Huge Majority of MozillaZine's Readers Visit for the NewsMonday September 15th, 2003As part of our fifth anniversary celebrations, we asked you what your main reason is for visiting MozillaZine. 1,579 people responded with a massive 75% saying that they visit to get information about Mozilla releases and other important project news. Meanwhile, 6% of you come to the site to keep up with third-party projects and other less mainstream aspects of Mozilla development. People looking for links to Mozilla-related media articles or other pages about Mozilla make up 4% of our readership. Given the activity in the MozillaZine Forums, we were surprised that just 3% of you said your number one reason for visiting is to take part in Mozilla discussions. Finally, only 1% of MozillaZine's visitors come primarily to read the MozillaZine Weblogs and a rather high 8% of you just want to vote in useless polls. Obviously, we value that 8% very highly, so here's another poll for you to enjoy. We want you to tell us which forthcoming Mozilla release you are looking forward to the most. Maybe you're eagerly anticipating the Mozilla 1.4.1 update. Perhaps you're holding out for the more major changes in Mozilla 1.5. Can you not wait to get your hands on Mozilla Firebird 0.7 or Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3? Or maybe you pine for an update to the Camino browser for Mac OS X. Tell us which release you're itching for the most and check the latest results to see which version everyone else is waiting for. That's what I'm most looking forward to - Mozilla Firebird to be the official Mozilla browser. Firebird 1.0, as well. 0.7 is not going to work well enough for me to switch, so I didn't bother voting in the poll. Although, depressingly, I guess Firebird may still suck by the time it finally does reach 1.0. It only sucks a little bit at the moment, but I'm sort of worried that the little bit of suckage is the type of thing they don't plan to fix. I have to say, never mind 1.4.1, Mozilla 1.5 is about as exciting as a dirty handkerchief. No offence intended to developers - I'm sure the work done to fix bugs and improve performance is important. It's just not terribly exciting and there are no significant new features, since presumably those are or will be happening to Firebird. I just upgraded from 1.4 to a current nightly and I'm seeing absolutely no difference whatsoever... --sam Could you elaborate on exactly how firebird sucks? I don't think it sucks at all. Firebird addressed the "bloat" issue by stripping the application of lots of useful features (like the prefrences menu) and functionality and pushing the addition of features to a gaggle of extensions. So one large "prefrences" menu is replaced by 4 or 5 "extensions" that give you 4 or 5 additional configuration menus. Is that progress? Uh, what? What preferences are you missing that Mozilla has, and Firebird doesn't? You do know how to open prefs now, right? jason No difference in the UI, major differences in the layout engine. Of course those are not as obvious when you start the browser.... Well, that's good (and I do appreciate the work you/everyone does on layout), but I presume these mainly just add up to performance improvements? Or maybe some small standards fixes... Actually, there would be one performance improvement that would make a real difference over 1.4, which would be making Mozilla (win32) come back into memory more quickly when it's been swapped out - it could pause for up to 30 seconds sometimes (on a 1.4 GHz machine) Maybe this kind of footprint improvement has in fact happened, maybe that's part of what you achieved in layout, I'm not sure yet (I've only just switched to a nightly build). As for the What I Want, (a) I know nobody cares, but (b) a few people did ask so here you go. The main things I have been waiting for in Mozilla (the browser) would probably be as follows: * configurable bookmarks (right-click on menu to delete) - Firebird has this, Mozilla is unlikely to get it because who'd waste time back-porting to the outdated platform * SVG support (which actually works, up to standard of adobe's plugin or apache's engine) Obviously neither of these will happen in 1.5 and in fact I don't see either of them happening in the time while the application suite is still 'primary'. The main things I am waiting for in Firebird are: * support for those who don't like tabbed browsing (i.e. option to make middle button open new windows instead of tabs) * better support for installing extensions - this should be handled entirely within the application, with full versioning so that you are only offered compatible extensions, rather than just dumping you to a random webpage. (Same applies to themes) * some kind of sanity with respect to preferences - yes, cutting down preferences was a good idea but *advanced preferences are also a good idea*. That means *organised* preferences, not the about: URL, and it means they should come with default not as an extension. You shouldn't need to install an extension to access minority but not bizarre preferences that the browser already actually supports (see above request re middle button). * now that key functionality is being moved to extensions (which is a fine idea), mozilla.org need to take control of those extensions so that a core set of extensions are (a) fully supported so that you can guarantee they will be updated with each major release and they will not conflict with each other, (b) easily available as checkbox items for automatic download as part of the installer * the browser should not crash like 0.6 did. :> --sam Every person can have one "main" reason to visit the website (like news, it's understandable), and other additional -more than one- also good reasons, you know... Thunderbird! Why? Well, if Firebird is to be my default, then I need another Mail client 'cause Mozilla Mail will not open Firebird as default browser. I think the main reason for "take part in Mozilla discussions" getting so low vote counts is because it was too vague. If the option would have read "to read and discuss in the forums", a lot more people would have voted on that option. I visit "mozillazine" to READ about the Mozilla products. I visit the "forums" to DISCUSS them. How about improving the polling so that we can rank the various options. Then you could rate the various choices and figure out what people really think the site is good for. I, for example, would rank those choices in this order: 1. Releases and other important project information. 2. Looking for other Mozilla articles/media/news 3. Mozilla discussions. 4. Other Mozilla-related projects. 5. Reading Mozilla weblogs. 6. Participate in polls :-) --Asa hrm... if you are coming to MozillaZine to find out about Mozilla releases, I think we may have a problem ;) Half of the recent polls have been pretty lame.. no way near as fun or revealing as your average slashdot post. How about a poll to see how many people the readers have managed to convert to Mozilla. I would have thought that most people whose primary reason for visiting mozillazine was the forums would not know about the poll, and therefore not vote so there would be a incorrectly small percentage of them. I can just picture The Sun (the biggest uk tabloid newspaper) running a telephone poll about what people thought the best newspaper was and then writing about the amazinly high proportion of respondants who said The Sun Any such poll is going to be pretty useless from a statistical point of view. that's the nature of web polls. For a poll to be worthwhile, you have to know the group you are trying to poll, and who within that group is responding. But it's not supposed to be a scientific poll, it's just a web poll - the discussion of the poll and its results are worthwhile even if the figures don't say much. Did you notice? According to the Google Toolbar, mozillazine.org has a PageRank 8, just under mozilla.org or yahoo.com (PR 9). This website is more well-known on the Internet than I thought... Congratulations. :-) |