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Mozilla The Internet Programming IT Technology

Ask Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker 243

Posted by Roblimo from the open-source-means-open-debate dept.
There have been several recent reports of squabbles and problems involving Mozilla and Firefox development. In an attempt to clear the air about what's going on inside the Mozilla Project and the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker has agreed to answer 10 - 12 Slashdot questions. Please look at some recent interviews with Ms. Baker and check her blog before posting in order to avoid duplication. We'll publish her answers within the next week.
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Ask Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker More

Ask Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker

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  • Two questions spring to mind: (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tabkey12 ( 851759 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:34PM (#11944604) Homepage
    Are you going to change your name now that you are no longer updating your eponymous web suite?

    What is the volume of complaints you have received when the Mozilla suite was cancelled - more or less than you expected?

    • Re:Two questions spring to mind: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:28PM (#11945171) Homepage
      What do you think about asking this:

      Why do you think it is that so many people continue to claim that the Mozilla suit was "cancelled" when the Mozilla foundation has just spent several years upgrading the suite to a new code-base which breaks the suite from a single executable into stand-alone applications?

      Why do you think this caught people so off-guard, given that the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to do so several years ago, and it has been clearly stated on the development roadmap for 2 or 3 years? What could you have done to be more clear?

      • not release alphas and betas for a product they supposedly never intended to release?

      • Re:Two questions spring to mind: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kollivier ( 449524 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @04:39PM (#11946523)
        Why do you think this caught people so off-guard, given that the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to do so several years ago, and it has been clearly stated on the development roadmap for 2 or 3 years? What could you have done to be more clear?

        If it was stated on the roadmap 2 or 3 years ago that there would be no Mozilla 1.8, then why was it a discussion issue just a month or so back? It certainly seems like someone in the Mozilla dev crew didn't know as an absolute fact that there'd be no Mozilla 1.8, and if their own developers didn't know, how can you fault average users for not realizing it?

        Yeah, people knew it would stop being supported, but I think they just thought they'd get a little warning beforehand. After all, what were all those people testing, then? The "backend" of Mozilla? Was this made clear to them? Did they realize they were testing software that would never be officially released? If they DID realize it, would they have still spent time testing it? I read about one poor guy who actually went through and updated language translations for Mozilla 1.8, only to find it was pointless of him to do so. A little communication earlier on in the process would have avoided all this.

        Criticize all you want, but big organizations would be eaten alive by their customers if they pulled something like this. Microsoft has trouble discontinuing Win98 support YEARS in advance. Mozilla is growing, and open source is a give and take strategy. If the project wants the support of the community, they've got to be willing to accomodate the needs and concerns of the community as well. I don't think it's fair to simply bash Mozilla for their mistakes, but I believe they could have dealt with the situation better than they did, and it would benefit the project if they learned how to handle these situations better, especially now that they're getting the attention of the public in general.

  • What will be the testbed? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:34PM (#11944609)
    Now that the Moz suite is apparent non-official, how will new code be tested? Will there be some sort of "beta" Firefox release for testing? Or a new very minimal piece of code that is a testbed yet not useful to consumers?

  • Funding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ites ( 600337 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:34PM (#11944610) Journal
    Could you explain how the Mozilla Foundation currently gets its funding and what your vision is on the long-term funding for open source projects like Mozilla?

    • Re:Funding (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:44PM (#11944709) Homepage Journal
      That's the first question most of us would ask. A related question: what's the significance of Ben Goodger [mozillazine.org] switching his employment from Mozilla Foundation to Google? Is this just a device to offload some of your payroll costs?
    • Could you explain how the Mozilla Foundation currently gets its funding and what your vision is on the long-term funding for open source projects like Mozilla?

      Furthermore, are there any plans to allow for specific funding of projects... ie, I would like to donate more than I currently have, but I'd like all of that to go towards a particular project (SVG in Mozilla, etc). I don't want to see my funding being used to promote projects that I don't like (MiniMo, etc). Will this be possible? If not, why not?

  • Waiting for the dust to settle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:34PM (#11944615) Journal
    I imagine this next year will be some of the most trying times for the Mozilla foundation as lots of people and companies are going to expect Firefox and Thunderbird to do and be lots of things. How do you plan to handle this all this pressure?

