answers from ask asa #16

It's finally here (Shawn and Jeff ;-) I've been pretty busy lately but I finally got around to it.

Etienne Juliot says,

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 ?

Etienne, we have never not been focused on the core technologies, especially the Gecko rendering engine. It is the core technology platform that made it possible for any of our applications to achieve the successes they have and we are always working to improve that platform, both for our applications (Firefox and Thunderbird) and for other applications, extensions, websites and web apps. I don't know about a war, but the Mozilla project is certainly committed to improving the web and a big piece of that will be adding features that our developer community cares about. You can read more about the Mozilla 2.0 platform at our developer wiki.

Shawn asks,

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

Shawn, I do a lot of different things. I'd say that my big areas of focus are 1)community organizing, 2)release management, and 3)quality assurance and testing. I'm also involved in product planning, marketing work, policy issues, technical roadmap development, and I help out with office management stuff as well. I'm sure I'm leaving off a few things here, but that's a reasonable overview. As far as my day to day activities, again, that's a lot of things and it mostly depends on whether or not we're coming up on a release. Releases take a huge amount of effort from nearly everyone on the project. During release times, on a typical day I'm reading bugs, evaluating blocker nominations, approving and denying patch landing requests, taking in feedback from places like the Mozillazine forums, weblogs, and the newsgroups. I'm also working with the build team and the QA team to make sure we can test all of the important fixes as they land. I might also be meeting with the drivers@mozilla.org or the Firefox product team to discuss schedules and requirements or I might be meeting with the localization teams on IRC and in the newsgroups to ensure we're all on the same page.

poynting has several questions,

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?

Poynting, we are hard at work to improve our application update mechanism and we will have some major improvements for the 1.1 release. I expect that you'll be able to see more of that work landing as we get closer to Beta. I do think that the upgrade notification needs to be more visible and I've recommended several times that we adopt the more familiar mechanism of using the Windows tray, a slide-up notification, and a persistent icon. This is something that I believe the majority of Windows users have come to expect now that Microsoft and most other regularly updated software (anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc.) have standardized on this. There is a balance we need to strike here, though. If you make something too annoying, the user may disable it permanently and that's something you really want to avoid. Your final question, about market share, I don't have a lot of information there. I have seen a couple of datasets including from top 25 websites and our own update download logs and that all suggests we need to do more to bring our users forward. I'm hopeful that a easier to use and more capable update system in 1.1 will help quite a bit.

David Naylor asks,

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?

David, there are no plans, that I'm aware of, to include Mouse Gestures in 1.1.

Bram! says,

With the new Options UI and SVG going into 1.1, I'm surprised 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 becoming 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 developed outside the trunk and what is there status (roughly)? [1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html

Bram, it's certainly not the 1.1 we set out to build around the time of shipping Firefox 1.0. That original plan called for just getting Firefox on an updated Gecko foundation (the Firefox 1.0 Gecko was about 9 months old when it shipped.) What we're working on now is also not really very close to the Firefox 1.5 which is planned to be the half-way point, application feature-wise, to Firefox 2.0. What we are seeing with the current 1.1 is more of the Gecko 2.0 features (things like Cairo, XULRunner, SVG, etc.) and not a lot of the Firefox 1.5 or 2.0 features (improved bookmarks and history, per site controls, accessibility improvements, find and search improvements, etc.). We are, as you note, getting some browser improvements, including the preferences UI changes, the overhaul of the extension management system, and most importantly, a more functional Update system. So, yes, maybe this is something between 1.1 and 1.5, but it's mostly in the core Gecko area that we're plunging further ahead and not in the end-user browser features. About Firefox features being developed outside of the trunk, that's not really happening. I mean, I suspect that the developers all have some set of changes in their local trees, and that's compounded some by the development trunk being restricted to 1.1a1 changes, but right now we're laying the foundation for a lot of that user-visible feature work and it's mostly all happening on the trunk.

OL asks,

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, there are millions of users switching from other e-mail clients to Thunderbird. I don't have any solid information on whether they're switching from Eudora or from Outlook or some other client, but they're definitely downloading Thunderbird by the millions. It's not something I see happening in the future. It's something I see happening now. My browser's user agent today is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050517 Firefox/1.0+

Auss asks a number of questions,

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 "enhanced" features and is developed by paid specialists employed by MoFo and free one, which is developed and supported by community only?

Auss, Firefox and Thunderbird will always be open source and they will always be free of charge. Today, we have a Firefox official build and a Firefox community build without the trademarks and branding, but I don't see a time when there are two dramatically different Firefox products. On to your second question.

larfnarf asks,

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 ownership of mozilla splits off? Will the GRE just be developed on Firefox instead? 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.

