Mozilla: News from the front 90
Point_Blank
pointed us to an update on Mozilla.org regarding the
state of mozilla
written by Mike Shaver. Mainly it refutes some of the arguments that
the project isn't "Open" because @netscape.com developers outnumber
outside developers. I agree with him- the fact that there are /any/
outside developers is a great thing. Anyway, some interesting
stats regarding download numbers and bug submissions and stuff. A
nifty piece if you're following the project.
Re:Subtract AOL? (Score:1)
Think about it this way:
100 people are on the internet.
80 of them use Microsoft Internet Explorer.
20 of them use Netscape.
Ok so far? Now, we know that 30 people use America Online. AOL uses IE exclusively. All of those 30 people must, therefore, use IE. The other 50 IE users are using some other ISP. If all AOLers had to switch to Netscape (not counting people using older versions, etc.), then 30 people from the IE side go to the Netscape side. Making it a 50/50 split. Change the word 'people' to 'percent of people', and you've got 'the real world'.
hmmm...I guess the above explains why I'm not a math teacher...
-RN
100% satisfaction period (Score:1)
A friend of my mother was getting backpacks out of the closet for her son's start of school and found that the backpack she bought the previous year from L.L. Bean for her son was badly worn and had a broken zipper. She returned it to have the zipper fixed, explaining the situation. They sent a new backpack, no questions asked. She later found the backpack that she had in fact bought the previous year (the one she returned was 5 years old). Needless to say, she has been loyal to the company ever since.
People want to be honest, but they want respect and are willing to pay more to a company that they trust and that gives them the benefit of the doubt. While I hadn't thought of it in this context previously, much of the loyalty to Open Source comes from this kind of experience. Any user that has found a bug and gotten rapid response from developers will never want to go back to the dreaded tech support line to wait an hour to get to the person that knows enough to tell you that it is a known bug and _may_ be fixed in the next release. And the satisfied customer will likely tell his friend.
The flip side of this is that bad experiences are also spread by word of mouth. We must do our best to realize that we are all the company in the open source movement and the customer deserves 100% satisfaction.
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Re: Communicator can already do "skins" in *nix (Score:2)
change its colors and map an xpm imge to the
window by putting this in your ~/.Xdefaults file:
! Some Netscape hacks
*nsMotifFSBHacks: true
Netscape*background: grey20
Netscape*backgroundPixmap:
Netscape*foreground: grey80
! End Netscape hacks
...now I haven't been able to get the Pixmap
option to work but I've seen screenshots from
someone who has. No details on how they got
it to work.
Hint: Turn off Java (Score:1)
and the only problems I've had have been from
prolonged use with Java applets enabled. Now
I keep Java turned off and the browser only
crashes once a week or less.
Re:mozilla-win32-m8.zip (Score:1)
this will create a subdirectory, bin, if i recall correctly...
in that subdirectory you will find tons and tons of subdirectories and dlls and exes.
i presume you've already done this, and the mess of files is the source of your complaint ---- NEVER FEAR!
simply execute apprunner.exe --- everything else just happens.
test (Score:2)
Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
The XCOM, in turn, handles the XPFE [mozilla.org], which is essentially a combination of an XML implementation, PNG graphics, and JavaScript for event handling. Yes you can customize the buttons, the throbber, and even (if they support this part of CSS2) the cursor! Will the fun never cease? ~mindlace
Why mozilla is a successful project (Score:2)
Mozilla is the way it is- and has taken as long as it has- because it has been driven by the demands of those who use it. You could argue that the end users have not had that much imput, but the truth is that the real 'users' of any browser software are web page developers.
Mozilla's choice to go with Raptor (a good idea of their own), and to fully support DOM1/CSS1/HTML4.0/ECMAScript are a godsend to developers.
This came about because these decisions were made in the open. The initial idea was to do a release on the 4.x codebase, but with the community (and the WSG) clamoring for standards compatibility, the correct design decision was made to go for the next generation layout engine instead of the heavily patched 4.x codebase.
As TCaTB[1] mentions,
"Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow" (Fred Brooks, "the Mythical Man-Month".
Re:Brooks' Law (Score:1)
As for number two, that is one of the approaches specifically indicated in The Mythical Man Month. I was extrapolating from the concepts of the book. I apologize if I made it sound differently.
Re:state of mozilla (Score:1)
Sigh. It seems it must be repeated over and over again:
The current Milestones of Mozilla
ARE DECLARED TO BE PRE-BETA.
If you don't know that it means exactly what you described, just don't touch it.
