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FOSDEM talk slides

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Robert Kaiser

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Feb 25, 2007, 3:59:51 AM2/25/07
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Hi,

I've done a talk about current and future SeaMonkey development,
including suiterunner, yesterday at the FOSDEM conference.

If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/

Robert Kaiser

Rich Gray

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Feb 25, 2007, 11:36:17 AM2/25/07
to

Excellent. How was the talk received? Was there good discussion?

--
Rich (Pull thorn from address to e-mail me.)
SeaMonkey - Surfing the net has never been so suite!

hyc

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Feb 25, 2007, 2:13:55 PM2/25/07
to

Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
to be too awkward...

Manuel Reimer

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Feb 26, 2007, 3:38:52 AM2/26/07
to
hyc wrote:
> Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
> to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
> it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
> to be too awkward...

I think it's a good idea to get this patches in to the official calendar
extension. Could you file a bug at bugzilla and attach your patches?

CU

Manuel

Simon Paquet

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Feb 26, 2007, 5:02:48 AM2/26/07
to
And on the seventh day Manuel Reimer spoke:

There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.

Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.

Simon
--
Sunbird/Lightning Website Maintainer:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Sunbird/Lightning blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar

Howard Chu

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Feb 26, 2007, 6:15:54 AM2/26/07
to

I didn't submit them, because I assumed they would be rejected. I.e.,
the Calendar project's official policy is that the extension is no
longer supported. Are you saying you believe we can change their mind?

--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Jan Steffen

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Feb 26, 2007, 7:47:18 AM2/26/07
to
Howard Chu schrieb:

> Manuel Reimer wrote:
>> hyc wrote:
>>> Nice slides. Just fyi, I've been maintaining a private set of patches
>>> to keep the Calendar Extension working with Seamonkey. I haven't tried
>>> it with a Suiterunner build though. I just find Lightning's interface
>>> to be too awkward...
>>
>> I think it's a good idea to get this patches in to the official
>> calendar extension. Could you file a bug at bugzilla and attach your
>> patches?
>
> I didn't submit them, because I assumed they would be rejected. I.e.,
> the Calendar project's official policy is that the extension is no
> longer supported. Are you saying you believe we can change their mind?
>

Perhaps your patches can also help to make Lightning work in SeaMonkey.
That is still a goal of the developers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313822
Then please go ahead and post them.

Jan (using calendar-0.2.0.20060116.xpi in SM1.1)

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 26, 2007, 10:07:00 AM2/26/07
to
Jan Steffen schrieb:

> Perhaps your patches can also help to make Lightning work in SeaMonkey.
> That is still a goal of the developers:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313822
> Then please go ahead and post them.

No need to post any patches for that. Lighting _is_ already working in
suiterunner (as seen in my talk at FOSDEM). The only small patch needed
to make install it smoothly is in the bug you cited. Lightning will not
work on SeaMonkey 1.0.x/1.1.x or other xpfe-based SeaMonkey though, and
it's not planned to enable that.

Robert Kaiser

Benoit Renard

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Feb 26, 2007, 12:02:30 PM2/26/07
to
> Excellent. How was the talk received? Was there good discussion?

Not much discussion. I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked (it
wasn't available in the build shown, even though KaiRo was sure it was),
and I asked about a possible compromise with toolkit's minver and maxver
extension property checking.

During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
explained.

KaiRo can probably better answer how it was received, since he looked at
the crowd. :)

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 26, 2007, 12:38:28 PM2/26/07
to
Benoit Renard schrieb:

> I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked

Th was Gijs, naturally, who is on the Chatzilla team. I still got to
look into why it didn't show up on that build - that's interesting for
me as well...
Might just be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371298
though, I vaguely remember I have unpacked a .tar.bz2 as root in a
non-user-writeable dir.

> and I asked about a possible compromise with toolkit's minver and maxver
> extension property checking.

BTW, in the talk about building extension on Sunday, it was massively
said that setting maxVer is a quite important thing due to
incompatibilities between versions. I guess EnigMail has felt such
problems a lot...

> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
> mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
> explained.

Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.


Robert Kaiser

Philip Chee

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Feb 26, 2007, 1:43:55 PM2/26/07
to
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:02:48 +0100, Simon Paquet wrote:

> There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
> officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.

> Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
> for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
> CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.

If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite? Worst
case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar extension
and move it into the SM part of the CVS?

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]This is just a hobby. Perfection is not required. Fun is.
* TagZilla 0.059.4

Simon Paquet

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Feb 26, 2007, 3:41:43 PM2/26/07
to
And on the seventh day Philip Chee spoke:

>> There is no Calendar extension anymore. The Calendar Extension has been
>> officially discontinued by the developers of the Calendar Project.
>
>> Our focus now lies entirely on Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore patches
>> for the old Calendar extension will not be accepted if they only fix
>> CalExt bugs and not also bugs in Sunbird and/or Lightning.
>
>If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
>it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?

I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.

Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.

That will give you a working calendar extension out of the box without
the need to actively watch every checkin in mozilla/calendar for bustage
potential.

>Worst case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar
>extension and move it into the SM part of the CVS?

You'll have to ask the SM council for that. Although I read posts like
this <F_Wdne2CCoMIan_Y...@mozilla.org> from KaiRo, that the
council is not interested in a fork, which is understandable, since they
already too much code and too few developers.

Howard Chu

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Feb 26, 2007, 4:16:01 PM2/26/07
to
Simon Paquet wrote:
> And on the seventh day Philip Chee spoke:
>> If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
>> it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>> that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?
>
> I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
> to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
> 6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.

I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.

> Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
> the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
> patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
> once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.

