Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters 260
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments."
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored (Score:3, Informative)
stolen idea after idea from Opera. Tabs
Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.
Re:What good is extensibility... (Score:2, Informative)
... if Firefox's new and unnecessary rapid development cycle renders plug-ins invalid every three months, and the plug-in developers choose not to participate in Firefox's inane rapid development cycle. I, a Firefox user, am left with an egregious choice of keeping the browser secure by jumping on the rapid development cycle bandwagon, or using the plug-ins I want to use by skipping the security updates embedded in the rapid development cycle.
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All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.
How on earth does this nonsense get moded "Insightful"?
Three years ago, I fixed a bug in Firefox. It took two years before the fix was in a widely used version. By that time, all the sites that put in a hack to work around the bug forgot why the hack was there, and the hacks had to be supported by browsers forever. With a six week release cycle, the fix will take six weeks to get to a beta, and another six weeks to get to stable. Twelve weeks from fix to release means more users have a browser with fewer bugs. "Release early, release often" is a good thing.
For some reason, a tiny number of neurotic loudmouths get very upset over the idea that a version number goes up often. Since no sane persion cares about a version number for anything other than tracking what release they have for bug reports, I can only conclude that these people are nuts.
Your add-ons don't work? As a maintainer of two add-ons, I sympathise with developers who now need to test and release more often. However, I am not so selfish that I expect mozilla to slow down updates to make my job easier. For the two thirds of users who don't have any add-ons, the faster release has no downside. If you want to run an obsolete program just for an add-on written by a developer who doesn't update their code, go ahead. But for the people who want a good browser, more releases are a good thing.
I'd miss firebug and web developer (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox is really the bees knees for web development....
firebug for javascript...
http://getfirebug.com/ [getfirebug.com]
and the poorly named web developer plugin for css make firefox a potent tool.
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ [chrispederick.com]