PS: Did not intent to be offensive, but please people, read the label before you open a package and wonder about the contents.
PPS: Why shouldn't it be made of thousand little files? It's a pre-beta! There are still many things that will change (though, I would not mind the number files it has now and know some reasons to keep it as it is...)
Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.dev.ski
there's not much there now, but it may get some more traffic as time goes on.
Skins are easy to make with Mozilla, since it uses a standard system to define appearance (CSS). All you need to know is CSS, and how to make graphics
I would Flame You... (Score:1)
Re:Dear Mr. Stuffy Writer (Score:2)
We have more users, so we're more popular. (At least that's what I'm able to parse)
You're certainly right; it is a bit verbose.
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Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
It's not a flaw in Open Source, it's a flaw in how Netscape interpreted it. You can do any type of development with Open Source. How you manage it is the key.
Re:Flame me, please - I'm feeling chill. (Score:2)
I don't know that having per-URL JavaScript and Cookie preferences is that "unreasonable". IE already has a limited version of this in it's security zones feature. (Unfortunately, you can't create new zones, so you are stuck with 'Internet' and 'Trusted Sites'.)
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80% (Score:3)
Don't forget that 30% of 'the Internet' is on AOL - and AOL only uses IE.
Subtract the AOL user base (I wish we could), and it's more like 50/50. Once AOL starts using Mozilla, Netscape will have the markt lead.
(Despite this post, I think browser market share is one of the most stupid concepts of all time. Who cares about the market share of $0 products. The intention of both Netscape Nav and MSIE from the beginning was mearly free advertising and standards embrace+extend for Netscape's and MS's server products. Which is why the iPlanet brandname is so odd. Oh well...)
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Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Re:Wow.. Mozilla almost makes me forget.. (Score:1)
I don't get it... (Score:2)
However, that is not the situation; the source is open, and an additonal twenty people, NOT paid by Netscape are contributing code. Furthermore, an untold number of people are regularly submitting bug reports/ideas for enhancement. For some reason beyond my understanding, the popular press deems this as a refutation of open source, simply because there are more people from Netscape contributing code than those unaffiliated with Netscape.
Netscape has not lost any brainpower by opening the code, and they are not paying their programmers any more or less. Rather, they have a 20% enhancement in contributers, and people say this is a failure. I DON't GET IT! Could some wise person please explain this logic to me? Please?
Alan Cox on free software and Brook's Law (Score:1)
This is exactly the point that Alan Cox made in his keynote presentation at the Ottawa Linux Symposium [ottawalinuxsymposium.org] last weekend. Alan did a comparison of how software engineering is done in big firms and by free software projects, and found them to be rather similar. It was most striking in regard to team size, where both styles of development work around an upper bound of 6 people per team. In companies, a heirarchical management structure breaks the developers up into small groups. Free software projects tend to fission as they attract developers, becoming a cluster of small related projects, all with small core teams of 6 or fewer developers. He pointed out the GNOME project as a good example of this, and after looking at the number of modules in GNOME CVS, I'm forced to agree.
This has some consequences for free software, that came up intermittantly in other sessions at the conference, so I found the keynote to be inadvertantly a good summation. For this fissioning to work, free software has to be much more modular than proprietary, and this leads to a strong role for developing interfaces in free software. Alan also pointed out that it also tends to lead to a lot of duplicated code. Both of the GNOME sessions, as well as the Mozilla one, strongly emphasized the need for component software, glued together with high-level languages for the user interface stuff.
Appropriately enough for this discussion, the Mozilla presentation by Mike Shaver (and a Netscape engineer whose name I've forgotten) was the session immediately preceding the keynote. As a result of it, I'm extremely confident about Mozilla's future (and I'm not just saying that because I got a Mozilla t-shirt there!).
ColinVery true. (Score:1)
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Scott Miga
I can't wait until mozilla is ready for primetime (Score:1)
Not open because of many Netscape devs? (Score:2)
Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Too many cooks spoil the broth (Score:3)
It is my observation that on most open-source projects there are a very small number of core developers (often friends in real life), but alot of users who submit bug reports and pester about the next release. Often the process of delegation can be more time-consuming than just doing it yourself. They say that human brains can only really cope with working in groups of up to 7 people anyway. Having to work over the Internet makes this even more difficult.
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Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Re:state of mozilla (on Mac) (Score:1)
and therefore won't work with my DSL line.
>Have they ever heard of a resource fork?!
I wouldn't complain about this too much, considering it's pre-Beta, or do you still have HFS disks?
Keeping the library files separate makes it easier to track bugs in the individual modules,
and is often how cross-platform Mac apps are assembled before finally being
rolled into one big app w/data and resource forks.
