Mozilla 1.0 DefinitionTuesday October 16th, 2001Brendan Eich, mozilla.org's Technical Bigshot, today posted what mozilla.org believes are the criteria to release a 1.0 milestone. The posting outlines exactly what Mozilla 1.0 is (and isn't), how mozilla.org plans to get there, and what the timeline to get to 1.0 is. Also, it explains why a 1.0 release is needed, and why it's not just another milestone. So, mister bigshot :) What is this, no new features? 1)Tabbed interface? 2)Link toolbar? These two are going to inpact mozilla more than you ever know! /HJ As I read it he's not saying that he wants a complete feature freeze _yet_, but does want a feature "slowdown" so to speak. Assuming that you're going all the way through 0.9.9 to 1.0, the actual feature freeze might be in effect for 0.9.9 and 1.0, for example, possibly also 0.9.8. If you want to get to a stable 1.0, you have no choice but to implement a feature freeze for all the reasons mentioned in that article and that have been mentioned here. That will mean that some "interesting" features will have to be postponed to 1.0.1 or 1.1 or whatever. If those happen to be features that you happen to want, you will just have to wait for them; that's part of the self-discipline that you need to have in order to put out a stable product. The fact that this is being recognized is actually a hopeful sign. --Bruce >1)Tabbed interface? Mozilla 0.95 has the tabbed interface added in. Therefore it was in bedore the 1.0 spec calling for feature freeze was put in. Sure, a professional organisation will need to put something on 'paper' like this. Some people might have problems with it, but I'm not one of them. Both the Tabbed browser interface and the Links Toolbar are going to help mozilla in a positive way. I'm sure more and more people will start using mozilla because of the new features. I do like new feautes, ok, and maybe even more than others. But hey, I was the person to introduce tabbed browsing for mozilla! /HJ No new features... it would have been nice to see autoscrolling work for 1.0. The lack of it it makes mozilla stand out from other apps and seems inferior. (bug 22775) ugh, I must disagree here .... the middle mouse button is for opening a new window, this is the Way it Should Be (tm), you scroll with the wheel, IMNSHO. Features like this are gimmicky, use bookmarklets for that kind of stuff. Correctness, performance, and footprint bugs should come first. Though I think its cool that things like tabs and the link toolbar are still being accepted, as long as a core group of guys keep banging away at major bugs, mozilla will be fine. As far as 1.0 goes. This last milestone is my "1.0". I'm pretty happy with it, except for some weird form behavior, Mozilla has met _my_ criteria for 1.0, so as far as I am concerned, the 1.0 number doesn't mean anything to me, its more of a psychological milestone and getting the CNETs and TechTVs of the world to take Mozilla seriously, because it is now 1.0, all of a sudden its ready for the world. Never mind that many other software companies would have called the code quality of .9.2 or even worse .6 (Netscape) commercial quality. Because its not 1.0, its not considered good enough to consider for review, or to recommend to friends, or to use on a daily basis. The sooner Mozilla gets the 1.0 milestone out of the way, the better - developers can then continue to do what they do best. Code. .9.5 can easily meet the criteria of a 1.0 (certainly better than an MS 1.0), IMO ... lets just name something 1.0 to get the dumb Mozillaquest guy and betanews guys and all the other critics to shut up and let mozilla to continue on in peace. Who cares what its called, just do it to get people to leave you alone. I don't know why most people are clamoring for a 1.0 release anyway, we all know that regular mozillazine readers will just get the next nightly build that comes out anyway. :) "I don't know why most people are clamoring for a 1.0 release anyway, we all know that regular mozillazine readers will just get the next nightly build that comes out anyway. :)" I will use a nightly on my workstation, but I am not going to deploy one in my organization. I want a 1.0 release that I can deploy, without the Debug and QA menus and extra cruft, and something that is not a moving target. I am all for 1.0, and eagerly awaiting it. Cheers, Jason. I think mozilla.org has already stated that the Debug and QA menus and "extra cruft" will not be removed from any release, even 1.0. Mozilla is not meant for direct public consumption, it is for testing and as a basis for other products (i.e., NS6.x). I'm by no means an authority here, but this is what I know. -jeff I don't know, it won't be 1.0 for me untill a see a few of my favorite bugs fixed. Bugzilla seems down right now though for me to post them :( But there are a few site freezers