Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker Replies 170
Last week we requested questions for Mozilla Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker. A lightly-edited interview transcript is posted below. You also have the option of downloading and listening to an MP3 of the phone conversation itself.
Roblimo: This is Robin "Roblimo" Miller for Slashdot. On the other end is Mitchell Baker, the chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla Foundation. How are you?
Mitchell: I'm great, thanks.
Roblimo: Not just good, great.
Mitchell: Yes, I'm great.
Roblimo: That's good to hear...
Mitchell: You know life is interesting and here we are.
Roblimo: And we heard you just got back from China because we all read your blog.
Mitchell: Ah, yes I did. I really had a great trip to China. I spent five or six months as a foreign student in China many years ago and so going back in the new era was really exciting.
Roblimo: I shouldn't wonder. Well there's a question, let's start off here with one that wasn't the first one and I don't even know if it made the final cut. But people... several wanted to know what browser do you use yourself? (Mitchell laughs) Do you use... which version of Explorer?
Mitchell: I use Firefox.
Roblimo: You don't use Explorer?
Mitchell: I don't use Explorer. In fact I rarely see Explorer... I actually used the Mozilla application suite for quite some time, far longer than many people. And eventually, since our development focus was here on Firefox, I thought I really ought to be a Firefox user as well.
Roblimo: Well, I don't disagree with you. I use it myself. That leads us into the question: What will be the testbed -- that comes from a reader who calls himself Ars-Farsica (laughter) -- his question is, or her question, we don't know, "Now that the Moz suite is apparently 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?"
Mitchell: Oh, that's a good question. Let me give a little bit of background first because sometimes those of us who are deep in the project tend to use... just assume contacts that not everyone has. So the name Mozilla, or Mozilla 1.8 or 1.7 or 1.0, 1.4 has always had many different meanings and that's been confusing. So sometimes it just meant the Mozilla code base, sometimes it meant the application suite, sometimes it meant the platform underneath, and we have... we've been working in the last year or so to try and clear up that confusion and we still have... we've made some progress and we have some work to do. So when we have said Mozilla 1.0 or Mozilla 1.4, 1.7, that actually applies to two different things. One is the application layer, you know, the set of user... the things that the user sees and the user interface and the kinds of interactions that the user can have with the program.
Roblimo: What we're looking at right now on our screens.
Mitchell: Yes. We've also used Mozilla 1.0 or Mozilla 1.7 to refer to all the infrastructure technology that sits below that architecturally, but the average human being never sees and doesn't really want to know about; the networking stuff, the layout stuff, how the client talks to the server; all of those things that most consumers just want to work but are never going to interact with directly. And our shorthand for that set of code is Gecko.
So in the past, when we have done a Mozilla Seamonkey 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 release or release candidate, we have been testing both the application layer and the Gecko layer underneath it. That will continue. What will happen now is the application layer will change from the old suite known as Seamonkey to Firefox and Thunderbird. So we will continue to do releases that test both pieces. The difference is -- as I've announced, I'm repeating myself -- is that the application layer itself will change. So to answer more specifically, we will not be shipping some minimal piece that's not useful for consumers. For us to get the kind of testing and to produce the quality of product that we need to, we have to ship something usable that those hundreds and thousands of beta testers and then millions of people will actually test and use.
Roblimo: Okay.
Mitchell: Does that sort of make sense?
Roblimo: I think so, and that leads right into a question by kollivier -- that's the Slashdot I.D. that he uses or she uses -- and says he's one of the core developers on wxMozilla and has been wondering how the GRE and Gecko SDK fits into the overall Mozilla framework, and you really just answered it, didn't you?
But his other question, which I'll come to now, says, "I have one more related question because I'm a Mac user." (laughter) "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 libraries, which are geared toward OS 8 and 9. I realize this is open source, I'm certainly willing to help in any efforts toward 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."
So I guess what he's really asking is, might this help be forthcoming at some point... Mac support?
Mitchell: Well, looking at the embedding libraries is one of the things on Josh's list. It's not currently, I think, right at the top of the list. I think there's some focus on UI bugs, toolkit-related things, maybe some of the Cairo rendering work on Josh's own priority list. But embedding is there and certainly if either this reader or anyone else actually can be helpful, we'd be very interested in that.
One of the reasons that we're excited to have Josh join us is that he's part of the open source community and understands about revealing patches and helping other people make progress with things he's not working on directly. So that turns out to be a long answer for you.
Roblimo: I'm going to add a question in here that isn't on this list of reader-generated questions, but more than one reader said, "Help, I want to help, I'm offering support." What's their best way to get involved?
Mitchell: That depends on where that person's expertise is and how advanced it is. So if this person or anyone else is actually at a point to write useful patches, then that's the single best way.
