Accomplishments in 2001Tuesday August 6th, 2002ac wrote in to tell us that Asa has published a list of Mozilla's accomplishments in 2001 on his weblog. Take a look and see how far we've come. Wow, I just remembered the time around Milestone 18 when I started to use nightlies regularly. On my old computer I've had to wait for a new window to come up really long and things were so unpolished. And now I'm using a superb browser beyond the version 1.0. Heh, what a nice fuzzy feeling. I know how ya feel. When I first used 0.9.3, I thought was never amount to nothing. Wow, was I wrong... I don't remember when I first started regularly downloading nightlies. But the first time I used it it still had the very attractive older blue theme. I loved it. Then they had to go an make Modern1. Which was correct me if I'm wrong around M14? So it's been before that. I've seen it grow in to a very very lovely browser. I know the old modern theme from my first mozilla downloads when I tought "Oh no, Yet Another Browser to support when making webpages". Unfortunately I don't remember when exactly this was.But I do remember M18 and how I was very confused about nightlies, trunk, branch and all the stuff going on on mozilla.org. I remember when some cretin told me there was no practical way to determine whether a page should be rendered using the "standards" or a more traditional set of rules. He challenged me to support my assertion that there was a practical way. I told him the rendering method could be determined based on whether the document type definition existed or not. Soon after that, "quirks mode" was introduced. you may have contributed something very useful to the project....thanks You really shouldn't be taking Tanyel seriously. She's a bundy in these forums. They always tell people to ignore me when I am right and they cannot think of any way to talk me into being wrong. If somebody had acknowledged my prior contributions to the Mozilla project then I would have offered solutions to other problems Mozilla guys thought were impossible to solve. Some of them were obvious. WOW! I had no idea that you came up with the idea of using doctypes for determining how to parse and lay out a webpage. I guess I was confused because I thought that idea originated with SGML and later HTML and XML. Silly me for attibuting the idea to the ISO and the W3C. It's great to have someone of your stature advising us on the Mozilla project. As usual, you either completely misunderstood me or are intentionally attempting to get other people to misunderstand me. I did not say I developed the concept of document type definitions. I think document type definitions are absolutely stupid. I said I developed the concept of determining how to render a page based on whether the document type definition exists or not. The page gets rendered the w3c way if the document type definition exists and gets rendered the original way if the document type definition does not exist. I refuse to believe your cognitive ability is too weak to understand that. You must be attempting to confuse people because you know I am right. You "developed the concept of determining how to render a page based on whether the document type exists or not." Seriously? You're seriously claiming that you were the person that came up with that? Wow. OK. I'm finished here. --Asa I am serious and it is good that you are finished. Wrong. The W3C says that the standards should be implemented if and only if it contains a doctype. Mozilla is just following the W3C directive. Unless you are a member of the W3C then obviously the idea didn't come from you. And who gave you the monopoly of ideas? I myself have filed numerous RFEs in bugzilla which I thought really rock, only to find it was a dupe many times over. If the idea indeed came from you, then show us the bugzilla page you filed for it and it must be marked FIXED. Napakatanga mo talaga. I became a regular user around M12 I believe. I don't see how I could have used Mozilla regularly back then. It was sooooo sloooooow. And crashed all the time. For a time, I actually went back to MSIE. But, then I came home. Worked on a theme for Mozilla back when my time was not valuable. I am so happy Mozilla is where it is today. Back when Netscape 6pr1 came out, this all seemed like an unattainable fantasy. Mozilla 1.0, a stable and fast browser, a decent Mail + News client, a time when the majority of people were NOT calling the Mozilla project a failure. *sniff* Maybe someday, the majority of web users will be using Mozilla. I mean, look what we (developers, users, bug reporters, advocates) have accomplished up to today. Anything can happen now. The first time I tried Mozilla was about M4 I think.....I just saw the litte test program that was totally unusable for browsing but had Gecko embedded. But it could display some webpages and using NS4 as my browser back then I *loved* reflowing, it was so cool and fast. I startet to use it "regularily" at about M12...it was usually like starting Mozilla, surfing around for some minutes till the first crash and then switching back to NS4 every day. But the phases using Mozilla got longer since it became more stable and I started using it as my primary browser and downloading nightlies at M15 or M16.....since then it was somehow usable and is definitely today. I don't want to miss it... I've followed the Mozilla project since the day the source code was released and I've downloaded nightlies and milestones since the very first release. Even before that, I've been a Netscape user from as far back as version 0.94 in 1994 or 1995 (I forget which). I've been eager to see Netscape / Mozilla make a kick ass browser but the user interface in Mozilla and Netscape's Mozilla based browsers keep dissapointing me. Right now and for the past couple of years, I've used IE for my browsing needs and Netscape 4.7x for email. The other day, I was reading Mozilla blogs and I ran into this piece, by Dave Hyatt, Mozilla veteran coder and creator of Chimera: http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/2002_07_28_mozillian_archive.html - scroll down to "Mozilla 1.0 Review". Basically, what he says confirms what I've seen. The core of Mozilla kicks ass bt the UI is of very poor quality. What's shocking is the following thing: "This problem also applies in the open source community, where the level of contributors varies widely. Mozilla has non-Netscape contributors that have been given checkin access to the tree that have no business being let anywhere near a computer. The argument for access was always, "But this idiot from Netscape is allowed to checkin, and I can't?" and so the lowered bar at Netscape resulted in a lowered bar for the rest of the world. The only way Mozilla is going to become a strong product IMO is if many fewer people are allowed to check in. Mozilla has to stop the bad code from getting into the tree. They tried to do this with the review/super-review process, but it isn't really sufficient. There are simply too many patches being contributed for super-reviewers to catch all of the problems and errors caused by bad coding practices and sloppy programming. I began working on Chimera largely out of frustration with having to deal with all of the lousy work being done on the Navigator front end (both in UI design, marketing nonsense and lousy implementation). It wasn't so much that I wanted to learn Cocoa or anything; I just wanted to work with a small number of talented people instead of an uncontrollable mob." Now, hearing this, I don't know if it's correct or not, but it confirms my fears and I would have to assume that Dave Hyatt as a Mozilla insider and Netscape developer knows what he is talking about. If it is correct, however, it raises questions about what the focus of Mozilla should be. Right now, the main focus is on the Browser - Mail & News - Editor - Chatzilla combo, with a XUL frontend. Maybe it should be something more along the lines of Chimera, with a native, fast, correct and polished UI. Personally, I would like to have a good, solid mail client as part of the app too, but I find correctness and polishedness to be more important. I find it puzzling how it ended up this way in the first place, because so many of the issues are just so obvious. Like having two tree-widgets right next to eachother but with two completely different borders (Select Addresses window from the mail composer), having tree-headers that dissapear when clicked twice to change the sort order in the (Help window), widgets with inconsistent alignments and sizes (all over the place), inconsistent or wrong 3d effects and shadows / direction of light (tabs in editor, under the document), etc. How did these things end up in the codebase in the first place? Were there no reviews and approval of them? If so, why were these things not caught, pointed out and corrected? How many times does this http://news.com.com/2100-1023-949492.html?tag=fd_lede have to happen before people realize the W3C is a bunch of power-hungry cretins? |