toylet [mozilla] wrote: > > Well.. it's pretty scary. But I do hope the developers > wouldn't give up, but stop releasing new features.. :) > > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/10/1554256 >
Its a long read, but I took alot time thinking about this MozillaQuest article that paints such a sad story: If he only knew the real deal for what it is, I feel I have to remind and enlight people here: The thing that irratates me is that he fails to mention that kinds of bugs that are in mozilla, many duplicates, many bugs are old and outdated bugs based on old architectural stuff, many are RFE's, many are not really bugs that an end-user can see a difference just by running the app. Crashes: I dont even experience the so call 400+ PC crashes that mozilla's suppose to have on the PC. Many of them are startup, shutdown, and a crashes when something doesn't work, most of which have been fixed so it doesn't crash mozilla, many of them are not closed out, based on stack traces for a reason, in case it occurs again. I know the #'s are big, but if Mozilla was a browser only, non-cross platform application, the bug numbers would be a fraction of what it is, and been released earlier. Well you can't really turn back the clock, in general there are many more bugs for addin/fixing stuff that is feature work, than just something is broke. Many of them fall under under-lining foundational work, not trivial ui/polish and end-user noticable. The landscape of what a browser should be has changed in the past 4 years too.. before, no one voiced their problems that platform X, OS type x did work like so and so and gosh when netscape 4.x came out all we had was NT, win98, apple classic OS.. and hardly Linux was being used.. I'd say for Mozilla to change its priorities and start from scratch and still be able to manage to accomidate all the changes that have occured in what a browser should be is unbelieveable.. its even build in the other apps around the browser at the same time, which probably has put mozilla about 1 year of work in this area alone. (dont quote me, just guessing here) Now I dont see IE, multi-platform, Multi-OS (-Mac), besides MS basically had to develop Visual Basic, before IE would work on every OS it has too.. how long did it take MS to do that, 3 or 4 years before having a decent version probably to generate API's. If you need something of this size of a project for comparison.. see Beos, OSX (or Next), Itanium for starters IA-64, Windows 2000, (about 4 or 5 years to almost 7 here for Itanium development here for all these).. I threw that in because Intel is creating a new Instruction Set Architecture here, very big task. Mozilla vs IE: Now if you had to make some comparison to IE here, Mozilla is like IE4 in the respect that IE4.0 was the first version of IE that was major/high distribution and full of architectural completeness.. Mozilla is that way after 4 years, or several milestone versions. Now if you compare how IE 4 has moved onward to IE5 & 6, most of architecture has not had any changes, just standards work and that were added, very little in the way of feature work. Mozilla will be mostly on par or better here than with IE 6. Now most of IE works with ActiveX plugins that access the exact same code in any MS app. Mozilla is starting to become drop-in/copy and it will work for your app too, with XUL & XP work. So Mozilla has really done more work in less time than IE6 has to this point. They've re-architected Netscape communicator from the ground, up, the have dropped netscape proprietary stuff, added most standards-compliance, even standards that didn't exist when they started Mozilla, added 4 extra apps, installers, XP-platform functionality across way more platforms & OS's that you can shake a stick at, theme-skinning.. they've created their own set of API's and XUL.. and more features that never used to see in any app, more hidden & custimization and even the ability for other people to distribute, build on and add to Mozilla, try doing that with IE. Not to mention that you probably cannot count on all ten fingers how many standards for layout and browsing have been added since netscape communicator 4.5 release. You get what I'm trying to say? Mozilla is really better off here.. :) Some stuff is slower like DHTML, but I personally dont use any pages that have it.. so *I* dont need this to be faster by 1.0, some people do, I can respect that. These guys do work hard, just some stuff gets overlooked as many bugs are fixed, but sometimes they break fixed stuff, some are hard to verify if you don't know the code or build yourself; like me; and debugging problems are half the problem to fixing the bugs. The other half is knowing how to code with the languages and how to fix it given the API's you're working with. Now with all that.. I'd say Mozilla is doing way better than all these number seems to lead on. I haven't even used nc4.x in like forever, I rarely have to open IE to do something I wanna do on the net. Plugin's are one of those that I usually have a problem with, real player & wmp are mostly the problem plugins, I get different results on different web pages, some problems are probably the website's code. I do occationally point out that as much as I like to see Mozilla 1.0, sometimes I start to see bug problems get worse, stuff an end-user would pick up on immediately, (probably because I use a new build everyday to browse the web, do email with, but not exensively as many people have real specific issues they want fixed up, I have a few too, but in other areas) and to me I start to feel it doesn't look like it should be released just yet. Its a much bigger project than just creating an HTML browser app which many people dwell on. And I can't wait for a new Netscape release off it so I can use my Webmail account in a better browser.. hehe :) Go 1.0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd liked to see a RC2 build time of about 2 or 3 weeks like any branch freeze to RTM as a last minute absolute polish and testing on every functional piece that is suppose to be in for the 1.0 roadmap release time. Its not going to end all to be all 1.0 - best piece of software release ever, and all bugs are suppose to be fixed, *not*, but its a framework release for the rest of the fixes/bugs/updates that need worked on, and has to be *clean for a distribution release*.. and feature work not necessary for the mozilla1.0 roadmap.. -Dennis
