Fine print: CCing a bug doesn't mean it will be addressed in a timely manner, it may take 10 years[1] but in the meantime you'll receive 2,147,483,647 mails of other people "me too"-ing and discussing about the bug.
Having a ten year-old bug isn't a mark of shame, if anything it's laudable when a project doesn't take the easy way out by silently closing ancient bugs like most projects do. Bugs should be fixed according to importance and priority, not simply according to age.
The problem is that "importance and priority" are pretty much subjective terms, for example, for many people Hello or Pocket were everything but a priority.
The solution is that it's an open source project. If you disagree with the priorities of the other developers, then you are empowered to take the initiative.
Leaving the cynicism and hyperbole aside, what bothers me are not the e-mails, but the double-sided stance of Firefox as a project, in feature-parity bugs we get the draconian speech of "oh no, we must follow the standards strictly, it doesn't matter if every other browser work fine and it doesn't matter if you already spent your time to develop a patch", but in the outside world we get the announcement of support for webkit-prefixed properties (to name an example).
As a developer, this destroys the credibility of Firefox when it comes to interoperability, and in the outside world I have been perceiving a rise of Chrome-only web applications, this can't be a coincidence.
There's a lot of people at Mozilla, and they talk fairly freely, so the result is an inconsistent message. Not everything you see is a stance, much of it is people trying to figure things out and communicate the decisions-of-the-moment.
As far as web compatibility and standards, the inconsistency is part of Mozilla. Is Firefox a tool for open web standards advocacy? Some in Mozilla feel that way. Do we just want Firefox to render things well? There's a whole team for that too (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility). And of course there's Bugzilla, which can feel like a lottery – it's very hard to know who you encounter when you enter the project through there.
This stuff is hard, and making the right choices is hard – I'm sure Mozilla has not always made the right decisions, but I personally prefer ongoing struggles to make the right decision over a consistent and credible stance.
Firefox's policies are no different from those of Chrome in this regard.
There is in fact a middle ground between "free for all, implement whatever you want" and "implement only what is precisely required by a standards document". In fact, this middle ground is the only way to make a practical browser engine. The two extremes are untenable.
The bug I linked was just assigned last month: it's being worked right now.
There are definitely some 10 year old bugs, just like there are funny, off-topic, celebratory bugs (https://bugzil.la/1000000). Like callahad said, you can tweak your email settings, and the bugzilla email headers are super easy to filter on.
I hear your frustration; people inside the company found some of those changes frustrating, too. Test Pilot is a step in a new direction that's more participatory and inclusive of the community, and injects a lot of data into the decision-making process.
As far as web standards go, Gecko's the only open-source browser controlled by a nonprofit. The alternative is a webkit monoculture, a world controlled by Apple and Google (oh, and Microsoft). Within Mozilla, the Firefox and Platform teams are super focused on improving standards compliance and squashing bugs. Things are getting better :-)
I really appreciate that, I would hate for the web to be controlled by Google/Microsoft/Apple and Mozilla is in the best position to stop that from happening.
I know, the name thing, what can you do? I worked on Persona before this, so I guess I'm not surprised by the Mozilla enthusiasm for reusing project names.
Have you tried the Activity Stream add-on? Captures so much of what we wanted to do with Chronicle. It's amazing what that team was able to crank out in four months.
The Search add-on turned out really well, though I wound up having to rewrite it in XUL after the MVP feature set got trimmed. It took some pretty strange requestAnimationFrame hacks to get highlight stealing working, I blogged about it: http://6a68.net/2016/highlight-stealing-hack/
Let's round up the Chronicle alums and grab drinks in SF sometime!
Well, as long as you do not bring back custom toolbars and a real status/add-on bar and as long you don't re-introduce advanced UI customization like combining different bar elements like tabs with the url field or the ability to move all buttons around where we want to have them, i will stay with Otter Browser and Vivaldi.