Now, of course there's a set of people who want to be involved and aren't yet accustomed to our code or need to learn more about it. For those people, there's another series of steps. Some of those -- and again it depends on what people want to do -- some people find a good way in through the QA process: defining bugs and then doing test cases and fixing them. Other people find a good way in through writing extensions.
And there's a number of people -- since the technology necessary to write extensions is a subset of our total technology pool -- who get a good handle on that and write interesting extensions that catch people's eyes and then, through that, look deeper into the product. If someone, for example, already had Toolkit or Cairo or, you know, Mac OS X experience and was able to just jump right in and do things, that's always the single best way.
Roblimo: By the way, the background noise, that was my dog, Terry, who wanted to know if there's any way to translate Mozilla into dog-ish, but I told her no.
Mitchell: Oh well, absolutely. We actually do have Sparky, who joins us here at the office quite a bit. Sparky is, I think, a little terrier and pretty under control sometimes and neurotic the rest. But everytime the phone rings, he does a fair amount of translation.
Roblimo: It sounds like Sparky and Terry would get along. I'm accused of being flippant in these interviews and not treating people with the seriousness they deserve, but (laughter)...
Mitchell: I know, but part of what we do is we try to have fun while we're doing it.
Roblimo: Well, I always thought that was the point. As I recall, Linus Torvalds' autobiography was not entitled "For the Misery of It." I thought he called it "For the Fun of It." But what do I know, right?
Mitchell: Right. But very often people ask us if we're in this for revenge or to go after Microsoft or if that's what we think about, and the answer is no. I mean, who wants to live waking up... at least I don't want to live waking up everyday about revenge. I mean, we're here to try and do something useful and help keep the Internet something fun and useful for us and have a good time while we're at it. So that's really a part of enjoying what we're doing and been able to pursue it.
Roblimo: Codemachine has a tough question titled "Integration and Lost Features." And says, "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. So is there any plan 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?"
Mitchell: Okay. Well there's a set of questions in there. Let me get started and see how far I can get.
Roblimo: Well, there's a bunch of questions that more or less ask that. So I just threw them all into one, as it were.
Mitchell: Okay. So, it may well be the case that one option for delivering Mozilla products is to have a combined Firefox, Thunderbird, maybe a calendar, who knows. Some combination of products that the user gets and installs only once and gets a set. That may well be the case. We're not sure yet; some people want it, many people seem to be happy currently with getting the browser separately. The goal of Firefox and Thunderbird is a new architecture which allows those products to be built separately, to remain separate products. But that is separate from the packaging and delivery mechanism. So we do have in mind that it might make sense at some point to package these and deliver them together. I think that's one of the questions.
Roblimo: And the other one is...
Mitchell: The second question would be, what happens to some of the functionality that used to be in the suite or the stand-alone applications in the suite? So there is a fair amount of work going on with Nvu. Linspire has been active in funding and promoting that work, and Daniel Glazman, an old Netscape and Mozilla contributor, has been doing the work. And we are in close contact with both of those, so when Nvu reaches a 1.0 level we will look and see whether it makes sense to make it a product. It's a very big job, to take a project, you know, and make it into a product and if at some point it makes sense, if we do an integrated bundle, then we would certainly look at Nvu.
Roblimo: Okay.
Mitchell: I don't think that ChatZilla is getting the same kind of attention that Nvu is currently, at least not to my knowledge. So we'll see, we'll see what happens there. I'm still using ChatZilla pretty happily.
Roblimo: I know a number of people including Timothy Lord, Timothy on Slashdot. He uses and loves ChatZilla.
Mitchell: Yes, ChatZilla's really a great example of how you can write an application using XUL that doesn't look at all like a browser, and it can be simple and effective.
Let's see, there was something else in there...
Roblimo: Well, I think we've...
Mitchell: And the third piece, I think -- 'cause this does relate to the Seamonkey suite, is a set of functionality that exists in the Seamonkey suite that does not currently exist in Firefox or Thunderbird. And that the set of people who are very happy using the Seamonkey suite and don't want to switch because they like some of this functionality.
And so there's been a set of questions of, "I want this set of two or three features in Firefox and why isn't it there?" And the reason many of these features aren't there relates to the core design philosophy of Firefox and part of why we think it's successful. One of the long-standing complaints about the application suite is that it's giant, or it's bloated, or it's for power users, or it's got many features that maybe ten percent of the world wants but the other ninety doesn't. And if you have a lot of features that ten percent of the world wants, pretty soon you have a giant program of which any one person is using only a small portion. So our design philosophy for Firefox is to keep our default distribution of Firefox very slim; to have it be this lean product that encapsulates what most people need. And if you want some additional features, rather than having us include them in Firefox where everybody gets them, we use the extension mechanism. So the individual user can go and get the extensions for the features that you want, and you and ten or maybe twelve or fifteen or twenty percent of the world really needs to be effective, but the other eighty percent doesn't. So the answer for those people is there's a set of functionality or preferences in Seamonkey which probably will not show up in a default Firefox distribution. And those features should be made available through extensions.
