Roadmap updated for Mozilla 0.9Thursday April 19th, 2001James 'kovu' Russell writes in: Roadmap is at http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html So, what caused the crash landings? The roadmap shows several modules, but it doesn't show what exactly happened. The component swaps were discussed here a few weeks ago. Basically, they didn't work and had to be replaced. I also would like to know more about this. Where can we find more details about these "crash landings" ? A "landing" is when some code, is checked into the Mozilla source code. So when someone lands a fix, he/she is just updating the code to fix a bug. In this case, there have been several landings of entirely new components (much larger than a single bug fix) in a relatively short amount of time. This has been causing some instability problems (which is expected for any major landing) that have kept the tree closed and delaying things. This isn't an entirely a bad thing, since we have a new cache and a new image library that has made Mozilla much faster. Alex I don\\\'t want to complain, but the Build bar hasn\\\'t been updated since the 12th. Since Asa seems to be overloaded, could we try that idea where the users submit their comments about the daily builds in a message board or something similar? We can discuss them here :) For one thing, there's a problem with bookmarks, see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76502 I don't have the bug number on hand, but a fix was implemented so that plug-ins are now "lazy loaded." This means that plug-ins are not loaded until they are used the first time, as opposed to being all loaded on startup, which was the case before. This is a great start-up performance boost to those who have a bunch of plug-ins. PSM2 has been in for a week now, and there are probably some kinks to work out with it but let me say that my browsing experience got SOOOO much better with PSM2! Visiting secure sites is a hell lot more responsive. Alex Great job with the update. I didnt know all of that development was going on. The lazy loading implementation is brilliant. Thank you It wasn't an extensive update, since I was just thinking of a few things off the top of my head, but thanks. One more thing comes to mind now: when you click on an email address in the header of Mail/News, the option to copy the email address is now included, which I've been waiting for for a while. Alex http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsquery.cgi?treeid=default&module=SeaMonkeyAll&branch=HEAD&branchtype=match&dir=&file=&filetype=match&who=&whotype=match&sortby=Date&hours=2&date=day&mindate=&maxdate=&cvsroot=%2Fcvsroot Basically summarize that thing everyday. :) Also give a status report on the "cannot delete IE favorites folder" bug. That ones bound to get fixed eventually if we all keep voting for it. :) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22642 I realize that this bug has a lot of votes (thanks to Nemo_NX's frequent complaints about it), but is it really that big of a deal? A reappearing IE Favorites folder is not going to interefere with anyone's ability to use the browser. I would much rather have people fixing regressions and squashing performance bugs. These are things that make people to not use Mozilla as their default browser. Right now there are over 55 votes for this bug; have any of those voters tried to develop a patch? I have seen Nemo_NX imply that it should not be that hard to fix; if so, then why has he not fixed it? Um, because I don't know how to program in c++? Because a couple of patches have been submitted by other people and been ignored? Even though Mozilla is open source, most people would find it too hard to initially understand the code at all? Takes too much effort to fix one bug if you're new to the coding scene? I bitch about it because if people actually paid attention to the # of votes it's getting than it would be fixed right away BECAUSE it's a popular bug. However that seems to be NOT the case. Therefore the voting system is a joke and needs to be removed so that people don't keep their hopes up that this will be fixed anytime soon or would be fixed sooner because a lot of people voted for it to be fixed. Personally I'd prefer that the folder is eliminated all together and not something that should be deleted. We need to have a wizard that imports IE favorites. Why? Simply because I didn't ask for that IE folder to be there in the first place. I also think that it hurts start up times of mozilla as well. At LEAST he bothered to put it in a specific Mozilla milestone as it used to be a bug that would seem to never get fixed. However, it seems to be painfully aware that there are a lot of big problems with the bookmark window as I see tons of bug fixes keep coming in for it. It bothers me that storing and managing links can be such a huge problem for these guys. Maybe it they took a more radical strategy and though of the bookmark window as a "file system manager" from the beginning then the bookmark windows wouldn't be in such a sad state that it is in right now. There's been talk of it moving to the Outliner widget or whatever it is so that means to me that it's going to be totally redone anyways therefore it's pointless to fix this folder bug at the moment. That would be the only acceptable reason why it should not be fixed right now. Any other reason is simply unacceptable. A LOT of people voted for this thing to be fixed and if the Netscape guys really cared about what us users think then they would fix it sooner than 'next year' laterish. After I'm done with college, I'm going to create a page ripping Netscape/Mozilla about all the more visible bugs that they neglect to fix. My main rant would be on what a web page should look like. Should web developers have to support two or more different types of HTML, CSS, DOM... ect? Take for instance that Mozilla .81 is close to looking EXACTLY the same in IE for many different web pages. What stops it form looking exactly the same? Line spacing issues and one major fucked up bug that still pisses me off and wants to give up on these Netscape idiots. It's the proportional font text field problem making those fields appear WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to BIG on the websites. The thing is that NO ONE AT NETSCAPE KNOWS OF HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. They are too fucking clueless on how to do as to render something as simple as a text box!