True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
Suiterunner are also pretty tiny. Since there seems to be some interest
I will post my patches to bugzilla shortly. (It's missing a few
niceties, like the Sunbird app icon, and the About dialog shows you the
Seamonkey version instead of the calendar version. I can probably trawl
thru CVS and get that straightened out later.)

> That will give you a working calendar extension out of the box without
> the need to actively watch every checkin in mozilla/calendar for bustage
> potential.
>
>> Worst case could someone on the SeaMonkey council fork the Calendar
>> extension and move it into the SM part of the CVS?
>
> You'll have to ask the SM council for that. Although I read posts like
> this <F_Wdne2CCoMIan_Y...@mozilla.org> from KaiRo, that the
> council is not interested in a fork, which is understandable, since they
> already too much code and too few developers.

Right, a fork would just be more pain.

Karsten Düsterloh

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Feb 26, 2007, 5:00:24 PM2/26/07
to
Robert Kaiser aber hob zu reden an und schrieb:

> BTW, in the talk about building extension on Sunday, it was massively
> said that setting maxVer is a quite important thing due to
> incompatibilities between versions.

But, actually, I think that especially this max-versioning is broken by
concept. Given you have an addon that does work on trunk and you set the
maxVer to the trunk value which is usually higher than any releases, you
will not only be broken by trunk changes (which is understandable, given
that its version doesn't change until about the next stable version),
but also any minor update release may break your extension!
E.g. you support TB 3 on trunk and they change an API between TB 2 and
TB 2.1...

Trunk versions/nightlies shouldn't enforce maxVersion.

>> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared and
>> mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The team
>> explained.
>
> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.

I rather like the FF approach, because I can edit the stuff I type
there. But at least - after CTho's explanation - I understand now why
you don't like it, though I still do think that our floating find dialog
and our uneditable fayt are worse...

And as for the reception:
Compared with the ratio of downloaded copies of Firefox vs. SeaMonkey,
the number of SeaMonkey users/devs in the Mozilla room on FOSDEM was
tremendous! ;-)


Karsten
--
Feel free to correct my English. :)

Howard Chu

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Feb 26, 2007, 5:15:56 PM2/26/07
to

Simon Paquet

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Feb 26, 2007, 6:20:35 PM2/26/07
to
And on the seventh day Howard Chu spoke:

>>> If you are unwilling to own and maintain the Calendar extension, would
>>> it be possible for a new team to take ownership of this in the same way
>>> that the SeaMonkey council took over the abandoned Mozilla Suite?
>>
>> I can not speak for the whole team, but I doubt that anyone would object
>> to this. The only problem is, the Calendar team did search for at least
>> 6-12 months for a CalExt owner, but could not find one.
>
>I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
>step in here.

Well, it was announced on the Calendar Project homepage for over six
months, but of course you're welcome to participate.

>> Besides I do not see a real use case in a fork. When Suiterunner becomes
>> the official Seamonkey, Lightning will run in Seamonkey with a very minor
>> patch (see Bug 313822), which will likely be incorporated into Lightning
>> once Suiterunner aka Seamonkey 1.5 gets official.
>
>True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
>Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.

I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.

Asrail

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Feb 26, 2007, 10:07:59 PM2/26/07
to
Robert Kaiser, 26-02-2007 14:38:

> Benoit Renard schrieb:
>> I recall someone asking if ChatZilla worked
>
> Th was Gijs, naturally, who is on the Chatzilla team. I still got to
> look into why it didn't show up on that build - that's interesting for
> me as well...
> Might just be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371298
> though, I vaguely remember I have unpacked a .tar.bz2 as root in a
> non-user-writeable dir.

That's almost a joke.
Yeah Kaiser, you shouldn't expect CZ to appear on that menu.
Your steps are exactly what I did to reproduce that bug on Linux :D.

>> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared
>> and mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The
>> team explained.
>
> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.

Help viewer doesn't have a status bar... so that is a nice workaround.
At least is "quick find" instead of the bloated UI (Control+F there).


Asrail

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Feb 26, 2007, 10:12:01 PM2/26/07
to
Asrail, 27-02-2007 00:07:

> Robert Kaiser, 26-02-2007 14:38:
>>> During the talk, when KaiRo showed that toolkit's Find bar appeared
>>> and mentioned that he didn't like it, Gerv asked why he didn't. The
>>> team explained.
>>
>> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that
>> both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.
>
> Help viewer doesn't have a status bar... so that is a nice workaround.
> At least is "quick find" instead of the bloated UI (Control+F there).
>

By the way... please, never put something which the background color
flashes and turn red when you enter some text that wasn't found.
That's too distracting.

Philip Chee

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Feb 27, 2007, 6:04:26 AM2/27/07
to
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:16:01 -0800, Howard Chu wrote:

> I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
> step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.

Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?

And I suspect that some people would prefer the Calendar UI to the
rather cramped Lightning in SuiteRunne.

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[ ]Keyboard locked..Press F1 to continue
* TagZilla 0.059.4

Philip Chee

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Feb 27, 2007, 6:06:23 AM2/27/07
to
On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:20:35 +0100, Simon Paquet wrote:
> And on the seventh day Howard Chu spoke:

>>True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under

>>Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.

> I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
> continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
> Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.

