That's what he's saying: it's called a Release Candidate, but it's not actually a candidate for release.

"If only there was a calendar with the stock Mozilla, that would be kick ass. (no plugin/extension counts)"

Why not? Honest question, seeing as there is a very nice calendar extension which integrates well. Are you really so immature as to demand that it all be part of the same download? Please don't tell me you've bought into the Microsoft lie that in order for programs to integrate well, they have to be made by the same company and all be inextricably tied together...

I want to ask what you mean about it breaking bookmark-groups.

Mozilla releases (like many other large open source projects) are time based and have been for quite a while now.

> there must be some poor bastards who use Chatzilla as well

Hey! I use it. I don't think it's that bad.

> Maybe the performance/fixes, plus spellchecker, are a big enough deal to merit the 1.5 tag but > I don't know...

In Mozilla-release-note speak, "performance/fixes" means anything from "major architectural changes to the layout engine" to "fixed some random bugs". 1.5 is closer to the "major changes" end of that spectrum.

Mozilla developers fixed over 1,000 bugs and features during the 1.5 cycle.

As much change happened in 1.5 as happened in 1.4 (roughly 110 people checked in changes to 210,000 lines of code).

I think other browsers (and other software products) have made more considerably larger version number leaps with fewer improvements. We've changed nearly a quarter of a million lines of code and bumped the version up by 0.1 and you think that's unreasonable?

--Asa

It's great that Mozilla development isn't only about adding more features but also about improving the core, the engine of Mozilla. Improvement of the quality of the suite is as much a reason to increment the version as adding more features. I would not mind at all a milestone with absolutely no new features, only architectural redesign and such.

"And as for the "guys at moz dev team" - you should remember that the "team" included 50-odd Netscape staff until July, and now it doesn't. Obviously things will go slower when you have 5 people instead of 50."

Things didn't really go slower and we're not down to 5 people either. In June there were 48 not-netscape people landing code, in July there were 63 and in August there were 67. The number of non-netscape contributors have matched or exceeded Netscape contributors for many months and had been rougly tied for many months before that.

In Mozilla 1.1, we had about 200,000 lines of code changed by 140 people. In 1.3 we had about 195,000 lines of code changed by about 130 people. In 1.4 we had 230,000 lines of code changed by 125 people. In 1.5 we had about 210,000 lines of code changed by 110 people. I'd say we've done about as much work in 1.4 as we have in any of the previous 1.x releases.

There were a couple fewer new features introduced in 1.5 than some of the earlier milestones (and their inevitable regressions) so hopefully we've made some big leaps in quality and stability. And there have been feature improvements too. There have been new features and major improvements to features in Composer, Mail, Dom Inspector, Chatzilla, View Source, Tabbed browsing and more.

--Asa