Roblimo: So there are gonna be... they will or can be made available through extensions? If anybody wants to take up the ball and keep 'em and maintain 'em and love 'em.
Mitchell: Exactly, exactly. And I could certainly see, you know, it's possible that some extensions would eventually become part of the default if they prove to be really important to a lot of people. Tabbed browsing is an example of that, but until that case, we would use the extension mechanism. We worked very hard to make extensions very simple.
Roblimo: Let's move on to a totally different topic. The most popular Slashdot reader, Anonymous Coward, asks, "When will there be a real effort to support SVG -- that is, Scalable Vector Graphics -- and have it turned on in the builds by default?"
Mitchell: Well, there actually is a real effort underway right now with the development effort and a fair amount of planning and thinking. The question that we've looked at is the SVG standard itself is a giant standard and particularly the new version, contradictory to existing standards. And so we have struggled for quite a while to figure out how to integrate the parts of SVG that we need, given that it's part of the standard which contradicts CSS and various other issues. And so that's part of the reason why it's taken some time to figure out what to do here. So I guess the short answer to that is the work is actually going on. We're actively trying to figure out which part of SVG, what do we do with this giant standard? And we're also in the process of trying to figure out when does it get turned on, or how does it get turned on, but I don't have the dates for those now.
Roblimo: Alright. I'm gonna move on and I'm just gonna take a little bit of another question from kollivier. And this is something that came up -- a lot of the questions that were not moderated up to five, but it was a repeated question. Essentially it boils down to, "Yo, we have a whole lot of Mozilla suite installations in our company." Some of them are talking in many thousands of desktops.
Mitchell: Yes.
Roblimo: And what's up with that? "There's gonna be no Mozilla 1.8 and basically we're screwed. Help! What's gonna happen, what should we do?"
Mitchell: Okay. Yeah, this is a good question. Because any time there's a shift from one product line to another product line, it's a difficult and complex set of issues to work through. And there's no perfect way to say, "We're focusing on what we think is the correct future for the project, the new application," and still do everything with the old product line that makes everyone happy. So one thing we've said for quite some time is that the 1.7 releases will be a long-term supported set of releases. This is in with our history. When we released Mozilla 1.0, we said that it would be supported for a long term, that one we supported for about a year.
Roblimo: Let's define long-term.
Mitchell: Yeah. The Mozilla 1.0 was a year.
Roblimo: Okay.
Mitchell: Mozilla 1.4 was our next long-term supported branch, that's been two years. We either just did or will do in the next few days a release on that branch. So that one's been two years. 1.7 is likely to be in that range. And by supported, we mean maintenance and security releases as needed. Plus, we will maintain all of the infrastructure for that product as we always have. This is not the development of needed things on 1.7 and stopping. New feature work will not be occurring on the 1.7 branch. Security and maintenance releases that that customer base needs are part of the plan of record.
Roblimo: Will you consider extending it beyond two years, considering the level of enterprise penetration there is?
Mitchell: We would certainly consider that. It depends on who's still using it two years from now, which distributors are interested in it, and what kind of support they choose to give.
But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes. The things that are different in our case are, well, certainly 1.7 will be supported for some time. Anyone who's actually interested in that branch, 1.7, and what happens to it is welcome to get involved. Now of course, many enterprises do not want to get involved in that, they want someone else to do that. And there certainly are some people who are distributing, particularly in the Linux side, 1.7, who may well choose to maintain and provide support beyond that. Within that several-year time frame, if customers are interested in new features and maintenance, they should look at the new products and think about a migration strategy.
So we recognize that someone using the suite might well want to stay with that suite forever. At the same time, we cannot develop the application suite and the new product lines forever, and do so effectively. So we have new products, which have been well received. We have a commitment to provide some support and we've been working with a key set of early adopters on a migration plan and looking at their issues to see, "Are there any issues with migrating?"
Roblimo: Okay, that should help them out. But right now we're saying two years, maybe if there's a user base that needs it, more, if it's appropriate. That sound about right?
Mitchell: Yeah. I would say that on a timeline, we continue to evaluate who's using things, how many people are out there, what do they really need.
Roblimo: Okay. Let's go on to this one here. I'm not going to read this whole question, the guy has a lot of citations in "Firefox drive-wiping bug took one year to fix?" from user chris59256. "Recently," he says, "I learned of a bug in Windows Firefox versions prior to 1.01 which was fixed in this version. This bug wipes users' 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?"
I'll give you one more paragraph, a short one: "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 offer a safe remedy?"
