I don't agree that Places was the one and only thing that sold Firefox 2 though. I took a look through the Firefox 2 Requirements page to look at some of the other stuff that's going on. Reading that document, I think I can see now why people are down in the dumps about no-places Firefox 2. I don't think that document necessarily does the best possible job of capturing the excitement I have about some of the Firefox 2 features we're pursuing.
For the past week or so, I've been toting around a printout of another document, which I wrote because I wanted to convey some of the vision I have of the Firefox 2 product as a whole - a more holistic view as it were.
If you take a look at the black buttons stacked in the right column of this page, you'll see that one of them reads "Safer, Faster, Better." I don't knowwho came up with that one but it's a good tag line. It has a certain cadence about it. People have attached lots of these to Firefox in the past - "Take Back the Web" was the one I came up with, there's "Rediscover the Web", the FirefoxFlicks project has yielded a few good ones too - I like "Web For All". But "Safer, Faster, Better" is not just a tag line, it can also map into a set of themes for product development.
So, taking a look at the Requirements page, I attempted to do that. My document wasn't a comprehensive collection of everything on that page, I was focused more on the things immediately visible to most users. I guess my problem with the Requirements page has always been its very engineering/technical focus. The result of this is that the priority of items tend to reflect how difficult something is to implement, or where it lies in the development cycle, not necessarily the impact on the user. What I ended up with I guess is a sort of "Shadow PRD" that reflects what I personally thought was cool about Firefox 2, and what I wanted to get out of it.
A copy of the document is here.
Some notes:
All in all, I think there's easily enough here to justify a "2" designation. That's just my opinion though. I also think whole numbers are probably easier for the general populace to understand than decimals.
Firefox has never been about date driven development (within reason). The changes with Places should not be seen as a change in this sentiment. What we're about is high quality software development with real advantages to
users, and I think that with the updated plan we're still on a trajectory that supports and encourages that, perhaps more firmly now than before.
And that's it from today's "Ben waits for the tinderboxen to clear" report.
]]>As a result, we decided to pursue a release focused on application level improvements, on a separate branch. Going into it, we knew the perils of multi-branch development. We knew the divergences that would inevitably form between branch and trunk. We had experience from the painful development of Firefox 1.0 on the Aviary branch. We resolved to be more methodical about our commits, but we knew to expect some pain. The goal was to produce a high value release in short enough time so that we could all return to the trunk and help build new features that utilize the back end being developed there, to help shake them out.
Late last year, we put together a list of things to pursue for the Firefox 2 release. A month or so ago, we got together as a group and formalized this more in a Firefox 2 PRD. We had scheduled four major pre-release milestones, two alphas and two betas. We have already shipped one alpha. The intent of the second is to be "Feature Complete".
The people driving the various sub-projects on the Requirements list get together weekly to check status. As the weeks have gone by, it has become clear to us that the most complex feature on the plan is Places. It is easily an order of magnitude more complex than anything else on the plan. Places is a great feature and it has been exciting watching its capabilities grow. We are looking forward to the capabilities that it will expose. What we have learned though is that the work required to complete Places is probably too substantial to gate the Firefox 2 release. It falls more into the "significant rearchitecture" category of feature that's generally been targeted at Firefox 3.
What we have decided to do is as follows:
We think this is a good decision for two reasons:
Michael Schroepfer of the Mozilla Corporation has a newsgroup posting with additional information. His thread is also the most appropriate forum for discussion of this topic.
I have been working on refining some of the messaging surrounding feature content and prioritization on the PRD. I will post the initial results of that here soon.
]]>While I'm at it... the up arrow key cap fell off after about three weeks, in early 2004. About six months later I lost the little rubber membrane thing that made it slightly easier to push the arrow. Since then, I've been typing by pushing down on the little connection thingy on the keyboard tray.
It's been shedding pieces of plastic too. I've never dropped the computer once, but pieces of the shell have begun to snap off.
When I first got it, when the secondary battery was in place, when the primary drained the machine would hibernate, even though the secondary was present! Pretty awful bug to ship with. There was never a solution that I could find. Speaking of batteries, the primary battery is pretty much toast... it won't go for more than 5 minutes before shutting down. It began doing this at around the 12-18 month mark. And the battery light permanently flashes orange whenever the system is on.
Why don't I call the hotline? I guess I'll have to, before my warranty runs out. I don't because it usually involves 45 minutes on hold or explaining to someone who only has a script to read from that the issue involving a missing up arrow doesn't require restarting Windows or running some stupid diagnostic tool. I could have paid more for "premium support" at build-time but I found that concept sort of insulting: why should I have to pay extra to speak to someone who is smart and doesn't think I'm a moron?
And I don't want a Thinkpad either. I hate those computers. They have old-fashioned 4:3 displays, and the function key and left Ctrl key are reversed. I know I could map them differently but why would I? Why couldn't IBM just have designed the product correctly in the first place? Oh, and I'd sooner drink paint than run the awful IBM access connections software to connect to a wireless network, or deal with the fact that the Num Lock key seems to reset to ON every time the system is rebooted.
