Anyone 'losing faith'?

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Firefox
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TheCat
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Post by TheCat »

Ben, you do an excellent job!

It needs to be said. I'm shocked by the people who started a bunch of topics about the name change. Just like if the world is gonna collapse because the browser is now Firefox and not Firebird. The browser is the best around, call it wherever you want.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Jarmo P
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Post by Jarmo P »

Losing faith, no way !!!

Just got myself a member to this forum. And a few things to say to them whiners asking democracy in program development. That should never happen. Fellows, I don't know your background in programming and things. I always knew Firebird was a product of a very few bright individuals with a vision. Just because its code is open source doesn't mean everybody should be able to make some contribution in the finished code.

About the name change, well it was a bit surprise. If known real legal troubles were to be expected with them database developers, then for sure. I hope they payed well, to keep this project up, and to get all the publicity to help the developers with Fox. Otherwise, a bit drastic decision. My only complaint ;)

Firebird has been my default browser since 0.6 for these reasons:

Usability: some good decisions have been made for the simple stylish look with some people who agree with me how a real nice browser should work. If the developers were to start listening to all the whiners here, there would be no end of demands and the program would get cluttered up as most the other ones. Hope it never happens.
Safety: Hope never Active-X things added. This should never become a replacement for IE.

I like the way it comes. Only javascript, no flash and other stuff. Java version could be distributed when this is ready, I think it is already, mayby time to skip 0.9. For those who cannot find it in the extensions. The windows installer was a nice thing to add for all the newbies in having difficulties as basic users.

Lets face it people, Firefox will never become the most popular browser, it will always be MSN one. But it will become the best known alternative one if not already. That is a big accomplishment.

MSN will copy them features for the new one, as usual. Will IE ever get safe, propably not. Too big a corporation.
Hermeneut
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Post by Hermeneut »

Whoa, there. Have you actually conducted tests? Using dedicated browser-test pages (saved locally) I found IE time and again to be two to three times quicker to render pages whether plain text or CSS.

Before making accusations like that, make sure you can back them up - as I have!

...

Let me reply to this.

I'm running FF across a university network on multiple machines and on a wireless 54g home network with 4 machines. In the local page tests I run, on xhtml, php and sql sources, FF is almost TWICE as fast as IE. Where there is a difference, however, is in the launch spped of the broswers, but with IE built into WINdows, that is an unfair comparison.

If a caffeine OD meant my earlier reply was a tad saucy, my original complaint still stands: this is the best browser around, and FF is its best iteration. Yes, I want it to be better -- e.g., I want Pinstripe on Windows yadda yadda yadda -- but given the input of committed coders with a belief in standars, it will be the best. Daubrey -- shut eet!
niralisse
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Post by niralisse »

Ben, find yourself some moderators that you can trust. Please. I have tremendous respect for you but expecting users to formulate support requests in UE terms is BS. Find someone to do that for you and take "I hate the download manager" into "Consider how the average user wants to download files...."
Hellmark
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Post by Hellmark »

Fire* launchers quicker for me and loads pages quicker. I've compared against Lynx, Konqueror, IE, Seamonkey, various versions of NS, and various other browsers (I have 6 or so on each of my machines).
denis09
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Post by denis09 »

bengoodger wrote:For those that want to complain, look at the list above. Could you do any better?

The only thing I wish I could do better is delegate. The reason I have difficulty with this is that I'm generally a pretty distrustful person. I have years of experience seeing work get done that is logically counter to creating a successful browser for the marketplace - seeing the work of a few talented people squandered by incompetence and temporal greed.


And that is probably why you have created the best damn browser existing today.
The whining apparent here is not really constructive. Supportive and constructive criticism, patches etc is helpful, complaining about the efforts of people doing a _great_ job is counter-productive.

How would any of you feel if you made a great piece of software, continued to work on it for a long time, getting a lot of popularity, and then getting comments on how what you do is not the best for the "community" ? Seriously studpid way of trying to communicate if you ask me.

The focussed and tight development that has been done on Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox has resulted in an awesome piece of software, actually the piece of software I use the most both at work and at home.. The stability, usability and extensibility is simply the best!
The extension model is what makes Firefox so appealing to me, without the Tabbed Browsing Extension, the Webdeveloper extension and others Firefox would simply be a nice browser. With them it is brilliant.. The developer community around Firefox is not only the actual developer(s), but also the people putting in work in extensions, themes etc.
If you really have ideas that you want implemented, make an extension. If the extension is so brilliantly obvious a standard (killer) feature, Ben will maybe notice it, if not you still have the functionality..