Mitchell: To give an answer to this specific bug, I would need to go back and review this specific bug and all the decisions that were made because I'm not following bug by bug, you know, on this issue. So the reader may be dissatisfied with the answer, but the answers for bugs that are serious, of this type... If they're not fixed right away, it's usually hard to reproduce. In, I don't know, however many millions, thirty million people, however many people have used Firefox, those fifteen people got a very bad experience and we intend to fix it. But it may well be very hard to find and reproduce. Now I'm not saying that's actually the case in this bug because I haven't gone through all the specifics. So it may be that. It may be that it happened only in a very precise set of circumstances, with certain configurations or certain flags or certain other issues that happened. In which case, sorting through those and figuring those out can be very difficult.
Roblimo: Yeah, He's got all his cites and bugzilla over and over again but I think the real question came down to responsiveness. He says, "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," and the questioner is quoting here, "This is not an acceptable solution to force on all users because some people make bad assumptions and then don't read dialogs." Now we're just taking his quote, we don't know where he got it, but he continues, "Is Firefox truly ready for 'the masses' when developers maintain this sort of attitude towards users?"
Mitchell: Well, I'm not sure if it is. So one developer has said... sounds to me like there's no easy answer to this. And in looking at it, one-two is figured out. One solution was to do x and it forces on thirty million people a response that might not make sense and might be a bad experience for them to help these fifteen people. That might be the right balance, it might not. That seems to be what this developer, what this quote is saying. And clearly, the person writing in disagrees with that attitude. So I'm not exactly sure; it may be a responsiveness question, it is certainly the case that we are not as responsive as we would like to be in each and every instance. I'm not sure if anybody can be perfect in that regard, but we certainly aren't.
So it's possible it's responsiveness, but I suspect that if it's something that really relates to people's hard disks, it's a question of figuring out what the problem is and figuring out a solution for that subset of people that doesn't have negative implications for a much larger set and then balancing how much negative implication for the larger set makes sense to avoid this problem for a small number of people. I mean, I'm guessing that that's the kind of discussion that's going on here.
Roblimo: It seems to be part of the chronic open source question, whose itch is being scratched. But let's move on anyway.
Mitchell: Well, you know, and that might be it. And if I investigated it, maybe that's what we would come up with. But I don't think that's us because this kind of issue... it's not... that is our itch. So I suspect that there's more to it. I don't think that the developer or our QA folks were uninterested in this stuff. I suspect that there's a level of complexity in here that isn't clear through the quotes and that figuring out the solution and how to implement it and what's the right solution for everyone is not as simple as it appears. I'm not claiming we've done a perfect job here either, because I don't know all the facts, but I don't think that it's just that we're not interested in something like this.
Roblimo: Well, Tuxedo Jack seems to think you're doing a pretty good job. In fact, in his question under the headline, "Corporate-scale Firefox usage," he says this: "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 lead to malware infections?"
Mitchell: Well, our experience has been that there are many companies who recognize that their internal content or their intranet or their extranet or whatever, includes or might include IE-specific content. And that in the past, when it wasn't so clear why IE-specific content is so dangerous, many companies ended up either intentionally or because they didn't try hard not to, with IE-specific content. And so now they're worried, well, "Boy, we're interested in deploying Firefox, now we can see the advantages to it. But how do we figure out what content might not work in that case?" But it turns out that public sites are pretty standards-compliant. There's been a chunk of work done at those sites and many of them, maybe some of the banking sites are an exception, but the vast majority of sites work great in Firefox. It turns out that the private internal intranets aren't nearly that far along because they don't have the pressure of the public coming to them. And so companies go round and round and round in trying to figure out, "I'd like to do something new and get out of the track I'm on," but on the other hand, "What do I do? How do I figure out what content doesn't work and know how to fix it?" That's what I think.
Roblimo: And so starting in about 1997, both Jeffrey Zeldman and I both wrote all kinds of articles warning people about getting tied too tightly to Netscape-specific functions rather than being standards-compliant.
Mitchell: Yes.
Roblimo: And you'd think that some of these companies would have learned their lesson then, but I guess not, eh? (laughing)
Mitchell: Well, there's a couple of things going on. One is that there's a question between, you know, moving, developing new things and standards.
Roblimo: Yes.
Mitchell: So there is, I think, a legitimate issue there. And the standards process can slow down development and implementation of new things. But I think the belief that it almost didn't matter and the use of tools that generated IE-specific content without thinking about it, or generating it because ActiveX was so convenient. You know, those are approaches, the dangers of which have now been realized.
Roblimo: Yes. So let's talk about calendars. EvilStein wants to know, "Are there any more plans to put weight behind the calendaring solution? I know that Sunbird exists and there's now Lightning, but the project details are quite vague. The Mozilla Suite could benefit greatly from a fully functional calendar, especially in the small business realm."