    --
    suso.org website/email hosting [suso.org], no disk space quotas and personalized support.
    • Abandoning Mozilla Suite in favor of stand-alone
      applications will not inspire corporations to
      look favorably upon any F/OSS project that doesn't
      respect stability. The rapid-fire changes made
      to FF/TB, including mind-numbing UI changes can't
      instill confidence in the product, especially
      when bug-fixes are abandoned in favor of glitzy
      UI changes.

      It would be very nice to have a browser suite
      that incorporated the following feature set:

      (1) stability, including timely bug fixes
      (2) patches and/or module updates, rat

  • Names (Score:5, Funny)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:39PM (#11944663) Journal
    What products are you planning on renaming now?

    And if so, what 1970's muscle cars will they be renamed for?

  • Brother? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do you have a brother named Sue?

  • Consider affect on large corp customers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:46PM (#11944728)
    Prior to making the decision to not release a final 1.8 version of the Mozilla Suite, did you analyze the affect this would have on large corporate customers doing internal deployments? Although we are small, I work with some fairly large entities who are using 1.4/1.7 for internal deployments (>10,000 seats in one case) and were expecting there is be a 1.8 final - even if that was the last one.

    Does this decision to drop Suite 1.8 in mid-stream as it were affect the credibility of Mozilla Foundation in the long run?

    sPh

  • Composer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by krewemaynard ( 665044 ) <krewemaynard@noSpAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:47PM (#11944733)
    Composer is the only reason I keep the Mozilla suite around now. Will it be a standalone product? A Firefox extension like ChatZilla?

  • Browser of choice? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:47PM (#11944739) Homepage Journal
    So, what do YOU use on the desktop? Firefox and Thunderbird, Mozilla Suite, Internet Explorer and Outlook, Opera and Eudora?

  • Calendar (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <.ten.pbp. .ta. .maps.> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:47PM (#11944740)
    Are there any more plans to put weight behind the calendaring solution?

    I know that Sunbird exists and there's now Lightning [mozilla.org] but the project details are quite vague. The Mozilla Suite could benefit greatly from a fully functional calendar, especially in the small business realm.

  • Security Updates (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mr. Sketch ( 111112 ) * <`mister.sketch' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:54PM (#11944804)
    What are the plans for incremental security updates to the Firefox suite? Currently we only get a new release of Firefox that has to be reinstalled. Are there plans to allow small security patches to be applied without having to reinstall the whole application?

  • Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)

    by m50d ( 797211 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:55PM (#11944814) Homepage Journal
    As a female with a fairly high profile among the open source community, do you get a lot of unwanted attention from losers like me?

  • Future / Challeneges (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Askjeffro ( 787652 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:55PM (#11944816)
    Where do you see the Mozilla foundation in 5 years?

    What types of new projects are the Foundation considering?

    Why should the average consumer use Mozilla software over Microsoft's offerings?

    What is Mozilla's greatest challenge in getting the average PC user to utilize their software?

  • Corporate-scale Firefox usage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tuxedo Jack ( 648130 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:55PM (#11944825) Homepage
    Given how easy it is to deploy Firefox across a campus (load it into a Ghost loadset, then deploy in your next periodic reclone), why, in your opinion, are medium-to-large companies loathe to deploy anything but IE, especially given the tendencies of employees to use office machines for distinctly non-work purposes, which often leads to malware infections?
    • I'd like to add that Clemson University has Mozilla 1.7.3 on its Standard Lab Image which is cloned to over 1000 machines so it seems that Matt (Matt Cantrell, who manages the lab image) has no problem doing this. Right now CLUG is working on getting OpenOffice deployed but Mozilla works just fine saving all its settings to each users' network directory.

      The CpSc Dept. opted to put Firefox in its lab image and I'd image that this will spread to SLI once Mozilla stops updating.

  • Raising the bar (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Grip3n ( 470031 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:58PM (#11944878) Homepage
    Clearly the fact that Microsoft had a monopoly on the browser market reared its ugly head; we haven't seen any improvements to IE for around 5 years. However, as soon as the hint of competition comes, MS is back on their feet.

