Now that we are in July, do you still think we can make a 2.0 or even 1.5 release by the end of the year?

My question (or rather a set of related questions, sorry):

When a bug is marked WONTFIX, what, if any, is the decision process leading up to that? Do developers make that decision independently, or would do they consult other devs first? If a decision has been made in the past to not implement xyz, what, if anything, would prompt a review of that decision?

Thanks for your answers and keep up the great work. :-)

with the up and coming IE7 beta this summer and the release before christmas do you really think it will make a difference to how the web will work..

many companies and colleges (ive just completed (today!) a college course at a college of technology and most of there systems were running IE 5.5 and windows 2000) are still using old technology because it works

do you think that if microsoft had stayed on the bandwagon with developing IE we would have a lot more things to play with as web devlopers e.g VRML or SVG

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microsoft always gets the blame for having the style scrollbar-color css tags because there IE only, but mozilla has the moz-opaticy and moz-borderroundess (i may not be accurate with those) dont you think there is a contridiction there?

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with FF 1.1 coming towards us hows the update mechnism coming along all year ive been trying to convince my sys admin to go to FF for the college network is there any chance of an offical mozilla FF network installer / updater or an easy way to stop the installation of extensions or themes (certain extensions like vbrowse and google cache allow students to get past certain restrictions)?

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i know this is your personal blog as well as mozilla based but do you have to get your blogs checked in any way before you post them?

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so google eh... anything going on there that you wanna tell us ?

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i read a lotta tech news sites as a FF user i feel good when people mention it but it seems that every story that comes out now about a browser that has comments enabled always seems to get the my browsers bigger than yours! , my browser had that feature first, my browers more secure, my browser can beat your browser at golf, my browser has a better flash plug in

to tell you the truth as ium sure your aware its seems to be mostly the opera and FF fanboys that are at each others throats and some of your posts have been slightly anti opera, in a world of wanna web standards shouldnt there be more of a partnership there rather than 2 oppersite teams, i know the opera browser is a saleable product but the two browsers are very alike as is the fanbase

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i think thats about it for now but ill have some more .... stay tuned

Well... some of these I'm sure other readers can feild, and I'll do my share to try and unburden Asa with some of the easier (or my preception of them as easier) questions.

@Dominic

[quote]microsoft always gets the blame for having the style scrollbar-color css tags because there IE only, but mozilla has the moz-opaticy and moz-borderroundess (i may not be accurate with those) dont you think there is a contridiction there?[/quote]

The difference between these two technologies is their basis in webstandards. Right now with the border roundness you can't impliment this in other browsers, yet it is available in the CSS specifications. So mozilla developers have jumped on board and given us a half/implimentation. Why is it prefaced with moz-? My guess is that this is to warn developers that this feature is not ready to be used outside of the mozilla environment. I personaly mostly use the feature when designing themes for firefox and this may have been where the hack originated.

@Rishi

[quote]When a bug is marked WONTFIX, what, if any, is the decision process leading up to that? Do developers make that decision independently, or would do they consult other devs first? If a decision has been made in the past to not implement xyz, what, if anything, would prompt a review of that decision?[/quote]

Lots of times when sitting around in #firefox we'll be doing bug triaging. A bug is generaly marked wontfix is it's outlandish, or silly, or something we know isn't possible at this time. Lots of times those are personal calls on the part of bug triagers, lots of times we'll ask in the channel what people think and get a concensus. If you want your bug re-opened, continue discussion in the bug, and keep proding people. Perhaps it was wont-fixed becuase of a poor discription, or they didn't understand you properly, try re-writing your bug report such that it might be more clear. And most of all talk to people.

That's all I got

Anders

What marketing efforts are you making to ensure that people upgrade to 1.1? Why isn't spreadfirefox pushing this harder?

Ada,

Once I knew about firefox and started using it, I had been telling others to use it. And it is my default browser.

Sometimes, I have to switch to IE because some sites don't work in firefox. Is there any way, users can let you guys know about such sites ?

Also, I love firefox, but I think if some small features are implemented firefox usage will be more nice. Where can I request any features or suggest any changes ?

Keep up the good work,

Cheers,
Praveen

To clarify my earlier question (sorry).

I don't mean 1.1 specifically, I know it isn't out yet. I mean 'most recent version' after a security bug is fixed.

Regardless of how much you push the new update mechanism, millions will still have FF version

My point is that marketing updates is necessary, if painful.

argh! that should say Firefox version < 1.03

Mr. Asa Dotzler,

I am a web/desktop software developer for 18 years. I want to let you know how much I appreciate the Firefox web browser with the multi-tab capabilities, it really is a top notch browser.

I have a complaint as a web developer about the browser. I noticed that my web applications are not functioning as I expected because the Firefox browser shares a single session for all open Firefox browsers and tabs on a single computer. I believe this to be a design flaw that has a deep impact on the usability of the Firefox browser. My questions are as follows:

Do you have plans to create a unique session for each browser and all tabs within each browser?

