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Ask a Mozilla Person About Firefox 2.0

Posted by Roblimo on Tue Oct 31, 2006 12:31 PM
from the most-popular-browser-among-Slashdot-users dept.
The Internet
Last week's interview guest was Dean Hachamovitch, formal title "general manager Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp." This week we have Chris Beard, Mozilla's Vice President of Products. (Here's a recent "pre-Firefox 2 release" interview with Chris that you might want to look at to avoid duplicating questions.) Chris will be calling on other Mozilla and Firefox people to help answer your questions, but he's the point man here. Slashdot interview rules apply, as always.
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[+] Microsoft's IE Team Leader Answers Slashdot Questions 530 comments
We got lots and lots of questions for Dean Hachamovitch, whose formal title is "general manager Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp." Picking a mere 10 of those questions was not easy, and I wish Dean could have answered twice as many -- and so does he, but his schedule has been tight this week. Anyway, here are his answers to the Chosen Ten.
[+] Mozilla People Answer Firefox 2.0 Questions 55 comments
Chris Beard was "point" on this interview, but got help writing his answers to your questions from other Mozilla and Firefox people. (Since this was sort of a "companion" interview to one we did just before it with MSIE dude Dean Hachamovitch, you might want to look at the two Q&A posts side by side and compare the way they answered.)
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  • cake (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:37PM (#16660555)
    How was the cake from MS?

  • Tabs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:40PM (#16660613)
    What were you thinking with the changes to the tab UI? Everyone who opens enough tabs to trip it hates the scrolling, yet the justification for the feature was based on those who don't open enough tabs. Will it be changed back, or will we forever need to visit about:config on installing FireFox?
    • Christ, and what's your alternative - NOT being able to get to your tabs at all? There IS a menu right next to that (ala Safari and others).

      Seriously - what the hell should the behavior be?

  • FireFox 2 Rendering Speed Compared to IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MSTCrow5429 (642744) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:43PM (#16660657)
    Dear Chris Beard, I have used Firefox since before 1.0, and one thing that Internet Explorer has always beaten FF on is rendering speed. With the release of IE7, Microsoft has made IE at least feel faster than before, and it certainly has adopted many features that made FF such a stand-out, security not withstanding. I would like to know if Mozilla has made it a priority in the past to give FF a rendering speed competitive with or faster than IE, and if we will see FF becoming competitive with or faster than IE in rendering web pages in future releases? Thanks.
    • Who cares how fast it's rendering something when it's not rendering the correct thing. When IE gets better CSS support, then you can talk about and compare rendering speeds. If all we wanted was rendering speed, we'd all be using lynx.
      • For the 20-30 pages I visit regularly, I haven't noticed a rendering difference between IE7 and Firefox.

        I suspect the same holds for 80% of the internet population. The 80/20 rule.

        So why would the 80% try out a "slower" browser? And before you say Mozilla doesn't care about the 80% ... they do, they are a corporation [mozilla.com] complete with a board of directors and chairman.

      • we care (Score:2, Insightful)

        by vp0ng (751157)
        Missing the point completely. the question was asked because people DO care about rendering speed. I could just as easily say "Who cares about the acceleration speed of my car? It still gets me from point A to point B" People want things to go fast. Fast cars, fast internet, and fast browsers. If people weren't concerned about speed, we'd all be on 9600bps modems.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by pherthyl (445706)
          Whether FF renders faster than IE is true or not, I have no idea, but it is a good question.

          A good question perhaps, but not a good statement. The original poster was claiming that IE is faster than Firefox at rendering without any proof. Since that is not what benchmarks have shown (search on google, it's pretty much a toss up between the two), and doesn't reflect many people's experiences, it is only natural that his conclusions are being questioned. Of course, it may be that IE is faster than Firefox

  • Competition (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phroggy (441) * <slashdot3@phrogg[ ]om ['y.c' in gap]> on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:45PM (#16660699) Homepage
    What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Opera?

    What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?