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I mean, come on guys, and get a major fucking clue here. You guys got the website looking VERY close to what IE displays it but these damn text boxes ruining the design of the page. It's bugs; http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43847 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44467 and you'll see a post in there about some guy saying that he doesn't have a fucking clue as to how IE makes these text boxes 'wrap' around these proportional sized fonts. Meaning, they don't know how to render web pages period and that's soooooooo fucking sad. Really is inexcusable. Then I would get into what a 'standard' is. I'm not really arguing the good standards should be ignored but when a feature like IE specific DOM is used on a lot of websites than it's something that Netscape HAS to support as well. Why? Because Netscape has only like 10 percent of all users using its web browser therefore web designers have really started to ignore them big time. I've complained and complained to Steve Gibson to fix all of the little Netscape bugs that his site (www.shacknews.com) has but he won't do it. He refuses to even have Netscape at all on him machine. I was hoping that someone could help him fix that one big problem on his front page but no one has offered to do so. So it goes unfixed forever and ever and... ect. That's the kind of big things that stop me from using Netscape. I'm pretty sure if and when Mozilla 1.0 comes out that people will change their minds about this web browser and support it. That's one reason I even bother to continue going to Mozilla.org and this page to test the latelys and see what you guys are up too. Got a chance to see the new cache & libPr0n turned on a few weeks ago and it was the first time I was impressed with what they were doing. My other main bitches are on the long start up times, quick scrolling of web pages like every other program can to (I use this feature ALL the time with IE!), clicking on a radio button should not change the border of the circle (wtf were they thinking on that one?), and long loading times of going to new web pages(hit a bookmark and see how long it takes for it starts to show up in Mozilla. IE does this waaaaaaaaay faster). So does this more than answer your question? :) #20 Re: Let me try to explain a FEW things better then. :)by Nemo_NX Saturday April 21st, 2001 9:11 PM "At LEAST he bothered to put it in a specific Mozilla milestone " I meant to say Ben Goodger. I also learned an important lesson today. Don't use MS Word to space out text because it'll whined up looking like my last post. :( Sorry about that. Just a small note. Being calm is far more effective than yelling and swearing every other sentence. :) I know you're frustrated, but go get high or something. About the Steve Gibson thing... Hopefully, when Mozilla or NS6.whatever or whatever AOL uses Mozilla catches on, others will fix their pages. I've been doing my fair share of Moz advocacy, and it seems that people are far more impressed with K-Meleon 0.03 (wow!! it's so fast!!) than Mozilla 0.8.1. I guess what I mean is that if alternate browsers based on Mozilla's layout engine catch on, people will still have to write standards-compliant code. This is a very good thing. Mozilla isn't close to being at its end at all... We're only just entering the beautiful DOM and CSS world! Don't know if it's even worth responding to your rant. Obviously you've been building up a lot of frustration, and I'm sorry that the good folks who read these discussions had to hear it come out. Do you think, perhaps, that the issues you pointed out may NOT be simple things to fix? That they may be more involved than you think? If you don't know how to program in C++, how can make a judgement on how easy or hard something is? Keep in mind, too, that you don't have to know C++ to work on parts of Mozilla... most of the UI work is done using web-standard languages such as XML, JavaScript, and CSS. If you know these technologies then you CAN contribute. Losing your temper and throwing personal insults at the programmers is just mean-spirited. Programming is like puzzle-solving; the answer isn't always immediately obvious. You have to work at problems a long time. Sometimes you have to go back and redo things better. Just because already over-burdened programmers may not be able to spend many hours on a complex problem when there are many other issues that might be a better use of their time, doesn't mean that they don't care about that bug. And it certainly doesn't mean that "they don't know how to render web pages period" when the Mozilla rendering engine renders pages more beautifully, correctly, and quickly than any other browser I've seen. (And using MSIE as the benchmark of how web pages should be rendered is a mistake; the only reason many sites look best in IE is because web developers have gotten used to writing incorrect code to accommodate it. Use standard coding practices and Mozilla does beautifully while IE flops. We set our bar higher.) Your concerns about the bugs you mentioned