Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble (eWeek)

[Posted March 9, 2005 by corbet]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols worries about the future of Firefox in eWeek. "Here's the long and short of it. If the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox friends like Google don't start spending money - right now - to hire more programmers, more project managers and more servers, it won't matter how many ads in the New York Times Firefox supporters take out, Firefox will have already reached its high tide of popularity and we can only wait for the ebb to begin." (Thanks to Steven G. Johnson).

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Stupid Contrarianism strikes again

Posted Mar 9, 2005 21:25 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (3 responses)

Whenever there is a prevailing meme that has taken root without much opposition, you invariably end up with someone who plays Stupid Contrarian just to get attention. Okay, so what is are his points?

* There are open bugs in Firefox.

Yes, Firefox has an openly viewable bug queue. Yes, some bugs get fixed and some get pushed back and some ignored. At least this is public information. Would he prefer the "trust us" approach of Microsoft? Maybe he's just happy to be ignorant of whatever issue have yet to materialize as exploits in Windows.

* There are some people who work on the code who are disgruntled.

Can a blogger make five posts without complaining about something? Really, looking at the rate of progress in the Moz code and Firefox, they are making good progress. Compare support for key standards between Gecko and Trident. Who is working hard and who is hardly working now?

* Adblocker is an extension.

If it wasn't, he'd be griping about bloat. For the record no such tool will ever exist for any version of IE, because Microsoft will never support an extension system that empowers users and they will never tick off potential corporate partners and MSN advertizers by creating an adblocker.

Stupid Contrarianism strikes again

Posted Mar 9, 2005 22:39 UTC (Wed) by dang (guest, #310) [Link] (2 responses)

According to the article, it isn't that developers are disgruntled:

"In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think we're in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews"

Dunno if the quoted comment is true, but if it is then this is an honest problem and one that has been live for mozilla for a long while ( and is a standing concern for all open source projects ). So the interesting questions are these: is the community of skilled Firefox hackers drying up? Why? And what can be done?

Stupid Contrarianism strikes again

Posted Mar 10, 2005 1:10 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (1 responses)

If there are holes, they will get filled. Hell, people are still hacking on dinosaurs like Emacs.

Not to say the new generation of coders won't fork, but thats not always bad (see X.org).

Stupid Contrarianism strikes again

Posted Mar 10, 2005 9:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, X.org had the old generation forking too; in that it was similar to the egcs fork, more a way to forcibly switch maintainership than anything else. (The egcs fork was done in a much more civilized fashion, though, with eventual official status and no permanent name change).

Firefox Is Heading Towards Success

Posted Mar 9, 2005 22:11 UTC (Wed) by Lou57 (guest, #12083) [Link] (4 responses)

Sometimes it is amazing how folks don't get it.

Mr. Vaughan-Nichols states that "Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble" and then after relating several items that need to be overcome, equates the success of Firefox with market share. It is either going to continue to increase or "we can only wiat for the ebb to begin."

And if market share was THE measure of success ... then that might be true.

But Firefox's success should NOT be measured by market share. That is what is done by those looking to make a profit, by those that know that there are only X number of dollars truly available for purchasing a browser.

Firefox's success should be measured by how well it does it's job. Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has pointed out some important Firefox issues, including quoting a significant contributor to the Firefox project. But then it is up to the Mozilla Foundation and others to "start spending money - right now". So close, so close. But missed it altogether.

This is an open source project. What have you done Mr. Vaughan-Nichols (who makes putting Firefox on every PC he has one of the first things he does) to help with the very problems you pointed out? At the least, you pointed these issues out.

What have YOU (reader) done? (asked rhetorically) What have I done? I'm in the boat to do more than install on my own computer.

Time to put some time in.

Firefox Is Heading Towards Success

Posted Mar 10, 2005 9:40 UTC (Thu) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link] (3 responses)

The trouble is that how firefox does its job does depend on market
share: standards compliant browsers _need_ enough market share to be
taken seriously by web designers or the web will drift slowly towards
IE-only pages.
Your comment works for things that are not dependent on processing
content produced by other people: a text editor could have just one user
and still be a superb text editor. However, a web browser is useless
to most people if it can't browse most pages on the web. And for that
market share is needed. It doesn't have to be firefox, what matters
is probably the total of non-IE browsers but firerox is currently the
largest of these, and serious loss of share would be a real problem.