As for iCab, it's pretty damn good!
It just seems to crash more when I turn VM on.
Ah well, the filtering and quick rendering make it all worthwhile!
Pope
state of mozilla (Score:2)
Another thing is that the package is made up of thousands of little files. Whatever happened to the convention that an application is made up of one application and maybe a shared library or data file. I have never seen an application with so many separate data files. Have they ever heard of a resource fork?!
p.s. I would run linux but my mac is one of the few that has unsupported hardware. I do have a pc sitting next to me with the case open that will run linux as soon as I can get a cd drive for it and a bugger hd.
Common complaint (Score:2)
I think Mozilla 5 will succeed, but that for version 6, there'll be way more non-netscape people involved, as people add little bits here and there, optimize this and that, and generally mutate Mozilla into a more advanced life form than a Sea Monkey.
Unfair statistics....somewhat. (Score:2)
Unfortunately for us, there has been little-to-no support from people who have been blessed with CVS checkin authority to allow us to get the build patches in that we need to stay current with the latest changes on the tree. Without getting these patches in (regardless of whether we boxcar or not), our ability to address bugs is virtually nil.
What good is a bug fix metric when we can't even build the latest tree?
Before I rant for too long, it's important to note that support has changed very recently (Henry is working with someone to get the OS/2 build patches checked in), but it took WAY too long before that support materialized.
Mozilla Suggestions (Score:3)
I think that the Mozilla project is making great progress. I try out the builds daily, often on Linux and NT.
However, I feel that it would be useful if they woeked towards implementing extra functionality so that it could replace Netscape 4.6 for general webbrowsing. For example, there is still no right click on links and the Preferences dialog hasn't been hooked up yet. However, we already have features like Translate which are not used that regularly.
By adding a few basic features, I would use Mozilla as my main browser, I would find more bugs, and contribute more bug reports. If I had more time, I'd look at improving any features that annoyed me and so on.
I think that the number of outside developers contributing to Mozilla will snowball in a few milestones when more features are added. It is already shaping up to be a great product, and I miss its many of its features when I return to Netscape.
According to the Milestone Roadmap.... (Score:1)
Keep up the good work, guys!
Flame me, please - I'm feeling chill. (Score:3)
One of the perhaps smaller, but of a certainty significant, aspects of the Mozilla project is apparent to those of us who browse the Bugzilla database. Ergo, it has lain unnoticed by the silent majority, the flamedot minority, and the ha-ha-Netscape-fools gawkers.
Users and programmers have traditionally been the poles of a divide (if I may carelessly mix my metaphors), kinda like boys and girls. (Which of the pairs is analogous to which I leave as an exercise to the reader >:+} ). While other companies or groups have been renowned for their attention to user interface or responsiveness to users, Mozilla, through Bugzilla, more so even than through the newsgroups, stewards a new user/coder frontier: The blessed enhancement request. Pssst - Rob - your code won't permit me to include the necessarily long CGI URL.
Here, in this well-mannered and efficient forum, users make unreasonable requests [mozilla.org] - and watch with astonishment as they are sometimes granted! The Netscape engineers are for the most part tolerant and polite - even enduring unwarranted abuse [mozilla.org] - and are open to luser suggestion. If indeed lusers they be. And most proposals are at the very least discussed, for the greater number.
The seeding of this hitherto untapped and rather mangy range of the noosphere (to use your [tuxedo.org] beloved but limited vernacular), the (*scoffing*) user base, is an advanced, or rather advancing, inclusion that makes our trumpeted Open Source method more of a societal, a popular?, phenomenon than before. (*Leaving further such analysis to the grandiose*)
Needless to say, these words apply only to those members of society who are sufficiently interested to linger circa such domains. So should it be. We (or, perhaps, I) mad bastards who think to shape the next Netscape browser toward our ends and in reflection of our method-minds rather like the lack of company >:+)
And there is another aspect of appeal in the Bugzilla milieu. (Milieu being a browsable web database, an ongoing discussion with engineers, a devoted newsgroup set, a sense of comradeship against hostile outside, media, forces, &c) The satisfaction of submitting a bug and awaiting it's speedy repair soon becomes a quite forthright expectation, something akin almost to a human instinct, undiscovered alas until this late march of the Industrial age. It is the desire and expectation that, finding a bug, one reports it, and will soon be using a fresh copy of the software that is bereft of the very flaw. If such a cycle were established in all public domains, many corporations would be afflicted, and many consumers would rejoice. And lo!, the yobbers would owe we "computer hackers". It nearly calls to mind the fabled customer service and quality of vendors such as the Eaton's of the 1960s (to those non-Canadians who do not recognize the reference, *nyyahh* to ye).