If you ever decide to stop being the Chrome users and general less advanced users darling i think about using Firefox again. But until that point, alternatives here i stay.
So you finally step back from cloning the Chrome UI and add customization again to the browser? Oh wait, you are implementing the Chrome extension system.
That test pilot is only damage control as you are now not only facing Chrome, also frustrated users move on to Brave or Vivaldi.
But it is no real browser and only an advanced web app bundled with Chromium. Also, smashing a wrapper on top of Chromium with features and call it a day is one of the most stupid things ever which a group of developers can do.
But Vivaldi shows what guys do when they have respect of power users. They add features we want and we prefer and not only features what simple users or Chrome users want and prefer.
Exactly. I’d never use vivaldi, but many of its features are awesome. I’d also love if Firefox had a way to adapt the UI color to the current page, if I could have as nicely animated tab previews, and many of the other settings.
Firefox started working on many features for power users (look at testpilot’s vertical tabs), but let’s hope they#ll do more.
Sorry for being rude. It comes from a place of love, I think Firefox plays an extremely important role in the open web, and for that I'm very grateful.
Frankly, your response is indicative of the problems at Mozilla.
You need to realize that behind every sarcastic, disdainful comment about Mozilla or Firefox is years, often nearly decades, of Firefox usage, contribution, and promotion. When people come to trust and rely upon a tool for getting work done for many, many years, and then the organization responsible for that tool starts changing priorities in ways that negatively effect the tool's usability and usefulness, people react negatively.
And when the organization then gets defensive and offended at people's negative reactions, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle of negativity and not-listening-to-the-other-side.
Mozilla makes a great browser, saving the world from Microsoft and IE. Nearly two decades later, Mozilla starts mucking with the UI, chasing the mythical never-used-the-Internet-before-and-will-always-be-that-way user, forcing unwanted, unrequested features upon all users, etc.
Naturally, people respond negatively. "Why are you doing this, Mozilla? Why are you ruining this great browser? Why are you now chasing numbers and mythical unicorn users instead of pursuing excellence and usefulness like you always have before?"
Then Mozilla employees get defensive and respond with, "What? Why don't you like what we're doing? Why aren't you being nice to us? We're doing this for you! Stop being mean!" And then they say to each other--especially on Bugzilla reports--"Ugh, more comments from the peanut gallery."--or in Mozilla-speak, "advocacy"--"Locking this bug to editbugs-privileged only accounts."
So now we have two sides that are offended by each other and not listening to each other. But the two sides are not equal, for without users, what is the point of Mozilla and its products? Plenty of well-made software has fallen into obscurity over the years when people weren't using it. And without Firefox, what are users left with but poor imitations?
Undoubtedly Chrome has had an impact here, but Mozilla is mistaken to imitate Chrome to recapture its users. Some people leave Firefox for Chrome because they prefer Chrome, or because Chrome is faster (and they don't mind its memory usage). But other people leave Firefox for Chrome because--wait for it--Firefox has stopped being Firefox! They figure, well, if Firefox is going to try to be a poor imitation of Chrome, I might as well just use Chrome.
But what we really want is authentic Firefox, the browser that we started using when IE ruled the world and Phoenix rose from the ashes of Netscape to save us from the Evil Empire. Microsoft isn't the threat to the Internet it used to be, but monoculture will always be a threat, and proprietary, walled-garden, app-store-style software is a growing threat to user freedom and empowerment.
We need Firefox to be Firefox, not Chrome, not Mozilla's experiment of the month, not Mozilla's platform for enacting social change.
I guess the problem is that Mozilla is literally not who it used to be, because the people are different, and they have different ideas. Probably money has something to do with that; a few years of hundred-million-dollar+ deals obviously has an impact. People get used to the money, and when it comes down to it, they'll do whatever they think it takes to keep the money flowing, even if it means undoing what made them successful.
But the root problem is the Rug Problem: people react negatively when the rug is yanked out from under them without their consent. Mozilla should recognize this and not react defensively.