    Now that MS has put people back on their IE development team, it seems inevitable that IE will soon have the same features that Firefox does: tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, 24-bit PNG support, etc. What is the Mozilla Foundation's move to keep people excited about installing Firefox over being content with IE? Many of my friends who are less than computer savvy are more than content staying with what Windows already has unless there are some compelling reasons to switch. Firefox at the moment has those reasons in spades, but a quick tune-up to IE would undermine Firefox's natural advances.

    In short: how are you planning to keep Firefox ahead of the curve?
    • IE with 24-bit png support... Hell has frozen over?

      But what we REALLY should be asking is why IE Bloatware sucks less memory than Firefox. Needs a fix, guys.

    • Re:Raising the bar (Score:3, Informative)

      by pla ( 258480 )
      In short: how are you planning to keep Firefox ahead of the curve?

      Simply by not supporting Active-(e)X(ploits)?

      By leaving in the "dom.disable_window_open_feature.blah" options, one of the single best reasons to use Moz/FF? (hijack the context menu? I think not! Resize or move my window to appear how you think it should look on your sad little 800x600 (or worse, your envy-inducing 1920x1200) display, when most of us use a 1280x1024 or 1024x786 resolution? Nope!).

      By continuing to offer and improve p
      • You describe several good reasons why Mozilla will always be more secure than IE. But here's the big one: it's open source. Whatever the financial limitations of the OS model, it's a nice way to get a lot of people checking the integrity of your code. With IE, nobody hears about exploits until they appear in the wild.

  • Competing with IE7 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:05PM (#11944940) Homepage
    The new Internet Explorer is coming (at some point). Regardless of ones affinity or lack-there-of for the current iteration of IE, IE7 is sure to hold some major improvements. I dare say it might even be a good browser.

    Does Mozilla have a plan of any form for weathering IE7's release? With the practice of bundling the browser with the OS, how on earth can Mozilla compete (assuming IE7 holds the major feature enhancements that it needs so badly)?

  • Humor (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fr1kk ( 810571 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:11PM (#11945006) Homepage
    How is the overall morale of the devlopment team as far as being able to kid around and have fun? One example I can think of is about:mozilla in mozilla or firefox. It is obviously a pun of some kind, or an inside joke. I think it boils down to: As the projects get bigger and more professional do you see a difference in the team's ability to "have fun" with the software, or is there more concern for the need to "act professional"?

  • Can we continue to increase usage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brandonp ( 126 ) * <brandon@petersen.gmail@com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:13PM (#11945031) Homepage
    After considering two developments:

    1) The increased usage of Mozilla/Firefox browsers has seemed to be flattening recently, although still growing.
    2) It is rumored that Internet Explorer 7 Beta will be released this summer. This would appear to steal some thunder from Mozilla & Firefox browsers.

    What can be done to make sure that Mozilla and Firefox browsers will continue to reach and surpass the 10% usage point? How can the community deal with the probable hype that would be generated around the release of a Internet Explorer 7 Beta?
    • Yep I agree with you a hundred percent. We are less than a year away from google getting the major smack down when they incorporate msn search into windows
      and the browser. The only way out of this problem is for google to push firefox hard and hope for some huge uptake. The firefox team needs to concentrate really hard on making it easy to build, use , deploy
      xul apps. The platform must be leveraged if not firefox and google are gonna go down in flames just as those before them have.
    • Actually, the usage is not flattening. The growth curve used to be exponential, and now it is nearly linear. That's a slowdown in the growth, but the number of new users the browsers are attacting per month has been nearly constant since around the time Firefox 1.0 was released.
  • ...based browsing, it appears that security has become more of an issue in direct proportion. What security issues have come as a surprise for you? The growth of Mozilla specific exploits, the lack thereof? Et cetera.

  • Embedding (and Mac!) Support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kollivier ( 449524 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:19PM (#11945081)
    Dear Ms. Baker,

    I'm one of the core developers on wxMozilla, and for some time I've been wondering how exactly the GRE / Gecko SDK fits into the overall Mozilla framework and roadmap. I have two questions that center around that issue.