and quite a few mail/news bugs, that teams seems to have gone to sleep for the last month. I don't know what you think autoscroll is, but what the bookmarklets page has ain't it. I'm talking about placing an artifact on clicking with the mousewheel, and moving the mouse causes the page to scroll in that direction. It's not a gimmick, it's prevalent on any win32 computer with an decent mouse and it's a much easier way to scroll around. Instead of having to move over the scrollbars, you can scroll no matter where you are. And it can coexist with opening in a new window. I don't care whether auto-scroll is enabled or not, since the first thing I do is disable it. I already have the scroll wheel for scrolling, and see no need for dusplicated functionality. I also reassign the middle button to act as a double-click. Maybe you think that's weird, but it works for me. :) Wow, thanks for the insightful post. You know what, you're right. I may not have actually written it, but I was really attacking people who use the middle button for double click. And I also meant to say zontar is weird, but you beat me to it. Autoscroll has absolutely no advantages over rolling the mousewheel like a maniac when you have to travel a long way on a page. Long was to travel? Don't use the mousewheel, use the all new, exciting, never before seen, scroll bar!! Yes a bar, that scrolls. Genius you say? Well it can be yours for only 19.95 Why go to the side of the window when I can just click with my middle mouse button and move a little bit down? I wouldn't have to, except I'm using mozilla. Can you scroll diagonally with a scrollbar? Can you? huh? But that's not the point. You're not going to prove that autoscroll is a useless feature, only that you don't think it is. Fact: other applications have autoscroll and mozilla doesn't. Although it is a shame, it is not relevant that you don't appreciate autoscroll. it will, but developers are somtimes taking the right decision about priorities. And this is certanly functionality that can very easily be reached with the scrollbars. There are way to many other things that have to be done first before someone should think about little gimmicks like that. I don't even know anyone who uses AutoScroll regularily in any application. But I know many people who would like to see Mozilla start faster, be even more stable (a crash in a month is still a crash), does have a mail client that supports at least everything NS4 supportet and cool stuff like pgp. If the few pixels to the right to scroll down are to much for you I suggest you set your mouse acceleration to a higher value. Moving the mouse 2-3cm to the right and dragging with an easy going left button seems to consume less energy than pushing a often not so easy goning scroll wheel. And if you really think you need AutoScroll you'll just have to be patient. Nearly every useful feature will be in Mozilla sometimes but it takes some time to get them all there... Well I for one want the autoscroll. I'm sure if a neat little keyboard shortcut or something that you used in all your apps wasn?t in mozilla you would be a little annoyed too. And just because there is another way to scroll isn?t a good enough excuse to not have the ?autoscroll?. For instance, you can go to - Edit -> Copy but ctrl-v is just more convenient. I use the 'autoscroll' frequently in windows, so I get used to using it, I?m sure I?m one of many people who want the feature. >And just because there is another way to scroll isn?t a good enough excuse to not have the autoscroll. Okay it's maybe not a good enough excuse to not having it, but it's definitely an excuse to not having it now but a little later. And I think it's more important to have e.g. these textfields work better they are really messed up. If there were infinite ressources for development every feature would be implementet immediately but as they are limited some features (like this plattform dependant) have to wait until someone has time for it. hmm.... the touchpad on my laptop has a feature similar to that, and it works in mozilla. it does make scrolling long pages easier. ::shrug:: Stable APIs, and the codebase as a good reference implementation. Would that be the right way around? I have made several pleas for a 1.0 during the past few weeks. Invariably I got a response basically telling me 1.0 is not necessary since third parties can just use whatever is available. I'm glad I am not alone anymore. I see this as a sign of further maturing the development process. Testing and stabilizing are very much part of a development process. I never liked the attitude of leaving the finishing touch to third parties such as Netscape. I also think it is very wise to take a few milestones to stabilize things. I hope feature creep can be avoided for these milestones. Stuff like a link bar is nice but in no way