Larfnarf, we're down to the final blocker for 1.8b2 and I hope to announce a candidate build any day now. If our testing and the feedback we get from the community is good, then we'll be shipping Deer Park 1.1 Alpha 1. As far as the suite goes, it's moving along quite well. They've created a group to manage the project and are actively developing with the goal of having releases roughly coincide with Firefox releases. The GRE has been superseded by XULRunner. As far as your suggestions for dealing with blogs and the press, I've thought of a number of approaches. I don't like any of them so I'll just deal with it as it comes until I can't anymore then I'll probably stop blogging.

James Napolitano says,

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 developments 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?

James, I don't have any specifics on what's being worked on with Gnome folks but I do know that we're all interested in making the linux experience better for users. I'm not keeping any secrets, I just don't have any specifics there :-) Exciting developments or projects in the coming months; Hrm. Lightning is one, for sure. I also think that XULRunner is going to be huge. I still haven't had a chance to look over your bookmarklets. I've still got your email flagged and I'll get to it when I can. Yes, we still need more volunteers in automation development. Not a lot of progress to report, though. Tracy Walker, Bob Clary, and Sarah Liberman are working in that area. I'm sure they could use help.

minghong asks a few questions,

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

Minghong, I really don't have good answers for any of your questions this time. I'm not very familiar with the SVG work. You may be able to find more information at the Mozilla developer wiki. Cairo is not a libpr0n replacement. It's a replacement for some or all of our GFX implementations. You can read more about this at the wiki. As for the location of the Firefox profile, I don't know when or if that's going to be changed. Right now I don't see a lot of value in making the change simply for consistency's sake. That's not my call, though. Maybe Ben or Mike Connor could tell you more.

me asks,

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?

me, Firefox is about making the web easier to use and empowering the user. I can't foresee a time when that won't be of value. I believe that Firefox is, simply put, a better browser than IE and that it will always be a better browser because we put the user first.

Aronnax asks,

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?

Aronnax, I'm not intimately involved in the that part of the Mozilla hosting services. You'll have to ask that question of someone who is. Sorry. I do know that the site was being worked on heavily and was not taking new submissions for a while. I believe they've made enough progress that they're again working on taking on new extensions and themes. Several of the UMO admins hang out on IRC so you might be able to get answers there.

db wants to know,

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?

db, Quicklaunch wasn't removed from Firefox. It was never a supported feature of Firefox. I'm surprised to hear it takes so long on your system. I have a winXP laptop with 2GB RAM and Firefox starts up in less than 1 second. I don't think XULRunner is really about application launch speed or loading at startup. XULRunner is more about providing the necessary functionality for developers to build rich internet applications. You can read more about XULRunner at the Mozilla wiki.

Cameron wonders,

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

Cameron, I don't think 5 minutes could possibly cover what I'd want him to change about Microsoft, nor do I think he's even capable of changing what I want changed about Microsoft. Those points aside, if I could effect one change at Microsoft, I think I'd push to have all of the Windows and Windows-related source code well documented and made public under a real open source license.

pheloxi says,

I use larger fonts (maximum 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 possible?

Pheloxi, that depends. How do you define "harming the design of the website?" I adjust font sizes all of the time and don't believe it harms the design of websites. There are certainly some poorly designed websites out there, but their design is already broken so I don't think my font size changes harm them. You're visually impaired and you use a maximum font size of 16? Do you mean minimum font size? If you're using the minimum font size, it's doing what it was intended to do, display pages with a font size no lower than 16. It's not scaling all fonts. If you want to scale all of the fonts, you can use the Firefox zoom feature available from the View->Text Size menu or the keyboard with Ctrl+ and Ctrl-. If you want to persist those scaled fonts across sessions, you can probably get what you want from an extension like Textzoom or by making the adjustment in a user style sheet as documented at here.

tim asks,

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, Version 2.0 will be our next major release. Between now and then, we'll have a "half way point" release called 1.5. Before we do that, we're going to do a Gecko update called 1.1. I'm not sure what about that plan would be considered a "ploy".

Christian says,

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?

There's been quite a bit of activity from Ben on the road to 1.1. He's completely rearchitected the extension system, redesigned and implemented the Options/Preferences window, and fixed lots of other bugs. Blake isn't actively developing on Firefox right now. His involvement has been on the marketing side of things with me over at SpreadFirefox.com and he is also working on a project of his own with Joe Hewitt.

Rob Harwood asks,

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

Rob, I haven't read those but several people have recommended at least a couple of them to me. Do you know if there are audio versions available for download? I don't have a lot of time these days but my commute offers some opportunity.

M2Ys4U wants to know,

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

M2Ys4U, XULRunner is progressing quite well. We hope to have a preview based on Gecko 1.8 and aligning with the Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 releases. I couldn't predict when we'll see Firefox and Thunderbird running on it.

Doug Wright asks,

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...

Doug, The wiki is a scratchpad, not necessarily a definitive plan for everything that will happen. I don't believe that we've done any work to improve the alt ss UI for 1.1.

Cusser has a few questions,

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. 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?

