Firebird Bugs, Benevolent Dictatorships and Mouse Wheels
This is an ancient blog post originally published by Brian Duff on 20 August 2003 on Radio Weblogs, and rescued from the Wayback Machine.
So… Things have been changing over at Mozilla. There was a time when I used to use it so much that I had a script to automatically refresh my moz installation on my main PC at work to the latest nightly during the night (keeping older ones in case of calamity).
I’m entirely dependent on Thunderbird for email, mainly because of its adaptive junk mail detection. It does a great job of diverting around 30 messages a day I get about such diverse topics as printer cartridges, prescription drugs on the cheap, and (of all things) sailing ship sales to my SpamBucket quarantine folder where I can safely dispose of them.
Bugs in Gecko (primarily 133946, which has been sitting at “critical” for several months) mean our internal Bug Database web-based front end doesn’t work very well with mozilla-based technology, including Firebird. So, the evolution of Mozilla into Firebird and Thunderbird turns out to be quite useful, because it means I can continue to use Thunderbird for mail, but when I click on links to bugs in email messages, it at last opens my default browser. It’s just a shame it has to be Internet Explorer…
It’s interesting that Firebird, in particular, is more or less a “benevolent dictatorship” now. Pretty much one person (Dave Hyatt) makes final decisions about how the UI should be. I’m not entirely adverse to this idea. Mozilla was starting to badly suffer from being yanked in three thousand directions at once by users and developers.
In terms of usability, Mozilla was trying to cater to too many people all the time, and it was suffering compared to Internet Explorer as a result. Microsoft don’t have thousands of irate open source developers constantly demanding preferences and UI elements for every possible setting. It was a shame, because a) the good suggestions were being buried in the noise, and b) it was becoming a painful experience to actually contribute to the project.
The one and only time I ever tried to further my involvement by actually contributing code to Mozilla, I experienced exactly this kind of pain. I don’t actually care much about the mouse wheel preferences, but it seemed like an easy thing to get started on to learn about mozilla, and fix something straight off. But Bug 66522 turned out to be a singularly unpleasant experience.
The point is that, this kind of thing should hopefully happen far less often in Firebird and Thunderbird. Someone will just decide what the correct way to do it is. And that will be that. Sometimes, it’s a good thing. Honestly :)
Notes from modern Brian:
Firebird was the email-client equivalent to Firefox, where Mozilla significantly shifted the way they built stuff. The open source Mozilla project really suffered from an excessive amount of open source bike shedding which directly translated into its UI getting ever more complex.
Bug 66522 was a Mozilla patch I tried to land back in 2001. It became quite frustrating for me; the original bug filer had very particular ideas about how a (quite honestly unnecessary) preferences panel for mouse wheel behavior should be implemented, and a bunch of other random folks had different opinions, and nobody could reach consensus. Finally, we reached some kind of compromise, and another random person jumped into the bug thread and derailed the whole discussion, vetoing the patch that most people were ok with. Then not long after I signed out of the discussion altogether in (mild) frustration, someone else landed a change that was a less appealing tab-based variant of my patch. So goes consensus-driven open source software.
I’ve learned a lot more about compromise and not losing my temper in the years since this :)