essential for most users. Adding such stuff temporarily destabilizes mozilla and also creates new issues. I agree about the need for 1.0. That topic has been discussed a lot lately so I won't get more into that though. I'll just say that reading the 1.0 document made me happy and hopeful. A few bad usability issues remain, such as bookmark management being *way* too slow to use with anything more than 5 bookmarks. A few bad polishing issues remain, such as the status bar showing wrong messages in at least Mail & News half of the time or focus borders not being consistent with the actual size of the widget (check out the mail & news thread pane when you open mail & news for the first time - without resizing the window and with only a few/no emails in the inbox folder). But.. in general, things are starting to finally look up and I think 1.0 can't be very far now. So... that brings us to another issue here. How about a pool about when 1.0 will be released? Maybe one already exists? I propose as rules that the one who is closest wins the pot. I also propose that the prize should be small enough that we can allow anyone to enter - even Mozilla people with powers to heavily influence the release date. Does anyone have any good ideas regarding possible stakes / prizes? Here's my bet for the 1.0 release date: 14th of April 2002. ob. MQ joke: "Mozilla 1.0 released, behind schedule and buggier than ever!" Close, but not quite. 1 April 2002. Only fitting. But the joke will be on everyone else.
Well no matter how small the individual contributions would be they would end up adding up to a significant amount of money. And as the top mozilla people can ultimatly set the date they want, it wouldn't be fair at all. Now what sounds like more fun is to compile a list of bugs for 1.0 and have a bug fix race, and have the developer who did the most work win a prize, I would be willing to invest into that pot, definatly. Though how to define work might be difficult, total number of bugs fixed would be an easy measure, but not nessesarly the most accurate, so unless we want to go around assinging point values on bugs based on difficulty, just have total bugs fixed woudl be easiest. Daily "thumbs-up" blds still crash one-three times per day (win32). It seems v1.0 should involve feature freeze and gratuitous attention to stability bugs to facilitate acceptance in Enterprise. I would propose that v1.0 would be better accepted in Enterprise if very stable as opposed to full of wizz-bang -- albeit non-essential -- features. It would be unfortunately for formal v1.0 release to be plagued with instability/security "issues" -- as perceived by press/competition. -GA "we're not looking for new features; we want stability, performance, best-available standards compliance, tolerably few bugs, and good APIs. Features cost us time directly (opportunity costs born by those implementing the features, who likely could instead help fix 1.0 bugs) and indirectly (collateral costs on code reviewers, expert consultants, and other helpers)." Sounds awfully familiar. I wonder if the people who thought this argument was idiotic when it was expressed at length here will now begin to direct their flames at Brendan Eich? Why do I suspect they will not? "Why do I suspect they will not?" Maybe because Brendan is not an idiot. Maybe because Brendan does not throw in idiotic "statistics" about an increasing bug count. Maybe because Brendan is suggesting a realistic time line. Maybe because Brendan is not saying that the 1.0 milestone is going to come too late. Maybe because Brendan's post is laid out as a logical, organized document that presents the issues in a positive manner and lays out a plan of action to address those issues. Maybe because Brendan does not insult the developers who are working on Mozilla. I am sureI could list a lot more possible reasons, but I just got a call about a database problem that I have to take care of immediately. So catch you later. but that's just me Unfortunately, many people don't know the difference. And unfortunately many people don't know how to criticize without being insulting. Maybe not everything is good in Mozilla development but not everything is bad either. "Unfortunately, many people don't know the difference." So is that your excuse for why you have repeatedly insulted developers? You actually do not know the difference between insulting people and providing constructive criticism of Mozilla? Although it is good that you recognize your ignorance, you should try to learn the difference rather than continue to make the mistake. So basically you're confirming what I've been observing here all along: FACTS don't matter. You can say something that is completely correct but if you're considered "an idiot" - for whatever reason - that automatically makes your FACTS wrong in this forum. strauss has laid out - in length and several times in "logical and organized documents" (well, posts) - the reasons why 1.0 is important and why it's important to have a schedule for it. He has talked about the need for stable API's. He has talked about how adding new features, no matter how cool, are high risk and hurt the project. He has laid out the resons for this in great detail, only to be flamed about it. The flaming has happened earlier and it happened again now by SubtleRebel. A lot of people on this forum have some serious issues about handling criticism. The minute they see something negative written about Mozilla, they go into defence mode and attack the writer - not the points. They don't even take time to think about if the points could possibly be true or not. strauss is obviously very competent in software development process issues. I think people should pay more attention to what he says rather than flame him because he brings up issues which are embarrasing, annoying and frustrating for the Mozilla project. What "FACTS" did I, or anyone else, alledgedly flame him about? strauss usually gets criticized because of one or more of the reasons listed in my previous post. He does not get flamed for making valid criticism. His posts occassionally contain valid points, but they are buried in a bunch of garbage. If the point is valid then there is little need for someone to post a response saying "your point about *** was right" but there are a lot of good reasons to post a response debunking all the garbage in his posts. If strauss could post his valid points without the garbage then he would not receive the criticism. Brendan's document does not contain any of the garbage that strauss includes and that is why Brendan's document is welcomed and strauss's posts are discouraged. strauss's posts are annoying and frustrating because they are insulting and/or illogical and/or just plain wrong -- it is not because they are embarrasing to the Mozilla project; strauss is the only one who should be embarrassed by his posts. "What "FACTS" did I, or anyone else, alledgedly flame him about?" Well, among other things, the ones that I just mentioned in my post. How added features risk stability and use up resources. There was a lot of flaming over that, along the lines of "You idiot! This is an open source project. The guys who wrote X and Y were not Mozilla (as in.. "internal") developers. They were just volunteers.". strauss gave the exact same arguments as Brendan now did for WHY even outside volunteer implemented new features are high risk and resource eating at this stage yet when strauss laid them out, he was flamed and ridiculed. That's just one example. There are plenty of others - in particular the whole "why 1.0 matters" debate. "strauss's posts are annoying and frustrating because they are insulting and/or illogical and/or just plain wrong" Care to point us to some of those "insulting and/or illogical and/or just plain wrong" posts of his? How about some of the "garbage" of his that you mention? "Care to point us to some of those "insulting and/or illogical and/or just plain wrong" posts of his? How about some of the "garbage" of his that you mention?" I point them out whenever I see them; I am sure that you (macpeep) have seen me point them out before. If you want to see them again then you can go scan through some of the archives, but reading them once was more than enough for me and thus I have absolutely no desire to go looking for them. As long as they fix the bloody textarea, I'll be happy. Mozilla would be 1.0 already, were it not for the stupid textarea bugs. I think they should get the onmouseovers and onmouseouts working before version 1. Somebody set bug 24974 to be fixed in a "Future" version. I think it would be bad if this works in Netscape 4 and does not work in Mozilla 1. Bug 103558 seems to not have a "Target Milestone." I have read comments against searching for favicon.ico because it "hammers" servers during bookmarking. I think constantly downloading rollover images would be a bigger hammer and hit more often. It also makes Internet Explorer noticeably faster on pages with rollover images, along with actually working while Mozilla does not. It will be un great advance if u can take the menu out of the window and add it to the up side of the sreen, to do a kind of desktop eviroment. From Chile Lancer May I recommend MacOS to you? It will be un great advance if u can take the menu out of the window and add it to the up side of the screen, to do a kind of desktop eviroment. From Chile Lancer I won't stop insisting that the majority of 4xp bugs (there are 482 of them see 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=allwordssubstr&long_desc=&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&keywords=4xp&keywords_type=anywords&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&newqueryname=&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time) should