Thanks for your constructive reply!
Christian Mattar wrote:
> So, who defines what "Mozilla should be"? The Slashdot-crowd? The
> End-User? Web-designers? You?
Well, I asked the readers here at n.p.mozilla.general. But I would say
that IE is still the main reference, with addition of mail/news and XP
availability.
> Currently managers (in the broadest sense; this includes mozilla.org,
> AOL/TW, Redhat etc...) do. They think they know best what the market
> wants.
> If you think AOL/TW doesn't want to have a nearly-complete XP,
> embeddable, highly-standards-compliant browser together with a
> fully-featured mail/news-reader, then why do they still throw developers
> at it?
I think AOL might be somewhat less ambitious for version 1.0, although
some planning for change and flexibility in future versions is obviously
important (but 'extreme programming' preaches that this is generally
overdone I think).
> Please don't misunderstand me, I personally think Opera is a very good
> browser with a high degree of customizability, but there are IMO some
> critical features missing, e.g. full DOM support (add/delete nodes),
> incremental reflow, the ability to embed Opera.
>
> I'm not a professional programmer, but I'd bet the current design of
> Opera would make implementing these features very difficult, in this
> regard they're probably in a similar situation NS was before switching
> to Gecko. By implementing this, they'd also make their product much more
> complex and'd be subject to many of the problems Mozilla has.
Opera is much smaller and faster than Netscape 4.xx, and just newly
implemented on Linux. Seems like a sound basis, but it's hard to tell.
> You're right that there are far too many regressions, and many
> developers are complaining about it (just read the weekly status
> report). Nevertheless, I think this is partly also a matter of
> perception. Nowadays, there are much more people using Mozilla than,
> say, a year ago. This translates to more QA -> more bugs being reported,
> more regressions being noticed.
> OTOH, I'd bet about one half of the current open bugs are Metabugs, Dups
> of other bugs, or fixed without anyone noticing.
My concern is, that there seems to be little concern for the reasons
behind these regressions (amount of coupling, tolerance for 'shortcuts'
and varying programming practices). I always must think of the
relentless auditing of Theo de Raadt and his OpenBSD collegues.
But in the end I'm only a spectator, the least counter-productive
position for me ;-)
Bart Meerdink