    First, the current Mozilla communication issues are especially confusing for embedders, because, for example, the GRE has traditionally used the same numbering scheme as the Mozilla Suite. (i.e. there's not going to be a Mozilla 1.8, but what does that mean for GRE 1.8?) Furthermore, there's no roadmap for the GRE, so it's hard to tell where it's going or what the priorities are. So could you comment on what you see as the future of the GRE and Gecko SDK as Mozilla products?

    I have one more related question, because I'm a Mac user. ;-) I noticed the hiring of Josh Aas to the Mozilla Foundation and a commitment to improving Mac support, which I was very excited to hear about, and I was wondering if this includes improving the embedding libraries on Mac? (Modern Mac apps have significant troubles with the current embedding libs, which are geared towards OS 8/9 apps.) I realize this is open source, and I'm certainly willing to help in any efforts towards this end (and have already made headway towards some patches), but I would need some help and support from the Mozilla project to make this real.

    Thanks for taking some time out to read and respond to these issues!
  • With Firefox taking a very large market share since it's release and Mozilla suite being cut back, what are you planning to do next?

    Mozilla is becoming a name (as well as firefox) people trust, will you be taking advantage of this and exploring other areas of Internet access software?

  • libgecko? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Compenguin ( 175952 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:24PM (#11945140)
    Now that seamonkey has being discontinued are there any plans to release a libgecko/libgre type package that the aviary products can link against and that the embedders (e.g. yelp/galeon/epiphany) can link agianst?
  • Mitch,

    Specific to Web Application development:

    Many MS Access and VB developers (specifically) are attempting to move to rich client Web apps.

    One of the problems we are encountering in working with FireFox is that we cannot set the focus to any element we want. In my case, I want to set the focus to any valid DIV on the page. In the MS IDEs this is possible and very useful.

    Here are a couple of products that are attempting to do grid functions that do not work in Firefox because it appears that FireFox

  • How does MoFo see the Community's role? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by guanxi ( 216397 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:31PM (#11945210)
    Repeatedly, I see that members of the 'community' have
    expectations of the Mozilla Foundation that aren't met. MoFo and
    the community seem to perceive their respective roles and
    responsibilities completely differently. I'm hoping you can
    help bring together the two perspectives.

    Many members of the 'community' seem to expect management and
    development of the various projects to be as open as the code,
    and they often complain that MoFo makes decisions without
    consulting, warning or even notifying the community.

    Examples include the decision to release Firefox 1.0 based on Moz
    1.7 instead of 1.8, the decision to stop MoFo development of
    Mozilla Application Suite, and the business relationship that
    makes Google the home page.

    On a smaller scale, in my limited experience I've seen some
    community requests and patches ignored or dismissed summarily,
    though I've seen some accepted and/or discussed.

    I don't know that MoFo's approach toward the community is good or
    bad -- I can imagine the limitations of interacting with so many
    people -- but at least expectations should be clarified. I've
    been participating for over four years and I'm still not sure what
    to expect. It's difficult to contribute if you don't know where
    help is desired or needed. Finding out in hindsight and seeing
    hours of work wasted is frustrating and inefficient. I think
    clarifying the roles would improve efficiency and improve retention
    of contributors.

    What is MoFo's official, internal policy regarding the MoFo's and
    the community's roles and how they function? What is the de
    facto policy -- how does it really function in your experience?

    What resources are dedicated to community interaction? Finally,
    what can be done to improve the situation, at least by aligning
    expectations with reality.

    Or perhaps I haven't described the issue well: Does MoFo see a
    foundation and a community? Does it see something more subtly
    defined? Something completely different?

  • Gecko engine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:31PM (#11945214)
    Are there any plans to pull Gecko out of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc and making it into a shared library? Currently, the engine is re-implemented in every program that uses it. If a person were to run Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Nvu at once, that can end up to be a lot of memory usage.

    Extracting Gecko out and making it a shared library that the other applications build on could really help in the long run.

  • CSS2 & CSS3 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:37PM (#11945265)
    Microsoft has seemingly attempted to quash web standards by making early and strong support for CSS1 and CSS2 (thus making it a better renderer than Netscape 4), and then all but abandoning web standards in favor of Avalon. Does Mozilla have any plans to push web design technologies forward again, through more complete CSS2 support and CSS3? (and also widespread deployment of CSV?)