I say go on Ben, your work is _highly_ appreciated !
gaspeer
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Re: Anyone else 'loosing faith'?

Post by gaspeer »

bengoodger wrote:At times, it seems there are so few compelling arguments in this forum and such a lot of "I want it this way damnit!" and "this way sucks." A small number of people have made genuinely worthwhile comments on various features in the product and those comments have been or are being folded in.

I'm sorry if you feel disenfranchised by the process. If you have suggestions as far as any feature or bug goes, please try and articulate them in an effective manner. Stonewalling is never effective.


Thanks for those comments. I'm a frequent "lurker" and infrequent post-er at these forums. I've been using Firefox since its ancestor, Phoenix 0.4.

I have only one major "complaint" and feature suggestion. It's a suggestion that's been beaten to death in these forums, but if you have a chance as one of the developers, I'd like you to help me understand or at least respond to this: Why is there no built-in "Single window mode" in Foxfire? I really have a hard time understanding the advantages of tabbed browsing without a built-in single-window mode with features at least similar to the functionality of Tabbrowser Extension.

I'm sure at any given time there must be a dozen threads regarding TBE going on the various forums, most of them either condemning the quirkiness of that extension or praising its usefulness. But I can't recall reading a developer's response to this simple request: Why not include in Firefox's core a single-window mode of browsing?

Thanks. And thanks especially to you and all the developers who are working on this wonderful little browser. I've had numbers of friends use it and praise it's speed and various features. Keep up the good work!

Gary Speer
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Spewey
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Post by Spewey »

denis09
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Post by denis09 »

David James wrote:But just consider a few of Konq's definite advantages:
-single window mode - all popups (requested or not) and new window calls are shoved into new tabs
-more tab features, such as detach and duplicate tabs as well as tab reordering
-Crash recovery (available in the konq add-on pack)
-externally called URLs open in a new tab without employing some end-user hack


These are easily added with Tab Browsing Extensions.

David James wrote:-split screen viewing


An obscure feature I have never really had the use for, even when I had software to do it (Opera). Not a big deal opening two windows and scaling them either, if you really really need to do that..

David James wrote:-automatic plugin integration


I would not say Konq handles plugins better than Firefox at all.. I have little or no problems with Firefox & plugins on either Windows or Linux (even different distros)..

David James wrote:-spell-as-you-go in text areas
-a sane Settings UI that is cean, clear (no "Web Features" or "Advanced") and comprehensive
-configurable keyboard shortcuts


I personally think that once Firefox stabilizes (around 1.0 I would think?) and the settings dialog does not change so often, it has a far superior (both in looks and feel) settings UI than Konq. (And yes, I am an avid KDE user..) Additionally Konq doesn't really have all that many advanced features (I know I miss a lot when I now and then fire it up / try to use it.)

David James wrote:-printing goes through kprinter rather than that unholy mess called xprint that doesn't even work unless you pipe output to .ps or to another print manager (such as kprinter)
-mailto:s etc work right off the bat


Linux specific problems, but definitely easily solvable.

David James wrote:-view source employs kate in mark-up mode by default


Matter of taste, with the Web Dev. extension I think the view source is excellent in Firefox aswell.

David James wrote:-base theme doesn't conflict with dark OS themes (since it IS the OS theme) (try opening up the FF Options dialog with text set to white. hah)
-view man pages with man:/<app name>


Haven't had any big problems with this.. Man pages are best viewed on the shell ;)
The theme thingie is better if you use KDE3.2 as it integrates colourschemes better with GTK2 apps. Did you try running Firefox in Gnome2 ?

David James wrote:This list doesn't include areas where they're equal. All that Konq really needs is a way to switch between Gecko and KHTML and there'd be no contest after that.


It actually has (/ had ?) support for Gecko. But it doesn't really integrate it very well..
Konq is improving, but not as much as Firefox, and not as fast IMHO..
skreech
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Post by skreech »

PHPBB Hacks does allow some rating I'm pretty sure that many more suggestions will come in. Since Ben is interested in this maybe we can come up with a selection of the best and agree on one to be implemented?

few things seems to be strong in this thread to my ears.
1. Ben is the person running the official build of FF and is the point man for near anything that gets stamped.
2. If this is the case then FF is justifiably to be compared with Linux
3. Evrybody wants communication but the infrastructure isn't there for it ..yet