Um, SuiteRunner == toolkit

Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[ ]Is it still paranoia if they ARE ALL out to get me???
* TagZilla 0.059.4

Simon Paquet

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Feb 27, 2007, 6:59:54 AM2/27/07
to
Philip Chee wrote on 27. Feb 2007:

>>> True. Actually the bare-minimum patches needed to build CalExt under
>>> Suiterunner are also pretty tiny.
>>
>> I know that it is still barely working, but you should not expect this to
>> continue for long. There are some upcoming changes, that will depend on
>> Toolkit functionalities, which will break CalExt even more.
>
> Um, SuiteRunner == toolkit

Yeah, I misread the Suiterunner as Seamonkey, although I'm not so sure,
whether this was also a glitch on Howard's side ;-)

--
Simon Paquet
Sunbird/Lightning website maintainer
Project website: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar

Simon Paquet

unread,
Feb 27, 2007, 7:06:01 AM2/27/07
to
Philip Chee wrote on 27. Feb 2007:

>> I didn't see that before, but since CalExt is something I like, I can
>> step in here. Though it may be a moot point with Suiterunner.
>
> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an
> option?

I know that the Suite rationale was always to include everything but the
kitchen sink, but I get the impression that Seamonkey wants to move away
(at least a little bit) from that and not include more "options" into a
product already full of "options".

And as I said before, this will be a full fork. The Calendar Project
developers will make absolutely no effort to test their changes in an
abandoned extension running on an (currently) unsupported product and
fix resulting bustages.

> And I suspect that some people would prefer the Calendar UI to the
> rather cramped Lightning in SuiteRunne.

Lightning's UI is still evolving. We will most likely move away from
the combined mail/calendar mode to a separate calendar mode, which can
be switched on and off.

Neil

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Feb 27, 2007, 9:21:21 AM2/27/07
to
Simon Paquet wrote:

> I know that the Suite rationale was always to include everything but
> the kitchen sink

That reminds me, I need to ask Mook to update the kitchensink extension
to work with suiterunner ;-)

--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 27, 2007, 10:19:46 AM2/27/07
to
Philip Chee schrieb:

> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?

We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.

We might think of including Lighting some time when we're stable on
toolkit and Lightning is well-tested in that configuration and works
reasonably well.

But Simon is right in one thing: We won't include everything just
because it's available. Our goal is to ship an all-in-one app suite that
doesn't need installation of a bunch of extensions to be usable for a
big part of our target audience. Our goal is not to include everything
someone could need some time, and our goal is not to include stuff that
is not well-tested.

Robert Kaiser

Philip Chee

unread,
Feb 27, 2007, 12:20:11 PM2/27/07
to
On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:21:21 +0000, Neil wrote:

> That reminds me, I need to ask Mook to update the kitchensink extension
> to work with suiterunner ;-)

The Spirit will thank you.
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=mozilla&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=will+eisner+kitchen+sink&spell=1>

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[ ]I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
* TagZilla 0.059.4

Eddie-MacG3

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Feb 27, 2007, 12:57:22 PM2/27/07
to
On Feb 25, 2:59 am, Robert Kaiser <k...@kairo.at> wrote:
> If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
> online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/
>
> Robert Kaiser

Robert,

Bad link:

Open Discussion
http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/slide_end.html

Lower RH corner:
" http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ "

But link is to:
http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/index.html

rather than to:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/


Eddie

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 27, 2007, 1:06:58 PM2/27/07
to
Eddie-MacG3 schrieb:

This is intentional. Just because the splash screen image has the
project page URL doesn't mean the image needs to be linked there.

Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 27, 2007, 1:09:18 PM2/27/07
to
Rich Gray schrieb:

> Excellent. How was the talk received? Was there good discussion?

To me it seemed that the talk was well-recieved, but for details, you
gotta ask the audience ;-)

Some people afterwards told me they were impressed to see suiterunner
actually running, as they would never have expected that we'll manage to
do the toolkit transition when we started the project two years ago.

Many thanks to Mark Banner for doing lots and lots of work to get this
suiterunner project in shape!

Robert Kaiser

Simon Paquet

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Feb 27, 2007, 1:45:07 PM2/27/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote on 25. Feb 2007:

> I've done a talk about current and future SeaMonkey development,
> including suiterunner, yesterday at the FOSDEM conference.


>
> If anyone's interested in the slides I used there, you can find them
> online at http://kairo.mozdev.org/slides/fosdem2007/

Seeing the content of the slides and your presentations of the past,
I'm wondering whether I shouldn't present Sunbird/Lightning in the next
year, since your slides were pretty high-level, at least for someone,
who is watching the development pretty closely.

How was the general level of the Q&A session afterwards? Only high-level
questions, which could be answered pretty easily or also nitty-gritty
tech talk?

Cya
Simon

Benoit Renard

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Feb 27, 2007, 4:32:48 PM2/27/07
to
> Yes, it appears in help viewer. And noone objected to the opinion that both the findbar and our non-UI are not optimal solutions.

I think the non-UI is fine, really. I was too caught up in listening to
what everyone said to object. You can edit your search to some extent.
Just use Backspace and then continue typing.

Howard Chu

unread,
Feb 27, 2007, 5:22:59 PM2/27/07
to

Hear hear! In the few months since I last looked at it, it has come a
long way. So much that I'm no longer using my XPFE trunk build any more.

Howard Chu

unread,
Feb 27, 2007, 7:02:19 PM2/27/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Philip Chee schrieb:
>> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
>> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?

> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.

I can look into providing extensions for Windows and Linux-x86. I could
also take a run at Linux x86_64 if there's any need. Aside from that
folks will just have to patch their source trees.

> We might think of including Lighting some time when we're stable on
> toolkit and Lightning is well-tested in that configuration and works
> reasonably well.

> But Simon is right in one thing: We won't include everything just
> because it's available. Our goal is to ship an all-in-one app suite that
> doesn't need installation of a bunch of extensions to be usable for a
> big part of our target audience. Our goal is not to include everything
> someone could need some time, and our goal is not to include stuff that
> is not well-tested.

