What are your plans for Spread Firefox in terms of projects? Do you plan on a Spread Lightning whenever that project comes to fruition?

Also, do you plan on posting an audio clip of you saying your own name on your Wikipedia Entry for Asa Dotzler?

Asa,
What exactlly is it that you do for MoFo? Meaning if you had to describe what your day to day activities are what are they?

What are you doing to ensure that users of obsolete application versions upgrade?

Don't you think that it would be better security if the upgrade mechanism was far more insistent, visible and annoying?

You commonly post statistics showing Firefox browser share - are you aware of any mainstream ones showing how prevalent use of 1.0.3 is compared to older releases?

Any updates on the status of Mozilla Lightning? I know there was supposed to be an interview with Mike Shaver, but I've never seen one posted.

Many people have been switching from eg IE to Firefox, do you see them switching from eg Eudora to Thunderbird in a near future?

Also, could you post your browser's user agent? just curious ;)

OL: don't go there ;-)

Asa, will MoFo be able to be held up by donations and cash grants only for a long term. Can we be afraid of splitting Firefox/Thunderbird into two separate branches: free one, and that one must pay for (as the creator of X-Chat did, or on the example of RedHat with its Fedora)? I mean paid version, which has "enchanced" features and is developed by paid specialists employed by MoFo and free one, which is developed and supported by community only?

When posting this there were only 6 1.8B2 blockers... how is the release going to go? is there going to be test releases first before the official 1.8B2 comes out?

Also.. Is there any further information about the split off of ownership of the suite? It was announced, and then sorta dropped off the news radar as to further developments.

And.. what is the plans on testing the GRE when owenership of mozilla splits off? Will the GRE just be developed on Firefox instead?

You're my hero.

With the new Options UI and SVG going into 1.1, I'm suprised that 1.1 will be such a big improvement of 1.0. So, how do you personally look at the Firefox Roadmap[1]? Isn't 1.1 becomming sort of halfway between 1.1 and 1.5 as described in the roadmap?

As a slightly different question: How many new (Fx 2.0) features are being developped outside the trunk and what is there status (roughly)?

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html

Hey Asa,

I asked you last time about what happened with the involvement with GNOME, and you gave some vague answer like, "We continue to work with those folks on an engineering level." Can you provide any specifics as to what is being worked on? Like are they merely making Mozilla look-and-feel like a native GNOME application on the GNOME desktop, sharing some code, merging parts of the projects, etc. ? Or would you prefer to keep that a secret for now?

Some other questions: Can you give us some hints to any exciting developements or projects that will happen in the Mozilla community in the coming months (other than the next releases)? Will you please give my bookmarklets a quick try? (just tell me they're useful and that will encourage me to code some more). And how is the drive to increase automation/automated testing coming along? Do you still need more volunteers there?

With SVG suddenly included and enabled in 1.1, how much of the specification is actually finished? (All? :-P) The Mozilla SVG Status page was last modified at March 4, 2005 so it doesn't seem to be the most up-to-date. Giving partial support seems to be a bit rush. It is due to the pressure from Opera 8 which has SVG Tiny support?

Are there any plans for including any new extensions with Ff 1.1? My thinking is, if we can include DOM inspector & JavaScript Console (is that part of the dev tools?), then why not include the optimoz mouse gestures?

2000 -> 2003 was the Mozilla Suite success for geeks community, with respect of W3C standard and a very good powered rendering engine.
2004 -> mi 2005 is the famous success of Firefox for every one with an easy to use GUI and new fillers features.

With SVG, XForms, XULRunner, GRE, Gnome collaboration, ... does 2005 -> 2006 will be the return of the marketing for the engine of Mozilla ?
Will the browser war continue on the number of standard formats supported ?

asa, do you really think firefox progression will succeed not stopping by the arrival of IE7 ? And if so, if Firefox really survive, what will be the key success factors that will go drive firefox there?

Hi,
i have some Firefox themes based on the mac default theme.
http://www.grapple.net.tf/

They are already announced for months at the mozilla update site.
Unfortunately without a reaction or a reason of them.
Surely it is because they cause serious problems under Windows and Linux.

Enables the new update system it to create themes particularly for an operation system - or the target group to limit exactly?
Or are other possibilities to be solved planned around the problem?

