On 18/12/2001 at 00:32 Peter Trudelle wrote: >Yes, we care. Don't confuse having different values than yours with not >caring. The feature you seem to dislike so much started as numerous >requests from our customers, users and reviewers. Our marketing >department notified us of the strong demand for such a feature. > Management ensured that it was properly planned, and approved spending >time and money on it. Engineering designed and implemented it. QA wrote >test plans for it, and is testing it. > >One benefit is that users can tell, at a glance, the current site, and >which site such bookmarks came from, much faster than they could ever >read the URL. They can thus browse faster and with fewer errors. >Hopefully, that will lead to more of them choosing our browser, which >means more visitors to our web properties, and more advertising and >other revenue for Netscape and AOL.
That tends to imply that it was an AOL product requirement and not necessarily a mozilla.org one. I can't see any downside to AOL implementing their own feature set but this kind of feature seems a little odd to force on what is intended to be a standards compliant piece of software. Its also just a little disengenuous to say that AOL features are simply the result of customer requests, we both know that most features are marketing driven and that a major marketing reason to have this kind of feature is to highlight Netscape portal bookmarks. That's not to say that there is anything conspiritorial in AOL pushing this feature into the mainstream development rather than keeping it at a product/distributor level but you can hardly blame people for citing it as another example of AOL having what AOL wants and damning all the rest. The only speed advantage gained in having a little icon depends on remembering what the little icon means, which requires marketing dollars spent on making that a recognisable icon. The number of these is actually going to be relatively small, given the antipathy that mozilla.org has to hosting advertising within the chrome, why should (even given any of the reasonable technical objections being answered), mozilla advertise AOL, Netscape, Amazon and so on? Oh yes, advertising is about choice isn't it. Well let the choice be whether someone installs Netscape, not whether they have a mozilla based browser or not. The user has the option of titling any and all bookmarks to make them understandable, an icon unless it will always perform a useful task, just takes up space. Personally, I'd remove the curious existing bookmark icon anyway, it serves no real purpose. Sometimes Marketing is just wrong and its part of Engineering's job to point that out. That may have happened in this instance and you can't go to the barricades over everything and if I were part of a commercial build (not that I'm part of any build anymore :-)), I'd probably agree that it was worthwhile to implement it and I'd also try and get it enabled as a default in the mozilla.org distribution. But as I'm not, I think its a misuse of AOL's position to force this feature onto mozilla.org and if the feature remains it seems reasonable that people raise bugs on it as being undesirable. > >AOL also benefits from having more people using any mozilla-based >browser, since that gives web authors more reason not to knuckle under >and let Microsoft own the web. Obviously, we all benefit from that. > This is why we need to build mozilla for the masses. I've never much held to the view that mozilla is anything to do with browser wars as such and this is certainly not a feature that's likely to win any awards or kudos. I don't think anyone much buys that AOL is for the little guy anymore. It was barely supportable when it was Netscape saying it. Simon > >Peter > >Jonathan Wilson wrote: > >> From what I have seen with things like favicon.ico and other things >> not really. >> Accually, its probobly more like this: >> The engineers and coders do care about the browser and want to make it >> better (no, reading favicon.ico when first loading the page even if >> not asked to by the user with no way to turn it off is not better) >> But on the other hand, we have the managers and marketing department >> plus the people at AOLTW that seem not to care about the product known >> as mozilla and also as netscape 6. What I dont understand is just what >> AOLTW or netscape corp accually gains out of this favicon.ico thing.