are understandable. But your condemnation of everyone's hard work is not. Please stop taking your own frustrations out on others, and apply them to something more constructive. Mozilla is a community. We're all here to help each other. But temper tantrums don't help anything. "Use standard coding practices..." well damn, tell that to Steve Gibson or all the other almost broke web masters who are trying to keep up their website any way they can. They got enough problems to deal with, you know that? Having a "standards compliant" website takes a lot of work to do. If IE does dthread tricks easier for people like Steve to code, then that's what he's going to do. He made a big deal about it last year and said that Netscape(4.x) was holding him back on doing some cool features like dthread, for example. So he decided to do it anyway without any Netscaope support(didn't even have anything to test with for Netscape, because Netscape 6 didn't come out yet), so now your telling him to redo all his custom made funky code for 10 percent or less of his viewers who still use Netscape. Um, that would be nice in a perfect world but that's not the case. Supporting HIS code would be better because it'll show that Netscape is trying to make life eaiser for the web masters. It's like adding legacy code to a new program like Windows XP has for Win 95 only programs. You support it to convenience people who don't have the time to redo everything. Now does THAT sound like a toatlly bad idea? We know the code is wrong but it's not our job to argue what kind of code web masters should use. Whatever they use(is more popular), is what needs to be supported. If standards compliate code is what they'll use then good for them, if not and they want to use IE only stuff because of better documentaion and it's easier to code then good for them too. Let them decide and not be forced to do it one way(IE only) then the other way(standards compliant) or people(like me, unfortunatly) will bitch to them to fix a problem that didn't exist before. There's too many websites doing it wrong so it's best not to make them look worse to force the web masters to "fix" thier webpage til it pleases those 'standards compliant' people. This is where I think Netscape is really screwing things up. Do you kind of understand where I'm getting at? As for my insults at the Netscape programmers, this problem has been around since like what, M17? Taking time to get a problem right is okay, but these idiots are totally ignoring it. Meaning it will never be fixed. Never! Which is really sad because like you said, it's a good web browser. I see the 'future' tag which means this bug won't be assigned to any build before Mozilla 1.0. Yeah the big non-beta release. The moment in time people can really judge if Netscape 6 is junk or not. To not have that text box bug fixed by then is a real shame because now webmasters HAVE to CHANGE their webpages to make sure thier textboxs don't overlap on to other parts of the pages that it's not suppose to. I've seen this happen on www.stomped.com and they didn't fix it for like 2 months until they redid thier website. Now please give me one damn good reason why they have to do this? Why? Why deal with all the emails that will come in about a bug that's really Netscapes fault? When we are this close to having identical we pages in both IE and Netscape 6, this bug has got to be the most cruel form of punishment for both web masters and Netscape users. We EXPECT better than want we've seen so far. "XML, JavaScript, and CSS" <-- dunno how to program in these languages. Wern't part of my IS program at college. Sorry. Nemo_NX, Do you think diferent versions of IE show pages exactly the same? take a look at http://www.webreview.com/style/css1/charts/mastergrid.shtml and note how much differs support of CSS in different versions of IE. And even to make pages to look exactly the same on different IEs webmaster should either limit himself to the parts of standard that all the browsers (or IEs) support, or do page for every version separately. Now to argument that there are "just" 10% of all web users use non IE. Imagine, your employer gets revenue 1M$/month. And now calculate how much he looses if 10% of potential buyers will be unable to use the site just because it is made to work just on "mainstream" browser. Guess what the boss will do? Either will cut on staff, or finds the guy who will make website work for all. And finaly. I'm browsing web since 1994. I'm developing pages. And trust me - the main goal of web (html) was not to make things look everythere exactly the same (there is postscript and pdf for that). It was made to _supply_the_same_information_ to all! So those pages what are designed to include entry fields within graphics or counts on text height and width to be the same on every computer - are flawed in technical design. Why? Because there are people with bad vision. Because font with the same name in diferent countries are slightly different. Because people use monitors of different capabilities and the size which is good for one is totaly screwed for other. http://www.shacknews.com/funk.y?id=1126155 if it doesn't show up in threaaded view hit the comnments link and then reclick the link I gave ya. Steve Gibson sounds perrty pissed off just like me. Oh, btw, it's down to 5 percent not ten. Is it still worth it? Oh hell no. "And finaly. I'm browsing web since 1994. I'm developing pages. And trust me - the main goal of web (html) was not to make things look everythere exactly the same..." well then what the hell is a website suppose to look like? Why do they have to look different? Why do people struggle over design issues due to browser incompatibilites? Dude, whatI'm trying to say is that Netscape is really realy close at making them look the same. I say it's about time that they finish the job like.... NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #24 Re: Let me try to explain a FEW things better then. :)by Beafsteak Sunday April 22nd, 2001 2:15 AM I've taken a look at the two bugs you mentioned in your rant. It's really not as simple as you might think. How would you calculate the width of a textbox based on the size of characters. By using the widest? By just using an 'a' like IE does? But look how long it's been since anything remotely informative has been posted since that one test patch came out. