Submitted by “Asa Dotzler has been there from the beginning. As Mozilla’s director of community development, he’s had a hand in birthing some of the web’s most successful open-source software projects, most notably the Mozilla and Firefox web browsers. Now, with Mozilla getting ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Monday and with the June release of Firefox 3 fast approaching, Dotzler agreed to sit down with Wired.com and share how his outsider’s eye has helped shape Mozilla’s path. He tells us not only why Netscape failed, but why Mozilla’s first crack at a browser didn’t do much better. He also offers insight into how the Firefox team makes decisions (‘We’ve never been a democracy’, he insists) and why he thinks Firefox 3 will improve the health of the web.”
It’s funny how apparently it’s somewhat difficult to agree on a feature to be put in, yet the monstrosity known as the “AwesomeBar” (which is anything but) manages to make its way into Firefox 3. With no way to disable it other than… you guessed it… yet *ANOTHER* extension to make it behave in a resonable fashion (ie. the way Web browsers have worked for over a decade, with no problems). Completely braindead design decision.
Aside from that (and the Windows version’s ugly new theme)… the other features they’re putting in are quite nice. Yet… I still miss the days of around 1.0 or previous, before all the massive memory leaks and bloat made their way into the browser. Thankfully the next version is making improvements in these areas, but still… it would be nice if it was written good in the first place.
That said, it was an interesting review, I did learn some things I didn’t know from it.
I actually like the new behaviour. Sometimes I can’t remember the URL but can remember the <title> text so I find it very helpful. But then again I have been using it for a couple of months and gotten used to it now =)
The way Firefox 3 does it is terrible. Look at the implementation in Epiphany (which for some reason has a lot of features took years to get in Firefox) – it’s much more readable. You can write a bookmark name, url, something from history and everything is converted to easy to read single-line entry. Awesome-bar has a lot of unnecessary noise.
I’m going to flaunt my ignorance here and say; what the hell is the AwesomeBar?
I run Firefox 3 and it looks pretty much like Firefox 2 did. I guess Ubuntu disabled whatever the hell Awesomebar is?
Oh, it’s the address bar.
It doesnt bother me.
That was a hideous photo of Asa. Warn a guy, huh?
Have to agree. Looks like a fish eye lense or something!