Or perhaps I'm foaming verbose again - there was the Great Overboard [jwz.org] some time ago, as I recall - but we'll see when it ships, won't we, kiddies?
Why so few external devs .... (Score:2)
1) The size of the source: If you want to contribute you have to get into the source - this means read/read/read some some source to just try to get how the whole thing is working this takes times. Many Netscape dev are doeing this full time, they have the time to learn and can ask directly to the coder what he inteded to do when he wrote the code. While your learning everything is changing fast - Ok not so fast but fast enough so that it takes time to catch up. Ok but you might argue that the linux kernel is also Big and that it changes also constantly - right but the basic behind a kernel are thautght in any decent Computer school - it helps a lot, plenty of books are available on the subjects - so it you'll learn faster what the code does and how it does it
2) Time : this factor is only applicable to non US, nor Canada resident. In many Other Countries you have to pay for local communications so dialing your ISP and staying online cost some Phone-money , dowloading 25 or so MB really isn'yt cheap and really is painfull with a 33.6 even with a 56 k modem ...
Re:I don't like feeding trolls, but... (Score:2)
I never said that.
Ah yes, Eaton's (Score:1)
Think about it: what defines "satisfaction"? The consumer, 100%. That's quite a tall promise to make.
But, in those days (the 60s) people were honest - they wouldn't order a bunch of new furniture, fora party, and request that they be refunded three days later because they weren't satisfied.
Brooks' Law (Score:2)
The practical upshot is that the larger the team, the more productivity is lost to the overhead of dealing with other people. Therefore, the best software is typically written by very, very small teams (or often, single people).
It's not hopeless, however, to have large teams working effectively. If the project is modular and parallel enough, the team is broken in several smaller teams (and further subdivided, as necessary), each responsible for a subset of the system. The sub-team leads are responsible for coordinating with the other sub-team leads to keep the project coherent. This requires the sub-team leads to be a manager as well as a developer.
Re:Mozilla Suggestions (Score:2)
Do you think they (AOL+Netscape) would really want that just yet? It wouldn't be a ready product still even with those features implement. Most people using it would come from current Netscape 4 users with probably relatively few IE immigrants. It also would immediatelly open up the question of comparing Mozilla with IE5, in which IE5 would fare much better then it deserves.
Even worse then that few more Mindcraft-type test that could be staged, could be if multitudes of clueless users would try Mozilla without understanding what it is about. Their fustration could mean big problems for Mozilla. That could really hurt Mozilla's and Open Sources brandnames.
I wonder if they have thought about this and aren't implementing usability features until the project is much more muture. Well, wouldn't hold it against them if they have.
--Flam
Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
Opinion of a daily mozilla compiler (Score:3)
Used it for several hours today for general browsing, without any crashes. I haven't had that happen in several months, and this was after the Necko code landing (the new fancy-pants networking code... noticably faster, IMHO).
There are still significant bugs, and its important if you're going to pull the CVS tree you know what to expect, because what works and doesn't work depends on the time of day. If it builds and the tests run, then tinderbox will be green even if some glaring feature is missing. (Like menus in the mailreader under Linux on the tree I pulled at 2pm EST today...)
There are people talking on here about how its not beta quality, hardly works, etc. The fact of the matter is ITS NOT beta softare. No one claimed it was. The milestones seem to work relatively well, although I thouht M6 and M7 weren't too good under Linux -- half the systems I tried on wouldn't build them. M8 was great. M9 (real soon now, I think they were mostly waiting on the Necko code becoming the default and stabilizing the problems from that...) should be even better. its definately a useable browser right now for most things, even if some stuff is flaky. (I can't log in on Slashdot for example)
I've said this a few times before on here, but its really worth saying over and over. Mozilla is really coming along. Its running suprisingly well, rendered pages with proper HTML look great on it. It certainly separates the good HTML coders from the bad in that regard. Its *fast*. I noticed that today's build is much faster -- both networking and rendering -- than the last one I actually tried which was on Monday or so.
The better rendering engine, and GTK widgets/menus make it MUCH nicer to look at than Communicator.
I'd suggest the complainers stop complaining and start submitting bug reports if they're having such problems, but people like that aren't likely to give useful bug reports anyway.
Re:100% satisfaction period (Score:2)
...and then the developers get so bogged down in handling bug reports, many of which turn out not to be bugs. I speak from (proprietary software development) experience.
