millennium | ten

I’ve read a number of reviews comparing Firefox 2 and IE7’s RSS capabilities. Every time Firefox comes up short. There’s a reason for this though, and it relates to the Firefox philosophy of having enough features, not too many or too few.

In general, we felt that RSS reader was a very personal choice to be made by the user, and that we did not want to compete with existing RSS readers that exist, which are very competent in a variety of ways. Rather, we wanted to allow users to easily subscribe to feeds using their favorite reader. The UI presented is not intended to be one for consuming the content, but rather previewing the content before subscription (since many feeds have non-descriptive titles). I think this is where the confusion arises, because the presentation is similar to Safari’s and IEs and so people may expect reading functionality.

Does this represent a shift in philosophy towards RSS then, considering Firefox has a basic RSS reader in the form of Live Bookmarks? Not really, since Live Bookmarks offer something that most other readers don’t at this point - bookmark integration and a simplicity that make them somewhat unique (and I have to credit OmniWeb here for developing this approach).

If we did not have Live Bookmarks today, I might hesitate at desiring them now that this simple subscribe interface exists, and I use Netvibes almost exclusively.

I use Visual Studio 2005 to edit code. Feel free to hurl abuse. I like the concept of an IDE. I was one of the folk who clung to Visual C++ 6.0 bitterly for years after the new versions came out because it was fast. Well, in time people force compiler upgrades, and then folk like me who value performance over wizzy features get screwed.

Some bug reports:

• Every couple of weeks, the editor decides to stop letting me type “}” characters. The key on my keyboard isn’t busted, it works in other apps and after a restart. Weird.
• Stepping into and out of functions in the debugger is a lot slower than Visual C++ 6.0 on the same hardware. Almost all debugger operations in 6.0 were instantaneous.
• Since I leave the IDE open constantly, I regularly take advantage of the size of the undo buffer to restore earlier versions of files. Unfortunately Undo seems to be really buggy, frequently showing block symbols in the text editor instead of the code until you resize the window, scroll it or somehow otherwise cause it to update. I had begun to think that this was just a benign rendering glitch until last week a large undo operation that I was doing crashed the whole app, leaving me with a file in an intermediate state.
• My biggest complaint is how slow the entire environment is. This is not a good advertisement for .NET UI widgetry, guys… it’s slow to start, and operations seem to take a long time - bringing up property pages etc. Compared to 6.0, it’s a pig.
• Compounding the previous point, whenever you go from debugging to editing modes, the entire workspace relays out, causing lots of flashing and flickering and since everything is so slow, it’s jarring as half rendered boxes appear on the screen.
• Has anyone on this team heard of double buffering? Almost all of the UI is excessively flickery. See also my point below about the help viewer.
• The property pages are slow, and the Mac-style model of changing with selection would be fine if there weren’t so many bugs where selection in the Solution Explorer occasionally jumps causing the incorrect pages to be shown for what I clicked on.
• The tabbed editing MDI views in earlier versions of Studio.NET were great. The new system in 2005 is awesome. I am frequently losing documents off the end and forced to go into the annoying little menu to find them. I wish there was at least a docking “open documents” list.
• The keybinding for canceling a build just does not work.
• If I have the inline find box in the toolbar focused and hit a key binding for something like open file, I get an error - I need to focus the content area first. I’ve sort of almost trained myself out of doing this now, but this was not a problem in 6.0.
• From a developer point of view, the Intellisense is not all its cracked up to be. It seems to work only about 40% of the time. And since it does work for that 40% of the time I become dependent on it and need it the other 60%.
• There are lots of UI things that I think could be more efficient but I suppose I could write macros for them.

I had to create a separate list of gripes for the help viewer, the situation was so astoundingly bad. I can’t believe the Microsoft team rewrote it from the old MSDN library viewer which just used the HTML help viewer to this thing, and it still sucks so much.

• All of the flickery problems from the IDE are multiplied here. It is the flickeriest app I have ever used. Drag another window over the top of it and see!
• It is incredibly slow to launch and worse still seems to hang the IDE while it loads.
• It is not a standalone app like the old CHM viewer, it is bound to the IDE instance that launched it, so if you have multiple IDEs open and close the one that opened it, your help disappears.
• The built in search is terrible. Once upon a time on MSDN’s website you used to be able to filter results by category etc. Then some bright spark decided it was better to just provide search results and rely on relevance. Maybe that’s true, but only if the relevance calculation is good, or if everyone’s trying to do the same thing. I am not a .NET developer, so showing me .NET articles first in the results is not helpful. I use Google to search MSDN these days.
• There are focus issues with the left list and the content area. It seems you can never select content in the left list and have focus stay there, it automatically shifts it to the content area, making keyboard use nearly impossible.
• The help documents don’t remember where you were scrolled to the last time you viewed them, or what expandable sections you had opened.
• There is no history of what topics you have viewed.
• The favorites list is in the left list, which is annoying. There should be the option of a Favorites toolbar, like a web browser.
• Most of the buttons on the default toolbar are useless. The buttons I actually push are Back, Forward and Sync TOC. I recommend Microsoft instrument this app and figure out what people use, and nix the rest. And find some way to make TOC syncing happen automatically, or have a keyboard shortcut for it.
• The filtering is not granular enough, or something. I want all the ATL and STL docs, and I also want all the Platform SDK docs for Windows proper. I don’t want Windows CE docs. However because I can’t pick and choose which collections, I end up seeing Windows CE docs all the time, they are shown in preference to regular windows docs any time I select an API in the Index view. I would like to find and strangle the person responsible for this.