Instead, Mozilla should interpret every such comment as evidence of bugs in the Mozilla organization, people, processes, and priorities. When "customers" are unhappy, smart companies don't get offended and tell off their customers, they figure out why customers are unhappy, and they make them happy again.
As for myself, I'm keeping an eye on Pale Moon, which has made a commitment to stability in API and UI, and to usefulness for its users. I wish Mozilla would make the same commitment to its users and extension developers.
My response was solely critiquing an exchange which ended up looking like:
if (requestFeature(x)) { complain(); } else { complain(); }
That flow doesn't get anyone to a better place, but there are tons of ways to refactor it into productive dialogue. Let's do more of that.
I promise you that I legitimately do hear the frustrations felt by long-time power users of Firefox. I don't agree with all of them, but I do my best to represent them internally nonetheless. To your concerns regarding stable APIs: that's exactly what WebExtensions are designed to address: decoupling add-on APIs from implementation details so that we can keep add-ons working, even as we refactor Firefox to be faster, more stable, and more efficient.
> To your concerns regarding stable APIs: that's exactly what WebExtensions are designed to address: decoupling add-on APIs from implementation details so that we can keep add-ons working, even as we refactor Firefox to be faster, more stable, and more efficient.
Ok, that sounds nice, but is this yet another extension API that does it Chrome-style, restricting extensions to a solitary button in a solitary toolbar, rather than giving them the freedom to truly extend the browser and its UI? Because if I wanted handicapped extension APIs, I'd just use Chrome.
And besides, isn't that what Jetpack was supposed to be? How long until the next extension API that will get it right This Time?
One of the foundational pillars of Firefox is its powerful extension API, however messy and difficult-to-refactor it may be. Take that away, and it's just another browser, no better than Chrome.
Is it so surprising that power users are the most vocal one's and do complain if one of their pet features is going to be axed? (And many of our pet features have disappeared since that Chrome UI annoyance called Australis has ruined a big part of Firefox)
And instead that Mozilla goes back a step towards power users and brings our features back what do we get instead? Features which more simple minded users do want and prefer.
It is the deconstruction of Firefox as geek base what we hate and that is the reason we are so vocal about it.
The moment where Mozilla makes a significant turn back to their roots, the moment will be the one where complaints are going to stop or at least where people can believe in Firefox again.. a little bit.
> What productive outcome could we possibly reach from that exchange?
To advocate the devil, s/he'd like to change future plans. You did confirm it's being worked on, but the comment you're responding to tries to get you (mozilla) to work on implementing standards more often.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree, I'm underinformed (though I also ran into Firefox not having input types and am also not a fan of recent experiments, I can't tell whether the concept of doing such experiments isn't worth doing), I'm just pointing out there is something behind the negative sarcasm.
Hello (and Pocket for what it's worth) are relatively small add-ons that ship with Firefox nowadays, the bulk of the actual magic for both happens in web content. Hello has a new tab-sharing feature, but that also works by sending media streams through WebRTC.
I am starting to suspect that their prominent placement and sudden appearance in the default Firefox UI caused people to think that they are taking a larger amount of Mozilla's development resources than is actually the case.
To bring it back on topic to Test Pilot - hopefully this will help the overall Firefox community vet these types of ideas before they make it to the default UI.
Even if the outcome is ultimately the same (new feature is added/default UI is changed, which makes some subset of people legitimately unhappy), it gives a wider audience a chance to test and provide feedback and generally socialize new ideas.
Disclaimer: i'm a front-end web developer and rhinoceraptor's comments does not represent me.
Mozilla and independent contributors, please continue developing Firefox as openly and inclusively as you've always done. Web browsers have become a major tool of communication and information for many people, and i really appreciate having a good free (as in freedom) alternative on that front :)
If you have a bugzilla account, you can CC yourself on the bug to catch future updates :-)