And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
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Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#2I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours.
No surprise that it remained a Netscape project for so long.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#3I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours. No surprise that it remain…
"When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours."
Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN.
/srsly
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#4I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours. No surprise that it remain…
"When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours." Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN. /srsly
...Could you explain? I don't understand what you're saying.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#5I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours. No surprise that it remain…
"When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours." Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN. /srsly
This isn't always the case. It is highly dependent on the language, the compiler used, the size of the code-base and many other factors.
Most of the small to medium sized project I have worked on compile in what seems like an instant.
However, I work on a medium-to-large code-base at work and it takes around 8 minutes to compile on our build server and around 12-15 minutes on my dev machine. Even these speeds seem tremendously slow to me. I can't imagine being a developer on a huge C++ project and having to wait tremendously long build times. When your compile times aren't near instant it really changes how you program. That feed back loop of code-compile-run-repeat becomes more like code-double check code-code some more-compile-surf the web-run-repeat.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#65 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours." Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN. /srsly
This isn't always the case. It is highly dependent on the language, the compiler used, the size of the code-base and many other factors. Most of the small to medium sized project I have worked on compile in what seems like an instant. However, I work on a medium-to-large code-base at work and it takes around 8 minutes to compile on our build server and around 12-15 minutes on my dev machine. Even these speeds seem tr…
Ideally, you should not be in this situation where you have to compile large amounts of code to go through the code-test-debug cycle.
Even in a large project, there should be subysystems that a developer owns and works on that can be partitioned or isolated from the rest, and execute within a test harness on a dev machine -- a harness that feeds the subsystem inputs and records outputs.
Successful projects either begin with or evolve to a state where they have the architecture, the toolset, the process and the culture to allow devs to enjoy a fast code/debug cycle.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#8Lots of things on the Internet can move quickly but browsers are not Internet software the way that Google or Facebook are. Browsers are still desktop software and things don't move as quickly there thanks to slow PC upgrade cycles and the absolute dominance that software like Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer had a decade ago. Turning that massive ship took longer than many imagined but it is happening.
Jamie gave the open source Mozilla project about a year and a half, including the months of pre-source release preparation (and I think that's being generous.) Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker didn't give up so easily and thirteen-plus years later they're still giving all they've got to make sure that Mozilla continues to be successful in promoting choice, opportunity, and participation on the Web.
Some things are worth fighting for and I believe that the Web is one of those things. I'm proud to work with some of the founding members of mozilla.org and think it's a phenomenal thing that such talented people are willing to commit their professional lives to the Mozilla mission when there were and still are far sexier opportunities available to all of them.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#95 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time.
And today that product is used by more than 400 million people around the world -- far more users than Netscape ever had.
Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
#105 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time.
And today that product is used by more than 400 million people around the world -- far more users than Netscape ever had.
Specifically, it was Phoenix (aka Firebird, aka Firefox) that made that happen: a version of Mozilla that threw out everything but the browser, including the mail client that jwz considered essential. It made it smaller to download and faster to run, but most importantly it made it faster to write: they could ship improvements to Firefox way faster than they could to Mozilla, simply because there was so much less of it.