ask asa some more

I had planned on just picking one question and answering it as in-depth as possible but there were so many good questions I'm going to try answer several of them :-)

Without further ado, the questions and answers:

yacoubean asked, "Who writes the Book of Mozilla verses, and can you give any background?"

The Book of Mozilla, like other great works of truth, was penned by several prophets. The names of the various scribes are of little importance. It is the word of Mozilla and and how He reveals Himself and His plan that is most important :-)
The verses of Book of Mozilla, which have appeared in Netscape and Mozilla browsers going back for many years, were "easter eggs" triggered by typing 'about:mozilla' in the URLbar. They are displayed in white text on a deep red background.

Bibbl asked, "Will there ever be Mozilla Users on Mars? :)"

I don't think so. It's going to be a couple of decades before the first human explorers land on Mars and by then I expect the internet to have undergone at least one revolutionary change, maybe more, which will obsolete Mozilla as we know it. Mozilla will evolve, though, and some kind of Mozilla spawn may yet find its way to Mars with early human exploration :-)

Marcia asked, "How many squirrels are there in Mountain View, and are there any of the black variety?"

Marcia, the answer is "lots" and "yes". There are three varieties of squirrel in this area, the Western Gray, the Eastern Gray, and the Eastern Fox. "Black" squirrels are a coloring of the Eastern Gray and while the the black-haired variety are less common down here, you do see them around. We have a couple that hang out in our back yard. If you travel up to BC, you'll find that they massively outnumber the gray-hairs. It's rare to see any gray-hairs at all. Down here, I think the black (and dark brown) are outnumbered by the gray-hairs though.

Korou asked, "What are the Mozilla Foundation offices like?"

The office(s) is(are) nice. We've got plenty of space for the 10 or so people that work fulltime at the office. The space is mostly open with one wall of the offices filled with tinderboxen and build machines, and running down a section of the central space, we've got the sodacan bridge.

Av asked, "I've been wondering how many of the rocks on the surface of mars are actually small meteorites or fragments, and could the rovers distinguish between original martian rock and off-planet material?"

Av, I wasn't able to find an answer to this question. I'll keep looking. As you know, the Martian surface has been bombarded by asteroids and comets for literally billions of years and it's been turned up and over by volcanism and weathering as well. I'm not sure how easily we'll be able to measure the percentage of surface that's extra-terrestrial. The rovers should be able to characterize their local environments quite well and as they build up a catalog, I imagine they'll be able to start to distinguish "foreign" rocks. For the larger question about how many, we currently have two amazing orbital assets mapping the Martian surface and if I find an answer to the question, I'll bet that it will be a result of work done by the MGS' TES and Mars Odyssey's THEMIS.

Lor asked, "Is there a chance that the two sides in the MNG dispute will talk to each other and work something out, or has the situation gone too far?"

Lor, I think that something was worked out quite a long time ago. As I understand it, the MNG developers would need to meet a set of requirements for size, performance and functionality in order to get back into Mozilla. It's my personal opinion that the only part of MNG that would really matter to most people would be alpha transparency for animated image. I don't know a lot about how these image decoders are written, but it seems like we could get a lot more bang for the buck by just extending PNG to support animation.

Jose Jeria asked several questions but I'll field the one that was most intersting to me. He asks, "I read that Firefox 1.0 will be the last version taken from the trunk, does this mean that Firefox will kind of be in the same situation as Netscape, where only some selected bugs are added?"

The answer is that Firefox will branch for a 1.0 release. It will also, however, continue to be developed on the trunk just as Mozilla continued on the trunk after branching for 1.0. "Last version taken from the trunk" suggests a permanent branch, also known as a fork. I'm quite certain that's not in the works.

Jesse asked, "How do Firefox 0.8 downloads compare to Mozilla 1.6 downloads so far? Also, where's that graph showing the number of downloads of each Mozilla release that I keep hearing about?"

Well, to take the second part first, "that graph" isn't of downloads. The graph I have been building is of "start page hits" I don't think anyone's done any graphing of downloads and I don't know that the data's been consistent or complete enough to try. As you know, our browser has a default start page. We count hits on that page from the various Mozilla user agents and I get a daily email report covering those hits. It's useful to me to see how quickly a new release replaces the previous release but probably not very interesting beyond that. The first part of your question is also tough to answer. I haven't gotten any reliable download numbers since we moved to the new FTP mirroring system. The numbers I'm getting are incomplete and while I can make some educated guesses based on what we do know, it's nothing I'd stake my reputation on. I had slightly better data for 0.7 and 1.5 than the current releases and it suggested that in the first two weeks after release, Firebird 0.7 got about 75% the downloads of SeaMonkey. My feeling, based on some less complete data from the first week of Firefox 0.8 downloads is that Firefox is now passing SeaMonkey in downloads. I'll hopefully have a better answer soon.

van asked, "Where did the Beagle go? Seems no news about it for long..."

Van, unfortunately, the Beagle II lander, one component of the Mars Express mission, was lost. Investigations are still ongoing but the craft hasn't been heard from since it's December 19th landing. The orbiter, however, is alive and well, circling Mars and doing some amazing science.

Michael Perry asked "when, I wonder, will the Linux users be able to have the same integration of browser and email client as on Windows?"

We're workin' on it. Linux (Gnome in particular) needs to be working on it too.

michaell asked "You apparently have a new person called Gabrielle. Kerz said she was a new QA person. So, who is she? what's her role? and are there plans for QA that QA volunteer types should know about?"

I don't know any Gabrielle, and as I'm the only employee of the Mozilla Foundation with "qa" in his title, I think I'd know if we hired a new QA person. To answer the second part of your question, yes, there are plans for QA that QA volunteers should know about. We've got a lot to do and we're getting some new tools to do some of that, including the awesome feature upgrades we just got to Bugzilla and the soon to be minimally functional (I hope) testcase manager. In addition to the great tools, we're really making some good progress on BugDays slogging through the mess of worthless bug reports. You can find more information about BugDays in the posts below.

Jeff Walden asked, "Immediately after the release of Mozilla Firefox 0.8, mozilla.org, mozdev.org, texturizer.net, and mozillazine.org all slowed to a complete crawl. What sort of resources are needed to prevent this when Firefox 0.9 is released"

Jeff, the answer is that we've already taken steps to beef up the gang of servers that host our releases. There's more to do here, but we're much improved. As for mozillazine.org, mozdev.org, and texturizer.net, they're not hosted by the Mozilla Foundation. You'll have to ask them.

Robert Accettura gets the final question with "We were promised by various people that we would see pictures of the Moz Foundation offices. These promises were never fufilled. Why?"

Well, I guess the best answer is, "I suck" :-) A few weeks ago I took some photos of the office but the lighting wasn't great and then we started planning the developer day and I thought that might make for a more interesting "first look" so I decided to hold off on posting what I had. So it's "I suck" for a "why". How's "next week" sound for a "when"?

OK, I didn't answer all of the questions (and several were answered for me) but I tried to respond to the ones that seemed most interesting. I'm also likely to be completely wrong about everything I've said. I'm not the sharpest pencil in the drawer :-)

Well, what do you all think? Should we continue with "Ask Asa"? If you think it's a good idea, then use the comments at this post to pose another round of questions and I'll see what I can do to answer them for next week :-)

Posted by asa at February 25, 2004 11:59 PM