be adressed before a Mozilla 1.0 release. Mozilla *has* to be on feature parity with NS4.x. This is particularly the case with Mail & News (Browser is miles ahead of the old Navigator) where we e.g. can't still copy and paste from message headers (unless using the inconvenient "view message source" option), delete recipients with one move etc. I agree with you. I can't understand why Mozilla is going to be released without some basic features that Netscape 4.x had. The lack of support of S/MIME forces me to use Netscape 4.x for email. If Mozilla 1.0 is not going to support S/MIME I will have to start using Outlook. Tabs and Links and Themes and Sidebars are nice but the effort should have been directed to the basic features. S/MIME is already in the tree, has been for some time, and is being developed on a branch. It is very likely that it will find its way into your hands in the next Milestone. If you're interested in the kinds of things that are being worked on but not quite ready for primetime I highly recommend reading throught Bugzilla bugs and keeping your eye on the newsgroups and the branch landing page http://komodo.mozilla.org/planning/branches.cgi --Asa In Bugzilla you can find the bug "Bug 74157 - [RFE] S/MIME support in Mozilla Mail ". In the description field the last meaningful entry is from March and it says that S/MIME would not be ready for Mozilla 1.0. Since then there is not more information. I'm happy to know that S/MIME is going to be in 1.0. This was the only obstacle for using Mozilla for all my browsing and emailing. Good work. #43 Re: Re: Re: Re: 4xp bugs should be fixed before 1.by bzbarsky Friday October 19th, 2001 4:36 PM See bug 105526 After taking a closer look at themy, most of these 482 4xp bugs aren't missing features. So, the "on feature parity with Navigator" task will be easier than what I was thinking. So what critical features are you missing (besides S/MIME which you can already pull from CVS and build yourself) in Mozilla that you have in 4.x? I migrated from 4.x to Mozilla (browser and mailnews both) and have been using Mozilla exclusively for almost two years now. In the early days is was pretty tough without working search and filters in mail but just about everything else was tollerable. Today I find it a lot more than tollerable with Mozilla kicking the pants off of 4.x with key features that I use hundreds of times a day like custom keywords http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html , Sidebar (several critical tabs like the mozillazine sidebar, Search, bookmarks, tinderbox, note-it, and talkback lookup sidebar), Chatzilla, Document Inspector, Password Manager, Collected AB, Cookie and Image Managers, and more. I can live without a 4.x feature or two if I get a dozen new and useful ones in return. The only feature I can think of off the top of my head that I miss is ftp pubulish. Oh, and I miss spellcheck (which I can get by using a commercial vendor release of Mozilla called Netscape 6.x where I can also get IM, plugins and more). --Asa I have been using Mozilla as my primary browser and email client for the past few months. Until I read hwaara's post to bug #90328 a few minutes ago, I did not realize that Mozilla had any way to set the priority for outgoing mail. I figured it just had not been implemented yet like the unimplemented return receipt support (bugs 16241, 69126, 93085 (56377?) ). I am glad to see that it is indeed possible to set priority, but I do not think that the current UI for doing so is particularly intuitive or convienent. Although the UI placement in 4.x might not have been the most obvious, once you knew where it was, the grouping of message priority, return receipt, and encryption options in the mail composition window was very handy. I am not sure what the plans are for UI placement for return receipt and encryption options, but if the only way to set them is via the Options menu (as it is currently the only way to set priority) then the process for sending a high priority, encrypted email with a return receipt requested (not really an unusual thing to do) will be a whole lot less userfriendly process than it is with 4.x email. Is there a chance that all of these can be put into a new toolbar for the email composition window? Who is responsible for making such a decision? Some other features present in 4.x that I would like to see brought back in time for Mozilla 1.0 are addressed by the following bugs. Bug #41888 - Quickfile: 'File' bookmarks to cascading submenus, to file in folders (on the fly) Bug #83803 - Unable to drag from attachment panel to save when reading mail Bug #24867 - UI for FTP upload not implemented There is another 4.x email feature that I used multiple times daily, but can no longer do in Mozilla -- selecting