    What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)

  • Strategy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by otacon (445694) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:48PM (#16660729) Homepage
    With the continued growth of Firefox, there are still a lot of users out there that do not even know they have a choice as far as browsers go. Is there any effort to reach the average joe consumer, other than word of mouth, and if so what would that strategy be.
  • Why didn't you fix Firefox's single huge glaring flaw, the memory leak that makes it practically unusable?
    • What memory leak. I have been using firefox for years, and have never seen it go above 100 MB, and I often have more than 10 tabs open, with lots of images. Yet I've heard stories of it going up to 700 MB. I don't even see how this could happen. Is it just a question of using some weird extensions/plugins? Or is there a real problem that I'm just not encountering. What are the specific repeatable test cases on a base install of firefox with no extensions and plugins that get it to eat up 700 MB of RAM?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Vellmont (569020)
        Right now I'm running FF 1.5.0.7 on Linux and I'm using up 200 megs of memory. I've seen the same behavior on Windows on my machine, and on a clients machine. The only plugin I've got running on the linux machine is dictionary, and the clients machine had no plugins installed.

        Maybe the difference is you kill firefox and restart it every day. I leave it running days at a time.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Skater (41976)
          Can I ask why you leave it run for so long? Do you leave the lights and television on in your house when you aren't using them? Do you complain if the car you're driving runs out of gas after running for dozens of hours?

          Have you done similar tests on IE, Konqueror, Opera, etc.? How do they stand up over several days of browsing?

          Now that I know this memory leak takes DAYS to show up, I'm actually glad the Moz developers are working on real issues...sure, they can fix them as they find them, but I'm glad t

    • Re:Of all the things you did... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:24PM (#16661487) Homepage Journal
      Why didn't you fix Firefox's single huge glaring flaw, the memory leak that makes it practically unusable?

      I'm going to ignore the "practically unusable" part, since there are plenty of people who somehow manage to use it anyway without problems, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that memory issues are one huge flaw. They're not. They're a bunch of tiny flaws that add up together. It's not like they can go in, fix one bug, and free up half the memory. They have to track down a whole bunch of these things and fix each of them.

      If you look at the release notes, nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jester99 (23135)
        nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."

        As an add-on: Is there a reason Firefox does not just use a garbage collection library to free up memory that is missed by the explicit delete operations?

  • If Microsoft were to GPL Internet Explorer (warning: suspension of disbelif required) why would you carry on developing Firefox/Gecko?
    • Security? It's easier to start with something that's already halfway there than learn about a whole new Netscapesque spaghetti-ball of code.
  • Can we expect just as much doublespeak and question avoidance as was given to us in the IE guy's interview?
  • Firefox seems to work faster and more stable on Windows and slower and more buggy on Linux. This has been increasingly so especially after it has become more and more popular. And the situation did not change with the release of 2.0...

    Why do you think this is happening? Do you lack developers who use / know / deal with Linux; is it because something is wrong with Linux; or is it because there are more people out there using Windows?

    • I'm not going to try to impinge on your right to ask this question, but I was wondering if this question was based on anything more than anecdotal evidence. The reason I'm wondering this is that, in my experience, Firefox is as stable and fast on Linux as it is anywhere, and so I don't know whether to think this is just my anecdotal evidence vs. yours, or whether there are problems I'm not informed about.

  • Future? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nine-times (778537) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:52PM (#16660829) Homepage
    What does the long-term future have in store for Firefox? Is the web browser going to become more feature rich, or is the Mozilla team going to aim at keeping Firefox very minimalist and optimized? If the former, what features do you think will help advance the user experience of the web? If the latter, how will you differentiate Firefox from its competitors and maintain the brand in absence of flashy new features?
  • There has been a rather glaring memory leak since the Firebird days; it's not as bad today, but it's definately sill there. Is the problem found, waiting to be fixed, or can we expect just marginal improvements in Firefox 3?

