On or about Thu, 01 Mar 2001 08:59:49 +0000, Gervase Markham
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> allegedly wrote:
>> And yet, I would hope that Mozilla is not intended to be purely for
>> the tiny minority that are developing it. See, that's the Achilles
>> heel of open-source software: if it doesn't appeal to a programmer, it
>> won't get done.
>
>This is why having Netscape backing us, who can do UI research, market
>research etc. and ask their developers to implement stuff that's user
>friendly, is a good thing.
Fair enough. 'Course, many of us users wouldn't touch the bloated
monstrosity that is Netscape 6 with a ten-foot pole.
>
>> I am sure these are newsgroups for the developers, but damned if I can
>> find any other groups in which to discuss Mozilla. Best I can find is
>> "alt.fan.mozilla," which has a grand total of two (2) posts, both of
>> which are spam. There are no resources on mozilla.org or
>> mozillazine.org. There are no FAQs for users.
>
>When the newsgroups get reorganised, there will be users newsgroups.
Okay. So should I revert to Netscape 4.08 in the meantime? Seriously.
Although Mozilla's stability and speed have improved to where I use it
all the time, this profile stuff just doesn't work for me.
>
>> I would like to understand it better, and be able to point people
>> toward it. I would like to be able to tell people why they should use
>> Mozilla,
>
>Please _don't_ do this until we've finished it! :-) It will only create a
>"negative user experience".
Mozilla will never be finished. Says so on Mozilla.org. And, frankly,
I'd bet money that the 1.0 release will still be intended to be used
by developers.
>
>> like to ask the occasional question myself. Example: I find it very
>> frustrating that Mozilla insists upon creating cryptic subdirectories,
>> often several levels deep, when I create a profile. And they're never
>
>This is a security feature, and very important. It should be a single
>level of randomly-named subdirectory; if it's not, that's a bug.
Sure wish I could turn it off, though. As I said, I would like to be
able to synch my office and home computers daily, which means if I
make any changes to my bookmarks file I'd like them to be uniform. Not
a problem in any other browser. I also wish I could specify the
location of the disk cache, as used to be the case. How do you expect
to implement profile portability if the directory name is randomly
generated? Seems like an awfully myopic approach.
>
>> But as Microsoft would say, "that's not a bug, that's a feature." And
>> no one will respond to issues like this because I haven't learned the
>> secret handshake.
>
>Alternatively, because people are too busy fixing bugs. Remember that in
>other projects, all this development would be going on behind closed
>doors. The fact that it's public doesn't mean the developers can take time
>off to answer everyone's questions. Sad, but true. Kind people may answer
>them (thanks, dveditz) but are under no obligation to do so.
Quite true. But since I spend a significant amount of my time
answering tech support questions for free, and know a number of people
who do the same thing, I kind of thought there might be some folks out
there like that with regard to Mozilla. Or who might be interested in
an end-user perspective.
>
>> Perhaps you don't want end-users trying Mozilla out,
>> but without some real world perspective on how the thing performs and
>> functions, it will fail. And yes, I know it is never intended to
>> displace Internet Explorer in market share,
>
>Yes it is! :-)
We would all like to see that, yes.
>
>> but unless Microsoft's
>> effort to turn the Web into its private playground is stopped and W3C
>> standards prevail over proprietary Microsoft garbage, Mozilla will
>> have failed.
>
>Do you for one minute think that this needs repeating? Shouting "but you
>_must_ finish it quicker! It's vital!" isn't going to get it finished
>quicker.
I didn't say that. What I said was that the support of end users will
be required. With only the small minority of active developers
involved, it's going to fall off the radar screen entirely, and
nothing will work right in Mozilla when it finally emerges. Heck, much
of the Web already doesn't. Yes, I know it's because of lack of
standards compliance. But you need people out there *using* Mozilla,
even at the 0.8 stage, to care.
---
Mike Koenecke
to reply, change "nowhere" to "home"
