Tet's Journal: Mozilla

Dear Mozilla developers. I know you're a bunch of incompetent morons, but would it really be so hard to change that and release a decent product? Please?

That would require them admitting ...

[Barbara, not Barbie]

They would have to admit that the rapid release cycle is a bad idea.

They can't do that for marketing reasons - "OMG we're falling behind in the version numbers race."

I blame Microsoft. They started this whole trend when they jumped from Word 2.0 to Word 6.0 to be seen as equal to Wordperfect 6.0.

"Release early - release often" doesn't create quality products.

"Oh, but we'll get earlier feedback from real users" - so your users are all guinea pigs whether they asked to be or not, and you'd rather confuse

Moo

[Chacham]

I stopped with 3.6. I upgraded to 4, hit 5 gave up, went back to 3.6. With OldLocationBar, getting rid of that annoying bar, it's probably the best of the bunch.

I get the feeling that the newer developers don't appreciate having your own flavor. It's just follow the leader. The problem is, this leads Mozilla into a lack of identity, and as a follower, will eventually fade away. Plugins are probably the only thing keeping it alive.

Re:

[Tet]

Plugins are probably the only thing keeping it alive.

Perhaps, although in this instance, they're the source of my problems. My main machine died, so I switched to using the spare (which brought with it a 32-bit to 64-bit transition). My home directory is NFS mounted, and so shared between both systems. Consequently, none of my plugins work, because no one at Mozilla thought about this:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /local/opt/x86/linux/flash_plugin-11.1.102.55/libflashplayer.so [/local/

Re:

[Chacham]

It would have been trivial to put plugins into an architecture specific directory. This has been common practice in the sysadmin world for donkey's years. I've been doing it since the mid-90s, for example, and I learned about it from people that had been doing it for years before that. But no, Mozilla is written by people from a Windows background with no concept of such things.

Good point.

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Yes, to the general sentiment of your journal... and also Yes to "Mozilla is written by people from a Windows background with no concept of such things.". I've said exactly this in my semi-recent rant about the general state of software and user interface(s) [slashdot.org]

Re:

[Arker]

I went back to 3.6 too. It's starting to nag me to 'upgrade' quite often. I guess I am going to have to start investigating forks. Mozilla has always had problems but this is full retard.

Re:

[Chacham]

It only tells me to about the latest version when upgrading 3.6 with security patches. Of which, iirc, there's only two more before dropping support.

If there is a fork, i hope i get wind of it. Methinks there may be a lot of interest for it.

Re:

[Arker]

It's been bugging me for some time. It's not just on updates, it's frequent. The dialogue has a 'dont ask me again' option but it doesnt work.