The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

« Step 1: Public Discussions | Main | Writing for Busy People »

March 22, 2006

Step 2: Ask Questions

A healthy project is one where active contributors are always evaluating the project's progress, making sure it is headed in the right direction (usually stated in the project mission or goals).

I think we could be better at this in Mozilla. I'm not suggesting people be assholes or anything, but I think some more pan-project analysis would be useful.

Historically, I can point at a couple of groups of people who have attempted to do something like this. The drivers@ group is one that looked beyond individual modules within Gecko to make sure that the right thing for the shipping products as a whole happened. The Firefox team is another example. By taking a holistic view, user experience was enhanced.

I think contributors should not be afraid to poke their nose in other parts of the project and see how things are going. Ask questions. Learn more. Get involved in governance and management. If things don't seem intuitive, or a little arbitrary, ask, rather than assume it's for a good reason. One of the benefits of having an open, referencable set of discussion forums means that once you've answered a question once on the public forums, when someone else asks you can just give them a URL.

Posted by ben at March 22, 2006 5:27 PM

Comments

Please, re-redesign the Options menu to have a classic pre Firefox 1.5 look. I hate the top buttons and much prefered the side buttons. It was so much better. I hate it so much in fact that I refuse to go into the options menu and would rather stop using Firefox than encounter that poor copy of the Mac OS X menu system. I love it on Mac OS X but it does not belong in Windows XP.

Posted by: Hey at March 22, 2006 5:39 PM

At the very least let us choose the old one!

Posted by: HeyItsMe at March 22, 2006 5:40 PM

*cough*Status Bar Page Style Picker*cough*

Posted by: poningru at March 22, 2006 6:18 PM

*cough*Status Bar Page Style Picker*cough*

*cough* I mean the actual OPTIONS menu in Tools --> Options. You know, the one with "General," "Privacy," "Content," "Downloads," and "Advanced." Yah, that one. *cough*

Posted by: HeyItsMe at March 22, 2006 6:21 PM

Again I 100% agree, but think the communication problems come first. Often it seems the reaction to a change takes place when it lands. I don't think people are afraid to ask questions, nor do I think people are afraid to answer questions. I think people just don't know there are things to question until it's history.

Perhaps the answer to that is to do community wide status reports. Every week 1-5 lines with what was accomplished per person/group. Minimum 1 entry (unless you were inactive for the week), more if necessary. Even if it's just "Thinking about how cool it would be _______"

Would facilitate brainstorming, and let people know well in advance where people are going, and what they are doing.

Posted by: Robert Accettura at March 22, 2006 8:47 PM

Really? Why did it take as long as it did for us to ask for more transparency in operations on the part of groups like drivers@ etc?

There are many more questions that beg answers...

I think I'm going to abandon my step numbering. It makes it look like I'm going somewhere! And anyway I think this point comes before the previous one.

Posted by: Ben at March 22, 2006 8:54 PM

IMHO, Firefox should use the 1.5-style options window under Mac OS X, and the 1.0-style under Windows/Linux.

Posted by: Dam at March 23, 2006 4:06 AM

How about starting with a structured user-feedback mini-site where people can specifically discuss planned new features, rate them and vote for them.

The site could be built around simplistic descriptions of the components listed in bugzilla as categories for discussion. People would be allowed to submit their own drawings / screenshots / wireframes of UI design suggestions . A set of survey templates could be built to generate more meaningful, semi-structured descriptions of new concepts that cannot be displayed visually.

The above comments about the Options panel are a good example of something that you yourself wrote Ben seemingly for no particular reason other than you wanted to re-write the back-end code. Somethng you said was one of the oldest parts of the mozilla code. If that was such a problem, why not just re-write that back end code, leaving the front end alone? Did Firefox really need to convert it's Options dialogue to Mac OSX style or would it have been more relevant to build spell checking, anti-phishing, hard-coded rich text editing or better tabs and session saving/restoring; some of the elementary features that are only arriving around 12 months too late (IMHO). As for RSS, well, I admire the attempt to merge this subtley into ancient browser concepts like bookmarks but really, just add Sage or similar to the default install!

