Arstechnica has a interview up with Mozilla’s Scott Collins. The interview can be found here.
Arstechnica Sits Down with Mozilla.org’s Scott Collins
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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IE. has barely any “features”, view “small icons” and “no text labels” and the browser itself takes up very little real esate (in pixels) on the screen. As much as I hate to say it, it is a minimalist solution (in terms of UI).
With every release of Netscape being more bloated (thanks AOL) more and more people seemed to flock from it and eventually drop off the older 4.x series as it became dated (4.79 base install is still 17MB BTW)
Then we have opera, A browser with all the potential to be fast and out of the way but with little intention of doing that. A good realistic review of Opera’s UI problems can be found here http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005479.html
Well it took a while, but I am glad to see someone “gets it”
A few things:
“Ars: You’ve been with Netscape since 1996, around version 3.0 of the product all the way up to the beginning of Mozilla and the birth of the independent Mozilla Foundation. Was there a low point where you just wanted to give up, where Mozilla just seemed doomed?
Oh man. There was this long downward slope. We got the code out there, but slightly before then to around just past Netscape 6, every time someone saw me, found out that I worked at Netscape or was associated with Mozilla they would tell me how much the product sucked. Every time I saw someone it was about how much I sucked and how what I worked on didn’t matter. That really sucked.
One day that changed and somebody said “Man, Mozilla is okay!”, and things started to get better. People still complain about various things but they end it with “but man, I love the product”. Or, it doesn’t do the 5 things that they really need but they continue to use the product and back Mozilla. There was a low point where I had heard about how much we sucked for so long that it was like being an abused child and you want to give up. ”
“It’s really difficult to do this right. People got pissed off when the last default theme was chosen. Also, when you think about it, when has the majority ever been right? The fact is, more people think they have good taste and others would agree with. Everyone thinks that their own taste is fantastic. It’s good that we have people for whom the buck stops. Ben Goodger is the ultimate decider of what happens to Firefox, it’s not a democracy, it’s Ben Goodger, and that’s fine. If you want it to be different, you are encouraged to make your own.”
One I would like everyone to read the article. There’s apparently too much of a disconnect around here between developers and users. Two I would like all the professional complainers to likewise read it. There’s some lessons for you too.
I am quite surpised that there havent been more comments on this article. It is a good and long read, it is more than worth it (very enjoyable).
This isn’t meant to be a flame but a simple statement of fact: few people probably read the article. I use mozilla 1.6 and I had to do something I’ve never done: disable site colors and fonts and apply zoom and just generally transform the web page. That is the *ugliest* page I have ever seen.
But very true: it’s a long read, but interesting. I particularly liked his upfrontness (if I can invent a word) about Netscape’s failures. Also, he’s probably right: a lot of things are chipping away at Microsoft, but their main enemy is themselves.
(Still utterly disagree with the Great Theme Debate and I’ll never use Firefox anyway, but I’d have disconnected my box and installed DOS or something if it wasn’t for Mozilla – and that gave me a comfortable ‘home’ when I transitioned to Linux, without which I might have given up when the going was rough. So it makes the web bearable and makes the move to Linux easier. Those are very Good Things.)
Well, not ‘fact’, obviously, but my genuine opinion, rather than something meant as gratuitously insulting.
But that doesn’t matter. The read was excellent.
I wonder who that managerial guy was though who managed to stop 5.0 from getting squeezed out the door. That was an insane decision. I really hope he has many enemies now.
Netscape as well as Mozilla has really made some great milestones.. I love both in many ways.
One funny thing I’ve also noticed is that many of the semi professional users are now also hearing more and more rumours about mozilla (at least around here) and they are moving to a phase from “Yah yah, that normal Open Source Shite that doesn’t work TM” to…. “It seems to have been around for a while, maybe I should give it a whirl”…
I think both Seamonkey and Firefox has a promising future, and as far as I can see, that counts for all the platforms they’re available on.
It was a good interview. It serves as a hint for Swing as well, as they really should adopt the native look on each platform by default.
9/10. It could have been longer 🙂
Definitely a good read-as usual quality articles from arstechnica. The only thing I felt was lacking in the article was Scott Collins apparent lack of knowledge concerning the GNOME – Mozilla integration work-I assume he is a little too much ‘out of the loop’ to be up on the latest. Other than that his comments were interesting and revealing. Trully refreshing when the interviewer is more up to date on certain topics than the interviewee(sp?).