Why doesn't someone make the perfect laptop? I'd be interested to hear from someone how long the compile times are for FirefoxDebug on a 2.16GHz MacBook Pro...
]]>First, I managed to get a certain distance with a branch build, compiling with Visual C++ 6.0. But soon I realized there were too many dependencies that were trunk specific, so I had to build trunk. About a quarter of the way through my build died, of course, compiling from the same shell, wrong version of VC6.0 for Cairo/Thebes.
Starting over again with the VC7 tools, another failure towards the end. Some sort of cyclic dependency check error. Clobber and restart. Now I forgot one of my patches had a configure change, and the process begins anew, I have effectively clobbered.
When I bought this machine, a Dell Precision M60 with a Pentium M 1.7GHz processor, a 7200rpm disk and a gig of RAM, it could compile Firefox start to stop in 21 minutes. Now it takes over an hour.
The situation is better on my Google-supplied workstation, but for how long? Over time, Windows reaches a point of being completely useless for anything aside from the most basic activities. What's the effect? I had planned to work both days this weekend on Firefox 2 features. Instead I spent the whole time fighting one of the most frustrating fights possible, and have achieved nothing. I hate Windows. I hate this computer.
]]>You know, I never asked for blah to be "configured." I never asked for a report on bleh (What am I, a manager? Where is the report anyway? Does it have the appropriate cover sheet?) I just want the software gone. I'm getting really tired of excuses from software like this. Windows software seems to be getting worse and worse. On Mac, the typical way to remove a program is to drag it into the trash can. I can even do that to several programs at once! I do however have to be able to afford a Mac (I can, I have one). Many folk aren't as fortunate as I.
As a side note, I read an interesting article in Forbes a few weeks ago criticizing Microsoft for its delays shipping Vista, and asking why wouldn't you just side-step all the trouble and buy a Mac, since the odds were good many people would have to upgrade their PC anyway just to get the whiz-bang in Vista. The article side-swiped open source desktop initiatives, asking where the viable free alternative was. I think that was an interesting point, and especially so since the capabilities of Linux systems have come an awesome distance in the past few years but there have been few distributions or desktop environments that IMO make the most of all of those.
]]>It's been an illuminating experience. From a technical perspective, it helped highlight APIs that I had developed without a clear understanding of how they would be used. The Extension Installation API was one example of this, and we were able to make some great improvements to it in 2005.
But perhaps more importantly it has shed some light on how people perceive Mozilla as an open source project. These perceptions are not the sort of things people express explicitly. You have to notice them.
This is sort of the uber-perception. I think some of the reasons for this include the following:
Which newsgroup/mailing list/IRC channel/wiki/talk page/bug/forum page do I need to track in order to know what's going on in a specific area? The answer is unsatisfactorily complex.
The traditional method of joining a project in the OSS world (where you join lists and IRC channels and lurk for a while, gradually ramping up your contributions) scales uneasily to a project the size of Mozilla. The amount of data a mere mortal would have to absorb in order to be productive quickly is staggering. I have in the past jocularly referred to it as the "learning wall". I wonder how many people just give up.
As a large project, Mozilla has thousands of source files across hundreds of directories. One of my coworkers here at Google commented that he tried to find something as simple as the browser window code a couple of years ago and couldn't, because it lived under the thoughtfully named "xpfe".
There's not a huge amount of documentation - and I'm not just talking about public API docs. I'm talking about the much needed diagrams that show how the various building blocks fit together, and in-code documentation for pretty much anything that isn't intuitive (which is a lot). I've written as little of this as anyone else.
In the past, I have not done the best I could to establish a tone for discourse that is conducive to productive development. My tendency was to snap when provoked. I made two mistakes of judgement here, one was ignoring the effect that this sort of thing would have on those watching, aside from the victim. The other was to think that regardless of the tone set by my actions, we as a group could work through any negative effects. Any work we relied on others for we could do ourselves. Or we could hire through it.
The flaw with this is that when your project's contributions come solely from companies, for better or for worse the activities of those paid contributors will align in some way with the interests of those companies. What this does not always allow for is the pursuit of the sort of improvements that are outside the scope of these interests. Such things often include raising general code quality, speculative feature development, feature polish and detail etc. I don't mean to say that companies are against these things, but they're often not the primary concern during a release crunch. And what companies like to have is shipping software.
Alternately, even in the absence of corporate support, if there is not enough redundancy that the same set of folk has to do the grunt work over and over, the risk of burnout is high.
I feel this because I have been incredibly "plan" focused over the past few years, formally during my time at Netscape and less formally but no less importantly during the run up to Firefox 1.0 and 1.5. What I notice is that I no longer have time to work on the sort of interesting side projects that I used to enjoy doing when I was first starting out.
For example, about six years ago I discovered a bug in the Bookmarks menu shortly after scrolling was implemented. When you moused into a submenu for a folder that was in the scrolled section, the sub menu popup was pushed off the bottom of the screen. I took a couple of days to learn the menu positioning code and fix the math error that was causing the bug. The exercise was good for me in a number of ways: I learned more about another section of the code, my general expertise was raised, and well.. I fixed the bug that was bothering
me.
