Ask a Mozilla Person About Firefox 2.0 339
Last week's interview guest was Dean Hachamovitch, formal title "general manager Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp." This week we have Chris Beard, Mozilla's Vice President of Products. (Here's a recent "pre-Firefox 2 release" interview with Chris that you might want to look at to avoid duplicating questions.) Chris will be calling on other Mozilla and Firefox people to help answer your questions, but he's the point man here. Slashdot interview rules apply, as always.
cake (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't mean to troll here, but how about spelling Firefox right when you send the questions?
Jeez...
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Tabs (Score:3, Insightful)
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Seriously - what the hell should the behavior be?
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There's really no excuse for not being able to instantly click on any of your tabs, whether because of scrolling, or because of them simply being unattainably hidden under.
Either way, the standard FF way totally sucks.
Find an extension you like that manages tabs better, thats my advice.
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Personally, I like the scrolling, and you aren't positing any better suggestions.
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With the old method of handling tabs (resizing them to oblivion) I could typically keep track of what page was open and where. Often the custom site icons would help with this.
My alternative of choice would be to simply add a new row of tabs. That way they are all still visible and you can easily switch from one to the other. This would solve most of the usability problems with either of the other two methods.
Another suggestion I c
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Maybe that's the sort of thing best done as a plugin, though.
FireFox 2 Rendering Speed Compared to IE7 (Score:5, Interesting)
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The 80/20 rule (Score:2)
I suspect the same holds for 80% of the internet population. The 80/20 rule.
So why would the 80% try out a "slower" browser? And before you say Mozilla doesn't care about the 80%
we care (Score:2, Insightful)
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A good question perhaps, but not a good statement. The original poster was claiming that IE is faster than Firefox at rendering without any proof. Since that is not what benchmarks have shown (search on google, it's pretty much a toss up between the two), and doesn't reflect many people's experiences, it is only natural that his conclusions are being questioned. Of course, it may be that IE is faster than Firefox
Re:FireFox 2 Rendering Speed Compared to IE7 (Score:4, Informative)
Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?
What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)
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Ever heard the term, "shooting fish in a barrel"?
Strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
Of all the things you did... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Maybe the difference is you kill firefox and restart it every day. I leave it running days at a time.
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Have you done similar tests on IE, Konqueror, Opera, etc.? How do they stand up over several days of browsing?
Now that I know this memory leak takes DAYS to show up, I'm actually glad the Moz developers are working on real issues...sure, they can fix them as they find them, but I'm glad t
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One interesting observation, I have never seen it leak on Win98.
But I have seen it leak, BADLY, on XP. My tablet has 512MB of RAM, and sometimes I can get Firefox to break 700MB of RAM in an afternoon. That's just unacceptable.
(Note -- haven't used the tablet PC since just before 1.5 came out)
Re:Of all the things you did... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to ignore the "practically unusable" part, since there are plenty of people who somehow manage to use it anyway without problems, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that memory issues are one huge flaw. They're not. They're a bunch of tiny flaws that add up together. It's not like they can go in, fix one bug, and free up half the memory. They have to track down a whole bunch of these things and fix each of them.
If you look at the release notes, nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."
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As an add-on: Is there a reason Firefox does not just use a garbage collection library to free up memory that is missed by the explicit delete operations?
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when you experienced this horrible memory leak problem?
Are we talking sites with...
That might help us figure out what's going on.
Re:It might not be a problem with Firefox (Score:2)
You might want to reinstall your operating system [mozillazine.org]. There have been several clues recently that third-party software can cause Firefox to hog memory [mozillazine.org].
If you're still convinced that it's a problem with Firefox, help to narrow down what the problem is so it can be investigated [dbaron.org].
Well, how about (Score:2, Interesting)
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Don't mod parent up! (Score:2)
Doublespeak? (Score:2)
Step Child (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you think this is happening? Do you lack developers who use / know / deal with Linux; is it because something is wrong with Linux; or is it because there are more people out there using Windows?
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I'm not going to try to impinge on your right to ask this question, but I was wondering if this question was based on anything more than anecdotal evidence. The reason I'm wondering this is that, in my experience, Firefox is as stable and fast on Linux as it is anywhere, and so I don't know whether to think this is just my anecdotal evidence vs. yours, or whether there are problems I'm not informed about.
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Future? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tackling The DOM (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox Features (Score:5, Interesting)
How committed is the team to keeping Firefox's core as small as possible, and what, if any, features might be turned into extensions in the future?
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Re:Firefox Features (Score:5, Insightful)
You've created a great extension management system, yet aren't using it yourselves.
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Add In Validation (Score:5, Interesting)
Does FF worry that an unscrupulous add-on developer could produce what could be a click-fraud capable bot net hidden in an add-on that could be promoted and distributed by FF team? What steps are taken to prevent it given the add-ons are no signed or hosted by FF?
Thanks
Paul
A relevant question about the IE cake (Score:4, Interesting)
How do Firefox members believe they are perceived by the "competition"?
what next (Score:2)
Most of my friends are the same.
So, I, and I assume most of your users, have zero loyalty to firefox - or IE; that is the way consumers are, they are awful things to have as customers (and that is why in the real world, contrary to all the biz school bs, the 1st thing any busi
Old Bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
Add-Ons vs Built-In (Score:5, Interesting)
How does the Firefox team choose which features are going to be included and which ones should be left as add-ons? From a marketing aspect, is it possible to promote a product for being small and compact, or is a long feature list necessary?
