Doug asked, "Do you personally have any 'pet' bugs in any Mozilla products?"
Yeah, Doug, I do. There are a couple of bugs that I'd like to see fixed and several features I'd like to see added. Before Firefox and Thunderbird, things were a lot worse. I had at least a couple dozen bugs that bothered me and about 15 features or feature changes that I desperately wanted. My only pet bugs today are things like the address field dropdown not closing on second click (bug 192577), the "hidden window" showing up when you use Expose on Mac (bug 223779), and various inconsistencies in creating and loading Bookmarks from different locations. My pet feature requests have gone down dramatically as extensions fill in those gaps and the only ones that I still hope for are the ability to delete attachments from emails (bug 2920 - the extension still doesn't work right for me), Gecko improvements to cache the DOM and JS context so we can get some of that fast back button speed like Opera (bug 38486), and maybe plugin controls like we have for cookies and pop-ups (bug 94025 or similar). Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the application and think that Firefox 1.0 will be the best 1.0 release ever.
Jack asked, "Does Mozilla.org give any money to Mozillazine to help support the huge bandwidth costs they face ? If not do you not agree this would be a nice gesture as they have a hugely positive impact on the community, especially the bug finding/triaging side."
Jack, Mozillazine is an extremely valuable component of the Mozilla community. I consider Mozilla.org, Mozillazine, and Mozdev to be the three visible stars in the Mozilla community constellation and we certainly wouldn't be where we are today without the years of support from Chris Nelson, Jason Kersey, Alex Bishop and the other that have contributed so much of their time and energy to making Mozillazine a great resource that we all use. That being said, we don't give them a dime :-) Actually, both mozilla.org and the Mozillazine team have always appreciated the value in these two organizations remaining independent from each other. The Mozilla Foundation staff realizes the importance of Mozillazine and we will do what we can to make sure they are able to continue providing those great services, but to date, there hasn't been a financial or editorial relationship and I believe everyone would still like to keep it that way.
Ali said, "On July 7th you mentioned that there are over 100,000 registered Bugzilla accounts. I'm wondering how many of these accounts are still active, and how many of them contribute on a regular basis."
I had hoped to get some detailed and contemporary statistics for you but I'm having trouble with my SQL queries so I'll have to push this Ask Asa item to the next installment. Next time I run these queries, I'll see if we can't get something set up to do regular reporting of these statistics. To hold you over until then, here are some stats from my developer day presentation (the data is about 6 months old) earlier this year. About 60,000 people have Bugzilla accounts with activity. Over 50,000 people have reported a bug in Bugzilla. Slightly more than 18,000 individuals reported at least one bug in the last year. We've had 9,000 individuals report at least one bug in the last six months. There are about 2,000 testers with advanced Bugzilla privileges. Some stars in the Bugzilla world include Henrik Gemal who leads the pack with more than 2,500 bugs filed, sspitzer and timeless both with over 2,000 bugs reported, another two dozen people have reported greater than 500 bugs each. BZ has resolved (a combination of fixed and other) 7,700 bugs, matti and R.K.Aa, more than 5,000 each, and dozens more have resolved over 1,000 bugs in Bugzilla. David Baron has attached nearly 950 testcases to bugs, Mats Palmgren 922, BZ 907, Jesse Ruderman over 300, and nearly two dozen others have attached more than 200 testcases each. So we've got a very active community and this was before all the great Firefox press of the last six months so the numbers are probably a good bit higher today.
Jesse asked, "Which is worse, voting Republican (US) or using Internet Explorer?"
Well, Jesse, I really can't say with any certainty, but I will say that talking a lot about security doesn't actually make things more secure. People who are satisfied with that now will one day probably come to regret not asking for more than just talk.
Joey asked, "This kinda sounds like a dumb question but... about how many downloads of firefox/mozilla/thunderbird are there per day, per hour, and so far? I'm just curious."
Joey, it's really difficult to calculate this with any accuracy and it changes depending on how recently we've released products, but I'd estimate that combined, Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird are responsible for between 100,000 and 200,000 downloads per day at the mozilla.org FTP servers. My quick and dirty math says that it's about 75% Firefox and Thunderbird and about 25% Mozilla application suite.
(reminder: name calling, trolling, flaming, and other rude behavior will not be tolerated here. don't expect your comments to stick around if you can't keep it civil.)
Posted by asa at July 24, 2004 06:25 PMDid you guys check out Maxthon? It seems to me much better than Firefox. Actually I was using Firefox before, but then one of my friends suggested this program. I gave it a try and it simply rocks. Way better than Firefox, like moving tabs etc... and every site works too, since it is IE based. I wonder what do you guys think about this browser. And also since IE can integrate these features easily into their browsers, how is Firefox going to compete with IE in the future, because it looks like tab browsing is nothing specific to Firefox at all which was the main reason I switched to Firefox earlier. Is the plan to rely on religious propaganda or is there a big plan to make Firefox even better than Maxthon? I didn't switch to Firefox to promote Linux at all, I simply liked the browser since it was working most of the time and it had tab browsing. But because I don't want to go to IE every time Firefox can not render a site, I am switching to Maxthon.
Posted by: Alicia on July 25, 2004 02:16 AMHeh, after reading that last answer three times, it really made me laugh :).