All in all, the app sucks so much I would just use the website, but the website is worse - it’s slow, and it doesn’t work in Firefox (I would use IE for it, but IE7 on this computer is way too slow).

Thus ends my rant. Developers and developer tools are important to Microsoft, so I hope other people tell them about these problems too and we see them addressed in future versions.

While I’m reading the Herald, I noticed an article saying that IKEA is coming to Auckland in 2008. I know it exists in Australia, alongside Freedom, but I hope that Freedom is able to hold its ground in NZ, as having bought furniture from both Freedom and IKEA, I can tell you two things: Freedom products are generally pretty good, and IKEA is disgusting crap, for which the company should be fined.

I seriously wonder how much of their product line IKEA will be able to peddle in NZ due to the country’s strong consumer protection laws. Some of the stuff I have seen in the Palo Alto store would not seem to pass muster.

Let me also say that IKEA has the worst customer service of just about any large retailer I have ever been to. They tout their “low prices” (which by comparison aren’t that much cheaper than Freedom’s all things considered) but in return they expose the gruesome details of their supply chain management chaos to the customer. Back when I relocated here I went in to their Emeryville store (before the Paly Alty store opened) - a good hour and a bit drive - looking for a sofa. I asked after a certain model. They would not order it for me, just told me it’d come in “in a month”… I waited. I went back in. Still no sofa. “Another month” Yeah right. I bought something else, something I didn’t really want. They sell you file cabinets that use non-standard sized hanging files, and then are simultaneously out of stock of hanging files. Come back in a month! For all of the hassle of big government goody-two-shoes fireworks-banning nanny states, I hope the folk that handle consumer protection in the NZ govt scrutinize IKEA closely.

While I’m ranting, I will admit that I have bought a few things from there that I still use… my JERKER desks were excellent value at $69 and very solid, and I have a few of the paper vertical lamps left over, in addition to my leather sofa and armchair. The coffee table and leather swivel office chair (the least comfortable thing ever and overpriced at $249) got sent to Goodwill at the last move, the chest of drawers actually bowed out at the sides and the drawers fell out. And this was representative of the furniture that I tried in store - opening and closing doors, slamming them, making sure that they were solid!

You see, IKEA is a symbol of much of what I dislike about the United States - consumption of crap. Personally, I think it’s fine to lust after things - but only if they’re quality, and will last. But all too often what you get here in this Mecca of consumer whore-ism is nine different versions of the same crap. Look at the potato chip industry. Every non-Frito-Lay brand expands their range to clone Frito Lay’s uninspired offerings and then stops. As Leslie always says, “I don’t want more choices, I just want nicer things.” Well, IKEA has nine different kinds of crappy side table, desk or chest of drawers that will fall apart in 18 months. None of them are that stylish (you need to go to Freedom or Crate & Barrel for that), and for all IKEA’s trumpeting about minimal packaging, minimal packaging on crappy furniture you’ll have to throw away in a year is not that exciting.

I have a rant coming one day when I can write more coherently (i.e. when it isn’t 3:30AM) than this one about excess in packaging and consumption too, but I’ll leave this one here.

I was watching this segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann from MSNBC. I thought he raised an excellent point.

He says of Donald Rumsfeld,

“..Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience… we all might be able to swallow hard and accept their omniscience as a bearable even useful recipe of fact plus ego.”

In recent years, has there been a time when the Bush government has notbeen on the defensive about something? From the editorial to appear in the military Times this Monday, ” One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld”To me, and to a lot of people, these reassurances have always sounded weaselly.

It seems that after a while, if you’re constantly on the defensive, and yet you’re also not making traction, you should perhaps reconsider your strategy.

I’m no stranger to being unpopular - working on Firefox prior to 1.0, the project was not universally liked within the Mozilla community (and today it even still isn’t), but I felt there was a plan that would work, and we were getting enough good feedback that it was well worth pursuing. But what must it be like for Mr Bush’s government? When your real support comes oil barons and military contractors who don’t really care about you so much as they do their pocketbooks, and the uneducated and disinterested? Everybody else seems to be getting a little tired of what’s going on.

The more I think about this in its entirety, the more sickened I am. As Olbermann said, the unpleasant details of the Bush government could perhaps be tolerated if it were right more often. Or even perhaps once. Instead, we are left with a government that took office unfairly, and then was not content to just ride out that storm by being respectful, no, they had to squander the public trust in their thirst for money and power, while at the same time their team of hacks try to rewrite the history of the past 15 years in the minds of the people.

