MozillaQuest may be the biggest pile of shit on the net and Mike Angelo is obviously one big loser with a very strange fetish for counting bugs. However that doesn't change the fact that it really does seem like Mozilla 1.0 won't be released until in 2002. Seeing as how the development began in early 1998, it means it will have taken *5 years* to get the browser out. And that doesn't count the development that had taken place before 1998 - including a lot of planning on NGLayout / Raptor / Gecko, Aurora - the sidebar, RDF etc. As much as I hate to admit it, Mike Angelo is right about the project being a dissaster schedule and quality wise.

Choice quote from the MozillaQuest article (he doesn't have advertising revenue, so who cares about putting more load on his servers?):

'Sadly, the Mozilla Organization does not seem to grasp just how far behind schedule is the Mozilla Project and just how buggy is the Mozilla browser-suite.'

Quite ironic considering who's talking, eh?

:)

What makes me laugh about Mike Angelo and his Mozillaquest Web site is:

a) It's like a broken record. He finds very little different to say about Mozilla with each of his articles - it's either "it's got more bugs", "it's being released late" or both. Never mind what new features have gone in or if topcrasher bugs (which are the *important* ones) have been fixed.

b) This guy never actually comments on what it's like to actually use Mozilla in a regular browsing session. He keeps claiming it's too buggy but does he have any real-life examples ? E.g. is Mozilla failing to load (or badly render) one of the Top 100 sites ? Is a regularly-used operation in the browser badly behaving or crashing ? Does the mail client eat his messages or corrupt them ? Not *once* have I seen him actually say that he's used the browser and seen major problems with it. Users consider a browser "buggy" only if they can see the bugs (crashes, bad rendering, misbehaviour) on a regular basis. When I use Mozilla (nightly builds or 0.9.3), I don't seem to have a problem with the sites I visit, so you've got to wonder if Angelo even bothers running the latest releases for more than a few minutes.

c) There's a total obsession with the "1.0" release. This *only* matters for developers really (where we'd see an API freeze). For end-users, it's only pyschological reasons why you'd not use a "0.X" release compared to a "1.0", particularly in such a late stage of Mozilla's "pre-1.0" development as we're in now. It's not as if you "can't" use the 0.9.X releases, which is almost indirectly what Angelo is implying. The fact Mozilla 0.9.3, for example, is already as good as almost every other browser out there (I'd say that start-up speed and memory bloat are the only two bad marks against it now and we know they're being worked on) seems to have been ignored by Angelo.

d) The fact that it's got a parody site at http://www.mozillaquestquest.com/ surely tells you something's up with the "original" site :-) BTW, anyone else noticed that the parody site serves up text/xml MIME type, which only NS 6.X and Mozilla can load and render inline :-)

It seems someone posted http://slashdot.org/articles/01/08/27/0125214.shtml the MozillaQuest story to Slashdot. Luckily Asa's been putting everyone right (have a look at this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20947&cid=2220121 and this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20947&cid=2220179 if you're in a hurry).

Alex

He's a troll but there's some truth in his stuff. I recall discussions about mozilla 1.0 dating back to early 2000. At the time saying that a 1.0 would be a year away was seen as pessimistic (in retrospect it turned out to be overly optimistic). When netscape released 6.0 in august 2000, it was generally believed that a 1.0 was long overdue and probably close.

We're a year past that now and still no 1.0. The roadmap has been updated a few times since. The current one predicts that a 1.0 release is close. However, I'll believe it when I see it.

The current milestone is actually pretty usable. I would call it worthy of a beta and I disapprove of netscape using an even older build for a release. It's just not ready.

I think the mozilla developers agree with me on this (otherwise they would call it a 1.0). In the past there have been discussions here on what is alpha/beta. As I recall beta qualifies as feature complete with a reasonable level of stability. That's mozilla right now.

So, what is the importance of a 1.0?: - Communicates to the outside world that it is ready for usage. Only users who know what they are doing are willing to use pre 1.0 builds of software. - Gives the developers room to start working on a 2.0 version. Right now any new code that breaks current code is discouraged, this slows down progress. - Gives third party developers something solid to build on instead of a relatively stable build with an unclear status. It would be nice to see stuff from mozdev maturing, a 1.0 release is needed for that.

