And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

77 37 15 years ago

diego• 15 years ago

I interviewed at Netscape shortly after they announced they would release the browser as open source (June '98, ended up going to Inktomi). I remember being very excited about this, and downloading the source when it first became available. I found out that my (decent) desktop machine was not powerful enough to compile it. When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours.

No surprise that it remained a Netscape project for so long.

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

"When I found a machine that could compile it, it took about 8 hours."

Thank you. It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating. You just saved me a lot of heartache in a few months once it's time to start compiling. I love HN.

/srsly

windsurfer• 15 years ago

...Could you explain? I don't understand what you're saying.

Simucal• 15 years ago

This isn't always the case. It is highly dependent on the language, the compiler used, the size of the code-base and many other factors.

Most of the small to medium sized project I have worked on compile in what seems like an instant.

However, I work on a medium-to-large code-base at work and it takes around 8 minutes to compile on our build server and around 12-15 minutes on my dev machine. Even these speeds seem tremendously slow to me. I can't imagine being a developer on a huge C++ project and having to wait tremendously long build times. When your compile times aren't near instant it really changes how you program. That feed back loop of code-compile-run-repeat becomes more like code-double check code-code some more-compile-surf the web-run-repeat.

gaius• 15 years ago

It never occurred to me that you need a lot more processing power to compile code than you do to run the software you're creating

It never occurred to you because it isn't true! You could for example write a trivial raytracer that compiles in seconds and takes hours to render a scene.

rmc• 15 years ago

Also remember that compiling code can use memory. I once had a compilation causing the machine to swap. That took a while to compile.

sambeau• 15 years ago

This is often the case. My last company had software that took 45 mins to compile on high-end machines in 2010.

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

5 short years later, mozilla.org shipped a product that was finally ready for prime time.

asadotzler2• 15 years ago

And today that product is used by more than 400 million people around the world -- far more users than Netscape ever had.

seldo• 15 years ago

Specifically, it was Phoenix (aka Firebird, aka Firefox) that made that happen: a version of Mozilla that threw out everything but the browser, including the mail client that jwz considered essential. It made it smaller to download and faster to run, but most importantly it made it faster to write: they could ship improvements to Firefox way faster than they could to Mozilla, simply because there was so much less of it.

yuhong2• 15 years ago

I think by Mozilla 1.0 it was finally ready, but it was Firefox's marketing that finally led people to adopt it.

BTW, you can partly blame this petition:

http://archive.webstandards.org/ng.txt

leoc• 15 years ago

From what I recall, the long delay seemed to have much more to do with XPCOM than with the CSS engine.

asadotzler2• 15 years ago

Lots of things on the Internet can move quickly but browsers are not Internet software the way that Google or Facebook are. Browsers are still desktop software and things don't move as quickly there thanks to slow PC upgrade cycles and the absolute dominance that software like Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer had a decade ago. Turning that massive ship took longer than many imagined but it is happening.

Jamie gave the open source Mozilla project about a year and a half, including the months of pre-source release preparation (and I think that's being generous.) Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker didn't give up so easily and thirteen-plus years later they're still giving all they've got to make sure that Mozilla continues to be successful in promoting choice, opportunity, and participation on the Web.

Some things are worth fighting for and I believe that the Web is one of those things. I'm proud to work with some of the founding members of mozilla.org and think it's a phenomenal thing that such talented people are willing to commit their professional lives to the Mozilla mission when there were and still are far sexier opportunities available to all of them.

lovamova2• 15 years ago

When Firefox 1.0 came out, it was one of the lightest browsers available on the market. What happened until version 4.0? Even the latest Firefox beta is one of the slowest browser available. I’m not talking about the JavaScript engine, I’m talking about the user experience of your product.

glenjamin2• 15 years ago

I'd say that in the 10 or so years since firefox 1.0, the average computing power and requirements of the firefox user have shifted enough that the goalposts have moved.

Firefox 1.0's USP at a time when browsers were bloated was its lack of bloat. IMO thats less of an issue now.

daniel02216• 15 years ago

A pessimistic answer would be that all the people who were working on Mozilla who liked to add bloat like email and IRC and Palm syncing to a web browser jumped over to Firefox. Or that the guys who wrote Firefox 1.0 have moved on. Or that that's what happens when you write your UI in XML, render it with a browser engine, and load half a million extensions and history databases from disk on startup.

A different answer might be that it does so much more that a slowdown is part and parcel of doing all that's necessary in a modern browser.

mike-cardwell• 15 years ago

Exactly. I'm holding out for Firefox 4, and if it's not substantially faster than Firefox 3, I'll be moving to Chrome and I wont be moving back. Firefox 4 is their last chance to get their shit sorted.

pcwalton2• 15 years ago

What in particular about the UX of the latest beta do you find slow? We should fix it.

pnathan• 15 years ago

Due to Firefox slowness, I have fully transitioned to Chrome on all my computers. I run adblock plus and often flashblock.

Phoenix was fast. I liked that. I should go try to compile it and run it on W7 and see what it does on modern websites.

Speed and ability to render correctly are my killer features for browsers.

Isofarro• 15 years ago

Excellent documentary on YouTube covering the year long open-sourcing of Mozilla, right up to the point of jwz leaving Netscape.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig

(via codinghorror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/lived-fast-died-you... )

Andrew-Dufresne2• 15 years ago

Code Rush can downloaded from http://clickmovement.org/content/code-rush-download

Other links for unused footage and annotated version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush#External_links

stuhacking• 15 years ago

Thanks for linking that, I'd never seen it before and it was very fun to watch.

Near the end Jamie says (slightly paraphrasing): "This could all turn into television again... a small number of companies controlling what we see or hear."

And now we basically have Facebook, Twitter and Google as the big entry points for finding things on the web. I realise that we're not living in this closed system that's push only.. I just thought there was a slight parallel there.

nickpp• 15 years ago

"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company"

Awesome insight. Absolutely breathtaking. Explains so much of what happens at larger companies.

DEinspanjer• 15 years ago

That was a good post and I had forgotten about it over the years.

It prompted me to write up some of my own thoughts on the current day Mozilla Community: http://daniele.livejournal.com/80677.html

And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

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