Those are of course two reasonable points. But I personally have always
used the Suite with Calendar, I don't consider it an extension. I view
this recent effort as repairing a regression/loss of functionality, not
adding anything new. And stuff only gets really well tested over the
course of time, as more users pound on it.

Anyway... I didn't post here to make a major statement, just to make a
little note. I figured if it had gone this far, it probably wasn't
important to many people besides me.

Robert Kaiser

unread,
Feb 28, 2007, 7:39:25 AM2/28/07
to
Simon Paquet schrieb:

> Seeing the content of the slides and your presentations of the past,
> I'm wondering whether I shouldn't present Sunbird/Lightning in the next
> year, since your slides were pretty high-level, at least for someone,
> who is watching the development pretty closely.

I think that would be quite interesting - most people there are either
localizers or people working on their specific projects within the
Mozilla world, and they usually don't follow all other projects closely,
so getting a heads-up what's going on there is always interesting.

> How was the general level of the Q&A session afterwards? Only high-level
> questions, which could be answered pretty easily or also nitty-gritty
> tech talk?

Some of both, but nobody has a problem if you say "I don't work myself
on that part, please ask XXX" if something is too techy for someone who
doesn't actively write code. :)

Robert Kaiser

Howard Chu

unread,
Mar 1, 2007, 1:43:05 PM3/1/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Philip Chee schrieb:
>> Question for the SeaMonkey council, assuming that Howard's patches make
>> it into the cvs, would it be possible for SM 1.1.2 at least as an option?
>
> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.

I've uploaded the extension for SeaMonkey 1.x to my web site.
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/mozilla/calendar-linux-x86.xpi
http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/mozilla/calendar-win32.xpi

These will probably not work with trunk/SeaMonkey 1.5. I have a
different build for trunk/Suiterunner, but I haven't gotten the
installer right yet.

Georg Maaß

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Mar 3, 2007, 5:25:38 AM3/3/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:

> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an
> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.

But I think the calendar is more value in the office than chatzilla.

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 3, 2007, 8:00:13 AM3/3/07
to
Georg Maaß schrieb:

Sure, but it's just not as stable yet and not as well-tested. And for
that old calendar extension, I can't see that changing in any way.
For the future (suiterunner+lightning), that has to be seen.

Robert Kaiser

Georg Maaß

unread,
Mar 3, 2007, 8:48:32 AM3/3/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:

> Sure, but it's just not as stable yet and not as well-tested. And for
> that old calendar extension, I can't see that changing in any way.
> For the future (suiterunner+lightning), that has to be seen.

It's less important which calendar technical implementation is
integrated than to have a calendar integrated.

The old implementation was/is very critical if not used with exactly
that Mozilla build it was released for, causing not to work or crash the
whole Mozilla when launching Mozilla. But in the rare cases the calendar
extension an Mozilla fit together, it was really sexy.

May be that sweetrunner needs a different technical implementation of
the calendar than XPFE based SeaMonkey. As long as our Sweety has not
released, it also might be useful to maintain the old calendar to match
the needs of the XPFE trunk.

Howard Chu

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Mar 3, 2007, 6:36:01 PM3/3/07
to

The difference in code and features between Sunbird and the Calendar
Extension (as I've built it) is about zero. Lightning may be the future,
but until they figure out how to give it a UI people actually like to
use, it's still inferior to CalExt. In the meantime, Sunbird's support
for things like iMIP/iTIP is getting unnecessarily difficult because
they can't just interface with a built in mailer. All in all the
separation of the Suite into standalone components is only costing
developer time that should never have needed to be spent. I'm surprised
any of this needs explaining in this newsgroup, which is presumably
inhabited by people who already understand that Seamonkey/the Suite were
always the right approach from Day One. The diversion of development and
test resources, the duplication of effort, everything about the
disintegration of the Suite into standalone apps is a shameful waste.

Simon Paquet

unread,
Mar 3, 2007, 7:03:13 PM3/3/07
to
And on the seventh day Howard Chu spoke:

>>>> We won't include it in default builds. If he makes it available as an

>>>> extension, that's fine, and many users will like that.
>>>
>>> But I think the calendar is more value in the office than chatzilla.
>>
>> Sure, but it's just not as stable yet and not as well-tested. And for
>> that old calendar extension, I can't see that changing in any way.
>> For the future (suiterunner+lightning), that has to be seen.
>
>The difference in code and features between Sunbird and the Calendar
>Extension (as I've built it) is about zero. Lightning may be the future,
>but until they figure out how to give it a UI people actually like to
>use, it's still inferior to CalExt.

We see a lot of downloads for Lightning and people seem to like it.

Saying that people do not like the Lightning UI, just because a few
people that are accustomed to the old Calendar extension do not like the
Lightning UI, does seem to be a rather unfounded conclusion to me.

>In the meantime, Sunbird's support for things like iMIP/iTIP is getting
>unnecessarily difficult because they can't just interface with a built
>in mailer. All in all the separation of the Suite into standalone
>components is only costing developer time that should never have needed
>to be spent.

The reason, why most people moved away from the Suite was not to cut down
development time. The reasons were mostly UI-driven. And a large majority
of users seems to agree with those reasons.

>I'm surprised any of this needs explaining in this newsgroup, which is
>presumably inhabited by people who already understand that Seamonkey/the
>Suite were always the right approach from Day One.

I don't think that you fully understand, what Robert wanted to say. The
Seamonkey Council does not want to support an unsupported extension, when
the replacement of this outdated extension can be incorporated into
Seamonkey with nearly no support from the Seamonkey side, once Seamonkey
1.5 is mature and ready for release.