So is there any work actively being done on calendaring within Mozilla, the Mozilla organization or Foundation?
Mitchell: There is work being done on Lightning and the Mozilla Foundation provides the infrastructure support for that work -- both Lightning and Thunderbird. The actual coding and development is not being done by Foundation employees. Our mail folks work with those people. So currently the actual -- I think that question might be about the Foundation -- so the Foundation is providing infrastructural development and support for the calendar project. There is work actively going on, architectural and coding and design work all going on, on the calendar solution.
Roblimo: Okay. fm6 asks... let's talk about money for a minute. Money's always good. "What's the significance of Ben Goodger switching his employment from Mozilla Foundation to Google? Is this just a device to offload some of your payroll costs?"
Mitchell: (laughing) Well, the Mozilla project has always had people employed by different employers. It's actually been part of the stated goal for quite some time, so to us that's actually nothing new. You know, there's a chunk of people employed by Netscape for a long time, and Sun, and IBM, and Red Hat all have employed people. Novell employs people and now Google employs people. So it doesn't actually have a significance to us, I think, that it might to other people as well.
Roblimo: Now let's go to our last question, about funding. 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?
Mitchell: Sure. We generate funds in several different ways. There's the classic charitable contribution, which we receive thousands, and we're extremely grateful and they often come with notes from people, which are very heartwarming, about how much difference our products have made in their life on the Internet. Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.
We have generated funds through some -- what's the word I'm looking for -- directed engineering, let's say with Thunderbird, particularly a set of enterprise features that Thunderbird needed. So funding from that funds some of our developers. There's also some engineering and related work that can generate funds and we have arrangements with some of the search providers in the browser itself, which will generate funds as well.
Roblimo: Which search providers?
Mitchell: Well, there's a set. You know, you can see the setup there.
Roblimo: Actually, I've customized mine so hard that I can't see it. (laughter) I'm sorry! I'm one of those...
Mitchell: We come with a default set of five, and that's Google and Yahoo and Amazon and eBay and Creative Commons and some subsets of those.
Roblimo: And as far as companies that are giving financial support, Microsoft and who else?
Mitchell: (laughing) Yeah, right. Microsoft?
Roblimo: (laughing) Well, I like to end things with a little humor.
Mitchell: But actually, I wanted to come back to the money piece, and money and funding and support of open source projects, because I do think that this is a topic that I certainly want to talk about more in the future. And I think other, you know, many people will, because a project like Mozilla really needs people working full time on it.
Roblimo: Yes.
Mitchell: And that means someone has to provide funds. You have to raise funds somehow. And once there's money in the picture, money is great because we all need it to live on. Money tends to make people suspicious, if there's any money floating around. So I think one of the issues that open source projects, including Mozilla, will have to look at in the future is: given the need to generate enough funds to sustain ourselves and pay people, i.e. the need to generate funds, how does that change the dynamics of the project? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that if you're generating any funds, people tend to get suspicious of you and maybe rightly so. And so I think there's gonna be a whole round of discussion on exactly that.
Roblimo: Thank you very much for being our guest on Slashdot, Mitchell Baker. And I'm Robin Miller, known to far too many people as Roblimo, and thank you all for listening.
Mitchell: Well, thank you! I hope we can do it again before too long.
Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:5, Funny)
I would have thought Slashdot would have left the all important question: "Who the fuck are you and why do I care? [slashdot.org]" in but apparently they didn't
Re:Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:1)
Re:Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:1)
Re:Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:1)
She is a girl.
Re:Oh come on, ask something important! (Score:1)
Seriously, I think people who've been named badly should be able to beat their parents silly once they're able to do so...
Good To See (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Good To See (Score:2)
Oh, horrors!
Where's my
(yes, implied, morons.)
Re:Good To See (Score:2)
That sound have been "sarcasm implied", but I forgot
IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IE7 (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, it would have to be bullet proof from the security standpoint, faster than before AND run on linux. I think Mozilla or firefox is the official future.
Alot of enterprises are still tied to IE, but that will all change unless M$ comes back with a vengenance.
Re:IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IE7 (Score:4, Insightful)
If IE won't support something a good majority of websites won't either thus Joe Blow Computer User won't have any need for CSS2 support.
Re:IE7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IE7 (Score:2)
It's simple - you either support CSS or you make a hard to maintain franken-site with IE6 hacks in it.
I tell my clients that they can get a CSS site for Y amount, or a bastard ugly code site for Y x 1.75 amount.
Given all of my customers are smart, and their customers are smart - it's a non issue. Only little-old ladies with Packerd Bells and eMachines contiune to use IE6. All the smart people are using Safari, Opera, NetFront, Moz
Re:IE7 (Score:2)
Trust me IE7 will still be lame compared to firefox.