I think we need to have a project that is accessible to volunteers for this reason. We also need to provide a way to allow those volunteers to grow if they want to, so that if you're one of the folk at the center you can have a chance to step aside for a moment and take a breather and code for the pure joy of it.
Full time paid contributors will always be a part of Open Source development. But I don't think release-focused agendas will ever be a substitute for the passion of folk who participate because of the joy of exploration and of contribution.
As a project, we have made overtures towards being a more inclusive lot. For some of the reasons I've listed here, I think as a project we're still more inward looking than outward. How many of us have thought about what we want to be doing in 5 years? Will we always be doing this? Will our roles remain the same? My opinion is that it's fast becoming time for us to start considering making personal sacrifices in our short term conveniences to make the project more accessible to new people. Do I know what we need to do? Not exactly. But I have some ideas: find ways to make our discussions, our public faces, and our code more accessible.
With Firefox we did an excellent job of building a world class product that people wanted to use. We have a new challenge now, one that is larger and scope and in the long run in my opinion considerably more important because the long term success of products like Firefox depend on it. How will we grow a world class development community? How will we ensure that the freedoms we enjoy are protected, forever?
]]>Karl's book is very well written, nice and compact (272 pages), and contains useful information for anyone doing anything in the Open Source world: both developers and managers.
It will help people new to Open Source get a better understanding of how OSS projects are run. It will help people familiar with Open Source to get a better understanding of how to contribute more effectively.
It's definitely a "must read."
]]>Well, I can tell you that's sage advice. It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:
These days, I find I don't have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there's relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it'd be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".
Before you post, stop and think if you've written something in a way that'll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.
]]>I think we could be better at this in Mozilla. I'm not suggesting people be assholes or anything, but I think some more pan-project analysis would be useful.
Historically, I can point at a couple of groups of people who have attempted to do something like this. The drivers@ group is one that looked beyond individual modules within Gecko to make sure that the right thing for the shipping products as a whole happened. The Firefox team is another example. By taking a holistic view, user experience was enhanced.
I think contributors should not be afraid to poke their nose in other parts of the project and see how things are going. Ask questions. Learn more. Get involved in governance and management. If things don't seem intuitive, or a little arbitrary, ask, rather than assume it's for a good reason. One of the benefits of having an open, referencable set of discussion forums means that once you've answered a question once on the public forums, when someone else asks you can just give them a URL.
]]>One of the things people have (rightly) criticized about Firefox and Mozilla development in the past is that too much happens mysteriously, behind closed doors. This was for a number of reasons that sounded sufficient at the time - it was expedient, people were sitting within shouting distance, mental laziness, etc.
What poor communication breeds is a lack of understanding of procedures, priorities and such like. A healthy project is one where the contributors understanding where things are headed, and what parts they can play. It is one where newcomers can visit the project website and within the space of a few minutes get a decent understanding of how things work, and find out opportunities for them to participate.
People don't want to contribute to projects where things happen "magically". I've learned this lesson in the past.
To this end, I've been encouraging everyone to have public discussions on the Mozilla Newsgroups/Mailing Lists. For Firefox, the list is dev-apps-firefox@, and the newsgroup is mozilla.dev.apps.firefox. They are mirrored through Google Groups for ease of browsing. We're planning on improving the theme for Firefox2, and rather than pursue this effort in a walled garden like last time, we're going to proceed in dev-themes@/mozilla.dev.themes. Come on over and join in!
At the same time, we've been encouraging other projects to use the newsgroups/lists too. Decisions made in private email, IRC (which isn't archived anywhere) even in public bugs etc make it very difficult for people who aren't central to the project to find out more or participate. I think we should strive to strike a better balance between convenience and accessibility/referencability.
On top of this, there is a need to make the contact portions of the web site more accurate, relevant and easy to find, so people can easily find the list they want, and the person or group to contact.
We've been having discussions about all of this in mozilla.dev.general, in these threads. Rather than talk in a vacuum of only ourselves, I really hope that those of you that have experienced difficulty in the past in some of these areas will come forward and contribute to the discussion.
]]>The past couple of years have brought some immense highs, and some considerable angst. With success has come the realization that true now as ever: the spirit of open source is expressed through the creative freedom of the many. The surest way to navigate the murky waters of increased attention and marketshare and such like is, as Leslie has been saying for some time, to keep your karma clean. Do the right thing, not only in technical matters but also relationships.
For the Mozilla project, what we need to do (I think) is:
For my part, I'm starting out this year by doing things a little differently. I think we need to grow more as a project. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to achieve some positive change.
I understand that this post might seem a little abstract. I think what I'm saying might become a bit more clear after I talk about some tangible efforts, which I will do in future entries.
]]>I cannot believe people are discussing life without these things. It's like this: I have a patent on television. I don't plan on doing anything with it, but I'm going to shut TV down for all of you, and you're going to sit about and think about life without TV? What's wrong with people?! Is this the world we all want to live in, where people without the interest or capability to pursue technology can hold everyone else captive? That's not the world I want to live in.