If so, when can we expect to see this change?

If you do not plan on making a change for your session managing design, would you tell us how developers like myself can write web applications to work well with your browser without having to architect our own session managing framework?

Thank you for your attention in this matter

When will we see 1.0.5?

When will we see 1.1? :-P

@Steve

Simply don't use "session". HTTP is stateless: there are NO sessions. "Session" is in fact just a cookies, which IMO not reliable. Keep track of your users using database.

I don't have a specific question, but I'd like to expand on Anders' comment about WONTFIXing bugs. From http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-privilege-guide.html#resolving :

"Bugs should not be marked WONTFIX by the normal bug triager. The decision to mark a bug WONTFIX is reserved for module owners or module peers."

"You should resolve a bug as INVALID, if the issue described in the bug is clearly not a Mozilla bug or if the issue is intended behaviour. The exception are bugs in other software which we have to work around. Bugs covering this exception should not be INVALIDated by anyone other than the module owner or module peer. Reports of problems with websites that result from bad coding or use of proprietary technology should also not be INVALIDated, but instead moved to the Tech Evangelism product."

Will FF 1.1 pass the Acid2 test? If not, should we expect it in 1.5?

quote "Ada,

Once I knew about firefox and started using it, I had been telling others to use it. And it is my default browser.

Sometimes, I have to switch to IE because some sites don't work in firefox. Is there any way, users can let you guys know about such sites ?
"

theres a tool in the latest version of FF called report broken website.. that does exactly that

"Also, I love firefox, but I think if some small features are implemented firefox usage will be more nice. Where can I request any features or suggest any changes ?"

www.mozillazine.org/forums try the FF forums there

when will the skins suport the full gui instead of just icons and colors ??
currently, I find it a bit ridiculous.

One of the things that I've been thinking about recently is "sustainability" of large and/or important FLOSS projects in the middle-to-long term (i.e., attracting new developers to take over when the current crop "retire").

I'm curious if you can provide an "estimate" of developers within the Mozilla project as a whole (because Gecko/Core is just as important as the end-user apps themselves) who do "significant" work but who are not former Netscape employees.

As background/more precise explantion of my question: I know there's a large community of developers who fix lots of smaller bugs or who fix/add a major feature here or there--and I absolutely mean them, and their vital contributions, no disrespect. However, how many (say, from a Mac/Camino perspective, which is what I know best) Josh Aas-types are there, who will be able to take over when the Mike Pinkertons and Simon Frasers move on? (The whole "Firefox patch backlog" issue that attracted a bunch of noise a few months ago seems like a partially-related issue—Fx not attracting or generating new core contributors suitable to become module peers.)

This is really poorly articulated, sorry. And what's even worse is that I've been thinking about how to best articulate it for about a month now :(

Seeing as neither WHATWG nor Microsoft seem to be strictly following W3C standards but rather pushing their own agendas under the guise of innovation, where do you see the push for standards based coding and browser development at the moment?

Do you think that MoFo in particular is now being hypocritical in implementing tags like <canvas>? Surely this makes a mockery of all the Microsoft bashing that the Open Source Software (OSS) movement has leveled at Microsoft for so long? Is it ok for WHATWG to implement non-standard features while innovating but it's not ok for Microsoft to do the same (remember when the words Microsoft and innovation could be spoken in the same sentence without invoking laughter...)?

Regarding <canvas>, is this not also unecessary being that Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support is all but a reality? Couldn't supporting two vector graphics rendering capabilities be considered code bloat or is <canvas> and SVG support based on the same code?

When will MoFo return to simple innovation like building user-friendly rich edit functionality into still-arcane textarea boxes , perhaps instead of supplementing vector graphics functionality already supported by Flash plugins? Or does the MoFo/Firefox crew really think they have written the ultimate UI/application with no need for improvement (an attitude that could be derived from some 'commentary' originating from MoFo/Firefox circles)?

There are already extensions to do simple user-friendly features such as resizable textarea boxes. Why should users have to install and maintain extensions for such simple UI functions? What, if anything, has resulted from your enthusiastic suggestion that Firefox needed to be more friendly for bloggers (and therefore of course for any rich editing web application)?

Asa, thanks for providing this method of helping us all learn a little more about Mozilla/Firefox.

Couple of items regarding the Firefox 1.1 development work --

1) Why is it that there are many bugs that have patches, reviews, and even approval for check-in, but never actually get checked in? For the Deer Park alpha 1 cycle, it looks like there are still 15 bugs or so that have approval but no checkin, and for Deer Park alpha 2 the number looks like 40 or so (I am sure some will be checked in once things are opened up a little more after tha a2 release, but seems like a large number)

2) Regarding testing and QA, a topic I know you spend a lot of time with. What is your thoughts regarding specific functionality testing like smoke tests and other automated testing versus the idea of providing stable builds that people download and use on a regular basis as a form of testing?