  • Tackling The DOM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by x3nos (773066) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:53PM (#16660851)
    With the most recent releases of FF 2.0 and IE7 almost simultaneously, from a person who does QA for a web deliverable software company, trying to debug and locate the source of inconsistencies in the way that FF 2.0 and IE7 handles DOM - what steps is the Mozilla foundation taking to help blaze the trail for some kind of standardization in DOM? I realize that IE has its own version of DOM, but is there hope that 1) Mozilla will better respond to erratic DOM programming from those that develop for IE or that 2) Mozilla will somehow influence the Microsoft camp to come over to standards?

  • Firefox Features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eideewt (603267) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:55PM (#16660893)
    Firefox was created partly as an alternative to the bloated Mozilla suite. Now as Firefox matures, it too is gaining features. While all of them are fairly useful, some, such as spell check, web feed previews, and session restoration, might be better implemented as extensions. Firefox is still a fairly lightweight browser, and I appreciate Firefox 2.0's improved response speed, but I still worry that Firefox is becoming the kind of software that I hate.

    How committed is the team to keeping Firefox's core as small as possible, and what, if any, features might be turned into extensions in the future?
    • Oops. I also meant to mention anti-phishing as something that might should be an extension.

    • Re:Firefox Features (Score:5, Insightful)

      by diamondsw (685967) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:08PM (#16661169)
      As an add on to that question, since you can distribute extensions with the installer, why not just make these "official" extensions rather than building them into the app? Then people could easily switch them off or substitute third party ones (think tab management).

      You've created a great extension management system, yet aren't using it yourselves.

  • Add In Validation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jarhead1972 (667612) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:56PM (#16660919) Journal
    Chris;

    Does FF worry that an unscrupulous add-on developer could produce what could be a click-fraud capable bot net hidden in an add-on that could be promoted and distributed by FF team? What steps are taken to prevent it given the add-ons are no signed or hosted by FF?

    Thanks

    Paul

  • A relevant question about the IE cake (Score:4, Interesting)

    by merc (115854) <slashdot@upt.org> on Tuesday October 31 2006, @12:59PM (#16660959) Homepage
    I'm sure you'll see a lot of tongue-in-cheek questions here about the recent IE team cake--but in all seriousness do you think Microsoft was sending any message, subtle or not, with their gift? Was the cake a gesture of altruism or do you think they were telling Firefox not to forget that they are a competing member of a browser war?

    How do Firefox members believe they are perceived by the "competition"?
  • I am one of those people who use firefox because it is better; I really don't care 2 cents about MS wars and open source. I use fire fox because of four features, tabs, save all bookmarks to folder, cntrl+ , and clear private features.
    Most of my friends are the same.
    So, I, and I assume most of your users, have zero loyalty to firefox - or IE; that is the way consumers are, they are awful things to have as customers (and that is why in the real world, contrary to all the biz school bs, the 1st thing any busi

  • Old Bugs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SeaFox (739806) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:00PM (#16660983)
    Has the Mozilla team considered adopting timeframes to the resolution of bugs, no matter what the severity. I've seen bugs on Bugzilla that while minor, have been open since before the browser was named Firefox, some without any comment besides the initial confirmation they exist. Why do issues stay unaddressed after multiple major releases?

  • Add-Ons vs Built-In (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheFlyingGoat (161967) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:00PM (#16661001) Homepage Journal
    Many of us first switched to Firefox because it was so much smaller and faster than Internet Explorer. In fact, much of the early progress was directed at removing unnecessary code. Now it seems as though Firefox is following in the steps of Netscape Navigator by including many more features, some which everyone will use (spell check) and some which many may not (better RSS handling). The result is a larger download.

    How does the Firefox team choose which features are going to be included and which ones should be left as add-ons? From a marketing aspect, is it possible to promote a product for being small and compact, or is a long feature list necessary?
  • What are the top priorities for the next Firefox release? Will there be an attempt to add any new features in IE 7 to Firefox? Will standards compliance come first? Or will security be the main focus as Firefox becomes more widely adopted?
  • I've noticed that more and more preferences get taken out of the dialog with every release and they can be changed only through about:config. I can understand that you wouldn't want to crowd the dialog and confuse the users too much, but do you ever go back and review all those options and put back in the dialog some of the most used ones?

