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[Max B. <be...@ma...>]

Hello winscript-talks,

http://www.neowin.net/articles.php?action=more&id=88

Over  the last couple of months, Neowin has tracked the development of
perhaps one of the most promising open source projects for a long time
:  Mozilla  Firefox,  or  Firefox. We've managed to have a talk to Ben
Goodger,  chief  developer of Firefox, about whats new in the upcoming
release, and much much more.


Q.  Hi  Ben,  great  to  speak  to you again. As Firefox has gone from
strength  to  strength, how have the last few months been in your role
as chief developer?

Busy. Stressful. Action Packed.

Q.  Sounds  fun! Has the enormous popularly of the 0.8 release had any
adverse effects?

The  popularity  of  0.8  -  especially  within  the  first few days -
surprised  all of us. Our FTP mirror network experienced load problems
that caused many people to have a lot of trouble getting the software.
Our  community/news  partner  MozillaZine also experienced a number of
problems as people rushed in to find out more about new release. A lot
of  people  also  began  experiencing  problems upgrading incompatible
extensions  also. We tend to see such things as learning experiences -
so  we're planning for a much beefier distribution network for 1.0 and
more  stable  treatment  of  add-ons.  Sites  like MozillaZine rely on
community  support  to stay running so all I can say to people is give
generously if you value the services they provide.

Q.  With  0.8  must come a 0.9; whats new and exciting in the upcoming
release?

Tom, this is our biggest release yet. I know I've said that for pretty
much  every  release  we've  done so far, but it continues to be true.
Here's some of what's new in 0.9:

Stability:

New  Extension  and  Theme  systems that allow extension developers to
design  more  ambitious  extensions,  and to provide a stable scalable
method  of  keeping  extensions  and  themes  up  to date and ensuring
incompatible extensions or themes do not break the application.

Countless bug fixes, visual appearance updates and other refinements

Easing the Transition:

Dramatically smaller download size (now only 4.6MB)

Migration  of data for users of Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape 7.x
and  Mozilla  1.x, and Netscape 4.x on Windows, Netscape 7.x and Opera
on  Mac  and  Linux  (with more import sources to come in 1.0). People
using  IE  now  will  find  that  all  of their user data - Favorites,
Passwords,  Cookies,  right  down  to form data, browsing history, and
search keywords.

Improvements to make Searching, Bookmarks

The ability to launch your default email/news readers from the browser

Q.  Although  you  mentioned  last  time  that  you  didn't  use  many
extensions, have you found any since then that are particularly useful
to  you,  or  themes  for that matter? Do you have any plans to bundle
some of the more popular extensions with future releases?


I  still  find nothing that I absolutely rely upon. I think as long as
most  people  can  get their work done with the standard configuration
we're doing a good job.

We  already  bundle Inspector as an optional installable component for
web  developers. In the future we might look at other add-ons but it's
something we don't really have time to investigate right now.

Q.  Some readers might have noticed your blog has some news on the new
extensions  manager- can you tell us a bit more about whats new there?
Will it let people uninstall extensions rather than just disable them?

Yes.  The  new  Extension  Manager  lets users install extensions into
their  profile  (especially  useful  on  multi-user systems where some
extensions  before would only install into non-accessible areas of the
disk)  and  also does comprehensive version checking to make sure that
incompatible  extensions are not installed. Users can also elect to be
notified  of updates to their extensions so they can upgrade them when
newer  versions come out. There is also a "safe mode" whereby the user
can  start  the  application with the "-no-extensions" switch and have
all extensions disabled in the event that there are ever any problems.

We  are  also developing a user friendly centralized distribution site
that ties into the update checking system and allows trusted extension
developers to release updates to their extensions themselves.

Q.  So  after 0.9, whats the plan towards 1.0 and after? Will we loose
the Firefox name and see Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail?

No - we'll be continuing to use Firefox and Thunderbird as the product
names. After 0.9 work will continue on driving the list of 1.0 bugs to
zero,  which  includes  a  lot of polish and stability work, some more
low-opportunity-cost  UI  changes,  and  other stuff. Don't expect any
more big features, but expect Firefox to work better and better.

Q.  How does the Firefox team feel about all the optimized builds that
the  community  puts  out  on  it's  own.  Do  you  think it helps the
development of Firefox?

We've  looked  at  a few optimized builds and notice some of them feel
faster,  and  have begun evaluating some of the options used to create
them. In this regard they're beneficial in the same way extensions are
-  they  allow  community  members to experiment with new features and
configurations  that  we  perhaps don't have time to look at ourselves
and prove the merits of them.

Q.  Is  the  Mozilla  team  going to implement a new look and feel for
Firefox,  similar to what Opera have done for their latest release? On
that  note-  have you seen the new Opera browser? What do you think of
it?  Do you feel that the appearance of applications play a major role
when users make a decision of which product to use?

