[Balug-talk] Mozilla -> Firefox growing pains

[Bill Moseley]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 03:05:59PM -0800, Robert B. Livingston wrote:
> I am beginning to think Firefox is beginning to suffer from the hype-- 
> personally-- I like the full Mozilla. It is easier to use the Mozilla 
> Mail and just click back and forth between that and the 'net. The Fedora 
> Core 3 dumped full Mozilla for Firefox which I think was a mistake. 
> Firefox is hot with the Windows crowd-- but I fear that their clamoring 
> for Windows and Java apps will hurt open source. The years ahead I 
> believe will reveal political traitors to the open source movement-- the 
> greed out there may be too great, and our politicians only represent 
> their donors-- not us.

There's that argument that developing apps also for Windows hurts open
source in that it results in fewer reasons to not use Windows.
Indeed, my friends that switched from IE to Firefox are happier now
and feel more secure on Windows not using IE.  I'm not so sure about
that argument, but it sure seems like the Firefox I'm using on Linux
is moving toward the Windows way, and I don't like that loss at all.

I just clicked on an "autogen.sh" in cvsview in Mozilla and it says:

  The file "autogen.sh" is of type application/x-sh, and Mozilla does
  not know how to handle this file type.

and the dialog has a place to type in a path to a program to run.
Completely reasonable response to something it doesn't know how to
deal with and give me what I need to fix it.

Firefox's dialog says:

  You have chosen to open

      autogen.sh

  which is a : SH file

A "SH" file?!?!  Plus, no input box to type in a program -- only a
browse button.



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org