Cusser, I'm one of mozilla.org staff and I post at Mozillazine fairly regularly. Others on staff do as well (Scott spends quite a bit of time at the forums.) We can all do a better job of participating in more of the Mozilla community. I for one, have been trying to get more closely connected to the localization community over the last seven or eight months. I'm also working a lot with the grass-roots marketing community (not to mention the developer and qa communities). I haven't been spending as much time in the Mozillazine forums but I do read there several times a week. I also haven't been spending a as much time as I'd like working with the extension and theme communities or working with the Seamonkey and Camino and Calendar communities, or the Bugzilla community. Mozilla is huge and we have many, many communities under the Mozilla roof. I'd love to be more deeply involved with a lot of different areas, but I don't have the time right now to, for example, read even half of the posts that come through the Mozillazine forums. Maybe you all can work to build summaries for the other forums the way Peter has for the build forums and then publish an RSS feed that I could subscribe to where I just got the highlights. Asa Dotzler doesn't scale well ;-) so I need some help from you all. The review situation is about what it's always been. We've got more patchers than reviewers and we're not going to stop doing reviews so there's a bottleneck. I don't see that bottleneck going away anytime soon. I'm on "the team" and I'm well aware of Peter's list in the build forums. Some of those are definitely going to be fixed for Firefox 1.1.

AnotherGuest says,

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?

AnotherGuest, I third Cusser's question. It's one I hope to bring more attention to in the coming months and years. We are faced with a lot of challenges as we scale up the way we've been fortunate to with Firefox. One of those challenges is to grow our community leadership and build better communication mechanisms into the system. On to your second question, Ben has put a lot of effort into improving the extension system for 1.1. It's all of our hope that we have an easier time with this after 1.1 but software installation is always going to be tricky. If you think of Extensions as yet another application on the system, then there's really no way to avoid the difficulties that come with one more set of variables.

MarbleheadMan asks,

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?

MarbleheadMan, Firefox and Thunderbird are the premier applications from the Mozilla Foundation and as such have their product homepages at www.mozilla.org. I don't know of plans to change that.

Simone Chiaretta asks,

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. Can you explain how u spent the rest?

Simone, the money was raised for the New York Times ad and for other launch related activities. What wasn't spent on the New York Times ad was spent on Firefox 1.0 launch activities.

Gary van der Merwe asks,

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

I used to be listed on Planet but was getting regular complaints about my non-Mozilla related blog posts (on Mars, or my cat, or whatever) and the Planet feed was being syndicated to the front page of www.mozilla.org so I decided to pull myself off. I think that was about 9 months ago. The feed is managed by tor, and I think he's willing to add blogs from any Mozilla regulars. You can subscribe to my feed with this link. Any decent newsreader (I recommend Forumzilla) can aggregate my feed in with others including Planet if that's how you like to read them.

funtomas asks,

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?

Funtomas, I'm not sure how this will happen. I'll bet that Darin, Ben, or Dougt would know more. Also, I don't think we're necessarily limited to using the current build ID timestamp nor do I think that stamp couldn't include hours, minutes, and seconds if that was useful. You can track the Update development in the Update dependency list

Glaurung says,

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)?

Glaurung, I don't think that feature is currently on any list of planned work so it's hard to say if or when something like that would be implemented in Firefox. That's not to say that someone won't build it as an extension. I personally like your idea about image scaling but I suspect that it's not a very common use case and I don't know that it's worth adding the complexity. It'd be nice to have an extension, though, for those who did want it.

Kroc Camen asks,

The Printing functionality on Firefox is severely 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?

Yes. We've fixed literally scores of bugs in printing since 1.0. There is ongoing work to make printing better. It's a common complaint and there seem to be some core issues in Gecko that need to be worked out before it's drastically improved. Bugzilla can probably tell you more.

Tom asks,

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?

Tom, we have a number of projects planned for Spread Firefox. We just celebrated 50,000,000 downloads (check out what these guys did in celebration,) a substantial number of which came through the Spread Firefox affiliates program. In looking that information over, it appears that only about 30 to 40 thousand of the Spread Firefox's 100 thousand users are participating in that so one project is to revamp the affiliates program and try to get more of our community participating. We're also planning on improving the site some - to focus more on activities and less on discussion. To that end, we're going to be cleaning up and reorganizing the site to raise the visibility of quick and easy tasks that everyone can do to help spread Firefox as well as to highlight some of the ongoing projects that could use focused and specific volunteer attention. I'll be posting more on this over at SpreadFirefox.com in the coming weeks. As far as spreading Lightning, right now we're focused on spreading Firefox. If we expand any time soon, I suspect it will be to Thunderbird first. And yes, I do plan on posting an audio clip of me saying my name (since so many people are interested in that ;-) and maybe you or someone else maintaining that wikipedia biography can add it.

Thanks for all of the great questions. I know that some of you will have follow up questions and if they're substantial, it would be best to hold off and post them in the next Ask Asa segment where I'm more likely to respond. Posted by asa at May 17, 2005 03:42 PM