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I've made my point. You lose. :) If IE does it by using the letter 'a' or whatever then yeah it should be done that way for EXACT results. Eventually. Right now I'd just like to see those text boxs not so huge in height like they are right now. They were talking about counting in pixels in order to get the correct size & format. It's called using a ficken ratio! Whatever size it is now must decrease in width & height by and x percentages. Can't be too hard other than that darn problem of counting pixals. :) The Netscape developers might think they are close enough to the exact size but I know that they can do better than that. I've also thought that there would be an easy way to say "Okay, here's a font. I will add the textbox border after an x amount of pixals around the default number of fonts that should be visable". To me, that sounds simple and then the textbox would then be rendered in the right place. Having the text 'wrap around' the textbox seems like the more logical solution, don't you think? :) I'm not really good at math so don't ask me for specific numbers but simpler solutions are the more practical solutions for tough problems like these. >>How would you calculate the width of a textbox based on the size of characters<< There is a simple Windows api to do that. If there wasn't, we wouldn't have any word processors that wrap text. I assume that a similar API exists on other platforms. I think the problem is caclulating the correct size of the text box using a proportional font, when you don\\\'t know what text the user is going to enter. Obviously, the widths will be different if the user types in \\\"iiiii\\\" than if the user types in \\\"OOOOO\\\" using a proportional font. This is why a monospaced font is usually used. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the cross-platform nature of Mozilla mean that APIs native to one operating system are avoided in favour of developing a cross-platform solution? (I may have missed something here, so sorry if I'm being dense). Alex No, not really. Each platform has its own libraries in Moz which are called by the cross-platform script engine (JavaScript in this case). These libraries have identical interfaces. In other words, to show a File Open dialog box, the script calls the interface method for FileOpen (which happens to be the same for each platform). However, the each library has its own platform-based code. Ah, right. Thanks for that. I figured that things like the File Open dialogue were platform-specific because the native OS ones are used. I just wasn't sure to what extent the rest of it was - for example, we completely recreate UI elements such as tooltips, even though we could use the OS's own methods (a bit of a shame: I like the way Windows tooltips slide down). Alex Seems someone has been listening to your cries, current loading time for bookmark/links has improved greatly. I really think Mozilla should pushout a 1.0 release after 0.9 and not 0.9.1 Mozilla works fine on my measly Pentium 60 with 96 RAM on debian linux. Page loading is as it always has been very good, startup time is acceptable thouh slightly longer than Netscape (both with java enabled), window creation time is still slow, same with rightclick popup menu on pages, GUI has become very responsive. If my pathetic computer can make Mozilla preform to my liking then I'm sure the majority of people using PII-P4s will have few complaints about Mozilla's speed. Currently builds are good, Back and Forward buttons have died again and I've had some problems with losing text when typing here modifying it before i post. Hmm, I find it hard to imagine Mozilla could performance wise become much better but apparently there is still room to improve. After the regressions are worked out and any serious bugs fixed in the currently nightly (I'm just hoping whatever speed improvements made it into todays build will make it into 0.9) then I'll be a very satisfied surfer. Thank you for the great work. I think we should have Mozilla 0.9.1. Adding a mere 5 weeks (tentative) to the schedule will add greatly to bug fixes, tweaks, performance, and footprint. I mean Mozilla is very good now, but there are still areas that I like to see improved, and adding Mozilla 0.9.1 would allow that. Java shouldn't matter when it comes to startup times anymore, since "lazy loading" of plug-ins have been implemented (they are not loaded until first used). Speaking of speed improvements, Hyatt has an interesting fix, scheduled for 0.9, in bug 77002: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77002 Alex I can't agree, yes.. it will make Mozilla even better however the Windows build is awesome in both speed and stability. The reason why I believe Mozilla 1.0 should be released asap is because Web developers could finally start using it's advanced features that will promote Mozilla (maybe this way more people will start working on the linux build :) as a solid, useable browser. Mozilla on itself is hardly known to the common user, and if they hear its somehow related to Netscape 6.. heh. But if they simply hear "Next Generation Browser Mozilla 1.0 Released" instead of 0.9.1 or