Howard Chu

unread,
Mar 3, 2007, 7:46:32 PM3/3/07
to
Simon Paquet wrote:
> We see a lot of downloads for Lightning and people seem to like it.
>
> Saying that people do not like the Lightning UI, just because a few
> people that are accustomed to the old Calendar extension do not like the
> Lightning UI, does seem to be a rather unfounded conclusion to me.

The fact that people download Lightning also doesn't support a
conclusion that people seem to like it. Since the Calendar extension was
dropped, people who wanted to use a Mozilla-friendly calendar had no
other choice than to download Lightning. Now they have this choice,
although there still isn't an equal level of awareness.

>> In the meantime, Sunbird's support for things like iMIP/iTIP is getting
>> unnecessarily difficult because they can't just interface with a built
>> in mailer. All in all the separation of the Suite into standalone
>> components is only costing developer time that should never have needed
>> to be spent.

> The reason, why most people moved away from the Suite was not to cut down
> development time. The reasons were mostly UI-driven. And a large majority
> of users seems to agree with those reasons.

That doesn't mean those reasons are valid though. The UI is the most
flexible part of the Mozilla platform. If the reason for change is
mostly UI-driven, then the change should have focused solely on the UI.
Instead, the change brought about wholesale changes to the structure and
function of core code, deleting features that many long-time Netscape
users already relied on. (Note - deleting their core implementation, not
just their presentation in the UI.) And of course, any design change
that *doesn't* take development effort into account is ill-advised to
begin with. The change also introduced new features that are certainly
good (like a real updater mechanism) but again, that's beyond the realm
of UI issues. To say the change was mostly UI-driven makes no sense.

As for the large majority of users agreeing - again, the users mostly
just accepted what was available to them. The fact that the Suite was
officially dropped again left them with no choice, until a critical mass
of objecters resurrected the Suite.

>> I'm surprised any of this needs explaining in this newsgroup, which is
>> presumably inhabited by people who already understand that Seamonkey/the
>> Suite were always the right approach from Day One.

> I don't think that you fully understand, what Robert wanted to say. The
> Seamonkey Council does not want to support an unsupported extension, when
> the replacement of this outdated extension can be incorporated into
> Seamonkey with nearly no support from the Seamonkey side, once Seamonkey
> 1.5 is mature and ready for release.

That's a perfectly fair statement.

Simon Paquet

unread,
Mar 3, 2007, 8:17:54 PM3/3/07
to
And on the seventh day Howard Chu spoke:

>> We see a lot of downloads for Lightning and people seem to like it.


>>
>> Saying that people do not like the Lightning UI, just because a few
>> people that are accustomed to the old Calendar extension do not like the
>> Lightning UI, does seem to be a rather unfounded conclusion to me.
>
>The fact that people download Lightning also doesn't support a
>conclusion that people seem to like it.

The user feedback we get, does support this conclusion.

>> The reason, why most people moved away from the Suite was not to cut down
>> development time. The reasons were mostly UI-driven. And a large majority
>> of users seems to agree with those reasons.
>
>That doesn't mean those reasons are valid though. The UI is the most
>flexible part of the Mozilla platform. If the reason for change is
>mostly UI-driven, then the change should have focused solely on the UI.

It did, in the beginning and then the paths of the standalone products
and the suite moved in different directions.

>Instead, the change brought about wholesale changes to the structure and
>function of core code, deleting features that many long-time Netscape
>users already relied on.

Then those users didn't seem to miss it very

>To say the change was mostly UI-driven makes no sense.

It absolutely makes sense, because it is the truth. I was there in the
beginning, when Firefox was still called m/b.

>As for the large majority of users agreeing - again, the users mostly
>just accepted what was available to them. The fact that the Suite was
>officially dropped again left them with no choice, until a critical mass
>of objecters resurrected the Suite.

For a long time during the existence of the standalone apps, the suite
was still the premier app. That only changed after FF and TB 1.0 were
released. But already before that many people had moved away from the
suite and even more did, when Firefox 1.0 was released, because many
people only then became aware of the standalone apps.

In addition the suite was never fully dropped. If it had been, the
Seamonkey 1.0 release could never have happened so quickly. When Robert
and the other members of the council stepped up, there wasn't a lot of
catching up to play AFAICS.

Robert Kaiser

unread,
Mar 3, 2007, 9:13:24 PM3/3/07
to
Simon Paquet schrieb:

> For a long time during the existence of the standalone apps, the suite
> was still the premier app.
>[...]

> In addition the suite was never fully dropped.

Well, to tell it correctly, suite development asymptoticly neared a halt
until it really reached that with 1.7 - it was still maintained though
(there's a subtle difference between developing and maintaining), while
the standalone apps got all the new (and good!) developments.

It's true that it didn't need much work to have a stable suite, which
was a quite good thing, it needed some good work of a bunch of people to
make SeaMonkey 1.0 show off things that make differences to 1.7.x - and
it takes lots of quite heavy work of even more people to catch up with
the development that happened on the standalone fork ("new toolkit") and
get this thing we call "suiterunner" off the ground.
The good thing is that we can integrate some extensions more easily
after doing that work, with Lightning being an important example - and I
hope calendar folks will appreciate that they can get additional users
and testers through that.

Robert Kaiser

Georg Maaß

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Mar 4, 2007, 3:37:12 AM3/4/07
to
Simon Paquet wrote:
> The reason, why most people moved away from the Suite was not to cut down
> development time. The reasons were mostly UI-driven. And a large majority
> of users seems to agree with those reasons.

The UI is one reason, why I get angry, if anybody installs FF on my
machine. The UI of SM is much better.