I also appreciated his comments about native controls-I think what he is getting at is this: native controls are not necessarily better or faster but people really like them and enjoy the the percieved diffference which native controls make- I don’t think that speed and perfromance issues are signifiant enough to justify work on native controls, but the fact that this native tool integration is possible, something the community can do, suffices to justify the work ongoing. It is always interesting how the estimation of what one can do invariably brings the issue of what one ought to do to bare. Controls should be native-because they can be.
I for one am looking forward to the integration of the mozilla print functionality with libgnomeprint. Xprint is now part of the xorg development tree and this might lead to a complete revamping of xprint and deep integration with X and gnome/kde. It has always bothered me how many major Linux applications all roll printing in their own way-staroffice, mozilla, acrobat reader, gimp. I also hope that epiphany will become the ‘official’ version of firefox for Linux and that Galeon will become a test-bed for GRE development and extension.
anyone who has seen him live talking he’ll understand. the guy is not only a good programer but a excellent humourous speech maker. His blog: http://scottcollins.blogdns.net/journal/
I agree with him on that. The Mozilla foundation cares about the web and it shows.
on the fall of netscape, including the botched netscape 5. wow, i wonder how things would’ve been had it been released. maybe its market share wouldn’t have eroded that much.
I’m very unhappy with the use of native widgets in IE. It means that select controls don’t get hidden when you use the CSS z-index property. This has been a PITA for the web application I am working on, and there is no way around it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/s…
Yes, this is a very interesting article, for historical reasons. Anyone know who the unnamed executive is that sabotaged the Netscape 5.0 release? People like Joel Spolsky talk about this tech strategy fiasco as if it was the programmers’ fault, when it seems this was a management failure.
See:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html
I mean, first the programming team tells him it will take 2 years to get a good Gecko release, so he tells them it should be done in 6 momths. Then, after management sides with the programmers, he later convinces them management to scrub Netscape 5 for a Gecko release, only now it has to be done in 3 months!!
As Scott says (and any experienced developer knows) “Well, you can’t put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years.” Classic answer.
I’m with you man. Constructive complaining is one thing, but tearing people down who give their time to stuff like this is just sick.
In fact, even tearing down a Microsoft employee with “IE sucks” is pretty rude. Now I’m not saying don’t rip into them about it’s stagnant state (which seems to be changing soon), but remember developers are people with feelings and like your system administrator they can get you back
. Ok, maybe not, but don’t make fun of your system/network operator.
It’s like your neighbour coming to your house after you build a new deck in the back. You show him, you aren’t much good with your hands but take prid in your work, and he blurts out “I’m afraid to stay standing on it, this is a big piece of crap and it sucks.”
First tried the 0.94 release of Mozilla on the first release of Apple’s OsX. Have been using it regularily since the .98 release and downloading many nightly builds to watch this baby grow. I simply love the spirit, quality, and scope of the endeavor. I enjoyed reading some of the actual thoughts and feelings of a developer. This was a good article from my perspective.
I’ve been reading up on Mozilla lately, and it really is a fascinating piece of software. People kvetch at it for trying to do too much, but I seriously think the Mozilla guys are on the right track.
The nice thing about Mozilla is that it’s not just a web-browser. Rather, it’s a platform — one with a nice declarative (rather than imperative) GUI API. No wonder it took them so long — building an entirely new platform is no trivial matter! However, there are some issues with Mozilla as a platform right now:
1) It forces you to buy into an XML + Javascript paradigm. I don’t particularly like either (though, I’d rather use Javascript than C# as in XAML
The tight coupling between the guts of XUL and the XML + Javascript representation means that it’s really not easy to interface Mozilla to your own tools of choice.
2) It’s back-end implementation on X11 leaves something to be desired. It seems to be tied to GTK+ (the pure xlib backend seems unmaintained), and it’s drawing performance is very poor. Modern versions have quite good redraw performance in Windows, so I don’t think the problem is with the front-end code itself.
3) It’s developer documentation is schizo. They’re going in so many different directions over there (all the name changes, the Mozilla/Fire* schism, etc), that it’s hard to keep things straight. What is XPFE vs MRE vs GRE? The documentation is also full of tons of high-level concepts, without lot’s of good details about what’s really going on.
In any case, I think the Mozilla project has tremendous potential. There were some nifty things talked about at the recent Mozilla developer meetings, including stuff like accelerated Cairo/GDI+ back-ends for Gecko. It’s all very cool technology.