anything under 1.0 it will provoke a very conservative response. From a personal point of view and I'm sure many other people who come here feel that way it doesn't matter when Mozilla 1.0 is released, we'll all keepon using Mozilla Nighties for the latest and greatest. But fact it that most people havent yet heard of Mozilla and wont until one of the popular sites they visit mention it. Okay, allot of rambling and yet I've said very little so I'll stop here, hope somehow I made my point whatever that was :) "But if they simply hear "Next Generation Browser Mozilla 1.0 Released" instead of 0.9.1 or anything under 1.0 it will provoke a very conservative response." different, response rather.. I know, I know.. I should take english lessons :) Rushing a release would be just the wrong thing for web developers. If it's not solid, if I'm going to have to constantly write special case code to work around its gaps and quirks, then you have made my life harder by releasing it, not easier. The only saving grace of the Netscape 6.x releases is that no one is using them and so I do not need to support them. If I did, my life on the web would be at least twice as hard as it is. If Mozilla 1.0 comes out in a rushed, broken state, then web developers everywhere will rue the day it was even conceived. I don't think this is fair at all. I really like Mozilla, and I think it's a wonderful browser, but it's performance really is crap, even on my PII. I've finally tried out Konqueror (after all the nagging on /.) and I've decided that the performance issue really is a big deal to me too. Galeon still has a long ways to go, but the concept is solid. But until the speed is resolved, there's no way it's going to become the major browser on any platform. Just because you've got a PII, PIII, PIV, or whatever, it doesn't mean you want it to sit there and waste cycles pointlessly. I couldn't believe it when Moz would suck up 100% of my CPU on a regular basis. Things have to be responsive because the browser really should be a browser before it's a platform. I use Mozilla as my primary browser at work, and have since 0.8. I don't have any problems with speed on its own, but I do have problems with memory leaks. It's normally fast, but if it's kept open for a long time it slows down to the point where switching windows takes a minute or more. Any other bugs I encounter are only minor annoyances. I'm also hoping that Mozilla gets a GNKSA (http://www.gnksa.org/ for the GNKSA, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76449 for the base conformance meta-bug) with a 100% score (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12699 for the full compliance meta-bug), since I use it as my primary newsreader. Yes I think 2 of my 3 questions were more than answered by the rude, arrogant, ignorant, insulting, ill-conceived post from Nemo_NX. The answer to the first question is "No, bug 22642 is not very serious. Nemo_NX is just more of a jerk than I thought he was." The answer to my last question is " Nemo_NX has not fixed any bugs because not only can he not write C++ code, but also he does not even have enough programming knowledge to properly evaluate the complexity of a bug." But the post provided a lot more information than that. Despite his admitted inability to write any C++, JavaScript, XML, or CSS code, Nemo_NX still apparently considers himself qualified to rate and berate the programming skills of people who can actually write code and who are making real contributions to the Mozilla project. Of course new questions come up. Like how can someone feel justified in being so obnoxious and ungrateful to the people working to develop a free next generation web browser? Although it is helpful to have people find and document bugs, it does not help to have people bitching and whining; profanity certainly doesn't help any either. If you are unable to write code and you are incapable of learning to write code, then have some respect for those who can. If you want to motivate others to give more immediate attention to your pet bugs, why not offer a reward for whoever provides a patch? I would think $100 would give some of the volunteer developers some more incentive to focus on the IE favorites folder issue; I don't think being an asshole is doing your cause any good. #40 Re: Let me try to explain a FEW things better then. :)by Ben_Goodger Monday April 23rd, 2001 5:33 AM The worst Bookmarks issues will be fixed by hook or by crook before 1.0. P1s are being targeted first. Inline editing in the tree widget will probably be disabled for now because it is problematic. (The outliner switch may make this more possible). I'm fixing these bugs as fast as I can given my other responsibilities and my school workload. Please note that there is only ONE person working on this (me). Keep that in mind. I've already delegated some functionality out to other engineers (alecf is going to be tackling drag and drop for the personal toolbar) while I focus on the window's functionality and performance issues. I know about the outliner thing that you guys want to do and I'd rather see that worked on if it helps out in making the bookmarks window not crash so much and loads a little quicker. With this bookmark thing, and it's something I should have emailed you about because its so simple, is to HIDE or UNHIDE the IE favorites folder. That's it! An option to show the folder needs to be added under the Import Bookmark option in the File menu, that'll say either Show/Hide IE Bookmarks. Since the IE folder will be show as the default, then in the menu it should say 'Hide IE Favorites'. When you click on it the IE folder should disappear and the File menu should be updated saying 'Show IE Favorites'. Add a pop up to say that the change is in affect if you want. The only