Priorities (Score:2)
Preferences (Score:2)
Firefox and Tab Mix Plus (Score:5, Interesting)
And along the same lines, what would you rather do - streamline Firefox by removing features and making them optional add-ons, or enhance Firefox by building in more features which can be enabled and disabled without the need for extra installations?
I know I'm not meant to ask multiple questions, but it's all on the same theme - would you consider creating two major download versions for Firefox, one which is "barebones" and the other preloaded with the most popular extensions?
Firefox Publicity (Score:2)
Aside from word of mouth, what methods of advertising and promotion seem to help the most? Do you ever notice a significant increase in downloads after an advertising campaign? What are your future plans for promoting FireFox, and what weird ideas have people come up wi
To be impartial , you're turn to answer the CSS Q. (Score:2)
I have posted a question [slashdot.org] for the IE interview and ask you, what keeps you from fully implementing the CSS 2.1 standard in FF 2? Granted, you adhere to the spec much better than IE, but this is not justification enough to not follow.
Håkon Wium Lie's response [slashdot.org] about IE not following spec is that it is not in their best interests as a monopoly to do so. MS's response [slashdot.org] to this question revolves around priority. What priority is standards compliance to Mozilla? Also, what other things do you think hind
Re:To be impartial , you're turn to answer the CSS (Score:2)
Planning for the future (Score:2, Interesting)
The rationale: If FF supported a greater number of standards, technologies, and design paradigms than its competitors, I can only imagine it
Trademark nonsense (Score:2, Interesting)
Interview questions... (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks for taking the time out to field questions from the
1. What is Mozilla's direction with regards to implementing out-of-the-box email security with Thunderbird? Granted, there are extensions like Enigmail [mozdev.org] that add the functionality after the fact. However, the average user may not be aware of such an extension, or have the knowledge to use it. Perhaps your company could work closely with the folks at GnuPG [gnupg.org] to include such a functionality into Thunderbird (alo
On choices. (Score:2)
It's cold in here (Score:2, Funny)
Also, is there a place that we can send a box of chocolates to the person(s) responsible for the new UI widgets and text box spell checking? I 3 those changes.
Future of Thunderbird (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?
Mozilla (Score:2)
Firefox Memory usage (Score:2)
I've been a fan of Firefox since 0.8... I'm typing this in Firefox for Windows under WinXP Pro. It's been running since first thing this morning, and according to the task manager, it is currently utilizing 114MB of memory. What's being done about the rampant memory usage in Firefox? I know of the rendering debate and memory usage. Can't there be some middle ground on memory collection to keep a 6MB file download from consuming now 115MB of RAM?
Seconded. Why is Firefox so large? (Score:2)
This seems to be a general problem with gtk/gnome based applications, but how come the Qt/KDE guys are so much more efficient?
p.s. I'm typing this in Konqueror rather than Firefox simply because KDE+Konqueror is faster and lighter than Gnome+Firefox.
How do you support... (Score:2)
Tab Control? (Score:2)
Like many people, I've been using various tab-management extensions (e.g. TabB
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Progress bar (Score:2)
The Firefox Microsoft Visit for Vista. (Score:3, Interesting)
Crashing (Score:3, Insightful)
IceWeasel Ridiculousness (Score:2)
What are the biggest differences? (Score:2)
Bunch of bugs as old as Gecko (Score:2)
Why does it take soooo many years to implement display:inline-block? (bug #9458 since 1999)
Forms (Score:2)
Greatest Innovations (Score:2)
One question that I'd like to hear an educated answer to is what you think Firefox's (and mozilla's) greatest innovations are. What are your best additions to the field, and which are simply refined from other browsers?
Also, the spell checker in FF2 detects suxx0rs and roxx0rs as real words. Should I try to use them more?
When can I get my apostrophe key back? (Score:2)
How do you decide what goes in? (Score:2)
There are a thousand markup languages, covering everything from geometric data to maths equations to typesetting to fonts. (BLOBs seem to defeat the whole purpose of an ASCII-driven markup system, IMHO.)
There are a million capabilities that couldn't be done as extensions (multicast mosaic was a definite curiosity and only touched the outer fringes of what's possible).
There are a billion ways that any browser could be tw
What about Alt+S? (Score:2)
Acid Test: Why isn't passing it a priority (Score:2)
Firefox and Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
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Quit whinging about the look on Mac OS X. Firefox has a great theming system, and someone has already done the work to make it look good on Mac OS X: http://takebacktheweb.org/ [takebacktheweb.org]
GrApple (Eos Pro) theme is seriously hot. Windows and Linux users ought to be jealous.
Why do Firefox use so much RAM? (Score:2)
Iceweasel and Trademarks (Score:3, Interesting)
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One thing I would also like to know is how much money they make when we do certain things, I do use the little google bar instead of typing URLs now because as far as I am aware thats what makes them money - and it's nice to give back... maybe if we all started using the search instead of URLs then we could make them quite a bit
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Updates (Score:2)
What are your plans for pushing version 2 to the current group of 1.* users? Do you have a strict policy of not pushing major version changes through automatic updates, or is it something that will be done eventually?
Either way, do you have any plans for those users who don't posses automatic update capabilities (pre-1.5)?
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Mozilla 1.0.x users will need to manually update their browser to a new major version.
Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 1.5.0.8 which contains a patch to the update system that allows Firefox 1.5 to offer an option to upgrade to Firefox 2. This upgrade will only be offered and not forced unlike the minor updates which download, install and update with little user input.
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 quality assurance [mozilla.org]
Mozilla quality assurance blog [mozillazine.org]
Slightly tangential Mozilla bugday [mozilla.org] info. Bugdays happen every
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And foxes with weasels...
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You mean something like this? [mozilla.org]