We  may  make ongoing theme improvements and running UI changes as the
need  arises.  We  aren't planning any large scale changes before 1.0.
The  new  Opera  browser  has  a lot of improvements that I'm sure its
users  will enjoy. While I feel that there is a set of users who place
a  high importance on looks or "feature count", ultimately most people
prefer  a  tool that lets them accomplish what they want to accomplish
with minimal intrusion.

Q.  This  one  is  particularly  directed  to you by one of our neowin
staff!  He wondered what usually happens in the day for the guy who is
the chief developer of Firefox.

I  work  from  home  a little in the (late) morning, reading my email,
etc;  travel  the  short distance to the Mozilla Foundation's Mountain
View  headquarters. There I spend my time writing code and interacting
with  the  other  engineers  that  work  out of that office, including
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, Johnny Stenback, David Baron, my Thunderbird
counterpart  Scott  MacGregor, Myk Melez, Asa Dotzler, and Brian Ryner
and  Darin Fisher from IBM. Depending on the day of the week there may
be  meetings  (e.g.  the Monday Mozilla Staff meeting or any number of
other formal or informal engineering discussions) where we meet in our
"war room" - a set of tables at the far end of our offices with people
local  and  remote.  With  the increased amount of work lately and the
deadlines  for 1.0, I've been doing more and more work in the evenings
as well.

Q.  Stepping  back  from  Firefox for a second; I often thought how it
would  be  a great idea to have a 'common Mozilla code base', allowing
perhaps 1 big download, but very small files for Firefox / Thunderbird
/  the suite and other XUL programs. Does foundation have any plans to
do something like this?

One  thing we eventually want to pursue is a "XUL Runtime Environment"
that  is independent from any particular application front end whereby
just  the application level components (front ends) can be downloaded.
In that instance the browser might be only 2MB if you already have the
runtime installed. Thunderbird might be as small as 4MB.

Q.  Since  we  last  spoke,  Microsoft  have been making a big show of
Longhorn  and it's new technologies like XAML. Some readers might have
noticed Mozilla forging tight links with the Gnome people; asides from
this  what  else  is  Mozilla  doing to promote XUL (more) and provide
effective competition to Longhorn?


One of the things we want to pursue aggressively in the next 12 months
is improving the XUL toolkit to
a)  polish the feature set (adding any missing widgets, smoothing over
the rough edges, etc)
b)  add  new  graphics  capabilities  that  offer  more flexibility to
application developers using XUL, and
c)  make  it  easier for developers to start using XUL and develop and
debug with their favorite language.

Q. In terms of XUL, the language Firefox is written in, how do you see
the  foundation  encouraging  its use? Many coders find it hard to get
into due to lack of documentation / support / examples - how would you
respond to this?

We  lack  the  immense  documentation  resources  that  companies like
Microsoft  have to throw behind their technologies. XUL was originally
designed  to  solve  a problem that Netscape had - and as a result the
set  of  features it had and the tools that existed to develop with it
were  generally  only  as  sophisticated  as  Netscape  needed for its
software.  With  this  second  round  -  "XUL2"  -  we  are a bit more
experienced  in  the  world  of toolkits, and are tackling this with a
more  general approach. XUL2 is part of a larger API effort - "Mozilla
2.0"  (that  has  no relation to any Mozilla product line e.g. Mozilla
1.7  -  it  is  merely meant to indicate a new set of stable APIs) for
which  we hope to have more of a focus on XUL application development,
more useful stable APIs for application development, and documentation
of those APIs with a new project called "devmo".

Q. A recent blog entry of yours called for more people to get involved
with  the  project;  have  you  had  any  thoughts  on  how to do this
successfully? Are things like bug day the answer?


Contributions  in the form of good bug reports, reduced test cases and
other  things  that help engineers are great. People supplying patches
to  their favorite bugs is great. In my blog I was talking more to the
big  picture future of Mozilla, relating to some of the things Brendan
talked  about  in  his  presentation  at  the first Mozilla Foundation
developer  day in February (slides: here)... to progress towards those
goals,  and to create new and innovative applications we need more big
thinkers  dedicated  engineers  and  designers  passionate  about  the
technology  we  work  with,  and  passionate about the applications we
create.  It's  really the sort of thing that requires more than casual
or  occasional  contribution. We're trying to find ways to get plugged
into the various communities where people that fit this bill live

Thanks  again  Ben  for  taking the time to chat with us! Best of luck
with  the  up-coming  releases,  and  i look forward to talking to you
again  a couple of months down the road Neowin readers, stay tuned for
the  Firefox release around early-mid June for 0.9 and 1.0 in the late
summer/early fall, and a revised guide on the best extensions, themes,
and  how  to  get  the  most  out of your browser with those releases,
exclusivly from Neowin.

View: Firefox Homepage
View: Firefox Development Roadmap
Download: Win / Nix / Mac
View: Previous chat with Ben
View: Neowin's essential guide to Firefox
Back to Neowin.net

-- 
Best regards,
 Max                          mailto:be...@ma...
http://belugin.newmail.ru    ICQ:9406811