  • integration and lost features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by codemachine ( 245871 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:39PM (#11945292)
    I'm wondering whether there are any plans to integrate the existing stand-alone applications, and whether this will even be possible now that the Mozilla Foundation is not doing development on all of them.

    For example, it might be useful to see integration between two or more of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Nvu, the address book, and a chat component. But since the Mozilla Foundation does not develop Nvu or Chatzilla any longer (is anyone working on Chatzilla or any XUL chat app any longer?), this won't necessarily be easy.

    Is there any plans to work with Linspire and other application developers to integrate their work with Firefox and Thunderbird? Will the Mozilla Foundation be doing official extensions that bring some of the suite functionality to the stand-alone products?
  • What's up with DevMo? Devedge has been down for awhile now. I'm really missing stuff like the MultiBar for Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox, and the Core Javascript Reference 1.5.

    (Tell Deb to get crackin')
  • It appears that Mozilla needs volunteers, more volunteers across the board for development work, QA, and user support. Does the employment of Mozilla staff or Google hiring Mozilla (and/or Firefox) developers help or hinder the process of recruiting more active volunteers?

    What I am wondering do the unpaid contributors feel that they are working for free while other people are being paid to do similar work?

  • XUL as a development platform (Score:5, Interesting)

    by codemachine ( 245871 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @02:45PM (#11945359)
    What are the Mozilla Foundation's plans regarding the future of XUL as a development platform, especially as it regards competing with IE/XAML/Avalon? Will you push Firefox as a platform in itself like Netscape tried to do with their browser, or will the browser project and the XUL platform be handled seperately?

    I ask because it seems like many of the Mozilla 2.0 goals would apply to all XUL applications and the platform itself, not just Firefox. I could see two approaches to the development of Mozilla 2.0 - one being that Firefox becomes the testbed that the Suite used to be, the other being that the FireFox team only worries about producing a browser and another group develops the "platform" as a whole. But how would this platform be developed and tested going forward, and will it be capable of competing with Avalon/XAML?

  • Do you plan corporate Features in FF/TB? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Val314 ( 219766 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:00PM (#11945509)
    Are there any plans to make the Mozilla Apps corp. friendlier?
    i'm too lazy to dig up the Bug #'s, but i'm talking about Exchange Support (not via IMAP) for TB/SB, possibility to switch to MSHTML for specified pages (most intranets i've seen use at least some ActiveX stuff, that requires IE and i doubt that they'll recode their Apps just to be Mozilla friendly) for FF (as some kind of plugin)

  • SVG graphics? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:21PM (#11945717)
    When will there be a real effort to support SVG and have it turned on in the builds by default?

  • New York Times Ad Poster (Score:3, Interesting)

    by asoap ( 740625 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:29PM (#11945795)
    I donated some money to the Firefox new york times campaign. None of us were notified when the ad was coming out, so we got suprised when it did. You guys apologized and said that you would mail us all posters if we requested.

    Well, I requested a poster, and I've never seen it. What's the deal with that? Have you not sent any out, or is it because I live in another country, that you have not sent it to me because it costs to much to ship?

    Anyway, I didn't put up a fuss, because I assumed that the whole thing got dropped.. So what heppend?

  • Firefox drive wiping bug took one year to fix? (Score:5, Informative)

    by chris59256 ( 867944 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @03:29PM (#11945799)
    Recently I learned of a bug in Windows Firefox versions prior to 1.01 which was fixed in this version. This bug wipes user's hard disks. I've located 15 users who've suffered from this bug.
    Why did it take over *one year* to fix this serious bug?
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2257 31 [mozillazine.org]

    The bug only occurs when a user uninstalls Firefox. A user who uninstalls version 1.0 to prepare for installing version 1.01 is vulnerable. Why has the Firefox homepage not been updated to warn all users about this fact, and to offer a safe remedy?

    At least 15 people reported the bug. Assuming that 5% of victims would post publicly about it, this would leave around 300 actual victims. Even 5% is probably too high; a 1% estimate would leave around 1,500 total victims. Since the bug only occurs when Firefox is uninstalled, many hundreds or perhaps even thousands of potential future victims exist.

