Mozilla Moves Into 2002? Maybe.

alanjstr writes "MozillaQuest reports that Mozilla 1.0 has been pushed back into 2002 (from Oct 2001) in its latest schedule update. Since the end of 2000, the rate of new bugs being submitted has doubled (according to the pretty graph)." However, the Mozilla guys, whom our own HeUnique talked to have said that they are still on target, and that the 2002 story is not true. So - you be the judge on this one. Or not. Whatever.

The Better Quest Site

[newbiescum]

MozillaQuestQuest [mozillaquestquest.com]

Props to Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] for the link. If you want real Mozilla news, check out the latter link. Much more informative, and the discussions are at least somewhat insightful.

MozillaQuest is one big troll

[FattMattP]

I think that anyone who's kept up with Mozilla Quest and its articles has realized that it's one huge troll. The guy who writes the articles hardly ever has anything good to say. He also has a way of misconstruing and twisting things that would make a Microsoft PR executive beam with pride. Someone created a great parody of it called Mozilla Quest Quest [mozillaquestquest.com]. Apparently it requires Mozilla, or something that can handle XML, to view it.

Bottom line: Take anything the Mozilla Quest site says with a HUGE grain of salt.

mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.org

[asa]

I just want to make sure it is very clear to slashdot readers that MozillaQuest is in no way connected with or affiliated with mozilla.org. Do not be confused by the name or the 'borrowed' mozilla graphics (mostly gone now I believe). MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site. It is a shame that slashdot, a place that many in the open source community turn for information, continues to point its readers at this kind of sensationalism.

--Asa
(my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or mozilla.org)

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

The rate of incoming bugs has been pretty steady for some time. With 15,000+ active Bugzilla accounts it is not at all strange to see 300 bugs reported in a single day. Anyone who takes a minute to look closer will see a couple of important trends in these numbers. First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code. Second, the overall average severity of incoming bug reports has been going down for some time so that while the volume of incoming bugs hasn't changed a lot, the kinds of issues being reported are more polish issues that development or testing blocker issues.
I have been involved in organizing the Mozilla community quality assurance and testing effort for more than two years and I can say with confidence that the project is at a much higher quality level than it was 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 6 months ago (grab M9, M16 or 0.8 and compare for yourself). Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.

--Asa

One reason 1.0 is important...

[brunes69]

For all those who keep saying "Who cares when 1.0 is coming out when 0.93 is out now", and you are somewhat right, don't forget that RedHat has said (and I believe other distros will follow suit) that when mozilla reaches 1.0, it will stop carrying the horrid Netscape 4.7x altogether, in the distro, and focus on Mozilla as the default browser. This support alone will help Mozilla greatly.

Re:www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[asa]

I'll miss the favicon's in the title bar and bookmarks, and the ability to enable cookies and JavaScript on a per-site basis.

You can enable cookies and JavaScript on a per site basis. You can go one step further too. You can disable specific bits of JS on a per domain basis. You can, for example block a group of sites from opening new windows or resizing your window. You could block a site from moving your windows or altering the status bar text. See Configurable Security Policies [mozilla.org] for more information.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[mobydobius]

Jeezus, Dude!

I've been reading your comments in this thread and have come to the conclusion that Ockham's Razor [ucr.edu] is this new theoretical toy you've just found out about, and now you want to knock all kinds of shit over with it. You wield it like it is a magic wand that can take any experimental data and come up with the appropriate hypothesis to fit it. Well, "Sorry for the cold glass of reality", but Ockham don't do that.

I've graciously provided a link above that can tell you what the Razor is all about, but for now lemme tell you why you just don't go using Ockham in this case:

Various people have been giving different possible hypotheses for the increased number of bugzilla entries. Each hypothesis predicts different statements about the individual bugzilla data and events surrounding the data.

For instance, one ./er suggests that the increased bug reports come from increased numbers of eyes looking at Mozilla, and that the bugs are actually old and hitherto undocumented. A closer look at the bug reports would be able to see if in fact the bugs pertain to old unchanging segments in the code.

Since Ockam's Razor can only be applied to situations where two competing hypotheses would predict the same data, and since your hypothesis (Mozilla is getting buggier) would imply that the new bug reports are pertaining to newer segments in the Mozilla code--in contrast to the competing hypothesis--you can't use the Razor to imply your hypothesis is better suited to the data. In general, one should never use the Razor to circumvent more careful examination of data and further experimentation. If further experimentation can be used to distinguish between two competing hypotheses, then Ockham does not apply.

Though, secretly I must admit it would be helluva cool if there did exist a magic wand that could give me the perfect hypothesis for any data set. It would greatly simplify my life.

Re: Astroturf

[WWWWolf]

IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.

...annoying middle mouse button behavior, annoying habit of NOT remembering what size the new windows should be, and if I touch the mouse wheel - well, I may as well go to the Moon and back and it may have scrolled the first line... =)

And yes, it has a Footprint with a capital F. (Not that Mozilla would do any better on that field...) However, Mozilla wins here - it's probably somewhat smaller to download. =)

After 2,5 of dabbling, Mozilla - overall - still hasn't risen above the Netscape 4.x level.

Significantly better PNG support? Wow, CSS implementation that actually works? Less rendering bugs? Million times better bookmark manager? Search capabilities with configurable search engines? Save dialogs that work while Motif's save dialogs still don't work? And it doesn't crash every 5 minutes (I haven't yet got 0.9.3 to crash)? Themability to combat the general ugliness of Motif? Progressive rendering of pages (No freezes when some New Media Guru used tables dishonorably)?

I think it has come a long way since NS4...

Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[GreyPoopon]

And the right sidebar! I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Someone sign this guy up to write for Slashdot!

I absolutely agree, and I'm happy to see that somebody else has already expressed their sentiments on the issue. In all seriousness, when I first saw the link (on Mozillazine) to that article, I really believed it must have been a parody site. Subsequent research left me astounded to find out that it wasn't. I have honestly never seen such unprofessional and irreponsible journalism (if it can be called that) in all my life. And as you said, the sidebar really took the cake. It reminded me of some of the crap people in high school debate classes would dream up. In fact, better make that junior high. The high schoolers were much better at critical thinking.

This latest article just continues to prove how worthless it is to read articles on Mozillaquest -- unless you just want a good laugh. In fact, if you take a look at the current roadmap for Mozilla (that has been in place for a while), you'll see clearly that they aren't promising a 1.0 release anytime this year. They are *hoping* to have one, but the more conservative of the two numbering schemes obviously takes them into the next year. It's been that way for a while since the roadmap was revised.

My suggestion is that you use Mozillaquest to test out your new DDoS tools. We can just consider it to be the "door stop" of websites.