answers for ask asa #17

You all asked and I've (finally) answered.

Martin Alderson asks,

"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?"

Martin, we'll make our next major release around the end of summer. Major releases beyond that will probably be scheduled for early next year though we're not firm on that.

Rishi says,

"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?"

Rishi, it really depends. A bug will be marked wontfix for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's because fixing the bug would result in issues that are worse than the original problem. Other times it's a feature we do not intend to implement in Firefox. We have a system of Module Owners and Module Peers. They are ultimately responsible for decisions about bugs and features in their modules. You can read more at the module owners page. Module Owner decisions are pretty much final.

Dominique asked a lot of questions so I'll just pick a couple. He asks,

"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?"

No, I don't think there's a contradiction. The specification contains, for example, opacity and it most certainly allows user agents to experiment with and prototype new css features as long as they preface it with a -vendor flag and we do this with -moz-border-radius. With -moz-opacity, that's a slightly different story. It used to be -moz-opacity, but when it came into sufficient conformity with the specification, the -moz was dropped and now it's just opacity like the spec calls for.

Dominique also asks,

"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?"

Absolutely not.

poynting asks,

"What marketing efforts are you making to ensure that people upgrade to [the latest version]? Why isn't spreadfirefox pushing this harder?

Updating is important and we can always do more to get people to update, but the charter of Spread Firefox is to spread Firefox, not to work with existing users to keep them secure. We can certainly use Spread Firefox, along with all of the other outlets we have, to get the word out about updates, but the real solution is to get the update mechanism working so that this word of mouth effort isn't required. That's coming with Firefox 1.1 and all users of 1.1 going forward will have a much better update experience.

Steve Dettmers asks,

"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?

Steve, I do not believe that there are any plans to have each browser run in it's own process. I'm not sure what your application does and I'm not a developer so I really can't say how you would work around this (or even why you would need session management frameworks.)

Ryan asks,

"When will we see 1.0.5?"

Now :-) here.

Steve asks,

"When will we see 1.1? :-P"

We should be shipping the next major release of Firefox by the end of summer if things go well for us.

Limulus asks,

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

Limulus, Acid2 is not on the list of requirements for the next major Firefox release and we're not far enough into the planning for the subsequent release for me to say whether or not it will be on that list. update: one of our Gecko experts has posted in the comments saying "Asa, I think it's safe to promise that the next major Firefox release after 1.1 will pass Acid2 :-) "

Julien asks,

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

I'm guessing you don't understand the full capabilities of Firefox skins or I don't understand your question.

Smokey Ardisson says,

"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."

Smokey, I haven't done any math on this. I'm also not quite sure what it is you're trying to discover. Would you count people who, like me, were volunteers on the project _before_ they were paid by Netscape (or IBM, or Oracle, or Novell, or Red Hat, or Sun, or other major corporate contributors)? If I'm guessing correctly and you're wondering about how many people are working on Firefox/Mozilla/Gecko right now who were not original Netscape employees, I'd say it's an overwhelming majority. If you're wondering about people who were never paid a dime by anyone to work on Firefox/Mozilla/Gecko, that's a minority (especially since the Mozilla Foundation has been hiring up many of the contributing volunteer developers over the last couple of years.)

pd asked a lot of questions so I'm gonna just grab one. He says,

"Do you think that MoFo in particular is now being hypocritical in implementing tags like <canvas>?

No, I do not. The standards bodies serve an important purpose. They hash out new features and do as much as possible to future proof them and get them well documented. They do this in public so that all vendors can participate and can chose to implement (or not) that feature with a clear understanding of what it means. They do not design and specify new features with the intent of creating vendor lock-in to proprietary (and often difficult or impossible to understand/implement)features. Canvas is a multi-vendor specification that meets the above criteria for openness. I hope that Web Forms will follow the same path and be adopted by all the major browser vendors.

Darin Grimm has two questions. His first is,

"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)"

Well, they fall into a couple of categories. Some belong to developers who do not have check-in rights and they must wait on someone who is willing to take that responsibility. (Remember that when you check in code, you have to stick around and watch the Tinderbox until all of the major platforms cycle green and you're responsible for any bustage that happens during that cycle.) Another reason might be that the patch belongs to someone who is hard at work on a more pressing issue and he just hasn't gotten around to landing it. Before we ship a milestone, we take a quick look at all the "ready to land" patches and make sure we've got any that are critical to our release.