  • Firefox and Tab Mix Plus (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andrew Kismet (955764) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:04PM (#16661101)
    The Tab Mix Plus extension is widely considered to be greatly enhancing to any Firefox experience, alongside extensions like AdBlock Plus and All-In-One Gestures (and similar gesture extensions). Are these 3 features - enhanced tab manager, advert blocker, and gestures - going to be included in the initial Firefox package at any point?

    And along the same lines, what would you rather do - streamline Firefox by removing features and making them optional add-ons, or enhance Firefox by building in more features which can be enabled and disabled without the need for extra installations?

    I know I'm not meant to ask multiple questions, but it's all on the same theme - would you consider creating two major download versions for Firefox, one which is "barebones" and the other preloaded with the most popular extensions?
  • There have been several things that FireFox (or FireFox fans) have done to promote the browser; some rather mundane, such as purchasing ad space in a newspaper, while others have been unique and interesting, such as the FireFox "crop circle" [oregonstate.edu].

    Aside from word of mouth, what methods of advertising and promotion seem to help the most? Do you ever notice a significant increase in downloads after an advertising campaign? What are your future plans for promoting FireFox, and what weird ideas have people come up wi

  • I have posted a question [slashdot.org] for the IE interview and ask you, what keeps you from fully implementing the CSS 2.1 standard in FF 2? Granted, you adhere to the spec much better than IE, but this is not justification enough to not follow.

    Håkon Wium Lie's response [slashdot.org] about IE not following spec is that it is not in their best interests as a monopoly to do so. MS's response [slashdot.org] to this question revolves around priority. What priority is standards compliance to Mozilla? Also, what other things do you think hind

  • The question: What is Mozilla planning to do about supporting current and future design strategies and technologies such as SVG (I know it partially works/is partially in the pipeline), embedded XML support, proportional table rendering, and though I despise them, ActiveX Controls? In other words, what is Mozilla doing to incorporate more support than its competitors?

    The rationale: If FF supported a greater number of standards, technologies, and design paradigms than its competitors, I can only imagine it

  • Future of Thunderbird (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:39PM (#16661759) Homepage Journal
    Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.

    Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?

  • The Firefox Microsoft Visit for Vista. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oscartheduck (866357) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:47PM (#16661953)
    As reported on Slashdot, Microsoft invited the Firefox team over to the headquarters to discuss compatibility with Windows Vista. Did you learn enough about Vista to be able to offer a significantly better experience on that OS?

  • Crashing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpaceAdmiral (869318) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @01:50PM (#16662005)
    Since upgrading to FF2, Firefox has gone from crashing approximately "never" to crashing approximately "always." It literally freezes 4 or 5 times per day on me. I've read that this is an iFrame/JavaScript issue and that engineers are aware of it and working on it, but my question is: How could you release something this buggy?

  • Firefox and Macs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chrisgeleven (514645) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @02:52PM (#16663029) Homepage
    When will Firefox get some much needed love on Mac OS X? The toolbars look hideous, the form widgets don't look aqua like, and there is no integration into OS X services (like the dictionary). Plus there is always a need for speed improvements.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by anaesthetica (596507)

      Quit whinging about the look on Mac OS X. Firefox has a great theming system, and someone has already done the work to make it look good on Mac OS X: http://takebacktheweb.org/ [takebacktheweb.org]

      GrApple (Eos Pro) theme is seriously hot. Windows and Linux users ought to be jealous.

  • Iceweasel and Trademarks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MostAwesomeDude (980382) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @05:50PM (#16665869) Homepage
    Recently, it has been confirmed that the Debian Project will be stripping out Mozilla Foundation trademarks such as Firefox and Mozilla from their main repository when Etch is released, renaming the "firefox" package to "iceweasel." What are your thoughts on the usage of such trademarks, and do you have any comments on the non-free permissions of the Mozilla Foundation's trademarks and artwork?

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