Posted by: Sander on July 25, 2004 02:18 AMTo be honest Maxthon Alicia.
There are however several "browsers" based on IE that improve upon it's feature set and most browsers other than IE do have tabbed browsing.
Tabbed browsing alone is not why people choose Firefox or Opera or whatever.
If it's based on IE it has IE's rendering engine. For you that's a plus, i see it as a minus as it promotes badly coded sites which don't conform to standards. Which in turn lessens acessability. Not just for people using non IE browsers but people with screen readers etc.
If it's based on IE it also has the same security issues that IE has.
But if those issues don't interest you, then there are still other features firefox has that IE doesn't some are harder to notice. Like dragging url's from the address bar into a form field.
Then of course theirs extensions, no other browser really has the range of add on customisation that Firefox has.
I suppose the whole websites not working thing can be very important but it depends on the individual. I hardly ever find site that don't work in Gecko browsers now.
You need to go with what your comfortable with, so if you need IE to access sites fair play. So long as you can try and see that this is not a Firefox problem 99% of the time but the websites for not being coded to a reasonable standard.
I'd say stick with Firefox and see what happens it's seems to have got better and better over time and quirks mode seems to have got better and better at rendering sites that are badly coded or made specifically for IE.
At the end of the day it's up to you though :)
First line should have read, "To be honest i've never heard of Maxthon Alicia".
I really should proof read :D
Posted by: jasidog on July 25, 2004 04:45 AM'...since it is IE based'
Well, there goes your entire argument.
Posted by: David House on July 25, 2004 06:02 AMMaxthon is the browser formerly known as MyIE2, I guess they changed the name because MyIE2 sounded like a customised version of IE2. I remember IE2 well and that was the time when Netscape was still miles ahead in the browser wars.
Personally, the main reason I'd not consider browsers like Maxthon is they rely on the IE engine and therefore you get all the security holes that IE provides - actually a while back I remember reading that this browser now supported embedding the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla but when I last tried that option the integration was not very good.
Even forgetting about the IE problems I prefer the user interface of Firefox, by *default* the UI is uncomplicated and unclutters, but you can make it as simple or as complicated as you like. With many other browsers including Maxthon, Opera and Crazy Browser the user interface starts off too cluttered, basically throwing all features down your face. Most alternative browsers make the Mozilla App suite (Seamonkey) look like it has got a simple uncluttered interface.
Posted by: Dave on July 25, 2004 06:51 AMLOL! One thing I like about mozilla.org is that it's totally apolitical. But I will try to bring up firefox on my favorite website, freerepublic.com, whenever I can.
Posted by: arielb on July 25, 2004 09:50 AMI'd second that request for being able to delete email attachments (preferable from a bunch of selected messages). I get many emails with some comments, and a big zipfile with source code added. I'd love to keep the comments, and not keep the attachments in my email folder. I'd rather keep the sources in the project directory rather than have them zipped up in my email.
Posted by: Av on July 25, 2004 04:02 PMI had a question spring to mind: what should I do about 'phantom' Firefox bugs, by which I mean those that are hard to reproduce?
I'm specifically thinking about a couple that I had which were not hard to demonstrate, but which were hard to recreate when starting from a fresh profile. For example, I recently had an issue where the context menu of items on the bookmarks menu was empty - it appeared as a small square, about 5px long. It didn't affect bookmark items on the bookmarks sidebar, manager, or in an extension I use, but has persisted through all recent versions.
Despite performing all the usual steps to try and diagnose the problem - installing the exact same versions of the same extensions in the same order into a new profile (I always do it alphabetically, and keep local copies to make my life easier), copying various files from the old profile into the new, etc., I couldn't make it happen again. I still have the broken folder on my desktop, until I can afford to spend longer looking into it.
Lazyness often prevails, so when I encounter a bug I wait a week watching before making my own - they're often temporary or quickly reported by others. I've often re-graded (mostly *up*graded, but, well... you know :) the browser several times, meaning I often can't remember the exact build I was using when things first went wrong. I don't have time to report 2000 bugs ('timeless' by name and nature, evidently, though I've often wondered if I'd save some by being the first to report issues rather than searching for dupes :).
So, again - I want your advice on what to do about an issue like this. Should I:
1) Forget it, my problem's solved by creating a new profile.
2) Report it, eventually it'll be resolved WORKSFORME
3) Investigate it, report what's wrong with my profile, hope that someone can decide whether it'll happen again and fix it if necessary
4) Lurk somewhere and bother someone about it away from bugzilla (this is what the QA department at work does, but I don't know how to apply it to the online world)
5) Etc...
Having the odd problem like this doesn't bother me when I'm using nightlies, but I could really do with being directed to some good "When to report bugs" instructions, even though I have a pretty good understanding of *how* to report them (the former is much more specific to the Mozilla development model).
Posted by: James on July 25, 2004 05:56 PMHey asa, thanks alot for answering.
Posted by: Joey on July 25, 2004 06:27 PMBetter plugin control would be *really* nice!
I love the flash block extension (click to play) and would like to see something similar for Java, etc.
Posted by: Joergen Ramskov on July 27, 2004 03:40 AM