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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)

#11

Post by lovamova »

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.

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

#12

Post by InclinedPlane »

seldo wrote: post #10
asadotzler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. A classic example of minimum viable product (although for phoenix far more than minimum). Phoenix was a breath of fresh air back then. Mozilla was as bloated and cumbersome as Netscape ever was, but Phoenix was fast, streamlined, and a joy to use.

The turning point was when the RSA patent expired and Phoenix could fully support SSL out of the box without any wonky add-ons. At that point there was no longer a good reason not to use Phoenix/Fire{bird,fox} and it started gaining huge amounts of momentum.

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

#13

Post by Andrew-Dufresne »

rayval wrote: post #7
Simucal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

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 recompile all of your program. It updates only those non-source files that depend directly or indirectly on the source files that you changed.

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

#14

Post by yuhong »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #12
seldo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. A classic example of minimum viable product (although for phoenix far more than minimum). Phoenix was a breath of fresh air back then. Mozilla was as bloated and cumbersome as Netscape ever was, but Phoenix was fast, streamlined, and a joy to use. The turning point was when the RSA patent expired and Phoenix could fully support SSL out of the box without any wonky add-ons. At that point there was no longer a goo…

The RSA patent expired back in 2000.

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

#15

Post by Isofarro »

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... )

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

#16

Post by yuhong »

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

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

#17

Post by gaius »

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

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

It never occurred to you because it isn't true! You could for example write a trivial raytracer that compiles in seconds and takes hours to render a scene.

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

#18

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#19

Post by voxcogitatio »

Andrew-Dufresne wrote: post #13
rayval wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

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).

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

#20

Post by glenjamin »

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.

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.

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