I really like the later approach, it proves Firefox in the "real world", fits the development philosophy of incremental improvements with a constantly usable platform, and seems to be the best method of testing a very complex system in an even more complex environment. I would really like to hear your thoughts on this approach. I have more than just a passive interest in this topic, we are currently working on some resources for aiding nightly/hourly build users with regression testing/bug triaging

Thanks

Extensions are not only a great way to allow 3rd party developers to easily add to the product, but also a good source of innovation for core features should they be incorporated into the product in the longer term. For example, I think Ben Goodger was hoping to get MiniT in, and you blogged ResizeableTextarea. Such useful yet non-bloating features would be great to have in the default install - is this happening?

Cheers.

I was "awarded" a SFX '25 million downloads coin' but I've never received one in the post. I know of another member who received nothing but an empty envelope. I am of course a little disappointed that it never arrived, all I want to know is can I even expect anything? I'm certainly not demanding an answer, after all, I was privileged to be awarded the rare coin in the first place. My blog posts (SFX, blakeross.com) e-mails, they've all gone unanswered... =o( Curses on whoever stole it...

Craig, I have received the awarded coin, and as I am in Europe (which makes it harder to deliver), I don't think there was some conspiracy in that.

Now for Asa. I would like to pose a question about Privacy options in Firefox. Do you think that they are implemented in such a way that normal user can get with them (I mean are cookies, cache, entries, history in vocabulary of normal surfer)?

IMHO, such options should be in advanced section, while just a simple mechanism should be used for mainstream user - in tools menu there would be privacy submenu with clear tracks/sanitaze command (available now) and record tracks checker (propsal). So, if you visit a site that you don't trust to you clear the checker, and that's all. In general, and specially among male population, people tend to have sessions of visiting untrusted sites, which makes this approach natural. Though I have proposed this before, I am much more sure that it is right way now, as Apple has implemented similar mechanism in new Safari.

why do extensions have directories with mumbers and letters?

could be posible to costumise make firefox / thunderbird profiles easier and working correctly?

I mean when insttall firefox / thunderbird I want create my own directories without messing everything up. the installer of firefox makes C:\Documents and Settings\(my dir)\Application Data\mozilla\firefox\profile and the installer of thunderbird makes C:\Documents and Settings\(my dir)\Application Data\thunderbird\profile, but is does not place it C:\Documents and Settings\(my dir)\Application Data\mozilla\. I like to be organised so I tried to created a C:\(internet files)\mozilla\firefox\(a profile name)\ and C:\(internet files)\mozilla\thunderbird\(a profille name)\, but I did not succeed, because firefox files got mixed up with thunderbird files.

an sugestion: install should have some sort of wizard to make default profile or costumized profiles with "a directory search" and "name the profile directory". this wizard should also be added to one of menus.

I have been looking at Dutch translations of firefox / thunderbird they use a lot more words in fact they look like more like "mini helps". do you have rules of translation?

thank you for you time to answer!

e-greetings
pheloxi

How much of the back-end of your site did you write? And the front-end for that matter.

It's long been maintained by those working with Mozilla that Gecko is much more secure than IE. But this year there have been 44 security vulns in Mozilla products, compared with 25 for Microsoft's products. What are your thoughts on those statistics?

Also - have the numbers of Firefox downloads started slowing down significantly yet, are they continuing at their impressive pace?

I absolutely love firefox and I use it on all the computers I work on. Herein lies the problem, though. It should be so much easier than it currently is to sync profiles (and extensions) between computers (if you're running the profile from differently named directories on the two computers). Why can't I simply move the profile from one computer to another? It would be great if Firefox incorporated an "import profile" feature.

Will this ever happen?

@Lucas; You can, just go to the profile directory and copy and paste it to another location.

Dear Mr. Asa Dotzler

Will Spreadfirefox.com ever become more user friendly?

And the downloads seemed to have slowed down this past few weeks, do expect the downloads significantly increase when you guys release Firefox 1.1 sometime around?

@Asa: If on one computer, I have my profile on C:\firefox profile and on my other computer, I have my profile on C:\internet\firefox profile, that will not work as the extensions are registered for a different directory (C:\firefox profile). When I moved the profile, I had to follow the steps found here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Changing_Profile_Folder_Location

@Lucas: If you are a single user, you can sync everything except extensions (and probably themes), which should be fine. I can't figure out why one would install 10 extensions a day.

If you need to deploy some extension in corporate enviroment, then that is different. I think that much has been done on Deer Park, for more info read Ben's blog (from may to now): http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/

@Asa: Will you increase, maintain, or reduce your efforts at annoying the Opera community to new heights for July?

