Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Asa, WHY when a new version of IE comes out, basically just make fun of any announcement they make, say Firefox did it before etc etc. It makes you look like a petulent child. Focus on firefox and fix the memory issues and Ill be back...

Duh... he's not making fun of anyone, he's just pointing out how simple it is to add functionality to Firefox.

@David Naylor... no, sorry... this post kinda proves that FF has the NIH syndrome big time. A community that is totally focussed on self is not good for innovation!

@David Naylor... no, sorry... this post kinda proves that FF has the NIH syndrome big time. A community that is totally focussed on self is not good for innovation!

@David Naylor... no, sorry... this post kinda proves that FF has the NIH syndrome big time. A community that is totally focussed on self is not good for innovation!

Uh... implementing something else's features "proves" FF is too focused on itself? And I suppose the ivory tower of MS is a shining example of an open community to you, right? Get outta here.

John, you are right. I see too much of self-patting and perhaps arrogance from this blog. IE8 is perhaps on right track and I would give the a credit for that. MS is too big organization to change things quickly. And I do not see any hostility towards FF coming from them as I see from Asa towards others. This is not a black-and-white world. Asa, instead of sarcastic commenting about competitor(s), how about answering couple of questions:

1) When will be a useable FireFox browser finally released. By usable I mean a browser, which doesn't slow down the computer (occasionally high and unexplained CPU use, ridiculous RAM "use"). Which we could leave open for a night with many tabs open?

2) Will the kind of awful UI we saw on FF3 beta 3 be on final release? Or you got the guts to admit: yes, the new UI is a disaster and needs to be changed ASAP?

Wait... how does imitating a competitor's feature demonstrate "Not Invented Here" syndrome? I'd think NIH would have led Asa to dismiss activities and webslices as useless, unimportant, and not worth the effort.

Or is there some other "NIH Syndrome" to which you refer?

@Kelson and @ant, it's the focus that is the poor behavior here:

>> Just in case the power of the Firefox platform wasn't obvious already

and Mike said things like:

>> Interaction with the preview window is a little quirky,
>> but I’m working on that. Surprisingly it seems to work
>> better than IE8.

Why bother spoiling things with negative comments such as these? Let's all focus on creating a better browsing experience rather than continuing the bad behavior of name calling.

The focus must be solely on innovation.

“The focus must be solely on innovation.”

I guess you haven't bothered to even look at firefox's development over the past 12 months?

Your assumption may or may not be correct @ant - but you've kinda introduced a new branch of this discussion. I'm sure that you can produce a list of some really innovative stuff that these people have been doing - but I see that as separate to what I'm saying. My gripe was that the focus of this discussion and others is focussed more on the 'opponent' than the future.

Sorry Darren that I'm not going to make you happy here but you're not going to get me to stop proclaiming the "power of the Firefox platform". Asking me to do so is just silly given that it's a big piece of what I do for Mozilla.

And what's "negative" about me pointing out how great I think Firefox is? Your logic confuses me. Maybe you're not an English as first language speaker?

- A

John, either your comment was meant for a completely different post or you're confused about what I posted.

- A

Tom, how about some quotes rather than spurious accusations with nothing to back them up. Where exactly did I write something hostile about Microsoft's release of IE 8 beta?

- A

Asa, maybe the term "hostile" was a bit over the top, but your two previous post following the release on IE8 beta were a little bit negative and personally sensed something between the lines. I have been following this blog for a quite a while and I sense, that at the certain point a discussion on and around Firefox has changed to defensive. At the same time me and perhaps many others are frustrated by lack on real innovation from Mozilla and inability to fix memory, flash, cpu problems. If I'm not mistakes, some of the problems were denied until relatively late. My comment is perhaps out of context from your post, but it makes me unhappy to read your post like: "Looks like microformats, microsummaries, a personal toolbar, session restore, and malware protection. Am I missing anything killer here?". Fix your own product, make it better, thus eliminate the constant need for nagging about others. I generally don't use IE, but unfortunately FF2 was a big disappointment and FF3 is maybe better. And yes, this kind of Mozilla evangelism sucks big time ...

I agree... Although I'm a Firefox user and fan, admitting Firefox's weak points and giving credits/praises to competitors for doing good things would increase your credibility, Asa.
I haven't followed this blog for very long, but haven't seen you make a single concession regarding competitors, which ends up coming off as quite biased, immature and stubborn.

That said, Asa isn't Mozilla, and Mozilla isn't Asa. Not that I have anything against Asa, other than what I said above.

--"Sorry ... that I'm not going to make you happy here but you're not going to get me to stop proclaiming the 'power of the Firefox platform'. Asking me to do so is just silly given that it's a big piece of what I do for Mozilla."--

And that should be kept in mind by Asa's detractors. I've disagreed with Asa's views here a few times, and I'm a Firefox user as well. But hey, "evangelism" comes as part of his job. I think IE 8 is pretty good, better than previous versions. But Firefox -- though it has some problems that need to be addressed -- is still "better". That's admittedly in some ways a subjective judgement, but in other ways it isn't.

FYI, I am not trying to implement webslices in FF to make fun of IE8 or to copy a feature from IE8. I'm not doing it because I think it's a killer feature or even because I think it's a cool one. I just do NOT care.
I do it because coding something like this is a bit exciting. Period. I was looking at the IE8 webslices spec and thought "well, I could implement it in FF". And so I did five minutes later. There is no other reason at all, even if I think now my implem is going to beat IE8's :-)

@Tom

So let's get this straight, Asa posts a positive message about the extensibility of Fx and that is bad according to you, meanwhile you spread the same old lies* (no, adding "if I'm not mistaken" does not make it OK to spread misinformation) about developers denying the memory leak and that's fine? You are a hypocrite, plain and simple.

*Unless of course you can link to these denials, I see this claim all the time I have yet to see a single person back it up.

I'm with Glazman. I just decided to do Activities in Firefox because I thought it would be an interesting challenge.

I don't necessarily think Activities is a great idea. I'll be posting more about those thoughts later.

And my preview really does work better than IE8 - in IE8 you can't click on links in the preview window, plus it goes away really easy.

I was just stating a fact.

Tom, I don't know what you use your browser for, but no other browser works better for me than Firefox.

I use certain extensions because I develop websites. These extensions happen to be very, very complex and useful and I accept their memory usage with gratitude because they make my job so much easier.

I do think that in general, there is not enough attention paid to memory management. Memory management must be the single most important aspect of programming.

I don't think any program should be permitted to consume all the available memory unless the user explicitly grants permission. That should be built into the operating system.

Maybe it's a good idea for Firefox to have a function to throttle the memory consumption of the Flash plug-in, other media plug-ins and extensions. That way, people wouldn't blame Firefox core how it performs with lots of plug-ins and extensions.

Yes, and what about Opera!