> And yet, I would hope that Mozilla is not intended to be purely for
> the tiny minority that are developing it. See, that's the Achilles
> heel of open-source software: if it doesn't appeal to a programmer, it
> won't get done.
This is why having Netscape backing us, who can do UI research, market
research etc. and ask their developers to implement stuff that's user
friendly, is a good thing.
> I am sure these are newsgroups for the developers, but damned if I can
> find any other groups in which to discuss Mozilla. Best I can find is
> "alt.fan.mozilla," which has a grand total of two (2) posts, both of
> which are spam. There are no resources on mozilla.org or
> mozillazine.org. There are no FAQs for users.
When the newsgroups get reorganised, there will be users newsgroups.
> I would like to understand it better, and be able to point people
> toward it. I would like to be able to tell people why they should use
> Mozilla,
Please _don't_ do this until we've finished it! :-) It will only create a
"negative user experience".
> like to ask the occasional question myself. Example: I find it very
> frustrating that Mozilla insists upon creating cryptic subdirectories,
> often several levels deep, when I create a profile. And they're never
This is a security feature, and very important. It should be a single
level of randomly-named subdirectory; if it's not, that's a bug.
> But as Microsoft would say, "that's not a bug, that's a feature." And
> no one will respond to issues like this because I haven't learned the
> secret handshake.
Alternatively, because people are too busy fixing bugs. Remember that in
other projects, all this development would be going on behind closed
doors. The fact that it's public doesn't mean the developers can take time
off to answer everyone's questions. Sad, but true. Kind people may answer
them (thanks, dveditz) but are under no obligation to do so.
> Perhaps you don't want end-users trying Mozilla out,
> but without some real world perspective on how the thing performs and
> functions, it will fail. And yes, I know it is never intended to
> displace Internet Explorer in market share,
Yes it is! :-)
> but unless Microsoft's
> effort to turn the Web into its private playground is stopped and W3C
> standards prevail over proprietary Microsoft garbage, Mozilla will
> have failed.
Do you for one minute think that this needs repeating? Shouting "but you
_must_ finish it quicker! It's vital!" isn't going to get it finished
quicker.
Gerv