    The bug was reported in bugzilla and discussed without fixing for over *one year*. At one point a developer didn't remove the dangerous code because he said "This is not an acceptable solution to force on all users because some people make bad assumptions and then don't read dialogs." Is Firefox truly ready for "the masses" when developers maintain this sort of attitude towards users?

    (copy, remove spaces, and paste bugzilla links since they won't work from Slashdot)

    Original bugzilla bug:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id =23362 5

    Firefox advocate ivanii attempts to raise concern about this bug (10/07/2004)
    http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/2808 [spreadfirefox.com]

    Here's links to a few people who suffered from this bug:
    1.http://computercops.biz/postp82180.html [computercops.biz]
    Thu Feb 12, 2004
    "Using the Firefox uninstaller has deleted almost everything in the Program Files directory..."

    2.http://www.terryfrazier.com/1391 [terryfrazier.com]
    10/5/2004
    "What idiot writes an uninstall routine that wipes out everything in the parent folder?!"
    "This is not some minor issue. This is a show stopper. I mean, damn!"
    "..every last vestige of that vile firefox has been eradicated from my registry. "

    3.http://sillydog.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4062 6 [sillydog.org]
    04 Aug, 2004
    "After un install Firefox lost all ,MBX Eudora mail files"
    4.http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic. php?t=64 871&sid=2d93836acbfea243769078b48c3eff90 [mozillazine.org]
    2004-03-28
    Also posted on Bugzilla as user "Cy"
    "This is not a minor inconvience. This is CARNAGE!!! Uninstalling a browser and ending up wiping out almost your entire hard drive."
    "This is ruining mozilla's reputation. I now have a distrust of any win installer release by mozilla"

    5.rajarajan.sampath final bugzilla victim to post.
    2005-02-04
    "The uninstaller wiped off, 2/3rd of my programs. This shouldnt be the case, no matter what."

    6. Thomas Passin (original buzilla poster)
    2004-02-09
    "This is DANGEROUS."

    7.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2 42 118
    2004-04-29
    "...I uninstaled the whole directory "E:/Program Files"!! It wasn't very nice for me..."

    8. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26969 9
    2004-11-13
    "All my backups and irreplaceble files are now lost.....Thank you for making a shitty uninstaller....i fucking hate you now"

    9.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2 71 805
    2004-11-25
    "Firefox will deleted all my other program in c:\program files. very unlucky,I did it!!"

    10. https://bugzil
    • All of the points lead to installer issues, not uninstaller bugs. It seems to me that the uninstall problems are symptomatic of installer deficiencies.

      The uninstall program did exactly as it should, which is to remove the installation. The problem would not manifest itself if the installer had not been less than intuitive in the first place.

      So while there is (was) an issue, people were barking up the wrong tree it seems to me. It looks like a communication disconnect.

      Absolutely, users should be protec
  • The Mozilla project is possibly the oldest "Open-source" (in terms of ESR's bazaar model etc) project apart from the Linux kernel itself, and as such was one of the major success stories in the movement's early period. How do you see ending the timeline for the core suite affecting the visibility and reputation of open-source projects in general? And what do you consider to be the likelihood that, without any sort of "direction" from the core suite, the projects with factionalize and fork due to political
  • Is it true that you are developing a bootable browser?

    And if not. Why not?
  • Does MF have any plans to produce a Custom Configuration Kit and Mission Control Desktop capability for Firefox, Thunderbird, and the other now independent parts of what was the Mozilla suite? These new components are being marketed toward end users with no apparent regard for the needs of universities, corporations, government agencies, or other large enterprises for CCK/MCD support.
  • While most web developers already love Mozilla because of its better adherence to web standards, how much will the Mozilla Foundation actively promote, support, and mature the XUL standard for web applications in the future?
  • I've heard of some of your programmers having disputes over certain aspects of the design process. Could you clarify this?

  • Cooperation with GNOME (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jonasj ( 538692 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:04PM (#11947961)
    There used to be talks of a Mozilla-GNOME alliance, perhaps even a merger, to stand united against .NET/XAML/etc. Any news on this [gnome.org]?

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