“Ranchtastic” is a word that I made up that describes the perfect 1950s ranch style house. There are a lot of them near here that aren’t just the standard cookie cutter. They sort of were - based on standard plans - but then highly customized with different exterior treatments (varying amounts of brick, stucco and wood, hip vs gable roofs, etc), the universal shake roof with optional accessories like little bird houses etc.

What are some of these details? Here are some of my favorites:

The X Door
I don’t know exactly what the style is called, but most of the houses have a type of door that is three fifths glass, two fifths wood panel. The glass in the upper section is either a tic tac toe grid of nine panes (which are often opaque) or a more elaborate panel of diamond shaped panes. Underneath is inset paneling in the shape of an “X”.

The Dutch Door
A Dutch Door is one where the top half opens independently of the bottom. I don’t have any practical use for this sort of thing myself - except maybe on hot days when you want to have the top half open to let air in without fully giving the impression that your house is open, but it’s such a great gimmick that it’s hard to resist.

The X Garage Door
Many of the houses that still have their original garage doors have this sort of design: a horizontal or vertical board pattern painted to match the house, with frame and X shaped cross boards through the middle painted in a contrasting color, like white. These look terrific, although usually this type of garage door is not automatic, and tends to slide from left to right, which isn’t all that practical.

Original 1950s Light Switches
I can go on for hours and hours about how certain switchgear in cars makes me feel good. Tactile feedback is important. Modern light switches tend to be that large 1″ wide plate kind that you can easily whack with your hand. The older kind from the 80s and 90s is a less satisfying mushy kind. Back in the 50s they knew how to do light switches. You know, the kind where you throw the switch and you can feel the metal underneath, and there’s a resounding ca-chunk as the switch closes the circuit.

Oak Floors
Many of the 50s houses near here have their original oak floors, most of which have lived under carpet for the past half century.

A Little Streamline Moderne
In the early 50s, the last of art deco was just fading away, and many houses that still have their original single pane casement windows have a design that favors simple horizontal lines and wide glass panels.

Textures
A house’s street face should be more than just one texture, and those textural elements shouldn’t feel like they were thrown up after an afternoon at Home Depot. The right mix of materials like stucco (used sparingly), brick, wood plank (painted or stained) and cedar shake set the scene.

I have more, but these are what I can think of right now.

There’s a lot of posting about trademarks, Firefox, Debian, IceWeasel, etc.

Here are my thoughts based on my experience with the process, and some historical background.

In the beginning there was Phoenix, a name which Blake and Dave came up with because they saw obvious connotations with respect to the code and the Netscape legacy, yadda yadda. Someone in the Netscape design department had even done some spiffy graphics for some other project within the company of a Phoenix rising above a N logo, which was used in most of the early releases.

Phoenix Technologies contacted the project and said that they didn’t want us using their name. So we had to come up with another one. After some brief thought, Firebird was chosen, since it was like Phoenix, and sounded cool. We all thought at the time the conflict with the database was insignificant since the project had a different purpose. Well, we were wrong. Long story short, we had to come up with a name again. This time though we would do it properly, and do the due diligence and file a trademark so that what was ours was ours, and would be.

This was a long and frustrating process. After an iteration and some unsatisfying results (which involved me reading the dictionary), Blake suggested retaining the Fire- prefix as a link to the past and to simplify things a bit. Still nothing. Lots of crappy candidates… Firescope, Firebrand, etc. Then one night on IRC kerz muttered “Firefox”. We also had Firecat and Firefly as contenders. It was hard to beat the consonance though, and Firefox it was.

It was only after the legal folk went through the pain of actually filing the trademark that we actually were forced to consider the ramifications. It seemed reasonable that Mozilla should be able to protect its mark, since there were lots of sites popping up offering “fast free firefox downloads”. It was unclear what this would mean though. I remember being involved in some very informal discussions. One of the things we talked about was having a different branding set for the “100% free” code. This ended up being the globe sans fox, which is what you see today (although it has a stick of dynamite in it on the trunk).

I always thought distribution and customization was a good idea, and that it should be as simple as possible. The Mozilla Corporation and its partners, who I think have the sole right to distribute Firefox branded as such should be in a situation much like Netscape was with respect to the Mozilla code. In practice, this means:

• Completely separating all trademarked pieces out of the “free” sections of cvs.mozilla.org
• Renaming the “free” browser to something generic like “Browser” with the globe icon, so that other people can ship it as is, or choose to rename it to something else like “Fred’s Wacky Web World”
• Mozilla Corporation related codenames and nomenclature should be factored out, such that people distributing this code don’t need to strip away anything at all to ship off a release tag without –enable-official-branding. i.e. no “Bone Cho”, no “Deer Park”, no “Gran Paradiso”.

I think this would give people flexibility to build the product that is useful to them.