Chris Melville wrote:
> 2) Performance needs to be improved maybe 20-30%. I can't say I noticed much
Believe me, everyone involved is painfully aware of this, and we
have made huge improvements in many areas in a relatively short
time frame. The work will continue.
> 3) Its not yet robust enough for something which is supposed to be
> fairly near completion. I've had numerous start-up and crash problems in my
> first hour using it, in which I didn't really try anything very complicated.
0.8.1 has been the most stable milestone release so far, I believe,
but stability improvements have also been high on our list for
quite some time. 0.9 is probably going to suck stability wise,
though, with so many large changes made in the code. Expect better
after that...
> 4) This is my one "real" gripe:
> It ** really ** needs a multiple browser window interface (I avoided saying
> Maybe a sub-project should be spawned to look at this, if there isn't one
> already.
There hasn't been much interest in that. It would need a driver
who feels strongly for it (you?). I believe it could be quite
a lot of work, but on the other hand I believe it would improve
the overall quality of the code (breaking some bad assumptions
etc.)
Personally I prefer the current model for a *browser*. But for
something like word processing or a development IDE I prefer
MDI.
I'd like to point out that the current design does not rule out
MDI-like applications. Look at ActiveState Komodo, for example.
Komodo lets you open and work with multiple files at the same
time and they do not open in standalone windows.
> 5) The build process is horrible. I've never known anything need so many
> tools and emulations to build, and I lost track of all the compile/link
> warnings spat out (isn't this against the official rules?). I can't help
> wondering if there's any correlation with 3) above.
The build process is obviously more difficult than the average
open source project out there uses. On the other hand, you have
to remember that Mozilla is built on many very different platforms,
which makes it more difficult to find tools that work basically
the same way on all platforms, or are even available on all platforms
Mozilla wants to support.
If you take the Windows build instructions, for example, I am pretty
sure that it wouldn't take too much work to make minimal requirements be
Visual C++ and Cygwin (you'd need to disable JAR packaging without
zip; Netscape wintools and ActiveState Perl would probably be easy
to get rid of). Interested in simplifying the build process? ;)
About the warnings during build process. We are also aware of them,
but they aren't high on anybody's list (after all, if it works on
all our platforms then the warning probably isn't that big a deal).
In any case, we have warnings listed on the Tinderbox page so
it is easy to check if something actually is serious. Some of the
warnings happen because Mozilla wants to support a variety of platforms
and compilers, which means working around various bugs and quirks in
the compilers.
Cheers,
--
Heikki Toivonen
