Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Andreas Franke wrote:
> >
> > Ian Hickson wrote:
> >
> >> we have thousands of known bugs, certainly enough to keep
> >> us busy for a year at least (more, at the current rate). What's the rush?
And then, a year from now, we'll meet again, and then you'll say:
we still have thousands of known bugs, certainly enough to keep
us busy for another two years at least... rinse and repeat... ;-)
> > Ok, then please explain to me how it could happen that when
> > Netscape 6.0 was released, mozilla 1.0 was promised for/targeted at
> > the end of Q2 2001.
>
> Where did you get that information?
Well, I was referring to
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-25-Sep-2000.html
(and other people were referring to it, too: to quote just a few, see e.g.
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/141/2000/11/0/4724514/
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:RKuz-ck8F4Q:www.camworld.com/journal/2001/03/+%22Mozilla+1.0%22+2001+summer+OR+Q2&hl=en
[the Thursday, March 8, 2001 comment]
Oh, and I just found this:
http://www.heise.de/ct/00/25/024/
> c't: Wann erwarten Sie, Mozilla 1.0 herauszubringen?
> [When do you expect to release Mozilla 1.0?]
> Baker: Wir rechnen mit dem zweiten Quartal 2001. Die Roadmap
> auf unserer Website zeigt eine grobe Zeitsch�tzung.
> [We anticipate it to happen in the second quarter of 2001.
> The roadmap on our web site shows a rough estimate.]
(English translation by me. Apologies for any errors, mistakes and
inaccuracies.))
Of course, this roadmap paragraph was not binding, always conditional: "if all
goes well", "if the community accepts it" etc., so my terminology was not quite
correct. Sorry.
I know that estimates can be wrong. My own estimates are usually completely
wrong
(sometimes by a factor of seven), so I avoid giving any estimates now, if
possible.
But one thing worries me:
* From an end user point of view, the last few percent of _full_ standards
support (for the promised standards) is not a very high priority. (This is
supported by many, many comments on mozillazine and elsewhere.)
* When Netscape 6.0 was released, I read something like "it's based on Mozilla,
and they are still only at version 0.6". (If you want a reference, see e.g.
http://members.aol.com/G3AIOGuy/Archives/week130.html )
I think that some people used this to support their judgement that 6.0 was a
premature release.
We'll see whether the "they're still not at 1.0" thing pops up again. But if
standards support is ever going to hold up the 1.0 declaration, then something
needs to be done to communicate to the public that this is not a problem for
Joe User. And this won't be easy, if not impossible.
For standards to be successful in the future, you need web developers writing
to standards (as opposed to a certain browser), and for this you need companies
paying them to do this, and for this you need mozilla-based browsers to gain
some more market share, and _if_ there were sufficiently many users who say
"I'm too lazy to try this new browser. After all, mozilla still isn't at 1.0"
to effect this market share, then a missing 1.0 label could cause problems.
Andreas
