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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<link rel="top" title="Home" href="http://www.mozilla.org/">
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<title>Mozilla Apologator</title>
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<p class="important">You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is
highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If
there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Websites&component=www.mozilla.org">file a bug</a>.</p>
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<div id="mainContent">
<h1>Mozilla Apologator</h1>
<address>
by <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Michael Toy</a>
</address>
<p class="note">This is probably more therapeutic for me than it is
useful for anyone on the net. I'm still writing because I'd
like to at least be able to point people at this document than
to have to keep saying the same things over and over
again.</p>
<h2>The Bug Count</h2>
<p>The Mozilla software, as it shipped on free-source day, has
many many bugs. We made the decision to release the source just
as we were approaching the drive towards beta 1 of the 5.0
product, so this set of features has not yet been through the
intense process of making it ready for the general public. We
decided not to wait, that it was important to move over to a
net-based development model as soon as possible.</p>
<p>Our goal was for 5.0 to be a high quality release, and it is
a little disappointing that we didn't get a chance to redeem
ourselves after doing 4.0, which we allowed out of the building
with more bugs than we should have (but you never heard that
from me.) We lose a chance for personal redemption, but the net
wins, because the 5.0 that the net works on will be even more
stable than we could have made it ourselves.</p>
<h2>You may ask yourself, <q>How did I get here?</q></h2>
<p>Mozilla 1.0 was a "clean slate" project, and a serious
attempt was made to design this piece of software in a way that
would avoid many of the problems experienced in the development
and maintenance of Mosaic. It was also developed from 0 lines
of code to shipping product in seven months. These two items
are somewhat in conflict. Since then we have lived under the
philosophy that since the Internet universe is changing daily,
the most important thing was to put technology in the hands of
users as quickly as possible, and to worry about refining
things later.</p>
<p>In the face of great pressure to ship quickly, to make it
work for people, to add new features that initially seemed
impossible to integrate, a strong pragmatic viewpoint took
hold. If you read the code, some of it may not be pretty, but
it does work.</p>
<h2>You Are Doomed.</h2>
<div>
<p>In order to write successful code in the Mozilla
codebase, you need to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Write code which compiles cleanly under many
different compilers.</li>
<li>Write code which runs on machines with 16-bit ints
and 64-bit ints.</li>
<li>Be careful not to write code which opens up a
killer security hole.</li>
<li>Understand the async-I/O-based flow of control and
turn your pretty algorithms inside out so that the rest
of the browser still works while your code runs.</li>
<li>Know something about several different operating
systems.</li>
<li>Understand code written by several hundred people,
with very little documentation or support.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>So you are completely doomed. But we've been doomed inside
Netscape for years and it hasn't stopped us from shipping some
very cool software. Don't let the fact that it is impossible
stop you from doing cool stuff.</p>
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<p>
<span>Last modified September 16, 2004</span>
<span><a href="http://bonsai-www.mozilla.org/cvslog.cgi?file=mozilla-org/html/apology.html&rev=&root=/www/">Document History</a></span>
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