Open source projects do have the advantage of an open bug list, which reduces some of the volume. But just reading Slashdot for a little bit will show you how people, even with the most powerful research engine in history at their fingertips (the web), will still ask someone else what "Echelon" is.
Re:Flame me, please - I'm feeling chill. (Score:1)
________________________________________
$which weed
Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Re:Common complaint (Score:1)
Re:Off Subject -Mozilla Skins (Score:1)
Re:Brooks' Law (Score:1)
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Re:Mozilla Suggestions (Score:1)
Long live Mozilla.
Mike
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
As the Open Source community, we need to promote and applaud such efforts. Every bit helps. Especially one that has gotton such coverage. We have to be careful about predicting the failure of Mozilla. It will be seen as a blow to Open Source whether anyone really cares or not.
Some Clarifications (Score:1)
Also, the initial startup of Mozilla takes longer because some initialization that will eventually take place in the installation process instead takes place when you start up the browser that first time.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
However, since then, the processes has really shaped up, and almost all of Mozilla is new code, especially the layout engine.
Whee!
jf
Apologies then... (Score:1)
Obviously I need to be more careful about my quoting. It seems that *everyone* reads Slashdot these days. Hmmm, I used a Stroustrop quote a few days ago
BTW- JWZ: I love xscreensaver.
--Lenny
mozilla-win32-m8.zip (Score:1)
any help would be appreciated....
don't spam me just because this is a windows machine, this is my first post after lurking here for 9 months
i just want mozilla
any help would be appreciated
Re:Dear Mr. Stuffy Writer (Score:2)
As for the post's diction, I find it rather refreshing that a few people still know how to use words which are greater than two syllables.
Re:Market Share of $0 products. (Score:2)
Microsoft is just reading from the Netscape Embrace and Extend playbook here, although they rightfully have a bad guy reputation. As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy a ~50/50 breakdown and public sites that aren't 'optimized' for any specific browser. Anything goes on your intranet.
(People who don't bother to change their homepage hardly seems like a very ripe market, and it hasn't got either Netscape or MSN rich. Yahoo rightfully wins without 'herding' because they've got superior content. However, the only portal I visit daily is the toliet, so what do I know.)
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Re:80% (Score:2)
As for market-share, 30% of the internet may use AOL, but a large percentage of AOLers never use the internet (they stay on the internet AOL areas), and thus never use IE or get counted in the stats. Of those who do use the internet, a sizeable minority are those who have downloaded and installed Netscape or Opera, and use those browsers instead. So even if you subtract the AOL users that use IE, IE still is leading in market-share decisively.
Re:Subtract AOL? (Score:2)
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Re:I love mozilla (Score:1)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:1)
| 80% of the browser market now
Mozilla will run on my Alpha under Linux. Internet Explorer won't.
Kinda gives me little incentive to download IE, doesn't it?
Next question.
Re:Get your heads out of the sand, Mozilla = hopel (Score:1)
| illustrates the obvious failure of the open
| source system. The source code to a huge and
| monumentally important piece of software was
| released, a project that was professionally | worked on by paid developers.
Oh geesz - not *this* tired argument again. Your first point is false. The source code to a huge and monumentally important piece of software was not released. What was released was huge, but not monumentally important. Why? Because THE RELEASE WAS NONFUNCTIONAL. Had they released the code to an actualy working product, the open source community could have more quickly run with it. As it was, they released a huge, largely unintelligible, broken mess.
Now that Mozilla actually seems to be getting somewhere, here come the bashers.
As for the Linux kernel - well, it works. So people are motivated to work on it, because they can actually use the thing.
I don't like feeding trolls, but... (Score:2)
What I am saying is that Mozilla had problems acquiring developers because Netscape botched that initial release. In the Open Source world, you should always have a working chunk of code before announcing your project and looking to sign up developers.
A web browser is a large project, but is it fundamentally more difficult than a kernel, or a compiler? I do not believe it is. The initial reaction was problematic, but perhaps as the milestones roll on, more developers will get their hands dirty in the project. As for "flocks of developers", I don't think Netscape or the community realistically expected that. What *is* expected is a community willing to fill out bug reports.
You can by cynical about the project if you like, but I'm not sure why you are smearing it around Slashdot. Does it offend you that some are optimistic about the project? If you don't think its going anywhere, just ignore it -- you can filter out Netscape stories from your Slashdot account. I, for one, really *want* it to succeed, because once we have it, I can eliminate Netscape which is the last proprietary chunk of code on my box.
--Lenny, who is going to download the latest build right now.