Why was Quick Launch removed from Firefox? It takes about 10 seconds to load on my (WinXP, ~2gig) system, and the problem seems to be widespread and significant. My understanding is that part of Firefox's core philosophy is speed (and thus improved usability), this seems to contradict that?
(nb. I have tried MinimizeToTray but the occasional side-effects caused me to uninstall.)

On a related note, I am interested in the ramifications of XULRunner. My understanding is that XR will load when my OS boots and then if I open Firefox, Thunderbird or any of their friends it will be dramatically quicker to open. (Additionally, Fx and Tb could be much smaller downloads.) This sounds good! Is this accurate, and if so when will we see it?

Cheer cheer

> On a related note, I am interested in the ramifications of XULRunner. My understanding is that XR will load when my OS boots and then if I open Firefox, Thunderbird or any of their friends it will be dramatically quicker to open. (Additionally, Fx and Tb could be much smaller downloads.) This sounds good! Is this accurate, and if so when will we see it?

Wah! Does that seem that one will have to download XR and Firefox both separately like GTK and install them in the same way? If it so, I doubt there's any point of usability.

If you could spend 5 minutes with Bill Gates, what would you ask him to change about Microsoft?

> Wah! Does that seem that one will have to download XR and Firefox both separately like GTK and install them in the same way? If it so, I doubt there's any point of usability.

Actually I support this direction. Not necessary run when the OS starts. It can be something like JVM, which is run only when needed. Also, for example, when one is using Firefox, the Thunberbird will come up more quickly.

The Gecko engine can be updated independent of the application. As a result there will be smaller download. We can even make "XULRunner/GRE/XRE auto updater", so user will alway have the latest version of the Gecko (great news for web developers).

Forgot to answer your question: usability will not be hindered. Have you tried Gaim for Windows? It has 2 versions: one with Gtk and other one without it. It shouldn't be that hard for user to understand this. :-P

I use larger fonts (maximium font size: 16), because I am visual impaired.

I would like it if firefox creates a better why to switch from small fonts to larger fonts without harming the design of the website.

is that posible?

What is the reasoning behind releasing v1.1, v1.5, v2.0? Is that simply a marketing ploy? Are those just bookmarks in the roadmap with more releases to come?

tim: I believe there won't be any other releases than those. Skipping a few version numbers will better match the advances of Firefox with peoples' expectations. It will probably also increase the amounts of updates downloaded. If Firefox were to be released at the traditional 0.1 increments, a lot of people would probably think "Oh, just a minor update, no need for me to upgrade".

I haven't seen much Bugzilla activity by Ben Goodger and Blake Ross lately. Is it because I just haven't looked the right places, or are they buzy doing secret Google stuff or something else?

Asa, I'm curious if you've read any of these books (or if you have an interest in reading them). You seem to have very good instincts for marketing Firefox, so I was wondering.
* Crossing the Chasm
* Inside the Tornado
* The Innovator's Dilemma
* The Innovator's Solution

How is XULRunner progressing, and when do you think we'll see Fx, TB & SB running ontop of it?

What about the interview to shaver?

What's up with the alternate stylesheet stuff (status-bar icon, sticky selections)? The wiki says that the icon was supposed to be re-enabled after aviary-landing...

Mozilla.org staff used to reply to issues raised on Mozillazine, but haven't done so in a long time - this makes it harder for us to give useful feedback on things that aren't bugs.

I raise this issue since Bugzilla ends up being spammed with useless comments and advocacy when the topic is of community interest and blogs aren't really the correct medium through which to voice our concerns/questions/suggestions.

I want to know if we're going to see community participation from members of Mozilla.org again in the future...

Oops... wasn't quite ready to submit that, my apologies. The other two questions I want to ask are:

1) How is the review situation coming? I want to spend more of my programming time working on Firefox chrome patches (and maybe later some backend stuff when my C++ is up to scratch). So far, my one and only patch has been bitrotten which removes the incentive a bit. It's nobody's fault in particular, but how is the situation progressing?

2) How aware are "the team" of Peter(6)'s red list on the Firefox Builds forum and how likely are they to clear up the dozens of (very visible) regressions before Firefox 1.1?

