ask asa answers

There were a lot of great questions in this week's Ask Asa. As I said earlier, I don't really have the time to answer all of them so I'm picking a few based on how much time I do have and how much I think I can actually inform with my answers. So, here it is. Feel free to use this blog post to ask questions for the next installment of Ask Asa.

Doug asked "Is it the intention of Mozilla.org to release Tb 1.0 at the same time as Fx 1.0?"
Doug, it's been a few weeks since I talked to the product teams about this but last time we spoke about it the plan was to release both Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 at roughly the same time. Almost all of our efforts are focused on getting Firefox to 1.0 and thanks to mscott's hard work, I haven't had to pay as close attention to the Thunderbird release planning. I believe that we'll be seeing some updates to the Firefox and Thunderbird roadmaps some time soon. I'll certainly post more as we get closer to the releases.

Riscky asked "I’m going to basically steal this question from Grev, How is it that one man (Asa) is blessed with so many gmail invites that he could stand on a busy U.S. street corner doling them out."
Well, for a couple of weeks Google was handing out lots of gmail invites to me. I had a couple of gmail accounts (one I use to back-up my Mozilla mail, and the other is for personal mail) and each one was getting 5 or 6 new invites every couple of days. I know some people who were sitting on 50 or 60 invites :-)

Ludovic asked "I would like to know what OS most mozillian use ? (based on d/l numbers)."
Ludovic, based on download stats from Firefox 0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.7, about 84% of users are on Windows, about 6% are on Mac, and about 10% are on Linux. Is that about what you expected?

Fred asked, "Can a complete computer klutz such as myself use Firefox?"
Fred, not only can a computer klutz use Firefox, but a computer klutz should use Firefox. With all the worms, viruses, trojans, pop-ups and whatnot, a computer klutz can't afford to use IE. Today's internt isn't what it was eve just a few years ago. If you're not extremely savvy with computer security, it's just too dangerous to use IE. The good news is that no only will Firefox help keep you safe from all the dangers on the web these days, but it's also a very easy migration for IE users. Firefox will automatically import all of your IE favorites, history, cookies, form data and passwords and once you get up and running, you'll find a very comfortable browser that looks and feels a lot like IE, only better :-) I recommend that you give it a try and see for yourself. Firefox is a tiny 4.7 MB download (about 1/5th the size of the recommended IE install) installing is a breeze. You can download it at the the Firefox product page. If you have any difficulties getting it installed and up and running, feel free to ask for help at the mozillaZine user forums.

Lloyd and Thomas both asked about non-developer contribution opportunities. Well, you guys came to the right place. I actually got my start with Mozilla about five years ago asking that exact same question. A few folks working on the project pointed me to Bugzilla and said "go there!". My answer is basically the same :)
Actually, it's my job to give a better answer than that so I'll try. If you use Mozilla products and find problems, report bugs. If the bugs are already reported, or reporting bugs isn't your thing, you can help us triage the 100-150 bugs that get filed in Bugzilla each day. With so many bugs coming in to the system, developers can get overwhelmed. A quick example of this is the Firefox product in Bugzilla. There are about 10,000 bugs in that product. Of those, about 6,800 have been resolved as duplicates of other bugs, unreproduceable, or non-bugs. Nearly 1,100 have been resolved as fixed. About 1,200 have been triaged as legitimate and still open bugs, and the remaining 1,000 or so need to be looked at by someone like you :)
Given that a majority of incoming bugs are not of much value to the developers (dupes, invalid, and worksforme)and with tens of thousands of bug reporters filing more than new bugs each day, you can see where your help in this effort would be appreciated. You can read more about helping out with the Mozilla testing and quality assurance effort at the Helping with QA page.
If you'd like some hands-on help getting started, we hold "BugDays" every Tuesday on IRC. You can find us on the server irc.mozilla.org and the channel #mozillazine. Most QA activities are perfect for someone who only has a few minutes here and there to give. Hope to see you in Bugzilla or at BugDay!

And for Larfnarf, no, you may not "huggle" me.

Posted by asa at July 5, 2004 07:25 PM