Re:IE7 (Score:2)
They're going to have every feature that FireFox offers NOW. You're forgetting IE7 will be coming out in 2006 at the very earliest. FireFox will (hopefully) have new goodies and Microsoft will once again have to play catchup.
Re:IE7 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IE7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IE7 (Score:1)
In any case, if you don't want to think much about IE-only CSS hacks, you can always use "ie7" javascript [edwards.name], then only those who disable javascript in IE will look fugly.
MP3? (Score:3, Insightful)
Way to go.
Re:MP3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I said it. I don't really care about Open Source; open standards are adequate by me.
Re:MP3? (Score:2)
Not really; it's a patented standard that's being enforced.
Re:MP3? (Score:2)
The information required to read and interpret MP3 is publicly available. Thus, like AAC, it is open. Since it is patented and enforced, and since a single company controls the standard, it is not Open.
It's like Java, dig? Java is open; it is not Open.
Re:MP3? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MP3? (Score:2)
Hell, we're posting on Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:MP3? (Score:2)
And then of course you have the ogg developers doing there best to make sure you CAN'T easily find the ogg codec for windows. Worst site layout ever...
So yes mp3 for all its faults remains the best choice for widespread compatibility and ease of use.
Re:MP3? (Score:1)
Re:MP3? (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Requiring developers to undertake the job of warning people from every stupid, idiotic thing they could possibly do comes from the mentality that the smart are expected to protect the imbeciles from the forces of Darwin, and results in the insulting warnings on nearly everything you buy these days. "Don't eat the dessicant packet" couldn't do a thing for anyone young enough to put random things in their mouth. Anyone old enough to read that should deserve whatever happens to them if they should try to put random things in their mouth.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a simple thing really, and one lots and lots of other install builders have gotten right.
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod parent up (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a simple thing really, and one lots and lots of other install builders have gotten right.
Indeed. Most other install builders go so far as to know exactly which files they are installing, and the uninstallers only remove those exact files - and only remove the directories if they are left empty.
Which means a lot of uninstallers leave the program directory behind, with eg preferences files (which weren't installed by the installer, or have been changed since). But it's the safe approach to err on t
Uninstallers should be *smarter* (Score:3, Insightful)
An uninstaller *should* do what the user expects it to, which is just uninstall the program, no matter where the installer put the files. If it's too much work to undertake in the sh
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
A program's uninstaller should never, ever touch files that aren't part of the program.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
1. The uninstaller removes all Firefox-related files.
2. The uninstaller checks the Firefox directory for extra files, and offers to remove them. These files could be search plugins, extensions, etc.
3. The user clicks "Yeah, go on" and the uninstaller removes those files. The problem is when the Firefox directory is "C:\".
People saying "The uninstaller should keep a list of all i
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Say you accidentally install to C:\ - you might have expected it to create a subdirectory automatically, and forgot to check. That's silly, but it's not necessarily a sign of a user who knows nothing.
So you decide that rather than making a subdirectory manually, and moving all the files into there (annoying if you've got a lot of files/folders in C:\), you'll uninstall it and reinstall in the intended directory.
You get to the warning mes
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
1. You install FF and manually change the install directory to %SystemRoot%
2. You Unininstall FF
3. You select the option to remove the install dir
Calling this a bug is like calling "rd %SystemRoot%
Honestly, it shouldn't have even been a question and was just the result of poor research or caving to troll pressure. Grow up children.
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
No uninstaller should ever delete any file that the corresponding installer didn't place there. Period. There's this neat high-tech solution that's been gaining favor since - well, actually, since there have been installers, period - called "keeping a log of what files you installed".
The Windows Installer does this automatically for the developer. Given that all Windows programs MUST use the Windows Installer for their installation programs (which means Firefox can't c
Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
"If a user is advanced enough to change the install directory
You are making the incredibly incorrect assumption that only a knowledgable user can make the change.
Bullshit. Sorry, that's bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
No uninstaller should ever delete any file that the corresponding installer didn't place there. Period. There's this neat high-tech solution that's been gaining favor since - well, actually, since there have been installers, period - called "keeping a log of what files you installed".
The Windows Installer does this automatically for the developer. Given that all Windows programs MUST use the Windows Installer for their installation programs (which means Firefox can't call itself a Windows program), this shouldn't be a very hard task to manage.
The best part is that the uninstaller doesn't even remove the profile directory. Were I to uninstall Firefox right now, I'd have 30MB of crap left hanging around my hard drive. That's larger than the browser itself. Why? Because it doesn't - at the very least - erase the cache on uninstall. Hell, it doesn't even ask you if you want to delete your profile!
Saying that "it's OK to delete the entire hard drive" because the user has to take extreme measures to do it is bullshit. The installer should never even have to ask "should I remove the installation directory". It should know enough to remove all the files it installed and then remove the directories if they're empty. If they aren't, warn the user, but NEVER DELETE THE DIRECTORY.
