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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)

#21

Post by rmc »

daimyoyo wrote: post #3
diego wrote: post #2

I 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

Also remember that compiling code can use memory. I once had a compilation causing the machine to swap. That took a while to compile.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#22

Post by nickpp »

"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company"

Awesome insight. Absolutely breathtaking. Explains so much of what happens at larger companies.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#23

Post by leoc »

yuhong wrote: post #16
thought_alarm wrote: post #6

5 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time.

I think by Mozilla 1.0 it was finally ready, but it was Firefox's marketing that finally led people to adopt it. BTW, you can partly blame this petition: http://archive.webstandards.org/ng.txt

From what I recall, the long delay seemed to have much more to do with XPCOM than with the CSS engine.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#24

Post by sambeau »

daimyoyo wrote: post #3
diego wrote: post #2

I 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 is often the case. My last company had software that took 45 mins to compile on high-end machines in 2010.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#25

Post by daniel02216 »

lovamova wrote: post #11
asadotzler wrote: post #8

Lots 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 g…

When Firefox 1.0 came out, it was one of the lightest browsers available on the market. What happened until version 4.0? Even the latest Firefox beta is one of the slowest browser available. I’m not talking about the JavaScript engine, I’m talking about the user experience of your product.

A pessimistic answer would be that all the people who were working on Mozilla who liked to add bloat like email and IRC and Palm syncing to a web browser jumped over to Firefox. Or that the guys who wrote Firefox 1.0 have moved on. Or that that's what happens when you write your UI in XML, render it with a browser engine, and load half a million extensions and history databases from disk on startup.

A different answer might be that it does so much more that a slowdown is part and parcel of doing all that's necessary in a modern browser.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#26

Post by Andrew-Dufresne »

Isofarro wrote: post #15

Excellent documentary on YouTube covering the year long open-sourcing of Mozilla, right up to the point of jwz leaving Netscape. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig (via codinghorror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-you... )

Code Rush can downloaded from http://clickmovement.org/content/code-rush-download

Other links for unused footage and annotated version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush#External_links

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#27

Post by drothlis »

voxcogitatio wrote: post #19
Andrew-Dufresne wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides subsystems, tools like make and nmake utility can also reduce the compile time. Make figures out automatically which files it needs to update, based on which source files have changed. It also automatically determines the proper order for updating files, in case one non-source file depends on another non-source file. As a result, if you change a few source files and then run Make, it does not need to recompil…

Yes, but large projects often need to use recursive makefiles, which are notoriously flaky at detecting what has changed (if anything).

No project needs to use recursive make.

"Recursive make considered harmful": http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#28

Post by petsos »

glenjamin wrote: post #20
lovamova wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox 1.0 came out, it was one of the lightest browsers available on the market. What happened until version 4.0? Even the latest Firefox beta is one of the slowest browser available. I’m not talking about the JavaScript engine, I’m talking about the user experience of your product.

I'd say that in the 10 or so years since firefox 1.0, the average computing power and requirements of the firefox user have shifted enough that the goalposts have moved. Firefox 1.0's USP at a time when browsers were bloated was its lack of bloat. IMO thats less of an issue now.

I'm sorry but this mentality is everything that is wrong with software development. How is bloat not an issue now? We expect that hardware is getting better and better, but it is ok for software to become worse and worse just because it can sort of get away with it?

In this case Firefox has even managed to outperform Moore's law. It managed to become slower in a faster rate than computers get faster.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#29

Post by stuhacking »

Isofarro wrote: post #15

Excellent documentary on YouTube covering the year long open-sourcing of Mozilla, right up to the point of jwz leaving Netscape. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig (via codinghorror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-you... )

Thanks for linking that, I'd never seen it before and it was very fun to watch.

Near the end Jamie says (slightly paraphrasing): "This could all turn into television again... a small number of companies controlling what we see or hear."

And now we basically have Facebook, Twitter and Google as the big entry points for finding things on the web. I realise that we're not living in this closed system that's push only.. I just thought there was a slight parallel there.

Re: And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

#30

Post by mike-cardwell »

lovamova wrote: post #11
asadotzler wrote: post #8

Lots 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 g…

When Firefox 1.0 came out, it was one of the lightest browsers available on the market. What happened until version 4.0? Even the latest Firefox beta is one of the slowest browser available. I’m not talking about the JavaScript engine, I’m talking about the user experience of your product.

Exactly. I'm holding out for Firefox 4, and if it's not substantially faster than Firefox 3, I'll be moving to Chrome and I wont be moving back. Firefox 4 is their last chance to get their shit sorted.
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