Mozilla co-founder quits Firefox veep role

A longtime Mozilla Corporation VP has quit the open source outfit he co-founded in 1998. Mike Shaver, who oversaw technical strategy for the past six years at the Firefox maker, confirmed he was hanging up his hot foxy boots in a blog post. Shaver was among those who founded the Mozilla Organization following the release of …

[Anonymous Coward]

If current releases are anything to go by...

... probably a good time to leave.

I'm sure this post could cause a sea of down votes, whatever, but it's my opinion that firefox is heading down the wrong tracks as rapidly as the netscape which spawned it.

There's some sort of crazy version number 'catch up' going on with Chrome, or at least, that's how it seems.

I've had to cease using it on all my computers, because it seems to run so much slower than chrome.

As a former diehard fan of firefox, using it right from 0.6 (firebird) until a few months back, it's sad to see firefox seemingly in such poor shape - slow and bloated.

But hey, it could be just me ... or maybe not, most the other web devs I know have moved to chrome for similar reasons.

[Gordon 10]

And whats the point of using chrome as a web dev when most of your clients wont be using it?

This reminds me of the old flaw of developer machines being so higher spec'd than end user machines that any code developed on them ran like a dog on the end users.

Good to see nothing has changed - its still all about the willy waving. Plus dont the number of firefox web dev plugins outweigh chromes 5 times over?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something wrong with your post.

Any web dev would tell you they've been using Firefox when IE had 99% market share.

[Martijn Bakker]

Market share and web development

> Any web dev would tell you they've been using Firefox when IE

> had 99% market share.

Indeed. That's because Firefox has a a decent JavaScript debugger and addons like Web developer and because it has always supported a "force reload" that prevents the browser from using cached files. These tools make developing and debugging websites and applications a lot easier. It has had very little to do with market share or quality of the browser.

Whatever your choice of browser, you probably still need to take some time to adapt your sites to IE, Chrome, Safari or Opera (depending on target audience) after.. but that process has become a lot less time intensive these days.

[JeevesMkII]

I don't care about fast or slow as much as I care about interface. As it is now, Firefox is in the position the old Mozilla browser was in before Firefox shook things up. It was bloated and clunky, and had all sorts of bells and whistles cluttering the UI. It seems like they need another revolution to clear out 4 or 5 major revisions worth of built up crud. Plus I despise having to set exceptions for self-signed TLS certificates. That's a misfeature I don't miss.

As it stands, Chrome is lightweight (in terms of UI, not in terms of memory usage - dear god no.) and does the job mostly without getting in the way. So, sadly, I've consigned Firefox to the bin until they get their act together.

[Anonymous Coward]

Self signed certificates

> I despise having to set exceptions for self-signed TLS certificates.

Surely thats a good thing? Otherwise a site could be impersonating anyone.

[Rob Dobs]

beauty of Open source projects

That's kind of the great thing about projects built around open source software like Mozilla/netscape code....you contribute while your hearts in it, and then someone new and young comes over and takes over when your done....AT WORST the new guy moves it in a way people don't like and FORK! all of a sudden a new person/solution emerges with a new different way to go... Let's see Apple pull that off with Job's retirement.... I for one do not envy Apple stock holders right now, kind of like IBM in the 80's they look like they own the world, but the writing is on the wall for those who care to look and they look set for a big fall to me (sure they will stay relevant, and maybe even strong again one day like IBM is now, but it will be a different company in a different time) If apple is counting on a flat screen and rounded corners lawsuits to defend their market share, they are definitely in trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, BUT...

Its not always that easy.

The bigger the project the harder it gets to fork it. Well, forking in itself is easy of course; you basically take the code, apply the required changes to make it yours and then you basically have your new product.

But then what ?

A big project means many people working on it and usually developers work on their own sections. As such its not unlikely (though heavily depending on the project) that you will encounter many different coding styles, many different ways things get solved and many cases where things may or may not been documented or commented.

Forking maybe easy, but reviving or maintaining such a project could become a totally different story all together.

As said in the topic; of course you're fully right that this is in essence a big advantage over closed source. But let's also not forget that often its not as easy as a simple "FORK!" and you're done. Sometimes its sheer impossible if you can't find enough people who are willing to help you out.