The dialog box reads something like "Really really uninstall?" and so most users just hit "yes" because they have no idea what it's asking, and most certainly don't connect it with "erase the entire hard drive".
This is a HUGE FLAW on behalf of the Mozilla team and one that MUST be remedied.
Re:Bullshit. Sorry, that's bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Talking of bullshit...
Really? I've seen lots of Windows programs that don't use the Windows Installer.
What happens if they don't use MSI? Do Microsoft come and knock on your door if you dare to claim that your application runs on Windows?
Re:Bullshit. Sorry, that's bullshit. (Score:2)
Yes, they do. There is a special "re-education" wing at the Red West campus. Many of the people wondering around the inner courtyard at Red West are a part of this program. With many hours of intensive therapy, they learn the evils of their ways and are brought back into The Fold. What did you say your name and address is?
Re:Bullshit. Sorry, that's bullshit. (Score:2)
Again, not true. You are probably talking about this [microsoft.com].
Firefox can be described as Windows compatible. Of course it can be - it is trivially, provably true.
Firefox cannot, of course, sport the official Microsoft 'Designed for Windows' logo if it doesn't conform to the requirements. But then, ever since Windows 95 came out, those logos haven't had much effect on people's purchasing decisions for software - at le
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
I agree. There were many more important questions that weren't touched upon that could have been instead of this user error/bug.
If this really is a widespread problem then arguably Firefox or any application shouldn't be allowed to do the install or uninstall. Everything to do with package management should be handled Windows (as is the case with RPM).
Furthermore, t
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of you seem to believe the only "stupid" users would suffer from this bug. In fact the installer made it easy for a user to install to the wrong directory:
Misconception #2:
Users know better than to install Firefox into the root of Program Files rather than a subdirectory, so those who do it wrong deserve their fate.
Th
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
If you installed your system to D:\ (which I often do), your program files also default to D:\Program Files, and Firefox would default to D:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox, make the exercise you desc
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
If the problem is as another poster stated (ie. installed to c:\ instead of a subdirectory) then their uninstallation process of just deleting the entire install directory, is plainly stupid and the developer who implemented it was just a complete, lazy, incompetent fool.
Funding... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is extremely important to my company as we make free software tools and we try to do this with funding from commercial projects.
I don't promote my company on Slashdot and it does not matter - this is a general issue - but we've been making free software since 1995 or so.
It's not an easy combination but we're getting some really interesting work the last year or so. There are companies that spend significantly more on licenses for software than it would cost to build open source alternatives. This creates a market opportunity for companies like ourselves.
It does take quite a lot of courage for a large company to deliberately pay for an open source development. But there are smart CIOs out there.
And yes, I agree with Mitchell Baker that funding is essential. Love of the work is a large part of the reason for doing it, but love of success and fame and fortune are also a big part of it.
Re:Funding... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Funding... (Score:2)
I run the IT department for a small-ish law legal services organization. I like Firefox a lot, Thunderbird pretty well. But we're using Ghost to deploy (which is okay, really) because it's pretty tricky otherwise. Also, whenever I've asked questions about ent
Re:Funding... (Score:2)
Funding is essential for OSS to succeed in the mainstream. However, I'm sure that many in the OSS community would gladly settle for "love of the work" + "a reasonable full-time salary." There's plenty of money out there for the taking. We just need to be smarter about how we go about getting at it. Take OpenOffic
Sounds like someone has a crush! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sounds like someone has a crush! (Score:2)
Get my name right Roblimo! (Score:5, Funny)
Thats Ars-Fartsica, the art of farting. I assure you if you are ever sitting next to me on a plane I will make this painfully obvious to you.
Re:Get my name right Roblimo! (Score:1)
This is Slashdot, AC. =P
NVu developer's name typo (Score:4, Informative)
Integration (Score:1)
Re:Integration (Score:4, Insightful)
goose has been cooked by FF/TB. Too bad.
No common (shared) libraries between FF & TB,
so the memory footprint(s) and load times are
worse than with Mozilla (suite).
No plan for an integrated Calender, no plan
for an integrated Chatzilla, and no plan for an
integrated Composer.
I'll bet that when corporate users adopted the
Mozilla suite, they had no idea that it would so
quickly be abandoned in favor of FF/TB. Sometimes
too much good press at the wrong times is not a
good thing. Too bad the Netscape suite is in
such a shambles, what with the use of the IE
render engine.
When Mozilla does get properly forked, perhaps
some time and attention will be paid to actually
integrating these things back in. Making use of
binary patches instead of the complete download
of a new version would be nice, also. Overlays
and add-ins (like new skins) has also got to be
better that the current FF paradigm.