I have a question. But for the Opera fanboys. When will you stop trolling here and do something constructive instead of going after Asa for his opinions?

@ Dominic, Anders:

[quote]microsoft always gets the blame for having the style scrollbar-color css tags because there IE only, but mozilla has the moz-opaticy and moz-borderroundess (i may not be accurate with those) dont you think there is a contridiction there?[/quote]

The scrollbar properties are indeed IE only, and do not appear in any standard. On the other hand, opacity and border-radius do appear in the CSS spec. The spec also states that vendor-specific or incomplete property implementations should be named with a vendor-specific prefix beginning with a hyphen. So, opacity becomes -moz-opacity and border-radius becomes -moz-border-radius. Microsoft didn't follow this, thus the scrollbar properties appear more valid than they should, making novices think they can be relied upon.

@Ivan: I specifically want to sync two computers INCLUDING extensions. I don't want to install 10 extensions a day. However, I don't work on my computers for days at a time sometimes (my laptop is used somewhat more infrequently) and I don't remember all the things I've added or changed to my profile (extensions, themes, passwords, etc...) Why not be able to sync profiles including all these things? I'm the same user and I like the same things on both computers and I like the same extension preferences as well. Why not be able to migrate them?

What feeds do you subscribe to?

Will Camino's new automatic "Block web advertising" (Camino 0.9a1) feature make it into Firefox soon? It's pretty effective already.

Dex

What is your opinion on explosive diarrhoea? Have you ever experienced it, and how can the community use it to Spread Firefox?

Should Ben still be lead developer of Firefox? I don't mean only because he now works at Google, but I mean that because you simply don't seem him to be active in bugzilla.

I do know he implemented the new extension manager, new preferences etc, but once he has done an implementation, there are many regressions that others have to fix. Once he implements something he is invisible. It's like he did the job, and now if there are problems with the implementation it's up to others to fix the issues. Because he won't.

Compare with bz for exmpale, he is somebody that you feel really cares. He reviews, fixes bugs, triages bugs, look for regressions etc (you can actually believe he is at least 5 persons considering how active he is). I wish the lead developer of Firefox could be more like him.

Who should be held responsible for the appalling failure which resulted in a security regression in 1.0.4? Will they be punished (or at least censured), why did it happen, and what are you doing to make damn sure you don't compromise your users through sheer incompetence again?

Hi Asa!

My name is Mattias and currently live in Sweden. Been using FF for the last year or so, love it!

My questions:

Many features that are done with extensions are so usable that I don't really see why FF doesn't support it natively. Any thoughts about integrating some of the features provided by extensions into the FF "core"?

Moox, stipe and several other 3rd party builders provide users with quite a few performance improvements. Any idea if some or their work could be usable and integrated into an official FF version?

Thanks!

Dear Asa:

Does the way you are constantly picking on Opera and lying about it show that you are worried that it's a better browser?

Hmmm, how does this thing work Asa? Aren't you suppose to answer or do you wait another few days to "collect" more questions? I'm asking since I'm very curious about some of these questions :)

Thanks!

It seems as though Mozilla product releases have slowed down considerably since 1.0 releases happened. I seem to recall an article a while back with Mitchell Baker stating the goal would be to have regular product releases every quarter or so. Now, unless you count security releases in that mix, things have shifted from that mentality a lot. Could you expand on some of the contributing factors that may have lead to the slow down in product release? For example, was the 1.0 release bigger than you anticipated (creating more bugs to squash), or were there more features to be added/tested than anticipated? Also, how has the community involvement changed since the 1.0 release? Has there been more or less support for actual code/QA work?

Another main question I'd like to ask is in regards to user feedback and the road map. Similar to the product slow-down, it seems as though development activities haven't been nearly ask public as the pre-1.0 days. I still fondly remember looking through the MozillaZine forum with updates from mscott or others on how things are going. For quite some time, there were also daily updates on the status of nightly builds, how close things were to the next release, etc., but these stopped a few months ago. While I have discovered the Mozilla Wiki pages, much of the info is outdated or rarely updated and the Thunderbird info is basically null. Are there plans to increase the updating of the Mozilla Wiki pages or is something else going to fill the gap left since the 1.0 releases? I very much understand having mscott or others post on MozillaZine directly is a huge time commmittment, but since Mozilla products are open source, having better community communication helps with feedback, support, and planning. Could you provide any other suggestions on where to go for more information regarding releases and what pages could I point Mozilla Newbies to (other than MozillaZine or your site)?

I'm highly anticipating the release of 1.1 (especially the auto-update feature) for better recommendations to both my friends and those I support. Having the ability for the software to easily update itself seems like the final barrier to home computer adoption.

I doubt these are going to be answered.

I don't know if you are still taking questions, but... How is the progress on Lightning? When are we likely to see a release?