Mozilla Moves Into 2002? Maybe. 376
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.
Doubling bugs (Score:5, Insightful)
The rate increase in bug reporting is possibly due to wider use; as each build got better and better, more and more people tried it and found more and more things (little things) wrong.
In which case, that just means that Mozilla is getting more and more refined. I think this correlates with most people's experiences with Mozilla from build to build.
Just a thought.
Why 1.0? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is really important is that the browser keeps getting better, and it is. With each release they fix tons of bugs. That isn't going to change when it reaches 1.0. I don't care if it never reaches 1.0 as long as it keeps getting better. They could call the next release 1.0 and everyone would be excited, but it wouldn't really mean anything. Just like the actual 1.0 release won't.
A Rose by any other name (?) (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.
bugs are not bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why 1.0? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening???? (Score:2, Insightful)
even assuming the reports of the rate of rise of bug reports is increasing, and further assuming the rate of rise is as steep as indicated, ol' Billy of Ock wouldn't necessarily agree with you, try some other possible explanations....
1. the code portions showing the increase are relatively new and have not had the equivalent amount of debug time that the more mature sections of the code have been given
2. the coders producing the buggier code are new to the project and are still learning how to implement and design their particular sections, even highly experienced coders/designers have a rise their error rate when changing to an unfamilar design, this is usu short-term and correctable w/o a ton of effort
3. the bugs located could be on the "other" side of the code, say the JVM or the security sandbox or OS threading model or ??????
...and let's not forget that even M$ has acknowledged that W2K has shipped with nearly 70,000 ***KNOWN*** bugs....
the Mozilla Quest article does not classify the bugs by type or location, how many "app killers" are there? how many "OS killers"? versus how many are UI related where a drop down box doesn't autoscroll or automatically alphabetize?????
the entire MozillaQuest article reeked of hostility towards the current Mozilla development structure...
...as someone who is NOT a daily Linux user, and who doesn't use any Mozilla on ANY platform i found the tone of the article very opinionated and hostile...it sounded more political than analytical and seemed to have an agenda greater than informing the Mozilla faithful....
maybe justified, maybe not, i don't know...but there's way insufficient info in that article to conclude "...Mozilla is getting buggier"...
Bugs Approach a Constant Number (Score:5, Insightful)
You may fix the worst bugs, but as time goes on more and more bugs are found, and eventually bugs pretty much crop up as you fix them.
The thing is, although bugs are constantly appearing, the frequency of the average bug decreases. You start getting bugs that happen only once every thousand user-years. Try as you might, you can't squash them all.
There is some hope, in that you can use some fundamentally better method of software engineering and things get suddenly better. The bugs still approach a constant level, but it is a smaller level. Back when IBM studied this, it was still common to write operating systems in assembly code. Using a high-level language is so much easier to debug that you can achieve better bug rates.
But at the same time, we have much greater ambitions for our software. Mozilla 1.0 will have far more features than Microsoft Word 1.0 did.
Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info (Score:5, Insightful)
My question is how can we delegitimize this guy so the real media doesn't take his lies and run?
Re:Why 1.0? (Score:2, Insightful)
AFAIK the key is that Mozilla is in a feature freeze for the 1.0 release. All work until then is supposed to be bug fixing, although there also appears to be some cosmetic work like changing the available themes. Once they reach 1.0, they can start adding new features again (though many posters here would claim that Mozilla is already so bloated that new features would be redundant.) As other people have pointed out, 1.0 is also a big psychological milestone.
IMO, Mozilla is already well ahead of the quality of most released commercial software, and the willingness of Netscape to base NS6 on the existing Mozilla tree is pretty good evidence that Netscape agrees. The Mozilla team could declare the next version to be 1.0 and I doubt that any more people would complain about the quality than with other packages. The decision to squish every last bug before declaring 1.0 is a really good sign of the quality of code that the team wants to put out.
Re:Doubling bugs (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then I'd like to meet this Occam's razor. Did he/she/it do statistical analysis to see if bug counts are increasing, did it actually read through any bugs, did it ask the mozilla team if lots of duplicate bugs were being submitted.
You seem to have an awful lot of faith in this Occam's razor maybe you can explain to us why this is some sort of a irrefutable authority and a flawless analyzer of complex code.
Re:Mozilla into 2002! (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, thats complete bullshit unless the project you are comparing it to are exactly the same. You cant compare mozilla to any other web browser with bug reports like that unless they have all the same features. Even then, it is still not a good idea to use this as a benchmark.
www.MozillaQuestQuest.com (Score:2, Insightful)
See www.MozillaQuestQuest.com [mozillaquestquest.com] for a parody. I assume he works for Microsoft, the poor guy.
The Mozilla crowd has learned to ignore him; Slashdot should too.
Re:Doubling bugs (Score:1, Insightful)
The "critical" analysis on MozillaQuest seems fairly naive at best , and seems to be more a means of expressing frustration at the rate of progress of Mozilla, than a solid argument.