drawback to this is that Mozilla will still load up the bookmarks slowing down the start up times, but that can be addressed later. :) Now honestly, how long would it take you to do something like this? Not very long, but I can wait till 1.0 for it to be implemented. This is just something that's been bugging me for a long time, as I'm the kind of person who likes ABSOLUTE control as to how I organize my bookmarks. I'm the kind of person who has gotten so use to organizing my bookmarks my way that I can just close my eyes and still be able to hit the right folder and the right bookmark that I want. :) There's a lot of other stuff that I would like to see added to the bookmarks window but I'll talk about that later. Would be cool though to get your take on my 'File Manager' idea. :) One last question that I have is there going to be a .92 milestone? I don't know what the problem is with everyone and the Imported IE folders, I mean, I don't even see it on my RH7.1 Linux box ... geez people.. :) Seriously though, it's a minor detail that I'm sure will get fixed soon enough. IMO, I would rather see more performance work for 1.0, and 'fit and finish' work in subsequent .x releases. Well from what I understand, this only happens on Windows and the MacOS, especially annoying on Windows since you can't get rid IE and the Favorites folder. The greatest problem I had with the Imported IE Favorites (which is actually misnamed, since a live "feed" from IE Favorites, and not an import) was when I was at home: my brother used IE, I used Mozilla, and I did not want to see his bookmarks. It's a problem of annoyance since many people wanted to see it gone but could never get rid of it. I would like to see it fixed in time for 1.0. Alex All you've done is described a UI for selecting whether or not to import IE Favorites (though I think a checkbox in the Preferences menu would be better). I don't see any suggestions for the backend code to make it work. It's probably not the hardest bug to fix, but the developers are concentrating on more severe bugs right now. Alex The biggest problem we have with Mozilla are the bugs, right? Well, I just thought of a real simple minded patch to Bugzilla that really ought to help a lot. I do not know why someone did not think of this before! It is so simple minded! Can you tell from my exclamation points, how thrilled and proud I am that I have thought of such a brilliant solution?!!?! All that needs to be done is to add a text field on the Bugzilla bug form where Nemo_NX can type in a few lines in English about how the bug should be fixed and then when he hits the submit button, just have Bugzilla automatically generate the code for Nemo_NX's patch!! That's it! Once that has been added, bugs can be eliminated in hours or even minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. New features can be added as quickly as Nemo_NX can type! It should probably eventually be modified so that people other than Nemo_NX can fix bugs too and maybe we should not limit it to English only, but those issues can be addressed later. :) Now honestly, how long would it take to do something so simple? However, I guess I can wait till 1.0 for it to be implemented. I remember way back when I posted some things in a Netscape newsgroup that I didn't like about the latest version (M16?) of Mozilla. The reply I got back made sense. Bug the hell out of them to get the bugs you want fixed. Now I have never emailed any bug complaints to the Netscape developers. I've whined and bitched here at Mozillazine, but just to see who would agree with me on what bugs I felt were important to fix because I know those bugs wouldn't take a lot of time to fix. The ratio button, textbox thing, auto scrolling, and of course, the Hide IE Favorites bug that I mention so much. Performance is something that everyone has complained about but I'm not sure there's a specific bug for that huge issue. If there were then it would have a HUGE number of votes, which should really tell the developers where to focus their time currently. Since I started bitching about the IE favorites thing, the number of votes has jumped up CONSIDERABLY. I think the vote count before I made a big deal about it was like around 40 votes or so. After Mozilla 0.81 came out I felt that there was a distinct possibility that it wouldn't be fixed by the time the first official non-beta release came out (1.0). To me, that's something really sad to see still stuck in there for everyone to look at so that’s why I’ve posted my thoughts on the subject. Now the number of votes is up to 64 and rising quickly. My point is that making a big deal about it has resulted in a lot of people voting for the bug which in turn got Ben to respond writing a blood oath to get it fixed by the release of the 0.92 milestone (less than 10 weeks from now! Yea!). :) So even though you might not like my bitching, it has helped out to make sure the things that people really want fixed will get done by the 1.0 release. I think Ben would have the IE Favorites folder issue resolved by 0.92 even if you had been polite and respectful. Well maybe its not worth throwing a fit over, but I mean it IS a problem. I mean would it really be that hard to throw in a checkbox or two when Moz asks you to convert your profile? I'm not sure about anyone else, but I don't use IE, it's just there - I don't have a choice. I don't HAVE any IE favorites, except for the commercial stuff that Microsoft tells me I have to have in there. I can't even DELETE the one stupid commercial folder because it COMES BACK. I mean this is one thing about IE that pisses me off, that I don't even get a choice in the matter, and yes I am extremely anal about keeping everything uncluttered and clean so one extra folder does piss me off. I've even tried