Webblog von Mike Conner, einem der Firefox-Entwickler: http://www.steelgryphon.com/blog/index.php?p=37
This is bugging me, and its been bugging me for a while. In nearly three years, we haven’t built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think we’re in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn’t do a lot of reviews. And I’m on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I’m the only person who cares enough to make it an issue. Things I’ve raised in relatively private contexts have gone unanswered, and I’m growing increasingly cynical about our ability to ship 1.1 early enough to make 1.5 remotely viable this year. At the glacial pace of development we’re currently running at, I don’t see how the ambitious plans for 2.0 are going to be at all viable before late 2006. Maybe I’m wrong, but no one’s bothered to take five minutes and tell me that.
People have brought up hiring, but that’s one of the suggestions that apparently didn’t merit a response, so I’m not going to hold my breath on MoFo staffing someone to work on Firefox and shoulder some of the load. I won’t pretend to understand MoFo’s staffing priorities, I don’t work there, I’m out of the loop in a lot of ways, so I’ll have to assume they have some sort of plan. I’m _hoping_ they have some sort of plan. But until they tell me how we’re going to ship a product with the same size buglist as we had last August, with maybe 1/4 of the core resources, I’m going to be cynical. And while I’m cynical, I’ll be on walkabout, because this isn’t fun anymore.
Edit: Hello Slashdot! Without trying to whore myself, I must say that I’m quite happy with my hosting provider (Dreamhost) right about now, both the “staying alive without a blip” factor and the fact that I won’t come anywhere close to my monthly bandwidth limit even now.
Zusammenfassung in deutsch (ohne Gewähr):
Da man keinen festen Stamm an Programmierern aufgebaut hat, wird sich die Entwicklung verzögern. Von 6 Hauptentwicklern arbeitet zur Zeit nur einer tatsächlich an der Weiterentwicklung des Firefox. Und selbst der überlegt, ob er weiterarbeiten soll...
Deshalb kann man froh sein, wenn es Firefox 1.5 noch dieses Jahr geben wird. Firefox 2.0 wird es frühestens Ende 2006 geben.