multiple email messages by clicking and dragging the mouse. Now with Mozilla, I have to use a combination of mouse clicks and the shift key to accomplish the same task. Another negative about the way this works in Mozilla is that at least one of the email messages gets openned; when selecting a group of messages with the mouse in 4.x, none of the messages are opened. I have not been able to find a bug related to this. I am not sure if that is because none exists or because I am not adept enough with Bugzilla queries to find it. I' ve been using Mozilla Browser as my main browser for 10 months. As I already said, it's far away from NS4x in terms of features, standards compatibility and STABILITY. I only miss NS4 performance and footprint but that's off topic here. I use IE only when I need to save html with images and on poorly implemented web sites (admittedly a lot of them :( My most missing features from browser are: 49543 Separate Toolbar from Address Bar http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49543 41924 Change how layout handles broken images (alt text) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41924 47475 Need "show-image" item on right-click menu similar to 4.x http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47475 I use Mozilla as my only Mail & News client, since 6 months ago. As I said before, it is far better than NS4 on international support but, besides the usual performance and footprint issues, I still find a lot of key (?) features missing: EXTREMELY ANNOYING 62429 put signature above quoted text http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62429 62870 html message window has no context menu http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98608 62872 plain text message window has no context menu http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62872 61497 can't select text in message headers http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61497 18729 Windows integration for new mail notification (systray icon) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18729 64716 [RFE] Make it so POP users can delete local folders http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64716 Send To capability on Windows Explorer context menu (mapi?) NORMAL FEATURES 61139 RFE: progress bar when downloading mail http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61139 56301 Editor needs spell checking http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56301 43015 Only one file can be selected in Attach File dialog http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43015 BUGS NOT FOUND IN NS4 4302 PgUp/PgDn in editor don't move caret (platform differences) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4302 44823 UI: Thread Pane-Alignment of Subject column (oops! that's not 4xp) http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44823 82487 offline: Startup mode doesn't work-"remember my prev mode" http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82487 > 62429 put signature above quoted text (LINK) Oh god no! If this gets implemented, I want a pref to not receive mail from anybody who does this. :P Or maybe a button I can click to make a big boxing glove pop out of their monitor and smack them in the face a few times. > Or maybe a button I can click to make a big boxing glove pop out of their monitor and smack them in the face a few times. :) I know many users wouldn't want it but I supect they are not the majority. And this feature is *vital* for serious business mail (see numerous explanation about this in the bug report). Mail client can't be considered only as a "toy" for students, hackers and newsgroup readers. Maybe an option as in the good ol' NS4 is the right option. > I know many users wouldn't want it but I supect > they are not the majority. Well, obviously I wouldn't want to use it, but that's not the issue. I wouldn't want to have to *read* any mail sent to me with the quote on the top. I hate having to read an email from the bottom to the top in order to establish context. It feels really unnatural to read in reverse. In newsgroups, I consider anyone who top-posts to be ignorant, and I usually take the trouble of moving a top-posted quote to the bottom when replying so the quotes don't go in a zigzag from the middle to the ends*. But it definitely also applies to email (although I'm less likely to consider top-posters in email idiots, just inconsiderate). *by zigzag, I mean like this: (an email sent by baz@invalid.com) From bar@invalid.com: > > Are you sure about that? I thought it was 5. > > From foo@invalid.org: > > > From sna@invalid.com: > > > > > > What's 2 + 2? > > > > I think it's 4. Nope, it's definitely 4. On that report, there is a lot of good reasoning on both sides. I have already said that, for public discussions in newsgroups and bbs forums, current