Firebird Bugs, Benevolent Dictatorships and Mouse Wheels
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 catridges, 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...
Its 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 :)
1:36:16 PM 
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