Month: November 2005

I’m extremely proud to announce that I’m now joining the Flock team as a staff member. I will be working on a L10n community management, Flock’s I18n, and UI work around various tools including Bugzilla, Wiki and Flock browser.

Beside of the other tasks, in this month I will be working on two projects that will be contributed back to Mozilla project.
First one is a Bugzilla UI redesign. We are working with Chris to improve the user experience. It will get AJAX, XHTML 1.0 and a few nice UI features.
Second is a L10n tool. It will be quite complex tool that will allow you to work on source files, or to use CVS/SVN, compare locales, upgrade between versions etc. I’d also like to add support for distributed work.

First days of work are amazing. I’m working on what is my passion with a great people who have vision and the same passion to create something new for the web world. I’ll try my best to help them in this task.

Ok. Time is over. I’m walking around the project to create a XulRunner based tool for localizers for more than a year now. We were planning to create it as a MLP, AviaryPL and I wanted to make it by myself.
Now I finally have time to work on it, today I found my old thing called gTranslator, updated it to XulRunner app and started hacking. I should have a few mockups and some plan today and I’ll be looking for Xul/Js/UI people willing to help. It shouldn’t take much time, and I really prefer to create it than promote using tools like Mozilla Translator or some .po based tools.
If you want to help, comment here, or wait for more info on wiki 😉

I just read Paul Scrivens’s post about the Flock.

What can I say is that yes, Flock was overbuzzed., yes it made bad to Flock since it’s in early development. The rest of article is absolutely missing the point. For the very first author seems not to understand the way of Open Source. Man, GPL and LGPL and other licenses are not only a toys, they define the way we’re evolving. And taking something, making it better and releasing *is* the absolute native part of this system. So blaming Flock for doing so, seems to be a really big misunderstood. And yes, it means also that you can take Open Office, Gentoo, kernel and others, modify it and release under your brand. Suprised?
And we’re not doing so “by mistake”. It’s the way we *want* to go. And it’s one of our best values. Because in this scenario, the only one who wins is the user.

Author also said that he see no reason for another browser, since Firefox is doing so well. It’s also not the way software is evolving. We don’t stop trying creating new software just because another good app is already on the market. Right?
Firefox is a great generic browser. It has a great chance to replace IE in the future as a market king. But we made open standards, remember? So there’s no reason to have only one browser, and Opera, Flock, K-Meleon, Safari, Camino, Seamonkey and others have their reasons to live.
He also assumed that if browsers are OK for last 15 years, we should not touch it. I hardly can find better example of thinking that could block improvements. “Hey, Thomas, stop it, we have a candle, right?”.
Firefox will take more and more of the market share and it will, in the future, make it less and less flexible. It will have to make smaller changes, not to loose users. Flock will be there by that time to make what Firefox is doing now.
It’s another issue. People keep looking at Flock as it is today, ignoring “Developers preview” note. It will evolve, it will change, it will create it’s own set of features, and what you can see at the point is just a very early preview of the direction Flock chose.
“Flock is solving problems that does not exist” – “Firefox is solving the problem that does not exist. IE works”. We see a problem, and we think that in near future this problem will evolve, and Flock can solve it.

Ok, that’s all for now. Thanks for all comments, warnings and feedback. I’m, as always, very suprised to see how many people are angry because someone is trying to create something.

Alex, c’mon, can’t we just send a letter?

Heh, I really understand that once Ben and Google folks made usability tests, the results said that the very obvious feature from Flock, Camino, Safari and Opera is better.
But take a look at those bugs – suprise. People were asking for that!

I’m not sure if I like Firefox’s version. I think that I’d prefer to be able to close any tab – not only the focused one. On the other hand this could let me close tabs by accident, so maybe close button should be by default disabled for background tabs (with UI option to make it enabled). Hmm???

Another nice thing is that now, when you open a new tab from another, and close it, the focus will go to that “parent” tab, not the first on the left. It’s a really good choice.

I’m a bit suprised that Ben decided to remove a really nice option to create a new tab by double-clicking on tab bar. What’s wrong with that, Ben?

Note: Mozilla never made a “RC” goal. Always, there were UI and L10n changes after RC. We should really stop using “RC” name for it not to confuse users, media and ourselves 😉

Update: Confused… Bug 308396 has a “UE fixes for tabbed browsing for 1.5” title, but in last comment says that it won’t get into 1.5…

It’s only a proposal, but this looks to me like “Ok, we must release more often to stay on a field”. I’m happy with that.
It means that we’ll have Gecko 1.9 branched in Q4 2006 (so we have time to make huge improvements) but Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0 will be released earlier so users can have their cookies.

I’m wondering if Gecko 1.9 will became 2.0… it seems that the differences between 1.8 and 1.9 will be huge.