I think I remember you have defended changes in the past by stating that you've written plenty of code 'hooks' for extension developers to change things if people don't like your new code. That is all good except that very few people can write extensions no matter how easy XUL and JS may be in comparison to C, XPCOM etc. To use a recent buzz-word I've been reading in MoFoCo circles:

Extensions are the least "discoverable" features of Firefox

I wonder how many people are too scared (or just plain busy) to try extensions after being bombarded by malware in their previous browser (IE) for years? "Add something else to my browser? No thanks I'll never be able to get rid of it!"

I do some minor Perl web coding so I have some idea how hard it is to bridge the communication and skill gap between non-techy users and coders. It's even harder to graphically share ideas between those two distinct groups of people.

If MoFoCo can design a mini-site that actually invites discussion on development, you might get what you are after in terms of community involvement and feedback (how refreshing it is to see you now want a Firefox community after saying in the past that Firefox is not a community project). Ideally this would be something other than a forum because the forum format sucks and please, more interactive than blog comments!

Posted by: pd at March 23, 2006 4:39 AM

‘HeyItsMe’, fortunately for you, almost all options are accessible through about:config.

~Grauw

Posted by: Laurens Holst at March 23, 2006 7:43 AM

You little monkeys,
Im just so happy to see this whole thing alive.
Thank you---,and mozilla. This really is the 60's. Don't ask me, I know nothing..I Luv U..Seriously, really, I do.Diamo50
And, I really don't care if this is the wrong forum, just pass it On!

Posted by: SitsNSnitz at March 23, 2006 7:48 AM

Ben, by encouraging users to discuss Firefox project a lot of feature suggestions will appear. Looking at the Browser Metrics I can't find any plan to present the project results. IMO that would reasonably narrowed the number of suggestions and made easy to choose the right ones.

Posted by: funTomas at March 23, 2006 10:55 AM

I've always wondered if there's anything more I can do than just submit the odd bug report. Fixing them would be way beyond my ability, so is there anything inbetween?

Posted by: ant at March 23, 2006 3:49 PM

‘HeyItsMe’, fortunately for you, almost all options are accessible through about:config.

Grauw, how appropriate! Spoken like a true Linux "elitist." Don't like the features. Don't like the GUI. Don't like the lack of easy to use wizard based hardware adding that even grandma can understand. Well, it's open source, go program it yourself and submit the code. Otherwise, read the fucking manual.

Typical...
Even if you aren't a GNU fan the elitist mantra applies.

Kind Regards,
HeyItsMe

Posted by: HeyItsMe at March 23, 2006 8:52 PM

Hai,

I have created two more custom tabs in jsp with css.
when i click the tab it gets little shaking around the place.How can i eliminate this in ur browser ie firefox.It's working good in IE browser.I expect ur reply very soon.
Thanks
Regards
george

Posted by: George at March 23, 2006 10:07 PM

"HeyItsMe": With an attitude like that, you're not going to get anything done. If you have an objection to the new options interface that's fine; raise it in an appropriate place, but phrasing it as if it's the end of the world if everything isn't just perfect for *you* is not polite. There are many other Firefox users who like the new options menu (me included).
Even if you were phrasing your requests more suitably, comments on Ben Goodger's blog aren't the place to raise such an issue. Try mozilla.dev.apps.firefox on news.mozilla.org.

Posted by: Philip Withnall at March 23, 2006 10:24 PM

""HeyItsMe": With an attitude like that, you're not going to get anything done."
i agree

Posted by: Intel Centrino Duo at March 24, 2006 12:18 AM

Philip Withnall,

My crude sarcasm was purely in response to that of Grauw's. Read it again and you'll see that. I never said that my way was the only way but just as many users in this blog posts comments agree with me as those who are against it. The point being that my second post asked merely for the option to have either the new Mac OS X clone menu one or the old left-aligned menu.

However, you're right though, I'll take it to newsgroups.

Kind Regards,
HeyItsMe

Posted by: HeyItsMe at March 24, 2006 6:40 AM

You Gotcha one of the nicest blogs I have seen.

Posted by: Ronald at March 26, 2006 10:11 AM

Words to live by:
When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, simle and say, "Why do you want to know?"
Remember that the man who can shoulder the most risk will gain the deepest love and the supreme accomplishment;
Call you mother on the phone. If you can't, you may think of her in your heart;

Posted by: kit at March 31, 2006 2:15 AM

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
Reload icon is © Stephen Horlander;
Firefox logo is by Jon Hicks, and is a trademark of The Mozilla Foundation.
GetFirefox buttons are from rakaz