Walk a mile in another's shoes... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not going to put down or put on a pedestal any of the other available browsers. I use them all, on numerous platforms, both open and closed. Konqueror is great for quick and dirty net searches. Opera is great on low-end boxen. Explorer is well...explorer...*sigh*. Mozilla is quick, stable and does everything I want to do online. This is just my opinion.
From the pace of development, Mozilla is doing fairly well. If you're a programmer, you should realize the scope of what they are doing over at Mozilla. As for Slashdot, why exactly would you guys post an article so blatantly and obviously mis-informed?? Generally I look to /. to give up interesting news, somewhat outside the normal of FUD and goofie marketing/media coverage we see everywhere on the net.
Could someone from /. explain the motivation for posting the story in the first place? Not that an article which is critical of Mozilla or any open source should not be posted. In fact, critical articles are fine. So long as they are informed and well written which this one obviously is not.
Just a note to Asa - your posts are very obviously showing a note of tension. Don't worry about it, you guys are doing a helluva job and from one (semi) sane coder to another I'd just like you guys at Mozilla to know that your broswer is sweet. They'll always bitch abut something *shrug*
Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just so fscking sad that anyone would even link to it, much less give it guaranteed traffic by posting a story from it as "news" here.
/. editors, please don't choose articles when you've been smoking crack. You'll just continue to embarass yourselves and waste our time. Thank you.
In the meantime, I plan to continue to ignore MozillaQuest and hope that it'll just go away.
BTW, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.3 exclusively for my email and it kicks butt (and I don't have to worry about
Re:Doubling bugs (Score:3, Insightful)
"bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled" is not a fact. It doesn't even make sense. Doubled what? Doubled since yesterday? Doubled since the beginning of the project? Doubled in volume?
Bug submissions certainly have not doubled in volume in recent history. We get between 100 and 300 bug reports a day and this has been steady for quite a while. About half of those are immediately marked as Invalid, Duplicate or Worksforme by the growing numbers of active testers and Bugzilla account holders. We have over 15,000 active Bugzilla accounts and that number is growing (accellerating, even). And that is a fact.
--Asa
So when do we see a 1.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
With that being said, it's still quite apparent that Mozilla is an 800lbs. gorilla when it comes to memory and CPU usage. It has gotten a LOT better in the last few builds. If these kinds of optimization issues were worked out by the next release, I would happily convert myself and others that rely on my judgement on over to Mozilla.
Thing is, even as I type this on ye olde Netscape 4.78 after browsing around to several web pages, NT is reporting about 17M of memory allocated. Just to start Mozilla is 22M, and I haven't gone anywhere yet. To further illustrate the point, I went and opened up the newsgroup readers in each, subscribed to a group, and then pulled in all the headers of that group. NS 4.7 comes in at around 18M after this operation. Mozilla at 40.5M. Not going to bother listing numbers off of FreeBSD as I'm still running 0.9.3 on there.
Personally, it's just frustrating as heck to watch. There we have this Gecko engine was does a truly beautiful job of properly rendering a web page regardless of the platform. Exactly what a browser should do! Wrapped around this is a monster of a UI that even to this day still feels like I'm trying to interact with some bad Java applet. Oh sure it is pretty, but the reaction time even on a 1.2Ghz machine is noticeable.
Looking back, I'm finding myself in total agreement with critics I disagreed with before over one point. XUL. The Mozilla folks repeatedly told us all how much longer it would take to develop this project if they stuck with native OS widgets. I just have to wonder how much time has been wasted while the resources of the Mozilla project could have had Win32, Mac, Qt, GTK versions out the door by now? Certainly projects like Galeon have shown this could have been done.
Mozilla made a wrong turn early on (IMHO) with XUL. Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace. Problem is, those projects are out on the fringe, while IE is dead center of the web universe defining the standards across the board. Mozilla is FAR more than just a browser at this point. It's the last chance gasp at taking control of web standards and the Internet itself from Microsoft.
Re:So when do we see a 1.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, it makes sense from a programming perspective - you *should* abstract out the interface from the computational part of the program. It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.
And as for the responsiveness issue, personally I find no difference between native windows apps and mozilla and native linux apps and mozilla.
Plus I am sure that there will still be a few optimisations before a 1.0 release. If you knew anything about software development (which you appear not to) you would realise that the standard process is:
1) get something that works, so that people can start development in other areas
2) once it's working, start to optimise it, preferably without changing the interfaces.
I remember back when M16 came out people were saying mozilla was a POS, it was time to bury the project, it would never be usable, etc,etc. As somebody who'd been following the project since the start, I could see that some big optimisations were being a worked on, and mozilla was about to improve radically.
I told people that and was laughed at. But lo and behold, a few months later we got the 0.9.x milestones and as I predicted mozilla became very usable, to the point where people are now using it in preference to other browsers.
I believe now that many of the big optimisations are done and dusted, we will start to see a lot of the smaller optimisations worked on. The interface will improve, memory usage will go down.
