Browse > Home / Business Strategy / Mozilla is becoming disappointing

| Subcribe via RSS

Mozilla is becoming disappointing

November 17th, 2007 Posted in Business Strategy

UPDATE: Looks like the Mashable story might have been misleading. Thanks to the commenters, we have an update to the story. I’m still disappointed in the current state of Firefox on the Mac, and like Jon says in the comments, Camino? Really? Fingers crossed for Firefox 3.0…

—

Man oh man. I used to love Firefox. Safari and IE both have their advantages (mainly being native apps), but in days gone past they didn’t have the luster than Firefox did. Sure, I’d use Safari on occasion, but usually when I wanted to check something quickly without opening Firefox, which took a while (due to my 4,000 open tabs).

But in recent months I find myself using Safari more and more simply because Firefox has gotten slow and buggy. Then after Leopard’s release (and subsequent install), Firefox had some massive bugs which are still in place (non-functional pull-down menus, for instance). Boo.

You can imagine my disappointment when I read this Mashable story today about the release of Firefox 3.0 and the fact that they’re going to be ignoring a huge percentage of the known bugs in their rush to get the browser out the door.

Big enough, even, to postpone a release. And Mozilla is taking the next few weeks to fix these major bugs before releasing its final version of Firefox 3.0 next year. But the rest of those smaller bugs will have to wait. Only 20 percent of Firefox 3.0’s known bugs will be fixed in time for the release.

And that seems to be okay with Mozilla. It’s asked the developers to prioritize the known bugs in the app, which reach about 700 that are marked as blockers. Already months behind schedule, the pressure is on for Firefox to get these major bugs worked out, and hopefully there will be the same sense of urgency to fix the rest of those 560 bugs too.

Yikes. Seriously, why not just wait? Are they really in such peril to release that they need to release like this? I thought they were supposed to be doing things better than traditional software makers…


This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • Since Leopard came out, I don't think I've even loaded FireFox or Camino. I haven't seen anything that doesn't work in Safari 3 and it's super fast compared to FireFox. I doubt I'll go back at this point, I see no reason. I will probably even remove them from my system.

    I've even switched to using Safari on Windows for general surfing -- that's a twist I never expected.
  • Agreeed, that is bad news. But the fact still remians that from a development (tools) standpoint there is still nothing better than Firefox, so I as a developer will be stuck.

    You can always choose to run an older patched version such as 2.0.0.7 or something along those lines!
  • I still use Firefox as my primary browser for the developer tools and plugins, but I think it's becoming a victim of it's own success. Features seem to be the main focus, at the expense of stability.

    Frankly, I never understood why Camino was a necessary development product. Seems like they could have deployed those resources on making a better, faster, more stable Firefox for the Mac.
  • Have you tried Flock? It's Mozilla's newest...

    I see that we're both speaking in Seattle at the Web Community Forum. I look forward to meeting you!
  • Hey Jake - The mashable story was based on a misleading article that made it sound like we're ignoring 80% of *all* the bugs we've fixed in Firefox 3. The reality is we've already made over 11,000 bug fixes (including feature and performance enhancements) in the code for Firefox 3. I'd encourage you to read the details here.
  • Jeremy G
    The story of "only 20%" of bugs getting fixed before released was not true. Mozilla has already announced the fix of 11,000 bugs, with 700 issues still being discussed. I don't recall the source of the 20% claim, but it wasn't from Mozilla. I know that at least CNN has begun to acknowledge the inaccuracy of that story.
  • Camino is developed by the Camino development team and community; it's not a product to which the Mozilla Foundation devotes resources, other than fixing bugs that they find in the core code, and providing server resources for things like source control and builds. I don't think that ignoring those (few) bugs or denying the Camino community those server resources would have any positive effect on Firefox, but I suppose someone might think otherwise.

    As an aside, you shouldn't forget that you can participate in Mozilla's development directly, from layout engine to front end to testing to localization to user support; you're not restricted to hoping that things will go as you would like, or complaining if they don't, and we have literally thousands of people with no other software development experience who help us every day to improve Firefox and our other work.

    I'm a little saddened that people would read a single article somewhere describing a very significant change in development philosophy and just take it at face value, when it's really so easy to find someone directly involved in the project or go to primary sources. (Not picking on you, Jake, as it happens a lot. I think a lot of people just aren't used to the fact that the developers of a major piece of their software arsenal are actually transparent and available.) Hopefully this round of (honest) error and correction will encourage people, bloggers and journalists alike, to dig a little deeper before sounding our death knell. :)
blog comments powered by Disqus