Jayesh, you may want to look at who you are calling names. Here is some info from mpt's own web site: http://mpt.phrasewise.com/faq/ and I have seen him all over bugs in Mozilla, he puts in a lot of work and is deferred to on many issues.

Here is an URL to a buglist of all bugs mpt is either assigned to or has reported:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&email1=mpt%40&emailtype1=substring&emailassigned_to1=1&emailreporter1=1&email2=&emailtype2=substring&bugidtype=include&chfieldto=Now&keywords_type=anywords&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&order=%27Importance%27

This will take probably 1-2 minutes to load, THAT IS HOW MANY BUGS THERE ARE. I'm not sure if that link will work for you, but just search mpt@ in the Bugzilla query email field and check whatever criteria you like and hit Search.

By the way, the search I ran turned up 1073 bugs... that is right... ONE THOUSAND SEVENTY THREE bugs either assigned to or reported by mpt. If THAT isn't honest pride and hard work, I don't know what is.

Mike

mpt has done a great work on ui design (fighting against the numerous attempts to increase number preferences and other bloating, par example). But the first time I noticed a post of him I thought he was trolling. While I find it's humour a bit strange for me, I like to hear another kind of voice besides "mozila rocks " and "mozilla sucks" in this forum.

ok, this mozillazine autolinking stuff won't work .... email me at jorge@whiprush.org and I'll email you the deb sources - you can also find it on the debian.org website.

his arguments are right. He says that it's difficult to say how long it took for a product to get ready and that is just right.

And he is right that you should do the same for Mozilla and IE.

But luckily I think IE has never been really rewritten from scratch so it doesn't matter too much ;)

What point of mine do you disagree with?

If you enter the wrong password, mozillazine adds a set of backslashes. Every time that you get it wrong it adds another backslash. Sometimes you'll see a message with 5 or so backslashes. All it means is the person couldn't remember their password.

It's a really old bug which I'm sure "they" know about but just haven't fixed yet.

By default PHP escapes apostrophes (and a few other characters) to avoid that newbie PHP programmers by mistake make exploitable SQL queries. This feature is IMO a pain in the ass (I\'d much rather escape things explicitly), and I assume that that is what is causing the problems here.

Luckyly it can be turned off:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/configuration.php#ini.magic-quotes-runtime http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-magic-quotes-runtime.php I\'m sure MozillaZine admins already know this, and that there is more to it than just changing the configuration setting (e.g. that some scripts still expect the feature to be enabled).

Christian

Asa, your comments on user ratings are kind of off the mark, if you actually go through and read them. Half of the negative remarks have zero to do with the product itself, but more with hatred of MS.

IE 6 actually happens to be a pretty bang up browser. But, yes, it now does lag in several areas, like bookmarks, etc...

Perhaps your claim that users prefer Mozilla should be reconciled with the fact that Explorer's market share is ninety-two times higher than Mozilla's.

"Hmm, no users think we have better image and animation controls?"

Mozilla's image and animation controls are better than MSIE's in one respect -- they let you block images from particular servers. (Neither browser lets you filter by image dimensions, natch.) Unfortunately, that is outweighed by several aspects in which MSIE's controls are better. (1) They're in a `Web Browser' category branch (together with prefs for sounds, frames, and style sheets), rather than being nonsensically hidden in a `Privacy & Security' branch. (2) They don't encourage masochism by offering a bizarre `Ask me before downloading an image' option. (3) They're much more obviously and concisely worded. (4) When you specify that animated images should not loop, and you load a page containing an animated image, MSIE waits until you have (a) brought the window to the front and (b) scrolled to view the image, before animating it -- so that you don't miss anything. You may need to reread that last sentence to grasp the level of polish we're talking about here.

> Or better cookie management?

Again, Mozilla's cookie management is better in one respect: Mozilla lets you set a maximum lifetime for cookies. Again, that is outweighed by several aspects in which MSIE's cookie management is superior. (1) MSIE lets you accept or decline all cookies from a particular domain the first time such a cookie is sent; Mozilla does not. (2) MSIE lets you examine the cookie data in the cookie alert; Mozilla does not. (3) MSIE avoids using the evil `Yes' and `No' as button text in its cookie alerts; Mozilla does not. (4) MSIE fits all its cookie UI, *including* the list of accepted/declined cookies and sites, comfortably into a single preferences panel; Mozilla sprawls it over a preferences panel and two badly-laid-out tabs.

