A Bad Surprise
By Kazé on Wednesday, August 17 2011, 12:05 - Permalink
That’s not a secret, not everybody is happy with Mozilla’s new “6-week release” policy. Everything has already been written about that: the advantages of a rapid release cycle are real, and so are the drawbacks of the lack of a long-term-support version. The Firefox project is in a sensitive phase.
Yesterday, Cédric, a very long time l10n contributor and key person of the French localization, gave us a bad surprise by announcing that he’s suspending his contribution to Firefox.
The recent change about the release cycle has overturned the community habits and the irresponsible statements of some Mozilla representatives as well as the decision not to support a Firefox LTS release, for companies or end-users, are the root of the new nature of my contribution to the project.
At least Cédric isn’t dropping the FrenchMozilla community:
For my part, I won’t desert totally the project, because I truly agree the Mozilla Manifesto and I think the Mozilla Foundation is indispensable for the good health of Internet, but I will stop contributing in anything related to Firefox: the product, the websites and the marketing campaigns.
Beyond the fact that it will be very difficult to find anybody rivaling Cedric’s hard work and experience, I’m really bitter to think of the resentment of our community. Like Clochix said:
who would want to get involved in a project without being respected and listened?
Is the “sacred fire” fading out? I want to think it’s not, and I hope Mozilla will give a positive signal to the community before the upcoming MozCamps. Our community is what makes us different and better — let’s not take it for granted.
[Edit] just to make it clear: here in Europe, “community” refers to all Mozilla contributors, and most of them are volunteers — they’re giving their time, their energy, their talent to Mozilla “for the cause”. They do software development, translations (products and web pages), user support, evangelism… on their free time, because they think it’s valuable. [\Edit]
Comments
Not being listened to is probably the biggest issue are contributors resent today.
I know we want more contributors and engage more of our users - what I don't know is why we want it, that would probably clarify some thoughts in our communities.
That is an excellent point. Mozilla's leaders have not been helping the community move to the "New Firefox Order". I wonder if many localizations will be forced to support every other Firefox release, because it is very hard to commit so many volunteer resources so frequently.
It seems that the leaders wanted to move to rapid release so much, they left everyone else waiting in the dust, confused and worried. I mean, we want Firefox to be the best browser it can be,and to release more often, but we did not want Chrome.
I am not a volunteer, but I work for a school where we used to love Firefox, but now we are forced on 3.6.x due to uncertainty surrounding Mozilla's policies. We are especially worried that no major release of Firefox will receive a year of security updates, anymore. Can't some releases be "4.1 and 4.2" instead of "5 and 6"?
There's no difference between 4.1 and 5.0, i don't get that everyone is so mad about it.
They could have gone 4.2 4.3 etc.. really, same thing.
suh: I don’t care much about version numbers either, but if it makes no difference *and* the community prefers the other way, what’s the point? http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv...
Other example: the version numbers might get out of the “About” box. I don’t see the point though I guess I could cope with it. However, I still think our volunteers deserve a better explanation than that: https://groups.google.com/group/moz...
If we can’t even listen to our volunteers for “unimportant” stuff, I can understand they’re getting pissed off. Especially when we’re expecting more work from them at the same time, because of the 6-week release policy.
First off, rapid release does make a difference. Because new features are added often (or they're supposed to be, which they're not), add-on compatibility is broken often too. This is a problem.
For me, the biggest drawback of rapid release cycles is that we will see new features less often, and there's a tendency to deliver badly implemented features, because the "baking" stage is so short. Doorhangers are still not implemented properly, for example. The worse comes out really clearly when we consider projects that were supposed to be delivered in Firefox 4 and aren't even being worked on NOW: account manager, home tab, in-content UI, profile manager, customizable title bar, tab modal search bar, all fantastic additions that would have been great if added to Firefox, but no. What their working on instead is the new tab page (which is useless because opening a new tab is really a useless action - consider middle-clicks and ALT+Enter), delivering a standard look for the in-content UI that exists (and not implemented the one that doesn't), browser ID mockups and youtube videos, DELETING the search bar, and a bunch of silly "easy" stuff.
Well, it has to be easy, because they really don't have time for more, do they?
Unless I'm seeing it all wrong. But I am seeing it all wrong. Firefox 4 is not Firefox 4. It's Firefox 3.6 with panorama and a bunch of half-baked features and bells and whistles.
But open your eyes if you think this is the reason why Firefox keeps loosing market share (which it doesn't really need anyway, but that's besides the point). NO! Firefox keeps loosing market share because what really matters in today's market is not features, not lightness, not speed, not beauty, not ease of usage. It's marketing. Chrome proved that to any with half a brain. Its humongous lack of features, it's heavy weight, and how hard it is to use didn't stand in its way to take away from what Firefox 3.6 had. Why should it stand now that Firefox is starting to gain all the fantastic flaws that Chrome has had all this time.
Certainly it isn't Chrome's flaws that conveys it the power to take the market by the scruff of the neck?
It's marketing.
But don't worry. Whatever crap will do. Anything that's not Internet Explorer.
Or Chrome.
Or Safari for that matter.
Any old browser will do. And Firefox's market share will keep falling, I think. And even though each new release is going to be better than the previous one, for most of the stuff (don't think for a second that you're going to get away with every single one of the fantastic aspects of today's Firefox that make it so very damn awesome in terms of workflow - Mozilla will be sure to forbid you from interacting with unfocused tabs, for one), Firefox's market share will keep falling.
Until it crashes, and someone else takes over, with the same motto (of course!) but with a different vision. And Firefox's market share will keep falling.
I'm starting to sound like a doomsayer.
Whatever, I'm all for a fork, when the time comes. Do not be afraid.
Well, to be fair, Mozilla still makes fantastic products and I do enjoy seeing things improve with every release, on my home computers that I fully control.
I guess I feel sad that Mozilla doesn't seem to be communicating very well that our needs and wants are important and will be addressed.
I agree that Mozilla needs to do better at communicating (both listening and talking) with community contributors. But the reference to "the decision not to support a Firefox LTS release" is not quite accurate. Mozilla has committed to supporting Firefox 3.6 while discussions continue for supporting "enterprise" users. This doesn't make 3.6 a LTS release, and LTS won't necessarily be the outcome. But it hasn't been ruled out, either. The discussions are ongoing in the Enterprise User Working Group mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/e...).
Most of the rage I see in bugzilla, forums, irc is about the UI-dumb-down and Chrome mimicking, breaking people's workflows without giving an option to continue having the old behavior (customization is what Mozilla is about, right? or at least used to be). Of course users are not listened to in buzilla, no amount of votes matters. I've been using Firefox since it's birth and Mozilla before that, contributed with translations, beta testing etc, but now I'm considering deleting my Firefox profile and relegate it to "only for testing". There are many like me, it's sad really.
There is a browser vendor that cares for it's users, including power users, called Opera.
A few example annoyences:
Bug 574654 Remove browser.tabs.tabMinWidth and browser.tabs.tabMaxWidth in favor of CSS
Bug 576807 - Double-click on free space on tabbar doesn't open new tab when 'Tabs on top'
Bug 268936 allow user to disable "additional plugins required bar" for given plugin