Mozilla feature request response time
Eddy has been exposing some of the long standing feature requests for Mozilla. They have a huge record or such requests. My favourites:
- needsterminal flag in /etc/mailcap not supported, 5 years old,
- Support for $http_proxy environment variable, 6 years old,
- -width and -height options ignored, almost 7 years old,
- Reply-to-List feature in mailer, almost 7 years old,
- Support for the <ruby/> xhtml element, 7 years old,
- Inheritance of alignment attributes in table columns, almost 9 years old
And these requests are only a small subset...
On the other hand, I'm amazed the 1.8.1 branch (the one for Firefox 2.0) is ABI compatible with 1.8.0 (Firefox 1.5). I'm currently running epiphany with a pre-release of libxul 1.8.1.3 (coming soon in sid), and it works flawlessly (so far), without rebuilding epiphany.
I must say I'm impressed, especially when I look back at how 1.7.x releases were.
2007-05-23 19:28:34+0900
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2007-05-23 22:26:39+0900
My favorite feature requests: the thousands of feature requests that have been implemented.
My favorite people: the thousands of contributors who wrote code to implement those feature.
My least favorite people: those who complain that others aren’t delivering them their free lunch fast enough.
– A
2007-05-23 22:35:27+0900
Asa, I am with you. Someone has to write the feature request!
But think about critical bugs in Mozilla like:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193749
They should at least disable the bookmarks manager to prevent users losing the bookmarks until some fix is applied!
2007-05-23 23:31:16+0900
My favourite people: trolls like Asa Dotzler.
2007-06-02 12:54:59+0900
My least favorite people: intellectually dishonest folk like Asa Dotzler who deflect legitimate commentary with some irrelevant criticism of the messenger and irrelevant stroking of others. It’s a big fat strawman, since no one denigrated the thousands of contributors nor their implementations of those thousands of feature requests. Dotzler is employing the exact same dishonest strategy as George Bush and the other war hawks when they say that critics of war policy aren’t supporting the troups, and it’s the same strategy that supporters of Israel use when they call critics of Israeli state policy (many of whom are Jewish) anti-semites.
Insecure people like Asa Dotzler who inject the sort of “we’re not appreciated” ego issues that he did here
make it impossible to have frank rational discussion about policies and priorities, which leads to the very issue at hand.
2007-06-02 13:13:52+0900
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193749
This related to a fundamentally and deeply flawed “design” that has been with Mozilla/Netscape/Mosaic (and a lot of other interactive software) from its beginning — this crazy screwball notion of saving state when a program exits. Once upon a time, long ago, people’s main permanent storage was floppies, where writes were slow and painful, and it made sense to only save changes when the program exited or when the user clicked “save preferences” (but even that option disappeared from Netscape at some point). These days, there is absolutely no excuse for not writing through to disk every change the user makes. But no, add a bookmark or change a preference and then have the system crash or Mozilla crash (as it does frequently) or freeze (as it does frequently) when it must be killed, and those state changes are lost. This is so so wrong that only very deep flaws in the management of the project can explain it.