Hopefully Doron will be working on (1), (2), and (3) in the near future, implementing a more convenient alert design than that used in MSIE (read: fewer clicks required), so that Mozilla will become the browser of choice for the cookie connoisseur. At the moment, though, it's not.

"Or better javascript and window (popup) controls?"

Sure, in that respect Mozilla kicks MSIE's posterior. :-) That's the main reason why I designed them and encouraged Doron to get them implemented and checked in. (The other reason was that I was reasonably confident I wouldn't be wasting my time, because Netscape UE people wouldn't care enough to get involved and foul it up.) However, they are still a feature for relatively advanced users, especially since they're hidden in the `Advanced' category (fixing that requires redoing the prefs dialog completely, alas). And for just toggling Javascript on and off occasionally, MSIE is quicker than Mozilla, because MSIE remembers which preferences panel you were on last whereas Mozilla does not. Mozilla could easily be *much* better than MSIE in that respect, if the Preferences Bar was checked in to the trunk.

"Or better history and bookmarks management?"

Mozilla's bookmarks management is conceptually much better than the Organize Favorites dialog MSIE for Windows (organizing bookmarks in a *dialog*? WTF?), and its Bookmarks menu is considerably less convoluted than the Favorites menu in MSIE for Mac OS, though in both cases the bugginess of Mozilla's implementation leaves them about even.

As for history, however, there's no contest. It's late evening. How do you find a page you visited early this morning in MSIE? (1) Bonk the `History' button in the toolbar. (2) Open the server's folder (Windows), or scroll down to the morning's pages (Mac). (3) Click the item you want. You're done. Now, how do you find a page you visited early this morning in Mozilla? You can't use the Sidebar, because the History panel isn't in it by default, and (being an average user) you haven't figured out how to customize it yet. So. (1) Open the `Tasks' menu. (Wtf is `Tasks', anyway?) (2) Go to the `Tools' *submenu*, and choose `History'. (3) Click the triangle next to the folder (not the folder itself, of course) for `Today', which is annoyingly collapsed by default. (4) Click on the triangle next to the folder (not the folder itself, of course) for the server you want. (5) Click -- whoops, no, *double*-click -- on the item you want. You're done, eventually.

"Or a better sidebar?"

Yet again, Mozilla's sidebar is better in one respect: it's more customizable. (If you can work out how to customize it, of course -- right now I'm looking at a `Tabs' menu which is grayed out even though it's enabled. Hmmmmm.) And yet again, this is outweighed by several other aspects. Mozilla's sidebar is uglier, it doesn't slide in and out so that a beginning user knows where it came from, it's on by default, it has a close box which looks like a refugee from MS Windows, there's no Scrapbook panel, there's no Page Holder panel, and in every case where Mozilla *does* have an equivalent to a MSIE panel, MSIE's panel is better designed. For example, in the Search panel there is no visible Search button (it's *completely* outside the default sidebar width), the results appear in the content area *as well as* the sidebar (if I wanted them to appear in the content area, I would have DONE THE SEARCH in the @#$!ing content area!), the results don't wrap (because it's a XUL tree rather than HTML) and can't be scrolled (because the scrollbar is completely outside the default sidebar width), and the button at the bottom says `Bookmark t'. Bookmark *what*?

"Or better search plugin support?"

MSIE's toolbar has an optional `Sherlock' button. Is Mozilla's search plug-in support, or search UI, better than Sherlock's? Not bloody likely. (Even though Sherlock's UI is pretty bad.)

"Or a better javascript console?"

[end-user] A better *what*? [/end-user]

"Or better at not taking out the Windows taskbar or desktop?"

Sorry, I'm not omniscient enough to understand what you mean here.

"No users prefer our tabbed browsing or choice of themes or think we just look nicer?"