tricks like specifying the bookmark folder as read only so nothing else can be added, but IE seems to be able to over-ride my manually setting the folder. Is it critical? No it is not, but on the other hand you have to look at the problem like a step backwards since already Mozilla is importing a thing I HATE about IE. Fixing all bugs is important, but the people who WANT to use Mozilla nd WILL use Mozilla are voting for it right now. I mean if it's a popular bug, that in itself should warrent a person or two being assigned to figure out how to fix it. Well that's my opinion anyway Well, but with PSM2 they broke SSL over CONNECT-proxy *AGAIN*. It's 3rd or 4th time they do that! I'm tired to report this and repeat that this is not working. :-((( SSL via a CONNECT proxy has never worked for me, and I have tried many builds over the past few months. See bug 70209. Quite frankly, the inability of Mozilla to fix such an important bug is astounding. Agreed on the SSL/proxy problem. Luckily I run my proxy as a convenience and can choose not to send SSL through it in Mozilla setup, but it must be a show-stopper for people who *have* to send all traffic through a proxy. Important bug. "Quite frankly, the inability of Mozilla to fix such an important bug is astounding. " hmm, I'm rarely astounded when a software application not able to fix bugs. Oh, did you mean to say Mozilla developers? Quite frankly, the rude and insulting comments directed against a bunch of really hard working developers is what I find astounding. Please point me to one open source project (or commercail for that amtter) of this scale which didn't have any bugs in it's releases prior to 1.0. Oh, one other thing. This was fixed, several times. See bug 31174 for some history. I agree that this sucks. We had this working in previous releasesand it broke. That sucks. I hope it gets fixed again soon and stays fixed. But your comments just uninspired me to go hunting for the fix for 0.9. I think that it would be a good idea to have TalkBack for the build comments. That way we could discuss anything that got missed out of the comments and generally expand on what's been said. Being able to vote on the quality of the builds (thumbs down, thumbs up or thumbs up with !) would be good too (but Asa's rating should still be displayed as well). Alex What is really needed is a list of the major outstanding bugs. For example, do I really want to download the latest build if it can't show scaled images, can't show animated GIFs, can't connect to SSL sites, and crashes on FTP? Actually, yes I do :) But it would be nice to make an informed decision before downloading. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&email1=&emailtype1=substring&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=substring&emailreporter2=1&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&changedin=&votes=20&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=&short_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&long_desc_type=substring&bug_file_loc=&bug_file_loc_type=substring&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=substring&keywords=&keywords_type=anywords&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&namedcmd=stuff+i%27ve+touched&newqueryname=&order=bugs.votes%20desc%2C%20bugs.bug_status%2C%20bugs.priority%2C%20map_assigned_to.login_name%2C%20bugs.bug_id or maybe http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&email1=&emailtype1=substring&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=substring&emailreporter2=1&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&changedin=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=&short_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&long_desc_type=substring&bug_file_loc=&bug_file_loc_type=substring&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=substring&keywords=mostfreq&keywords_type=anywords&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&namedcmd=stuff+i%27ve+touched&newqueryname=&order=bugs.bug_severity%2C%20bugs.votes%20desc%2C%20bugs.bug_status%2C%20bugs.priority%2C%20map_assigned_to.login_name%2C%20bugs.bug_id It\\\\\\\'s not what then original poster meant. The first is a list of bugs with 20 (or more) votes, the second is the list of mostfreq bugs (you may get it through \\\\\\\"QA | Known bugs\\\\\\\" menu entry or this link http://www.mozilla.org/quality/most-frequent-bugs/) We need a list of fresh important bugs that affect the newest builds. By defintion thay are not \\\\\\\"mostfreq\\\\\\\" or have many votes as they happened in recent hours. And it is not the same as blocker or critical bugs as sometimes really nasty bugs are unconfirmed or \\\\\\\"normal\\\\\\\" in the few hours of their lives (until they are fixed, or worked around) Asa\\\\\\\'s page was a great service. I wonder what stopped him continuing it :-( At long, long last Bug 53080 (cannot specify any url for auto proxy configuration) is fixed. Big respect to all involved. That was a major obstacle for any sort of corporate deployment of Mozilla or a Mozilla based browser. My company currently supports NS4 as well as IE5 and would not contemplate Netsacape 6 until the auto proxy was sorted. mm, thought I might just have a look into this \"Apply Stylesheet\" feature that I\'ve never used even though its been there for god knows how long. I found an article on O\'Reillys however I beleive its outdated (placing a user.css file in the chrome dir does nothing) so I was wondering if someone could explain to me a little about how to use a stylesheet for all the webpages you view. Can someone give me some pointer? yes, somewhere along the line the user.css was split into userChrome.css and userContent.css, for applying user styles to browser chrome and web content, respectively. Recent builds of Mozilla have placed blank files of those names in the user directory automatically; I think there have been commented instructions/examples at the top of each, too. Take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html there are detailed instructions there :) Have fun, Fabian. 