Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting of Wednesday 29th January 2003
Wednesday February 12th, 2003
Gervase Markham has posted the minutes of the mozilla.org staff meeting of Wednesday 29th January 2003 to netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey. Issues discussed at the meeting include the direction of the project, communication between staff members, the status of the project, if the mozilla.org builds constitute a de facto distribution, legal issues surrounding the Chimera name and the mozdev donations drive. Under current plans, the minutes of future weekly meetings will also be posted to the newsgroups.
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#1 Break away!
by oconnorcjo
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 10:11 AM
If developers are afraid to break things, It becomes difficult to make *fundamental* improvements in the code so I say "break it!". That is what us testers are for. And if releases are not better and they don't come out every six months- big deal. Another idea is to start a 2.0 developement branch in which Big changes are made and state that 2.0 will take a year or so to come out. Have 1.X nightlies and 2pre nightlies. Shift most development away from 1.X (it really is a good browser and should really be in "maintenance mode") and start plugging away at REAL new code!
#4 6 months? I wish!
by bzbarsky
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 2:46 PM
If you look at the roadmap, we have releases every 4.5 _weeks_ that have to be functional enough to be widely tested (and if they are not, the tree is held closed till they are). We have releases once every 3 months that are supposed to be polished and shit.
#5 Re: Break away!
by Psiren
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 3:07 PM
That make a lot of sense. Eggs and omelettes and all that. The only problem is that developers are often more interested in working on cool new features, rather than fixing old bugs. That might leave 1.x stagnating while 2.x moves along.
#6 Re: Break away!
by Surge
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 3:13 PM
I belive that the only possible future for mozilla is to get separated into pieces... Let's call this branch 2.0 (or whatever). Once basic separation is done.. NO NEW FEATURES must be added until all visible bugs are fixed. If it takes a year... so let it be, if takes more - also no problem. Bug fixes and speed improvements must be two main goals for mozilla-navigator... Mail, Calendar developers, etc may improve their parts the way they think is appropriate, but a separate Navigator which is FAST and STABLE is really needed. All nice icons, etc for sure make it pleasure to use the browser, but when other stuff is broken this should not be a priority, imho... at least for now. Mozilla navigator should be merged into Phoenix, but with full featureset we have right now.
It is a shame that 70% of CPU are used for a few seconds just to display a bunch of bookmarks, that it takes to so long to load a browser from scratch, that memory footprint is getting bigger and bigger, that after a day or so being running mozilla must be restarted like I had to restart Win98/95 many years ago because otherwise it is as slow as turtle.
We need a mode when Mail can be opened in a separate process, it dies too often on me and all my open pages die with it :(
#2 Distribution: Make Moz the corporate browser...
by flacco
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 12:11 PM
..of choice! (damn short subject line there mozillazine).
Mozilla is a distribution, really. It would be a very positive step IMO if Mozilla.org established a goal to make Mozilla the corporate browser of choice. Cross-platform, open source, free. It could bring a lot of new resources to the project.
#3 Re: Distribution: Make Moz the corporate browser...
by bcortez
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 1:23 PM
That would only happen if the base functionality bugs were fixed first instead of adding new functionality. The corporate workd wants stability, it costs to much $$ to respond to a tech support call. Base bug are still in the current Mozilla build codebase. One in particulr, #45375 relates to tooltips. Without that and others, don;t coult on corp acceptance anytime soon.
#7 Re: Re: Distribution: Make Moz the corporate brows
by sphealey
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 4:12 PM
I am afraid I would have to agree with bcortez here. I am the director of my own domain (small though it may be); I use Mozilla as my personal browser and I would very much like to make it our organization's standard. But while the functionality is great, the "plays nicely on corporate networks" bugs are real, and the attitude of the owners of those bugs doesn't bode well. So its off to upgrade to IE6.
sPh
#10 Re: Re: Re: Distribution: Make Moz the corporate b
by jsebrech
Thursday February 13th, 2003 8:26 AM
As if IE isn't loaded with horrible bugs too.
#11 Re: Re: Re: Re: Distribution: Make Moz the corporate b
by bcortez
Thursday February 13th, 2003 11:17 AM
This may be true, I'll grant you that. However, it's also true that MSIE has over 90% of the marketshare in this arena. As a result, it also has 90% of the established tech support built into the fabric of corporate IT spending. So, it's got the luxury of being buggy. If Mozilla is to thrive in the corporate arena and actually compete with MSIE, then it must do things better and stronger for coporations to switch. If not, then Mozilla simply won't thrive....period. There are only 2 states of health in business, thriving or dying, there is no 3rd state. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but it has to be taken if Mozilla is to live (and thrive) there.
#13 Re: Re: Re: Re: Distribution: Make Moz the corpora
by sphealey
Friday February 14th, 2003 5:45 AM
MS IE has a lot of bugs - sadly, most complex software products today do also. IE's bugs are very often security related, though, which is one of the reasons I would like to replace it.
The problem with the Mozilla is different: there is a set of long-standing bugs related to "plays nice on corporate networks". Some of them have 4-digit bugzilla numbers, which I have to think means they have been around for a while. When you read through the threads of those bugs, you find that the development team doesn't think that they are a problem.
Now, I can't personally and don't have the resources to fix them myself, so I am not going to jump up and down screaming. But I can't deploy Mozilla on my corporate network, either, which I don't think is a good long-term sign.
sPh
#8 Support
by amutch
Wednesday February 12th, 2003 4:38 PM
Sorry, I can't see that happening without some support structure. I know, software support is usually non-existent but there needs to be something for corporate users.
#9 Even better
by ed_welch
Thursday February 13th, 2003 5:17 AM
Even better would be if some PC manufactures would start pre-loading Mozilla on Windows XP PCs. I think the new agreement allows them to do this, but I haven't heard of any OEM doing it so far.
#12 Re: Even better
by asa
Thursday February 13th, 2003 11:28 AM
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-983525.html
--Asa
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