In short, don't write mozilla off because it doesn't use native toolsets. Give it a chance, and we will see what happens before 1.0 comes out.
Re:Doubling bugs (Score:3, Insightful)
> Only an open source programmer would have the nerve to say this.
No, some commercial outfits say similar things. For instance Andersen Consulting, sorry, Accenture [accenture.com] has this bizarre mentality of artificially inflating number of bugs in their pre-shipping bug tracking db, because the quality of their product will be judged by the ratio(bugs_found_after_release / bugs_found_and_fixed_before_release). The intended way of keeping this small is to make a quality product with almost no bugs left after release. However, another way of keeping this ratio low is by inflating the denominator, i.e. making sure many bugs are logged before release. Every trivial item will be logged, and preferably multiple times (for instance rather than saying "error messages have many spelling errors", each individual typo will be logged as a separate bug...). So, not all commercial entities consider a huge number of bugs to be a bad thing; in some circumstances it's actually quite the contrary!
Now, back to the issue at hand: in this particular case (Mozilla), you have to consider the difference between bugs and reported bugs. If a product is so buggy that nobody uses it, obviously no bugs will be reported. Mozilla is now entering a phase where many more people start to actually use it, and to use it more thoroughly, so surely, more bugs will be found and reported.
A question for those "using" 0.9.x (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla 1.0 isn't a terribly meaningful concept, especially given that 0.9.3 served as the core of a genuinely commercial-quality Netscape 6.1--at least in most respects. But I do have a question for those who Mozilla or Netscape 6.x as their primary browsing and mail tool:
What's everyone doing about proper MIME support? Don't you people (and the developers!) ever send non-text e-mail attachments? Mozilla and Netscape 6 ship with virtually empty mimeTypes.rdf files and no auto-build from exisiting legacy MIME settings whether at the system level or from old Netscape 4.x configs, which means out of the box no external helper apps work--and worse, outbound email attachments other than HTML, text/plain, GIFs and JPEGs are mangled, transported as inline text. These empty MIME settings are years old.
Even more upsetting, the dialogs to edit and create mimeTypes entries from inside Mozilla/NS6 are broken: the checkbox that activates outbound MIME type declaration for a given mimetype is inactive, leaving hand-editing the poorly-documented RDF file as the only recourse. Not only that, but the Un*x Mozilla/NS6 doesn't seem to use the current environment in launching helper apps. Is it so hard or insecure or distressingly platform-specific to have the PATH environment variable--or use of "which" or "locate"--when launching helpers? Why must users manually locate the fully qualified path to their MP3 player, PDF viewer and so forth instead of simply entering, say, "acroread" or "xmms" in the dialog (or the RDF)?
Are the Netscape/Mozilla developers and those of you who claim to use Mozilla full-time passing around a hacked-up mimeTypes.rdf that isn't being shared with the public, and isn't even in an experimental branch of CVS? Or do you just never send email attachments?
And more to the point: doesn't the Netscape 6.x dev team ever send email attachments? How about the QA team? Are they all using Pine instead? And if they are, how does that jibe with the idea of eating dogfood?
Does Netscape even have a QA team?
I've thought of fleshing out mimeTypes.rdf myself, but I can't even figure out who owns it. Mail/News? Prefs? The core browser team? With the way the project owners point fingers, can I expect anyone to lay claim to it at all?
Maybe this is the problem.
Don't listen to anyone who says AOL's buyout has derailed the Mozilla project. They're clearly not taking an active role at all.
1.0 means different things in different projects, but one would expect nearly a year into the
Re:Doubling bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
So I guess Occam's Razor would also say the the amount of gold ore in California exploded at the start of the gold rush and the number of stars increased dramatically with the invention of the telescope.
If you start with the statement, "The discovery of X has increased", there are a number of explanations that meet Occam's rule, including:
- More people are looking for X.
- Methods for finding X have improved.
- The total amount of X has increased.
Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted.Ms.Taken's Lady Schick: Having an unpopular opinion doesn't make you right.
Mozilla is not a browser (Score:1, Insightful)
But, now I have seen the light.
Mozilla isn't a browser; it is a customizable generic application interface.
That's why it's taking so long.
There have been several phases of custom application development: COBOL/IBM Mainframe, UNIX minicomputer, Windows or OS/2 application, Java application, and finally, web app.
Web apps are great, and highly portable, but...they have a lame interface.
Mozilla is the magic tool that allows you to write something that is essentially a web app, but still have a highly customized front end. And with web services, it will be able to act more and more like those custom Windows apps that take so much longer to write.
Am I wrong about this? I may be, but I think Mozilla is the thing that ties this stuff all together.
Re:Why web browser must be big and slow? (Score:1, Insightful)
You can write a browser under a few hundred KBs, but it is certainly not going to achieve the same level of HTML, CSS, Javacript, etc., compliance that Mozilla/Gecko has achieved.