Right now mozilla does all it is supposed to do, it just needs to do it a bit better and more reliable.

My advice to the mozilla developers: After 0.9.4 call a complete feature freeze and take three months to eliminate bugs, polish the GUI, document the project and do some hardcore quality testing. Then call it a 1.0. When close to the release, have release candidates and advertise their existence so that you get lots of feedback.

Realistically, you need that amount of time to release a properly tested product of this size. If you take less time you end up with another "it may work for you but you're on your own" type of build.

After 1.0, plan 1.0.1 (e.g. a month after release 1.0), 1.1 (e.g. 6 months after 1.0) and next versions and allow for similar testing periods before a final release. And for heaven's sake, produce a roadmap that is actually realistic rather than a "we'll see what happens" list of meaningless versions.

I suggest a similar release schedule as the linux kernel would be appropriate: odd numbers for development and even numbers for releases.

Just ignore him, it seems we keep going in circles and talking about the same thing(s).

I believe that the enterprise (Netbusiness) version of Netscape 6.1 (codenamed eMojo) is going to be based on 0.9.4 (but I'm not certain).

Alex

yeah, the nightlys have been sort of unstable lately (although quite usable). I've been downloading them trying to get ftp to work (since it doesn't work for me on .9.3) and it still doesn't work for me, and now it crashes more often too!

I think many people want 1.0 to come out sooner not because they think that it's lagging so much, but because they're impatiant like me and want the perfect browser NOW =)

There actually is a document, I've seen it, can't seem to find it again though. But anyways, virtually all the features that are in now, is what 1.0 will consist of, plus anything in bugzilla marked as mozilla 1.0 (or less). But most importantly 1.0 is the target of API stability. Which we will have to be backwards compatible to from now on. Which so far, has been impossible, with the amount of major overhauls in the system. Things are stabalizing and cleaning up real nice, we should have something that can be frozen in no time. Then one must consider all the silly feature request for 1.0, many of which will probably get bumped to 1.01.

The current plan is that there should be no new features before 1.0. If you see the 1.0 document someone else linked to, you will see that all the landings specified there have landed.

Gerv

Well its definatly perfectly legal to make any changes you want to it. To redistribute those changes may not be, I could not find any licensing terms on it, as an its not included with mozilla you can't assume its MPL, you will have to assume it falls under standard copywrite. So do with it what you want, pass instructions on to people on how to modify it. I doupt they want it working with mozilla though, or they would have released it that way (they want to encourage users to use netscape commercial over open sourced)

I don't know about legality, but since I like the Toy factory theme, and use the nightly builds, I'd really like to get the modified theme..

Simple instructions to make the changes would also be fine.

Otherwise I'll just have to see if Netscape will ever fix the theme...

>There should be something on this site that filters any posts with "mozillaquest" in it

Whoops, guess your post would have been filtered then! ;-) Doh, and mine too since I quoted you! Aaack!

>The title, "mozillaZine" at the top right of these webpages should be a link to the homepage.

Uh... it is. Last time I checked, which was... now. ;-)

> anybody who cares about Netscape should be thinking about how to deal with ActiveX.

Curious what you mean by "deal with ActiveX."

I found that IE6 made my system unstable as all get out for the first day. Now after a few reboots, reinstalling office, running WinDoctor things seem (note - SEEM) to have settled down some. Really makes one appreciate that it might not be such a good thing for the os and the browser to be too tightly integrated, unless the browser is updated only with the os. Gee, IE seems to work best on Mac OS9 [5.1 version] ;-) . . .

As of right now, Moz is almost as fast as IE6, and a lot more stable, on my Win 98 system. Wednesday while browsing a Flash demo I found that I had lost track of what browser I was using: everything ran well, but it was Mozilla . . .

And Netscape Communicator 4.76 is at 84% approval... interesting...

One more comment: the "IE6 doesn't look any different" comments are reaction to MS's marketing. MS is marketing the XP look of IE6, which is startlingly different, and users are disappointed when they see the W98 look. I think MS may be using IE6 mainly as a marketing tool for XP. (Which, like it or not, seems to be a decent product.)

I suppose a Luna theme would be out of the question?

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