Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

April 2002 to September 2003. Heck of a long year.

After looking around, I quickly came across this link: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/000438.html

Al I can say is that I am VERY glad mpt is no longer involved in this project. He has dogmatically blocked almost all improvements (tabbed browsing, signatures) while providing only limited benefit.

Al I can say is that I am VERY glad mpt is no longer involved in this project.

Uh. Every open-source project has growing pains.

Arthur, were you quoting me, or contradicting me? :-\

>Arthur, were you quoting me, or contradicting me? :-\

I think it was both: I recognized portions of the comments above from another open source project I was involved in. Hard against hard, but at the end someone had to see the light and step down so others could move on for the *sake* of the project.

Growing pains in Open Source projects. So true.

OK, I don't understand. I don't understand what mpt has to do with anything, neither do understand why so many people involved with Mozilla seem to dislike him, or feel that his contribution was useless. I don't claim that he was always right, but seems that, on balance he did more good than harm. In fact, most of the issues he picked up on seem to have been major motivations behind the standalone apps. From The Top 10 Usability Problems in Mozilla:
1. Chrome structure
-Largely fixed in Firebird
2. Speed
-A design goal of firebird
3. Text area
-Some bugs have been fixed. Some have not. It's probably not as important as he makes out.
4. Message display
-Being worked on in Thunderbird?
5. Search
-Solved in Firebird
6. Menu structure
-largely solved in Firebird
7. Migration
-Still a major problem
8. Shortcut Menus
-improved in Firebird? The windows issue is an OS level probelm that Mozilla should not fix...
9. Validation
- Much ridiculed, but it is addressing the fundamental problem that Mozilla and derived products face - web compatibility. The idea behind dynamically validating pages that that users have some clue why the page isn't working and so complain to the site author rather than blaming Mozilla.
10. Preferences
-Fixed in firebird

So, it seems surprising, given he is ridiculed so often, many of the issues that he raised were deemed important enough to fork the project for.

As for easier plugin installation; for common plugins (i.e. Flash), the only solution that is 'simple enough' for most users is to distribute the plugin with the application, or at least allow the installer* to download and install the plugin. To a user, flash is as much a part of the web as html or graphics, and there is no reason that a seperate program should be installed. One click installation for other plugins would be nice and is, in fact, possible if only the distributers can be persuaded to use XPI as a distribution format.

For the record, I think mpt is wrong about tabbed browsing - it may well be better implemented at the window manager level, but since no major window manager supports it, that's something of an academic question. Moreover, a web browser is a special case; the web is a complex graph containing many nodes, and traversing that without some simple (i.e. simpler than multiple windows) way of opening multiple concurrent nodes is very very inefficient.

*When that major usability problem is solved, of course

Hey, don't diss MPT unless you have some constructive criticism to make. He was one of the few guys who stood up against the stupid crack-pipe ideas that flooded into bugzilla everyday. If it wasn't for guys like MPT, Seamonkey would have been full of more useless crud like kitchen sinks, seemingly enless nested menus and a UI for each one of the approximately seventy-million prefs that Moz has.

As jgraham said above the *Birds are both largely about addressing MPT's top 10 usability concerns. That's where they are going. The existance of those two projects implicitly confer that he was right all along.