IE-only pages? heh

Posted Mar 10, 2005 11:32 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] (1 responses)

Not "towards" but "quite there for several years". JFYI

So the question is whether this trend changes -- or not.

IE-only pages? heh

Posted Mar 10, 2005 12:17 UTC (Thu) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link]

On the whole, I think things have got a bit better. But this could
easily go into reverse if IE reestablishes its position as the only
browser worth worrying about from a web designer's point of view.

Firefox Is Heading Towards Success

Posted Mar 11, 2005 20:35 UTC (Fri) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]

Well, I guess that one of the questions is, what is a standard?

De facto standard: anything that just IS USED AND PRESENT IN
"LARGE" SCALE. We may hate it, but Microsoft DOES DEFINE
the standards, IE IS T H E STANDARD.

Then there are those "office clerk business project"-style
standards like most of the ISO ones. It's not that people
of a given field come together to settle on something to
benefit everybody. It's like, people come together, INVENT
SOMETHING, SUCK IT OUT OF THEIR PENCIL and try to plant
as much of their employer's patents in as possible duering
the process, and then declare: we have a standard!!!
Now, everybody, please pay ISO to
get a copy of this "standard" and then, please pay us,
for what ever reason, starting with patent license fees.

And of course, then there are those idealistic organisations
like the w3c and IETF, who have a nice, hognest and human, vision and
who's practical role tends to be fighting against the enslavers who
want to take over a whole area or field, for instance, networking.

OK, now, when somebody talks about, "nonstandard" browser, like,
IE, or a "standard" browser, like Firefox, then, the real debate is,
shall we approach the topic from real world and business point
of view or from idealistic, may be even evangelist's, point of view.

Leads to an interesting point though

Posted Mar 9, 2005 22:14 UTC (Wed) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link] (1 responses)

One interesting point though: a lot of those issues could be solved with a stack of money. What percentage of Firefox users are sending in a contribution? How many corprorate entities are sending in payment in lieu of license? Have any big players, such as Oracle or IBM, made substantial donations - either cash or in-kind?

Those I think are key questions for the future of Mozilla.

sPh

Leads to an interesting point though

Posted Mar 9, 2005 22:26 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

This is the wrong question. Contributions are not a reliable source for money.

How many people need extra features in firefox to get their jobs done? How many people depend on the maintiinance of firefox to continue getting their job done?

See Mike Connor's concerns

Posted Mar 9, 2005 23:44 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

To understand this article you really need to read Mike Connor's blog (he is a core Firefox developer). Basically, he believes that more core Firefox developers are needed. To be fair this doesn't show the whole story -- much of Firefox is actually the Mozilla infrastructure, which has a larger group of developers supporting it. Connor just believes that there's more development needed on the Firefox-unique part.

And it's fair to note the concerns about infrastructure; there are so many Firefox users that it's hard to update them fast enough. This is a good problem to have! But it still needs resolving. Perhaps what's needed is to change the nature of the problem; maybe add a a built-in BitTorrent for patches, and/or a way to send just a PATCH (not a whole new reinstall).

Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble (eWeek)

Posted Mar 10, 2005 16:27 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

As a part of the Mozilla community, I can tell you there's no real problem with funding for the infrastructure or the mangement of Firefox. The problems with recent updates were there because 1) it was the first time we ever did such an update and we didn't have everything going as planned yet and 2) Firefox 1.0 had an unfortunate bug that made all clients wanting to update at once instead of spreading the request over a longer period of time.
Both things were unfortunate but should be either resolved now or at least eased a lot with the experiences we made. Mozilla Foundation admins knew it would be a rough ride and tried to make it as smooth as they could, but still it wasn't enough to smoothen the experience completely. It should be better next time.

Additionally, we have quite a bunch of developers working on Gecko and all the Mozilla core architecture (well, we always need people and some areas are not too well maintained, but basically, Gecko and surrounding stuff is in quite good shape and development).

The "only" real problem existing is what Mike Connor said in his blog, and that is that there are more or less only two people left who do reviews and most of the work on the Firefox-specifc code, that is basically the front-end code.

In my opinion, that is how targetting Joe User and ignoring developers in the target audience pays back. Firefox has infrastructure and management support of Mozilla Foundation while lacking developers. The Mozilla suite ("SeaMonkey") currently runs into problems with having the exact opposite. But that's a different story.