The whole preferences UI of SM is much better than in FF. The tools are
much better and more complete.

If you take a bull and remove it's balls and brain you get a FireF ox.
For an ox the only thing we can do is barbecue.

Working people need an office suite that replaces the MS Exchange stuff.
This can be done only by SeaMonkey with an integrated calendar.

Simon Paquet

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 4:48:20 AM3/4/07
to
And on the seventh day Robert Kaiser spoke:

>> For a long time during the existence of the standalone apps, the suite
>> was still the premier app.
> >[...]
>> In addition the suite was never fully dropped.
>
>Well, to tell it correctly, suite development asymptoticly neared a halt
>until it really reached that with 1.7 - it was still maintained though
>(there's a subtle difference between developing and maintaining), while
>the standalone apps got all the new (and good!) developments.

Right.

>The good thing is that we can integrate some extensions more easily
>after doing that work, with Lightning being an important example - and I
>hope calendar folks will appreciate that they can get additional users
>and testers through that.

We certainly will appreciate that.

Simon Paquet

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 4:47:13 AM3/4/07
to
And on the seventh day Georg Maaß spoke:

>> The reason, why most people moved away from the Suite was not to cut down
>> development time. The reasons were mostly UI-driven. And a large majority
>> of users seems to agree with those reasons.
>
>The UI is one reason, why I get angry, if anybody installs FF on my
>machine. The UI of SM is much better.

This is not a "Firefox is better than Seamonkey" discussion. Please don't
turn it into one! I've seen too many of those flamewars and I get tired
of them.

Benoit Renard

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 7:50:46 AM3/4/07
to
> For a long time during the existence of the standalone apps, the suite
> was still the premier app. That only changed after FF and TB 1.0 were
> released. But already before that many people had moved away from the
> suite and even more did, when Firefox 1.0 was released, because many
> people only then became aware of the standalone apps.

But how many people knew of Mozilla, the suite? Right, not that many of
them. Some people got enthusiastic about Firefox, and it spread like
cancer. Even less people know that Mozilla became SeaMonkey.

Simon Paquet

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Mar 4, 2007, 9:51:57 AM3/4/07
to
And on the seventh day Benoit Renard spoke:

>> For a long time during the existence of the standalone apps, the suite
>> was still the premier app. That only changed after FF and TB 1.0 were
>> released. But already before that many people had moved away from the
>> suite and even more did, when Firefox 1.0 was released, because many
>> people only then became aware of the standalone apps.
>
>But how many people knew of Mozilla, the suite? Right, not that many of
>them.

Do you have any evidence for this conclusion?

Firefox was only fully noticed by outsiders after its 1.0 release. But
already a long time before that, people within the Mozilla community had
moved away from the Suite to the standalone apps.

>Even less people know that Mozilla became SeaMonkey.

And it's up to the Seamonkey Council and the community to change that. I
see a few initiatives currently under way to actively mitigate this
problem.

You also have to remember that the Seamonkey project is still in its
early youth.

The Firefox name has been around since early 2004 and there have been
quite a few (successful) marketing campaigns to actively promote it.

The Seamonkey name on the other hand has only been around for about 18
months and active promotional efforts are only beginning to arise.

Georg Maaß

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Mar 4, 2007, 10:51:05 AM3/4/07
to
Simon Paquet wrote:
> Firefox was only fully noticed by outsiders after its 1.0 release. But
> already a long time before that, people within the Mozilla community had
> moved away from the Suite to the standalone apps.

After Netscape vanished, there was no marketing for Mozilla. Marketing
started with the standalone Applications.

I never undestood why.

The size of only two standalone applications is bigger than the whole suite.

> You also have to remember that the Seamonkey project is still in its
> early youth.

the name is juvenile but not the project. It is still the Mozilla
project but now with probably the third generation of technology
(suiterunner).

> The Firefox name has been around since early 2004 and there have been
> quite a few (successful) marketing campaigns to actively promote it.

Yes, this was missing for Mozilla. Exactly this is the reason, why the
people moved from NN4 to IE and then to FF.

> The Seamonkey name on the other hand has only been around for about 18
> months and active promotional efforts are only beginning to arise.

When do we get the SeaMonkey clothing to rise up promotion?

How should the components be developed? Should the be developed as
components of the suite and then rewrapped into standalones, or should
they be developed as standalones and rewrapped into the suite, where
they then don't know from each other and do not interoperate?

* Gecko is a component used by each standalone.
* The composer is a component, which is probably also used by each
standalone. If you want to make a calendar entry with not just plain
text but rich text, you need a composer.
* Mailnews is also needed by the calendar for notification services and
by it self.

For best productivity of the users all of them need to be integrated
into one suite as single application for optimized interoparability of
the components.

If there are people, that must use Microsoft Outlaw for calendar and
mail and news, then it is usefull to provide to them a browser only
extract from the suite called FireFox as IE replacement.

But everybody using the calendar and or mail and news needs all
components even if browsing wit IE, so those people do not need
Thunderbird + Sunbird but simply the full integrated suite, which is not
much bigger than a single of them. After getting happy with the easy to
use suite, they no longer waste any time with IE.

