Mozilla Foundation Employees Interviewed on Las Vegas RadioThursday January 8th, 2004Several Mozilla Foundation employees were interviewed on Monday's edition of Computer Outlook, a Las Vegas talk radio show broadcast on the local KLAV 1230am station and the Talk Radio Las Vegas network. In the show, Chris Hofmann, Ben Goodger and Scott MacGregor discuss several aspects of the Mozilla project with show host John Iasiuolo, including its history, advantages, licensing and cross-platform technology. An archived version of Monday's hour-long Computer Outlook show is available for listening online in streaming MP3 format. Any chance we can get a transcript? "Any chance we can get a transcript?" OK, you're going to need a pen, some paper and the ability to write very fast. :-) If you're worried about bandwidth, the stream is encoded at a fairly low bitrate, should be fine for dial-up. Alex Nah, I'm worried about spending an hour listening to it when I could spend 15 minutes reading. I guess I'll listen then. Well, I agree with the speed, quality, and strength of the browser, but unfortunately I don't see how it's more fun and easier than other stuff that's out there. Maybe easier for developers to use, or for those who have the time and patience to deal with tweaking and going digging through folders to find and tweak files, but for people who don't have such and expect it to 'just work' (many of the people I occasionally fix computer problems for haven't even turned off the "These Files are Hidden" message on the C:\ drive, or simply haven't turned on "Show Hidden Folders"), all of the Mozilla projects would seem to lack wizards, intuitiveness, and ease of managing data. Granted this is much less a problem in Firebird than the Mozilla suite, but there are a good many wizards and ease of use functions that could be implemented to /really/ make it easy, fun, and useful. Wizards included with the programs (or suite once it reaches that point), that easily allows users to back up files across all Gecko applications in a united way, integrated ActiveX controls (including such basics as Flash and Windows Media Player), ease of use of HTML mail/stationary, moving mail folders (gotta love OE's method of changing the location of a mail store), etc. etc. etc. One of the few great things about Microsoft's stuff is that there's a wizard for nearly everything. Developers are so intuitive themselves that they're typically not interested in making things super easy, as well they shouldn't be (after all, it insults their skills and speed to be able to get in and do this stuff manually), and as is often listed for open source stuff, you can't make someone work on something they don't want to work on. I'm not ranting or raving, or asking for something that I'm not willing to do (don't really have the time or patience for programming), just making an observation. I have nothing but kudos for the product that has come from an initially grassroots, largely-volunteer-based project. I think what makes mozilla (and firebird in particular) more fun to use is that it makes webbrowsing less annoying. Tabs introduce better oversight, reducing the odds of information overload, popup and javascript controls reduce overall irritation, bookmark keywords allow faster access to specific search engines (I have keywords for dictionary, thesaurus, java documentation, cdbaby, ...), and find-as-you-type is ofcourse a lot faster to use than the old-skool edit->find process. Admittedly, there are fixes to get some of these things in IE (google toolbar, myie, ...), but the great thing about mozilla is that it includes it all right from the moment you install it. Better integration and easier to tweak. Then there are all the annoyance-reducing extensions. Flash-click-to-view and linky are the two pieces of functionality I miss most when using any other browser. Firebird on windows is pretty much perfect for me. Most annoyances I have left are strictly linux-based, like debian making me reinstall all system-wide extensions every time I apt-get install mozilla-firebird, and my inability to get any kind of asf viewing to work (crossover plugin doesn't work with anything recent, the mplayer plugin shows a blank square in firebird, even though it works fine in the suite). Given how I used to troll these boards predicting mozilla's imminent death, that's a pretty big thumbs up you're getting here ;) Ofcourse, that doesn't say anything about the email client, which I don't use (because evolution works fine for me, and I don't see a reason to try anything else). |