and Adobe's ActionScript.
And that's why Mozilla is complaining: not because some random people came across that stuff and are downloading it but because websites are encouraging them to do it.
I'd like to see XForms support. It's a great technology for Ajax-ish websites which has tremendous capabilities and allows to drastically reduce the amount JS required for many types of web applications.
Mozilla is already at an advanced stage in working on an implementation. The current progress is available via an extension.
Quite the opposite, fixing existing memory leaks has been one of the priorities of the development process recently - take a look a the following tracking bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3209
That's exactly how they are going to do it. It will be an extension.
.
After all, the technology is a sole contribution of Google and their Safe Browsing extension http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/safebrowsing/
For more detail regarding the implementation see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Safe_Browsing
So what is your point exactly? That we can't talk about any statistics or adoption rates whatsoever, because they are inherently inaccurate? That'd be absurd, of course we can as long as we remember to take them with a pinch of salt. The margin of error can be calculated and it doesn't make the statistic useless. We're talking about advertisements here and no one sane complains about inaccuracies this big in advertisements. The 100-million-downloads claim isn't that far off, anyway. Last but not least, don't know about you but I'd rather see more Firefox users making the web more open place than break my head over poor users, tricked into using the program by deceptive statistic.