implementation is much better. But that doesn't apply to many other types of everyday mailing. Mozilla.org prefers to "teach" people good email practices by not supporting a sometimes essential feature. For sure, they won't accomplish anything useful. It's wrong practice to cut off features in order to make users following a nettiquete they are not educated to understand. E.g., the vast majority uses automatic generation of "Re:" + + old_subject out of any context. Just to save time, they don't bother editing the subject. Take a look at most mozillazine threads (including this one). Would you decide to stop supporting automatic "Re:" creation and force users to manually insert subject on all replies?. in our forums (http://www.detonation.org/onIT (German)) we decided to not include any auto subject feature for this reason. And now most subjects are just the beginning of the first sentence like: Subject: I've got... Text: ...something to tell you but sometimes people are creative and everyone got used to these practice so voices demanding an auto subject feature became silent. But on the other hand it's a board and not an threaded forum like this so you don't read the subject to decide if you want to read the whole posting and it's pretty useless. You can argue all you like that licorice is the best flavor of jellybeans, but I'll still think they're disgusting. You can argue all you want that top-posting is superior, but I'll still find it a pain in the ass to read messages upside-down. And there's nothing wrong with "Re: ". It's a basic part of email and netnews. It really is a shame Mozilla doesn't have the PrintPreview. I must start IE or Opera when I want to print anything. And the second one - it's not NN4 thing but it's one of the most useful features in IE. (And watching adding one good idea of IE after another why this is still not in? ;-) What's the Note-It Sidebar? I can't find it using any search utilities. It sounds interesting, where can I get it? This is exactly the problem with Mozilla: it is trying to include a number of major components which have nothing at all to do with browsing - Mail, News, Editor, Chat, Themes are totally and absolutely superfluous. The inclusion of them is the singular reason for Mozilla's atrociously late delivery. Why can't Mozilla focus on developing a standards-compliant, high performance, small-footprint and reliable BROWSER?? > Mozilla's atrociously late delivery. So Netscape 6.1 was a figment of my imagination, then? > Why can't Mozilla focus on developing a standards-compliant, high performance, small-footprint and reliable > BROWSER?? Because the project's not just about making a browser. You may want it to be, but it isn't. Gerv Why do you think that the version called "1.0" has to be the one which maintains feature-parity with the one called "Netscape 4.78"? We will get to feature-parity with Communicator, but anyone who thinks we can do that in the next four or five milestones is kidding themselves. Gerv This feature parity is needed for the unavoidable comparisons with NS4x. This is particularly the case with Linux users. I agree that features must be prioritised but, if you dig in the whole 482 4xp bugs list, you will find actually the missing features are many times less. The feature list I posted above has 9 entries for Messenger and 3 entries for Browser. I left out some features I considered trivial or don't interest me, so on total there might be no more than 15-20 missing features. Not an impossible task for the next 4-5 milestones I think. Of course, I am aware of the huge work needed for bug fixing, performance, standards compliance, documentation, embedding etc. Prioritisation is not my task, I 'm just a simple tester (not even a perfect one) :-) Let's hope that, at least, essential things like context menu in mail composing windows will be implemented in 1.0 release. We are not the only company which is still using 4.x here. mozilla probably is much more stable than 4.x in the meantime, but there are so many "dear" features still missing in mailnews ... well not 482, but at least a dozen, which is plenty too, if those features are being used frequently. Take http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70478 for example. Its beyond me how this can NOT be in mailnews. I have raised this issue a few times in the wishlist group, but people there dont seem to be interested. They'd rather have automatic downloadmanagers, even more advanced handling of popups or a pacman game written in XUL. I dont know how many manyears were spent on getting the theme stuff right -- but, honestly I could live without themes. I cannot live without bug 70478 getting fixed. And although I am not a programmer, it cannot be that complicated: everything one needs must be there anyways. Well sorry for bug promotion, but I couldnt resist :) "I