So Here is my take on this
If we are going to have this be as succesful as everyone wants it to be then a Linux like structure needs to be setup. Linus owns the name Linux but he's very loose about who uses it and so has lost brand identity as has been mentioned before. Since Mozilla is very concerned about brand identity why not allow anyone who wants to come up with a build of Mozilla FF to do so and have a page that links to well known/most requested builds (With Java prebuilt in etc.) while making it clear that these are NOT Mozilla FF and I'm fairly certain the community here will continue to point most people back to the official supported Mozilla FF. This way many people can get thier Rolled Browser with Flash prebuilt in etc.
Secondly on communication aside from rating threads would it be possible to have a select few people sift out reasonable threads/posts or synopsize (Yes its a word I looked it up) the rants since as mentioned before out of the rabble generally can come a simple statement of a problem. This leaves two problems though as far asI see. Who chooses the few and how do they receive feedback from the fewer developers? If they simply feed info back to Ben++ then people will still get upset. If the developers dont give some reason for doing X feature or action then most of the flames will be turned towards the median. I'm not sure of the full situation with Mozilla so if anyone could point me towards the likely path that the foundation would take we can see if we can offer suggestions to improve thier journey to the solution
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jgraham
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Post by jgraham »

denis09 wrote:The whining apparent here is not really constructive. Supportive and constructive criticism, patches etc is helpful, complaining about the efforts of people doing a _great_ job is counter-productive.


Read the posts again. Notice that one of the people "whining" is a designated QA contact who deosn't feel that he can do his job properly. Would you regard QA as a) Worthwhile or b) Worthless?
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bengoodger
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Re: Anyone else 'loosing faith'?

Post by bengoodger »

gaspeer wrote:I have only one major "complaint" and feature suggestion. It's a suggestion that's been beaten to death in these forums, but if you have a chance as one of the developers, I'd like you to help me understand or at least respond to this: Why is there no built-in "Single window mode" in Foxfire?


Excellent question! Is there a bug? There probably is, search for one. If not, file one.

-Ben
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bengoodger
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Post by bengoodger »

denis09 wrote:And that is probably why you have created the best damn browser existing today.


Thank you for the compliment but I should highlight when I said "Firefox is basicaly just me at the moment" I should probably have emphasized "at the moment." I don't mean to take away from the superhuman work people like Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross etc have done in the past on all of the same things I listed (and may yet do in the future). And to people who think I'm overlooking the core - I'm talking only about mozilla/browser and mozilla/toolkit in CVS.
denis09
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Post by denis09 »

bengoodger wrote:
denis09 wrote:And that is probably why you have created the best damn browser existing today.


Thank you for the compliment but I should highlight when I said "Firefox is basicaly just me at the moment" I should probably have emphasized "at the moment." I don't mean to take away from the superhuman work people like Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross etc have done in the past on all of the same things I listed (and may yet do in the future). And to people who think I'm overlooking the core - I'm talking only about mozilla/browser and mozilla/toolkit in CVS.


I know, I have been following (from the outside) the project, from its early Phoenix days.. :) So I have a feel for the personell having been involved / being involved. In my "you" I meant not only you Ben, but "you guys". The graphics work by Arvid has also been excellent, to the point where installing the "IE theme" is no longer necessary for newbie users I convert. The Qute theme looks better and still is easy to get accustomed to..

There is a lot of work behind this browser, and all involved / previously involved deserve a big thanks from us users..
Caligo73
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Post by Caligo73 »

Well, without reading everyone's response, so I may repeat a few people--I work for a small software company in Vegas. We have a very small audience and have been working on the rollout for a new version for over a year. With the small audience we have we are contstantly being bombarded with complaints, suggestion, etc. Although we would love to take all of them, if we did we'd never get the software released. One suggestion overshadows another. You want it faster, but you want me to do more work to make it "improved"? We're already a year behind our release date and at some point we simply have to stop working on "improvements', simply work out the current bugs and get the thing out the door. And without building so much they can't handle the file size of the program.

I'm sure the developers would love to take every suggestion you guys have. But if FireFox is ever to be "released" they have to at some point stop. And keep in mind, we can't have it all--at least not right away. How often has a Version 1.0 of anything ever been complete? When has anyone ever stopped and said: "ok, it's perfect. We're done." If the suggestion isn't done now, that doesn't mean it can't be looked at later.

FireFox is far from perfect. But it's still better than the rest in my eyes. Otherwise, I'd just use IE. Or Opera. Or any of the dozen browsers out there today. You do have a choice. That's what makes it so nice. It's up to you to decide what the best choice for you is.
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