Darin's second question is,

"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"

Darin, I think both automated testing and interactive testing are extremely valuable. Because we've traditionally had hundreds to thousands of nightly build users who report bugs when they find problems in ad hoc testing, we've put more energy into finding ways to organize and utilize their feedback than we have into test automation. At the same time, it would be wonderful to be able to automate the morning smoketests that Tracy Walker has been performing on each product on each platform for about 4 years now (he deserves a break from that :-) I think they both have their place. We really do need to get some good automation together to test our layout, JavaScript, security infrastructure, networking, etc. Until that happens, we're overly dependent on nightly and milestone build user/tester feedback and that's led to problems in the past.

db says,

"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?"

Yes. We're always evaluating extensions. I have probably played around with about 600 Firefox extensions over the last two years and have recommended we take some of those into the core. A tab reordering feature, based on MiniT has already landed in Firefox and we're currently investigating a couple of other small feature additions from extensions.

Craig says,

"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'm terribly sorry to hear this. If you'll send me your mailing information, I'll put another coin in the mail ASAP.

Ivan Icin asked,

"Do you think that [privacy options] 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)?"

Ivan, I don't think that "Normal People" use preferences at all. Nor do I think most Normal People would understand what they were doing if they did start mucking about in cookies, cache, history, etc.

ispiked asked,

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

I didn't write any of the backend of this blog. It lives on Mozillazine's installation of Movable Type. I wrote the bulk of the structure and style of the front-end though.

Doug Write says,

"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 think Firefox and the Gecko technologies that underly Firefox make it the safest mainstream browser available. Security is a process, not a product and when we find problems, we fix them. Our downloads aren't slowing down at all, as a matter of fact, in the last two weeks it seems like they've sped up some :-)

Lucas says,

"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?

I don't know. It's certainly not on our list of requirements for any of the next major releases.

Jmack asks,

"Will Spreadfirefox.com ever become more user friendly?"

Yes, it will.

Jug asks,

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

Apparently some of them have very thin skin and see malice where there is none. I don't intend to change how I blog to protect the more fragile among us.

poningru asked,

"What feeds do you subscribe to?"

I subscribe to the standard ego feeds: google news, feedster, and pubsub searches for "asa", "firefox", and "thunderbird". I also subscribe to feeds from most of my Mozilla colleagues as well as JWZ's APOD scraped feed, and Gizmodo.

Dex asks,

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

Not that I'm aware of, Dex. I'll look into it though.

Christer Petterson asks,

"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."

Ben is the Firefox lead developer. If his module peers have issues with that, I'm sure they'll bring it up with him.

Matt asks,

"Any thoughts about integrating some of the features provided by extensions into the FF "core"

Yes, we are always evaluating these Firefox based projects and where it makes sense, we will incorporate their work in Firefox. That being said, in most cases, it makes the most sense that they continue on as extensions.

Rick asks,

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

That must be it. And the 7 million people that downloaded Opera 8 are clearly overtaking the 70 million people that downloaded Firefox 1.0.

Matt asks,

"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 :)"

Matt, I wait until I've got a good collection of questions and then until I have a free couple of hours to respond to them all and then I write up and post this blog post :-)

Todd says,

"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?"

Quarterly "final" releases for Firefox were probably never in the cards. Most users (and when you're reaching many tens of millions of users, you're dealing with more "regular" people that when you're reaching the first couple million early adopters) don't want to change their software every three months. We do intend to continue to make releases happen every two to three months, in the form of alphas and betas, because we rely on these for more widespread feedback and testing, but I think we're much more likely to see Firefox major releases more spaced out.

Tod also asks,

"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 commitment, 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)?"

We're always working on that. I am concerned with the lack of communication and am looking forward to seeing more communication -- even within the development teams. It's time consuming, though. We're trying to do more of it with developer and QA blogs, the Wiki, DevMo, and other outlets. We're open to suggestions for squeezing more minutes out of the day ;-) We do take this seriously and there's no doubt that it needs improving. I, personally, fully understand the benefits and know that even though it often feels like a burden and a big cost of time, it's worth because of the return that we get in being better coordinated and getting more feedback sooner.

Thanks for all your questions. If you had a serious question that I didn't get to, or you have follow-up questions, please hold off until I open the next installment of Ask Asa. Feel free to discuss these questions and answers here, but I probably won't be getting heavily involved. Thanks again and I hope that you all are still finding this a useful feature.

Posted by asa at July 12, 2005 05:36 PM