I do not support FF. If I do IT support at home of old people that see
the computer as the computer and do not distinguish different software
like text editor, finder (Mac) or explorer (Windows), browser, mail
client etc. - in there words: all that's the computer - I do not confuse
them with installing a bundle of software (FF, TB, SB), I just install
the suite, and they are happy. They simply know the SM icon is my swiss
army knife, which opens my doors to the world. They don't need to bother
about email or browsing or news groups (rarely used by them), because
all that is done well by SM. Only the calendar is missing, but most of
them circumvent this problem by using the calendar of the web interface
of their email provider. For this old people target this might be
acceptable. For colaborating people a integrated calendar with groupware
functionality is essential. But also the old people would apreciate the
calendar, if it came back unter the wings of the suite being driven by
the suite (22MB) and not as fat standalone (14MB) with plain text only.
Thunderbird is 18MB fat and FF is also 18MB fat. With the calendar
integrated into the suite the suite might be 25MB or 26MB. This is not
much more than a single fat fox or a single fat bird, but is about the
half of FF + TB + SB and has the opportunity of realizing full
integration and interoparability of the components.

Ricardo Palomares Martinez

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Mar 4, 2007, 11:30:23 AM3/4/07
to
Robert Kaiser escribió:


I guess that, when the time comes, we could have a reason to see a SM
build with Lightning bundled and ChatZilla dropped: Lightning locales
are in CVS, ChatZilla don't.


--
If it's true that we are here to help others,
then what exactly are the OTHERS here for?

Georg Maaß

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Mar 4, 2007, 12:39:46 PM3/4/07
to
Ricardo Palomares Martinez wrote:

> I guess that, when the time comes, we could have a reason to see a SM
> build with Lightning bundled and ChatZilla dropped: Lightning locales
> are in CVS, ChatZilla don't.

Even me not missing ChatZilla, because I don't use it, it is not
necessary to drop ChatZilla, if it does not harm the suite, because it
is probably used by the SM developers to manage there development
communications needs.

I my self prefer for this purpose bugzilla as some kind of task
management tool and the news groups for discussions. But other people
may prefer other tools for that discusson purpose, or use it as an
additional layer between the news groups and the task related bugzilla
entries. I see it as something like the QA menu, which at least belongs
to the development tools.

But it has less business value than a calendar.

Simon Paquet

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 12:11:03 PM3/4/07
to
And on the seventh day Georg Maaß spoke:

>> Firefox was only fully noticed by outsiders after its 1.0 release. But
>> already a long time before that, people within the Mozilla community had
>> moved away from the Suite to the standalone apps.
>
>After Netscape vanished, there was no marketing for Mozilla. Marketing
>started with the standalone Applications.
>
>I never undestood why.
>
>The size of only two standalone applications is bigger than the whole suite.

I don't see how your ranting relates to what I said in my article. That
goes for everything in your article. not just these three paragraphs.

Please put this stuff into a new thread, where people might be more
interested in reading this stuff.

Benoit Renard

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Mar 4, 2007, 2:04:34 PM3/4/07
to
> Do you have any evidence for this conclusion?

Every non-Mozilla message board ever. People know Netscape, they don't
know Mozilla, and thanks to marketing, now they also know Firefox. As
Georg said, there was no marketing for Mozilla.

Gijs Kruitbosch

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Mar 4, 2007, 5:16:08 PM3/4/07
to
On Mar 4, 6:39 pm, Georg Maaß <g...@bioshop.de> wrote:
> Ricardo Palomares Martinez wrote:
> > I guess that, when the time comes, we could have a reason to see a SM
> > build with Lightning bundled andChatZilladropped: Lightning locales
> > are in CVS,ChatZilladon't.
>
> Even me not missingChatZilla, because I don't use it, it is not
> necessary to dropChatZilla, if it does not harm the suite, because it

> is probably used by the SM developers to manage there development
> communications needs.
>
> I my self prefer for this purpose bugzilla as some kind of task
> management tool and the news groups for discussions. But other people
> may prefer other tools for that discusson purpose, or use it as an
> additional layer between the news groups and the task related bugzilla
> entries. I see it as something like the QA menu, which at least belongs
> to the development tools.
>
> But it has less business value than a calendar.

So, I really do not agree with your arguments even (I know of a fair
few companies and organizations who use IRC for discussing business
matters, even some which use ChatZilla especially because due to its
use of NSS it has excellent support for client-side certificate
authentication) but other than that, there's a very simple reason
Calendar might be moving out while ChatZilla isn't: ChatZilla is under
active development (by people who are otherwise completely not
involved in the SeaMonkey development process) and use (since 1999)
while Calendar isn't. If it were the other way around and the council
decided they did not want to support it themselves, I'm pretty sure it
would be dropped instead.

For honesty's sake, I should note I am actively involved in ChatZilla
development, so I am probably very biased. :-)

~ Gijs

Robert Kaiser

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Mar 4, 2007, 6:06:10 PM3/4/07
to
Georg Maaß schrieb:

> The UI of SM is much better.

Wrong. It's better *for you*. The Firefox UI is better for many other
people, including most people that switch over from IE to a "real
Internet browser", so to say.
The SeaMonkey UI and integration might be better for a selection of
advanced users and many business users, and we hope that it will grow to
be even better for those with our development work.
We don't have the same target audience as Firefox, and we don't want it.
SeaMonkey is no direct competition to Firefox, and doesn't try to be.
Joe "The Internet is that little 'e' on my desktop" User is not the
person we want to win over to SeaMonkey, he's probably much better off
with Firefox, and so be it.
Firefox is SeaMonkey's little brother (in a code-centric sense - though
"he" has, as so many little brothers, grown to be taller and better
known than our suite itself), and in a good family, the family members
help each other rather than fight each other most of the time. We hope
our communities do that as well (our developers manage to do that more
and more).
Both brothers have their own set of friend, some might be friends of
both, some might not even know that the one they got acquainted with
even has a brother. No problem with that.

Sure, we need to make our software know among those who _are_ within our
target audience and who are our potential users: advanced users and
experts who want a well-integrated all-in-one Internet experience, and
business users who want to install once, get all they need.