have raised this issue a few times in the wishlist group, but people there dont seem to be interested. They'd rather have automatic downloadmanagers, even more advanced handling of popups or a pacman game written in XUL." Wishlist isn't a good place for bug advocacy, really. Most people there tend to be one-time-posters who drop in to promote some feature they think would be a good idea. The regulars basically just reply to interesting-sounding ideas with "Good idea. File a bug." and bad ideas with "That shouldn't go in/wouldn't work because...". There's not much that wishlist can do for a bug report that already exists. "And although I am not a programmer, it cannot be that complicated: everything one needs must be there anyways." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!! "And although I'm not a programmer, it cannot be complicated..." Those words are the bane of my existence... :P Well, agreed, not a good place. But what is? I already brought this up a while ago and essentially people told me to use bugzilla. I think there should be a discussion/feedback forum for non-technical users on mozilla and project managers/designers should listen there: after all mozilla is for users, not programmers. Sorry for the epileptic fit I caused you with my remark about how it cannot be that complicated :) -- the truth is, I did some programming in my life but I think I wouldnt understand the code of mozilla quickly enough to fit an attempt to fix it in my time schedule. But even if you are allergic to that phrase: code for quoting the text from an existing message is there, it gets executed when the "autoquote" feature is switched on. So all one needs is to get the new action into the menu and call that code by hand, wouldnt you agree? "I think there should be a discussion/feedback forum for non-technical users on mozilla and project managers/designers should listen there" That wouldn't accomplish much. If anything, the forum would be *more* clogged with redundancies than the newsgroup, because more people use the web than use newsgroups. The same people who ignore the newsgroup now would ignore the forum. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions to the feedback problem. The wishlist group is best at directing new feature ideas towards Bugzilla, and Bugzilla's voting system doesn't accomplish much. The easiest way to get somebody working on a bug you find important is to either do it yourself or pay someone else to do it. Weird, I know I typed up a reply here a couple days ago, but it is not here. Anyway, although I too would like to see that bug addressed, it is rather annoying to hear someone say "although I am not a programmer, it cannot be that complicated" and that statement alone would discourage me from doing what you want done. Even if a programmer does not find that comment offensive, saying that it is easy will not help much because many programmers would rather work on something challenging than something simple. Since you are wanting someone to volunteer their time to fix a bug, perhaps you could offer some kind of reward for whoever fixes it? Programmers who are enjoying working on themes, download managers, and pacman games are going to need some kind of incentive to refocus their attention on a bug that they have no personal interest in. Programmers will often take on uninteresting tasks in exchange for money, food, or alcohol -- especially if it is indeed something easy. If you really can not live without having this bug fixed and you can not fix it yourself then offerring some kind of compensation would be a good way to help get someone to give your bug some attention. Why is the "Security and Privacy" section in the dependencies empty? No mention about S/MIME? How can an advanced e-mail client claim to be complete without S/MIME support? If Mozilla 1.0 were "complete" there would be no need for further versions. I don't think anyone things 1.0 will be "complete". Why is it only Mozilla where everyone expects the first version to be perfect? :-) Nevertheless, SMIME will land shortly. Gerv I was talking to someone about instant messenger clients and Jabber came up. That reminded me of the Mozilla based version of Jabber, which in turn led me to the following question. Everyone is talking about how Mozilla is not a browser but a "platform". Well, how much overhead does Mozilla give in size (ram AND disk)? For example, how big is the Jabber Mozilla client? How about if you separate Chatzilla and run it standalone. How much overhead will the Mozillabasedness give to disk and ram footprints? Also, in the space of "platforms", there's competition from a couple of directions, Java being one. Anyone got any metrics on XUL based UI speed vs. say, Swing based. In particular, considering the latest Swing implementations use DirectDraw for hardware acceleration on Windows. |