Re:Integration (Score:2)
Dear Roblimo (Score:4, Funny)
Ahh, open source chronic -- an unattainable panacea. I've search low and high, but what I've found [sourceforge.net] is not exactly what I'm seeking. The obvious [sourceforge.net] place to look returns a 404 error -- not the 420 I had hoped for. I've performed numerous searches, but haven't gotten many hits. Please help, I'm buggin'!
High Times,
Letter
open source chronic (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dear Roblimo (Score:1)
404 errors.. why? (Score:1)
Re:404 errors.. why? (Score:1)
mp3 available! (Score:5, Funny)
Now that will liven up your iPod shuffle.
Re:mp3 available! (Score:2)
MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store, M4A, M4B, M4P), Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4) and WAV
Source: http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/specs.html
Torrent of MP3 (Score:3, Funny)
To lighten the load on the /. image server here is a torrent of the MP3 file.
mitchell_baker_interview_cut.torrent [simplecache.com]
Please edit (Score:4, Insightful)
Also next time remove "and another question is...".
Just do: user questionN, answerN,
Re:Please edit (Score:1, Insightful)
However, the conversational style makes slashdot interviews more like old school interviews which means we get intelligent follow up questions instead of a single paragraph which just raises more questions.
Gee (Score:2)
I can't believe it... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a really important question for a lot of developers: When can we integrate Gecko in a project without (a) it depending fully on Mozilla or (b) including a whole entire of the GRE bundled?
Re:I can't believe it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I can't believe it... (Score:2, Informative)
- A
Aww c'MON! (Score:5, Informative)
"Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri. Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine too, eh? Good, then. Well then as you say we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine."
Re:Aww c'MON! (Score:2)
Gee, don't ask anything about rising security... (Score:2)
I was very interested in hearing about the influx of Mozilla vulnerabilities and Mozilla's direction on security.
Dogish!?!? (Score:1)
/. Interview edition of Firefox (1.0.2) is now out (Score:3, Informative)
I recommend listening to the MP3 recording instead (Score:2, Informative)
lightly editing (Score:2, Informative)
What The Transcript Says:
What He Probably Really Said:
WTTS:
WHPRS:
Chatzilla's (lack of) progress (Score:3, Interesting)
XULRunner description [mozilla.org]
XULRunner is a single installable package that can be used to bootstrap multiple XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird. [http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:Home_Page]
I don't know in what state the app currently is, but I was told it would greatly simiplify the packaging of Chatzilla, similarly to ffx.
Never heard Roblimo speak before ... (Score:2)
What happened to "clear the air" (Score:3, Insightful)
None of that was ever addressed, except maybe a little about Moz 1.8.
Not to mention the format was terrible -- it prevented long questions and had too much nonsense chat -- and Roblimo never challenged her. He was her buddy, not a journalist. Next time, just reprint a press release; who needs an interviewer?
SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird (Score:1)
Since the mail/news in 1.8b1 was a bit unstable I decided to migrate to Thunderbird which feels unpleasant and clunky, just like IE/Outlook, and then I find that changing things is also wrongly/poorly documented and hard eg ~/.thunderbird not ~/.mozilla/thunderbird at the top level, where are the hidd
Bloat? (Score:2)
Downloading the installer.tar.gz files, moz is 13M and firefox is 8M. Not a huge difference. In either case, if you are on a slow connection you go out for coffee while it downloads and if you are on a fast connection it loads almost instantly. When running, ff uses a little less RAM, but again not enough to matter much. So what's the big deal?
If you want an unbloated browser, the dillo rpm is 2
Re:Bloat? (Score:2)
For example, in Mozilla, pull down the Edit menu and click Preferences. Count the number of tweakable options you see.
Now do the same for Firefox.
Which has the less bloated UI?
Just for fun (Score:1)
No, actually it's called Just for Fun [amazon.com].
wait.... (Score:2)
What an odd pair.
Oh, for fucks sake (Score:4, Funny)
A lightly-edited interview transcript is posted below.
Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along (Score:1)
threshold. (Score:1)
Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along (Score:1)
Re:Easily noted (Score:2)
Re:Easily noted (Score:2, Informative)
You don't even need to listen to the whole thing. Just the start:
Roblimo: How are you?
Mitchell: I'm great, thanks.
Roblimo: Not just good, great.
Mitchell: Yes, I'm great.
Roblimo: That's good to hear...
I read that and imagined it was some lighthearted quick banter. Listen the the interview. It sounds like Roblimo has recently taken a large dose of NyQuil.
Oh, and:
Mitchell:
Re:Easily noted (Score:2)
Re:Boy or Girl? (Score:2, Informative)
Is it just me, or is 'Mitchell' supposed to be 'Michelle'?
No. [mozilla.org]
O'Reilly Bio/Picture (Score:2)