With the creation of CaminoBrowser.org, a very attractive-looking Mozilla product homepage, are there any plans to expand this idea (self-contained per-product sites) to other Mozilla products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird?

Asa, When are you going to answer these questions?

Two questions:

1) I would love to use the hidden "force links to open in..." option, but the way javascript links work makes it unworkable. In particular, I'd like to have every link open in the same window, then for links that I want to open in a new page, I'll middle-click them. But for javascript popup links, this doesn't work since Firefox first opens a new, blank tab, then tries to run the javascript code, which of course fails. Are there any plans to change Firefox's behavior for javascript links?

2) Are there any plans to multithread Firefox so that the whole UI doesn't become unresponsive when, for example, loading an entire folder full of tabs at once? I know this would be difficult to implement in a cross-platform application, but that is really the Achilles' heel of Firefox for me.

Mike

Asa,
on spreadfirefox there is a post about how you used the 250.000 dollars you raised from the NYT ad campaign, since the ad costed just 50k.
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/14846

Can you explain how u spent the rest?

Asa,
How come you blog dose not feed http://planet.mozilla.org/ ? Who decides who's blogs get feed to http://planet.mozilla.org/ ?

And can I change my comments on this blog to correct my spelling? ;-) "dose" should be "does".

It's been four days... do you plan to respond to anyone?

Jeff

Jeff, clearly you're new to Ask Asa ;-) I almost always give it a week or two to gather questions and then I take my time putting together answers. This is not a 1 day turnaround affair. Go look at some of the previous Ask Asa posts and you'll see how it works.

- A

Asa,

You are right, I am relatively new. I have been reading your blog for a few weeks now, and I had seen that you had posted back to other replies on your posts more directly, but I haven't looked back at any of the other ask asa posts. I didn't realize that you were working to sorta bring it all together in one big response.

I wasn't expecting a one day turn around, but since you had been posting other threads I knew that you were checking up on things.

Sorry for my impatience and thanks for your work.

Jeff

With the rendering pipeline moving to Cairo, will libpr0n be removed? The end of another legend? ;-)

Any clear idea how Firefox installations will distinguish new, binary patches already installed? If that changed the build timestamp, that'd be limited for one patch a day. Could you disclose how it'll work?

One incredibly useful feature of the latest version of Opera is the "fit web page to width of window" button. This one feature is the sole reason I continue to use Opera on a semi-regular basis. How soon do you think something like this could be implemented in Firefox?

On a related matter: I find the "resize large images to fit" feature of Firefox more annoying than useful. For big "portrait" style images which are taller than they are wide, I can fit it in the window (and have it be way too tiny) or struggle with looking at it full size. What I would like is the ability to scale the image so that its *width* fits the window: like a lot of other people, I don't mind so much having to scroll vertically, what I really hate is scrolling horizontally. So, would it be possible to make the "resize image" feature a 3-way switch (fit entire thing, fit width, full size)?

Ok, I have another question.. so it will be 3 total from me.

Has there been any talk about making a page for the mozilla journals that says in big bold letters "THESE JOURNALS CONTAIN ANYTHING THE OWNERS FEEL LIKE"

That way when people complain that you talk about cats and mars, you can just point them to a page that tells them you can post whatever you want.

I second the question about community participation from Cusser.

Beyond that, I too spend a lot of time on the forums. Too much. Besides bookmarks, the thing we see again and again is Fx malfunctioning because of incorrectly installed extensions. I think it's the single biggest problem.

Unfortunately, the methods for updating extensions are terribly inconsistent. Some cannot be uninstalled correctly, some MUST be uninstalled because they cannot be updated, and many must be updated before updating Fx. Worse yet, uninstalling extensions does not always work, so repairs may fail. As a result, we see hordes of people with a nonfunctioning or poorly functioning browser. What I would like to know is, what is being done about this, especially in the face of 1.1?

The Printing functionality on Firefox is severley broken (do print preview and then Press F5), I've crashed it on a number of occasions just with plain CSS. Has any work been done on this area for the 1.1 release?

Will the Firefox profile location be fixed?
e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox to C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Firefox

Or will the Thunderbird profile location be fixed?
e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird to C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Thunderbird

Now they are not consistent with each other. Either one of them should be fixed.