The marketing efforts to reach those need to be different from what
Firefox needs to reach people who change over from IE, and for our
target audience, one good (and not expensive) path is peer marketing,
i.e. our community talking to those they know in that target audience.

What we can do is try to support getting the word out this way with
T-shirts, website buttons, etc. - and this will come.

And, of course, the core argument to those people is having the
functionality they need - and that brings us back to the real topic:
Let's get suiterunner going, make Lightning work, get someone to write
up RSS support, make the news reader not suck, make us have a decent FTP
mode, etc. - any students here who may want to do a cool project for
Google's Summer of Code?

Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 6:13:07 PM3/4/07
to
Ricardo Palomares Martinez schrieb:

> I guess that, when the time comes, we could have a reason to see a SM
> build with Lightning bundled and ChatZilla dropped: Lightning locales
> are in CVS, ChatZilla don't.

I think it will be possible to get to a point where we can solve this -
at least some sidetalk I did with Gijs of the Chatzilla team on this
topic at FOSDEM sounded we will be able to get this done in a good way
once the Chatzilla team gets to know what really needs to be done to
support this correctly.

You can be sure I'll do everything I can keep up the generally good
communication we have with people like Gijs from Chatzilla, multiple
people from the calendar project, the MoCo build team, MoFo
organization/legal people, even the Firefox and Thunderbird teams, and
many others...


Robert Kaiser

Neil

unread,
Mar 4, 2007, 6:44:41 PM3/4/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:

> the standalone apps got all the new (and good!) developments

Well, not all of the new developments were good...

--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.

Howard Chu

unread,
Mar 5, 2007, 1:07:42 AM3/5/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Georg Maaß schrieb:
>> The UI of SM is much better.
>
> Wrong. It's better *for you*. The Firefox UI is better for many other
> people, including most people that switch over from IE to a "real
> Internet browser", so to say.

What the heck is so wonderful about the UI? Do you think Joe User can
even tell the difference between the Firefox UI and Seamonkey? Gee,
there's a Back button, there's a URL bar, there's a reload and stop
button. Big deal. When you're targeting the lowest common denominator,
what is or isn't present in the UI or under the covers is irrelevant
because that level of user will never look closely enough to be bothered
by it.

The problem with targeting the lowest common denominator is that by
continuing to make things easier for unsophisticated users, you keep
lowering the bar, continuously. The world doesn't need more uneducated
population; the 'net doesn't need more naive users. I recently saw some
puffy discussion about the Mozilla Principles. One thing that was
painfully missing from all the lofty goals of making the Internet
Accessible to Everyone, and Improving the Experience, is EDUCATING YOUR
USERS. That is the most certain way to keep improving things for
everyone. The fewer naive users you have clicking random malware links,
the better the world for EVERYONE.

> The SeaMonkey UI and integration might be better for a selection of
> advanced users and many business users, and we hope that it will grow to
> be even better for those with our development work.
> We don't have the same target audience as Firefox, and we don't want it.
> SeaMonkey is no direct competition to Firefox, and doesn't try to be.
> Joe "The Internet is that little 'e' on my desktop" User is not the
> person we want to win over to SeaMonkey, he's probably much better off
> with Firefox, and so be it.

If we accept the statement that Firefox is "simpler" than SeaMonkey,
that only underscores the point that SeaMonkey is still the better
choice for *everyone* - because when you start users on it, and you get
them interested in learning, they can grow into more sophisticated use.
If you give them a toy app that is inherently lobotomized from the
start, they will never have anywhere to grow to. At some point they will
find that it doesn't meet their needs and then they will suffer through
a migration as they try to find something sophisticated enough to meet
their new needs.

> Firefox is SeaMonkey's little brother (in a code-centric sense - though
> "he" has, as so many little brothers, grown to be taller and better
> known than our suite itself), and in a good family, the family members
> help each other rather than fight each other most of the time. We hope
> our communities do that as well (our developers manage to do that more
> and more).

Hm, maybe that's how families work for amoeba and planaria, but in human
families you don't cut someone off at the knees to create a new offspring.

> Sure, we need to make our software know among those who _are_ within our
> target audience and who are our potential users: advanced users and
> experts who want a well-integrated all-in-one Internet experience, and
> business users who want to install once, get all they need.

This is just echoing ill-conceived propaganda. Before Microsoft
destroyed Netscape, the Netscape Suite was the Number One web app, not
just for advanced users but for all users. Back then there were a ton
more beginners than advanced users anyway. To say that the Suite is too
advanced for beginning users is denying history.

> The marketing efforts to reach those need to be different from what
> Firefox needs to reach people who change over from IE, and for our
> target audience, one good (and not expensive) path is peer marketing,
> i.e. our community talking to those they know in that target audience.
>
> What we can do is try to support getting the word out this way with
> T-shirts, website buttons, etc. - and this will come.

I don't think T-shirts will open too many doors into big businesses.
You'd need a commercial organization like MoCo to go there, and they're
obviously not positioning themselves to do that for SeaMonkey.

> And, of course, the core argument to those people is having the
> functionality they need - and that brings us back to the real topic:
> Let's get suiterunner going, make Lightning work, get someone to write
> up RSS support, make the news reader not suck, make us have a decent FTP
> mode, etc. - any students here who may want to do a cool project for
> Google's Summer of Code?

--

Simon Paquet

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Mar 5, 2007, 8:14:11 AM3/5/07
to
Robert Kaiser wrote on 05. Mar 2007:

<snip>

Thanks for this great post, Robert. It is very balanced and positive.

--
Simon Paquet
Sunbird/Lightning website maintainer
Project website: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar

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