Hah. If Mozilla looked as nice as MSIE (or as nice as Chimera, even), it wouldn't need themes, as those browsers don't. Unfortunately you can't theme away basic poor UI, such as the clutter of the component bar, or the non-centeredness of the address field.

"No users think that bookmark custom keywords or our password manager make Mozilla more usable than IE?"

Oh, a few users think custom keywords are cool (I know you're one of them), especially those users who regularly enter commands such as `ls' and `mv' elsewhere. (Custom keywords are also available in MSIE for Windows, but you need to hack the Registry to enable them. I wonder why.) As for the Password Manager, I estimate that in its current state removing it from Mozilla completely would result in a net increase in users.

"I guess they're lying or confused when they make these claims."

That's not very charitable of you, Asa. You should treat your users with more respect than that. Certainly, there are users who prefer the features in Mozilla -- such as they are -- to the features in MSIE. Currently those users amount to what, about 0.9 percent of the browser-using population? For the vast majority of end users, however, those occasional advantages just aren't *noticable*. By the time they realize that they can set a maximum lifetime for cookies, or block images by server, or customize the sidebar, they've long since given up because they can't even have a Home button in the toolbar without having the whole @#$! `Personal Toolbar' turned on.

Now, our job is to increase that 0.9 percent -- by designing, fixing, testing, documenting, and distributing improvements to the many areas where Mozilla is deficient. Fanatically denying that room for improvement exists won't get you anywhere.

"Maybe we should work really hard to convince them ... that they would be much better off using IE."

No thanks -- MSIE isn't Free Software, and it's currently being used to maintain a harmful OS monopoly.

"I wonder how it is that cnet users rate IE 6 so much lower than Netscape 6"

Let me enlighten you, then. I've been trying IE 6 over the past couple of weeks at work (not my choice). As far as I can tell, overall it's *worse* than IE 5 in several respects. So even though it remains dauntingly better than Mozilla, people are likely to express their disappointment in it by giving it a poor rating. Conversely, Netscape 6.2 and 6.1 (which, you remember, CNet infamously conflated into a single entity) are massively better than Netscape 6.0, so people are likely to express their approval of the improvement by giving Netscape a good rating.

-- mpt

"You are such a small mind, and your argument is so pathetically drummed together, you must have had trouble finding two flossy threads of neuron to rub together."

Auditioning for a part on `When Good Advocacy Goes Bad', are we?

"There's so much that has been rewritten or completely redone in Mozilla that to claim that it's not a whole new product is fallacious."

There's so much that has been rewritten or completely redone in MSIE since version 1.0 that to claim that it's not a whole new product is fallacious. And yet ... PEOPLE DO claim that it's not a whole new product! they talk about something called `upgrades' instead! How dare they! They're probably the same idiots who post about Netscape 6 asking `Why was this feature removed?'. Damn, humans are an annoying species.

"But you're such a mindless windbag ... your many gaping orifices ... your malignant immune system ... you pathetic hayseed."

Please keep your comments friendly! You will be shown your post after submitting it, and it cannot be changed, so make sure you've read it over.

:-)

-- mpt

Charming... Who pissed in your cornflakes?

> You are such a small mind ... you must have had trouble finding two flossy threads of neuron to rub together ... you're such a mindless windbag, that some wispy piece of fluff that had entered your brainpan through one of your many gaping orifices must have been mistaken for a dangerous entity of free thought or will by your malignant immune system, and it in turn let forth the few words that must have been inscribed on the inside of your skull since birth just for such an emergency... you pathetic hayseed.

What a charming example of Mozilla advocacy-responding to criticism with personal attacks and a lack of fact to support it. Having a bad day?

For most end users, IE is much more usable and Mozilla is just getting there. Examples where IE wins: Customizable toolbars, rearranging toolbars, bookmark toolbars that don't lose items off the end when resized smaller, reasonably long address (URL) bar, fast startup and general browsing performance, visited links that get marked as visited, text boxes that behave like they should, minimize that works.

Mozilla *does* have catching up to do. Saying that it's rewritten from scratch or that it's been only in progress for X years (less than IE) is an excuse. It makes no difference to end users.

Mozilla's making slow but continual progress. Print preview and full screen are pretty nice now (catching up with IE). Mozilla certainly has better annoyance blocking features and may be more secure. Hopefully Mozilla will keep getting better and better and one day surpass IE in every way.