1.) It doesn't take any longer to write websites that comply to standards than it does to write websites that don't comply to standards. It took me less than a week to switch our *corporate* website from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.0 Transitional back in 1999: and we have a few hundred pages. 2.) Pages that comply to standards and are supported by IE5 are supported by Mozilla. Only pages that use IE5-only features are not supported. (BTW, I have had no trouble buying a book on Amazon in a recent Mozilla build, so any problems with SSL aren't universal). 3.) It takes maybe a week to learn CSS, maybe a month to learn JavaScript properly. They are not difficult to learn. Anyone who does not take the time to learn CSS and JavaScript isn't competent to comment upon #48 Just a friendly reminder that we're not at 1.0 yetby gerbilpower Monday April 23rd, 2001 2:37 PM Yes, Mozilla has a number of outstanding bugs, and I have a list myself of bugs that I pray will be fixed soon. But keep in mind that we're still at least 10 weeks, at the soonest, from a 1.0 release (based on a five week per milestone plan with two more milestones to go, not counting 0.9). Also, sometimes bug reports got for months without any updates or discussion, but without warning it gets fixed the next day. The moral here is that any progress mentioned in bug reports does not necessarily reflect the actual progress of getting the bug fixed. Of course, this is not always the case. I'm not trying to be completely idealistic here, since I've had my doubts from every now and then. So give a little time, wave your hands around aggressively if you think that a bug isn't getting enough love, but don't go straight and immediately insult the programmers since they may have a 1000 other important bugs to worry about. Alex (the NewZilla guy) I can't believe that 1.0 could literally be 2.5 months off. I remember "back in the day" when it was still "at least a year" (try two, them were the pre-Necko days) off. I would (nearly) stake my life that 1.0 will slip at least a few weeks, but we'll see. There's also the possibility that they'll start slapping "post 1.0" onto everything and get it out, but then, Mozilla.org doesn't really do that as much as Netscape or .6 would have been 1.0. Anyway, I fully agree with your post. I trust that 1.0 will be in good enough shape for embedders to use (AOL s goal, evidently; they've already announced an embedded Netscape WAP browser deal with Nokia so they're likely waiting on .9.1, if not 1.0. James ... and you'll see that a few milestones have been added. Mozilla 1.0 will not occur until at least the end of Q3 (i.e. September). To indicate the quality of Netscape 6, Mozilla 1.0 is scheduled nearly an entire year later. No significant new features have been added (netscape 6 had most of the important features) so that's a full year of bug fixing. Yeah, I should have looked at the roadmap. Thanks, I'm an idiot. I was just assuming that there was going to be 0.9.1, and then after that it would be 1.0. Oh well, at least much more bugs will be fixed by then! Alex ... and you'll see that Mozilla 1.0 could be released as early as May. Hmm, I'm looking there and 1.0 is scheduled for late Q3 and only in case "If we're lucky." It used to be May (and of course only "lucky")... When I look at the page I see these comments: mozilla0.9.1 (or 1.0 if we work hard and fortune smiles on us) starts on 20-Apr and releases around 28-May. mozilla0.9.1 (or 1.0?) 20-Apr-2001 23-May-2001 25-May-2001 28-May-2001 ? This keyword-proposal/target-milestone-disposal system will help decide whether mozilla0.9.1, mozilla0.9.2, or a later 0.9.x release deserves to be branded "Mozilla 1.0". Is no one else seeing these three references to the fact that Mozilla 1.0 could release in May!? The table and the graphic say different things: The table says May, but the graphic says Q3/2001. Yes, they do say different things, and I say that the Q3 release is more realistic than the May release at this point. Mozilla is making great progress, but I rather see more bugs fixed. Fixing every bug in existence isn't the point, but there are still a number of oustanding bugs that need fixin'. And besides, the graphic should be more uptodate than the table since we're more likely see a several month delay than see them suddenly jump a couple months ahead of schedule. Alex It looks like the only thing they really updated about that page was the graphic and perhaps some of the text above the graphic. All the text below that used to agree perfectly with the old graphic. So it looks like they just forgot to update the text. Moz 1.0 is looking more like sometime in September. The whole document is the Mozilla Development Roadmap. The graphic you're referring to is just "a depiction of latest thinking on tree management". The roadmap itself clearly states that Mozilla 1.0 could be released in May: "mozilla0.9.1 (or 1.0 if we work hard and fortune smiles on us) starts on 20-Apr and releases around 28-May." Maybe it needs updating, but that's what it says. Don't kill the messenger! :-) Here's the latest info on when Mozilla 1.0 will be released: "The next planned milestone is 0.9.1, for which the tree will close on May 23, and will be released a week or so following that date. Any milestone from this point forward has the possibility of becoming 1.0, and everyone is working hard to get the bug count down to make that happen." This means that Mozilla 1.0 could be released in early July. |