Problems With the Firefox Development Process 563
An anonymous reader writes "Mike
Connor, one of the core Firefox
developers, is raising a flag concerning the Mozilla Firefox
methodology of development. From his blog: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in
trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews." In an earlier
entry, he raised concrete concerns about the community involvement. Asa Dotzler
recently elaborated
on the process, as previously covered on Slashdot."
Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I wish there were more devs working on Firefox-specific issues.
Re:It's the Branding (Score:5, Informative)
This is probably a harder thing to do in the open source world, and also much more important to establish a trustworthy brand and indentity.
Re:Firefox is mostly a cute interface (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you're wrong. Firefox isn't any kind of version of anything else. It is an application built on top of the Gecko core technologies, designed from the ground up to be a faster, cleaner, and more capable web browser for the largest possible audience.
Mozilla 1.x is a completely different application built on top of the Gecko core technologies which was designed by a half a dozen different committees to emulate a seven year old monolithic suite of internet applications for a shrinking audience
--Asa
Re:Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
That said, I wish there were more devs working on Firefox-specific issues.
check out the mozilla source. The firefox browser is just compiled differently and with a few minor differences at the xul level. I really hate to see people thinking it's just gecko that's shared. There's xpcom, necko, nspr, etc... too
ok (Score:5, Informative)
How to write Firefox extensions [roachfiend.com]
Re:It's the Branding (Score:5, Informative)
RMS wants to rebrand Firefox. [mozillazine.org]
This thing will surely appear soon as another sensationalist Slashdot headline.
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Community, Induviduals and Fun (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, if you document what you're doing, it's fairly easy to turn your project over to more people. If you don't document, then you're cementing your position as 'the coder' and making it that much harder for others to join in.
Re:AWOL? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Engineering documents? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Case in point: vcards (Score:2, Informative)
1. duplicating effort
2. potentially (actually, probably) having his work rejected based on incorrect design.
They often act out their anger. (Score:5, Informative)
I've posted bugs to Firefox Bugzilla. All I know about the Firefox "community" comes from that.
One of the bug posts, about a serious memory leak that causes a complete crash, was handled in an angry way, even though I had spent hours documenting it on two computers and two operating systems.
This is an extremely common phenomenon among Open Source authors. They often use their position as a way of acting out their anger. I was criticized because I use Firefox in a more intense way than other users! When I posted a carefully written response to the criticism, I got criticism for posting a long response.
I offered to re-write the manual for another Open Source project, and got a negative response that was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
On another project, I entered a minor bug. The program was crashing if it saw a DOS end-of-text-file character in its text file input. I got back a long, philosophical discussion about why they were not willing to fix the bug because it was a problem that came from DOS.
One person with an anger problem can literally control the development of an Open Source project by scaring away potential helpers.
In my experience, the anger is often not expressed in a way that is obviously angry. It comes as opposition, sometimes very subtle opposition, even to good ideas or to useful help. The opposition vastly increases the amount of time required to contribute to a project.
The serious Firefox crash I reported in October 2003 was still there in February 2005 in version 1.0, even though it was verified by others in a careful way.
The background for all this is that Firefox is apparently the best browser, and an important window to the world for millions of people.
This is an important subject, and there is a lot more to say, but I don't have time now.
Re:Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
For me, it's the extensions. If not for that I'd be using Konqueror.
Re:What the Fuck did he have for Breakfast? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
(Who are the six that mconnor mentioned anyway?)
Re:What the Fuck did he have for Breakfast? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's strange... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's strange... (Score:2, Informative)
try 3.5 MB for opera alone, the rest of that is java...
so back to the issue, opera is 1.2 MB lighter...
Oh, C'mon! (Score:3, Informative)
You know this is just plain stupid. Comparing Opera with Suns JRE bundled and Mozilla FireFox without any Java just isn't reasonable.
At you are going to do a comparison, at least compare the proper versions to each other. That is Firefox (& JRE) vs. Opera (& JRE) or Firefox (bare) vs Opera (bare). And in any of those comparisons Operas footprint is indeed smaller (at least last time I checked).
Please note that I am indeed using Firefox myself, but lets at least keep our facts somewhat reasonable.
Re:Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
"Because of Konqueror's modular nature, the Gecko layout engine from Mozilla can be used instead of Konqueror's KHTML renderer. This ability is called kmozilla and can be found in the kdebindings package".
Surprising? (Score:5, Informative)
March 2005: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in trouble." [slashdot.org]
Re:you forgot.... (Score:3, Informative)
Trying to do CSS layout in IE is a giant pain in the ass, thanks to its insufferable interpretation of layout attributs...
Re:That's strange... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox is also Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
is redundant? Check out "Hide Object" and "Undo Hide Object" gesture targets.
Personally, I find using gestures much easier than using a context menu to
remove the object. Also, you can undo your hides without having to reload the
page from scratch.
Re:Firefox is mostly a cute interface (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox is mostly a cute interface (Score:3, Informative)
The most stable version I've used was 0.9. The last few releases have a habit of freezing up in various ways.
I had the same experiance. I moved from mozilla to Firefox at
Re:what ever happened to mailing lists? (Score:3, Informative)
Not possible. The IRS does not allow the value of "personal services" to be taken as a tax deduction, even if they're performed for a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)