The guy is just speaking his mind dude. No need to blow your stack and start swearing all over the place. Get a grip.

> You are such a small mind, and your argument is so pathetically drummed > together, you must have had trouble finding two flossy threads of > neuron to rub together

> But you're such a mindless windbag, that some wispy piece of fluff that > had entered your brainpan through one of your many gaping orifices must > have been mistaken for a dangerous entity of free thought or will by > your malignant immune system, and it in turn let forth the few words > that must have been inscribed on the inside of your skull since birth > just for such an emergency.

> [...] See Asa, you pathetic hayseed.

Regardless of whether or not I agree with any of the opinions expressed in this thread, that sort of personal abuse is not the kind of behaviour I would expect from an administrator of this forum, which *usually* lives up to its "friendly" label.

Replies like this are an embarrassment to this site. mpt made several *extremely* valid points in his email, and you respond with an immature tirade. Shame on you.

As someone who contributes substantially to Mozilla, I find myself in agreement with mpt. The UI for this product is immensely flawed. What we get right is vastly overshadowed by what we get wrong.

At this point we're the browser that does everything, but the "everything" that we do is sloppy. The flaws range from minor irritants to fundamental design errors, and in many cases, mpt is right on the money when he points these flaws out.

The basic problem I see is that there's too much dependence on and too much (for lack of a better word) religion tied up in this one particular Mozilla browser that is essentially Netscape-controlled.

Until the cord of Netscape control is cut, the UI is going to remain sub-par, full of quirks and flaws that make no sense when the superimposed Netscape revenue tie-ins are removed.

I agree with you on (1) and (2). Zones are a brave attempt by Microsoft to reduce the complexity of security options, but they really don't work -- in part possibly because bunching settings like that means the effect of changing from the default is too major for anything but the default to be practical.

Security is a nasty issue, because you're playing with human nature. Humans are generally bad at investing for long-term gain, so most would rather use a pleasant but insecure program instead of a secure but confusing one -- they just can't calculate the average loss in satisfaction from probability*severity of a security problem. (That's one of the reasons why Microsoft software has been frustratingly popular -- it plays on this weakness.) You have to find the right balance, at every point.

And indeed, bundling is important, but we shouldn't just stumble on waiting for a favorable court judgement in that regard, or we'll end up old and gray (or just gray). As I suggest in the Top Ten list http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$35#migration , in order to overtake a bundled MSIE, we "only" need to make a browser which is twice as good. For example, MSIE 2.0 was bundled with later releases of Windows 95, but that didn't stop Netscape 3.0 from being massively more popular.

Can Mozilla be twice as good as MSIE 6, as Netscape 3.0 was at least twice as good as MSIE 2.0? I think it can. It will require massive simplification of some features, radical dehorkage of the UI, and lots of effort implementing things which are almost invisible to the user, but I definitely think it's possible.

-- mpt

"... it was M3, IIRC, when [Netlib] was replaced by all-new code known as Necko"

M9, actually http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=698 . Before the Great Rewrite, Gecko was developed as a replacement for Mariner. After the Great Rewrite, Necko was developed as a replacement for the original netlib. Later, Modern 1 was replaced by Modern 2 and Classic. Still later, imglib1 was replaced by libpr0n. And so on.

I expect that any software project works the same way; existing features are improved by rewriting chunks at a time. The smaller the chunks, the smaller the improvement you can make in a single checkin, but the the less likely you are to regress fixed bugs and to cause delays.

The enormity (look it up) of the Great Rewrite was that the old code was decommissioned before the new code was of even similar completeness. That meant that Netscape (and the Mozilla Organization itself) went for three *years* without being able to ship something resembling a release-quality browser based on their latest technology. Netscape had to drip-feed 4.7x releases to the faithful, which understandably gave conniptions to the same Web standards advocates who had pushed for the use of Gecko in the first place.

-- mpt

Microsoft, or Opera, even Adobe can move ONE finger and Mozilla is history, five years of work go to trash forever.

There is a big fail in Mozilla, and all seem to be too blind to notice it.