Mozilla Milestone 0.9 Behind Schedule

Mozilla's March to 1.0 Slows to Snail's Pace

Mike Angelo -- 27 April 2001(c)

Mozilla Milestone 0.9 Branches Late

Has the Mozilla Lizard's March to 1.0 slowed to a snail's pace? It sure looks that way right now.

The March revision of the Mozilla Project Development Roadmap (Table 1, below) lists Mozilla 0.9 release for 23 April 2001. That was Monday of this week. Yet there still is no final release of the Mozilla 0.9 Milestone.

That Roadmap also lists 20 April 2001 as the date Mozilla 0.9 was supposed to have branched from the main Mozilla development trunk. Yet the Mozilla developers did not start the Milestone 0.9 branch until yesterday. Moreover, at publication time there still are not any Mozilla builds on the Milestone 0.9 branch in the public Mozilla FTP nightly-builds directory.

Add to the above mix last week's revision of the Mozilla Project Development Roadmap, which pushed the Mozilla 1.0 final shipping version release schedule back to September 2001. (Please see our story Mozilla 1.0 Pushed Back to Q3 2001.) That sure looks like Mozilla's March to 1.0 is becoming an even slower crawl.

Why a Slowdown

Whether this continual, falling behind schedule is a good or bad thing depends on one's point of view. For example, last week's push-back of the Mozilla 1.0 release date was, in part, to accommodate the addition of many new features, performance improvement work, and lots of rewriting. Please see our story Lizard On The Move: Mozilla Milestone 0.8.1 Browser-Suite Released for more about recently added features.)

Certainly the Mozilla folks should not be faulted for adding neat new features, improving performance, or re-writing code. That all makes a much better product.

On the other hand, Mozilla 1.0 has been some three-years in the making and it still is not ready to ship. That's an awfully long time in the context of computer-product development time these days. This Lizard could become a dinosaur before it reaches maturity if the delays continue to pile up.

However, in all fairness and contrary to what appears to be an all too common misconception, Mozilla is not an upgrade from Netscape 4.x. It is not merely code added to the Netscape 4 code. Nor is it a simply a re-write of the Mozilla code.

Rather, the old Netscape 4 code for the most part was scrapped. In essence, Mozilla has been rebuilt from the ground up. So, even though Mozilla might look and feel lots like Netscape 4.x (especially if you use the Classic skin) underneath it is a very different animal.

When 0.9

Usually, Milestone branching is done on a Friday and then release candidate builds are put though intensive QA (quality assurance) over the weekend. If all goes well, the Milestone is released on the Monday following the branching.

However, the Milestone 0.9 branching occurred nearly a week late and on a Thursday instead of a Friday. So it's hard to predict just when Mozilla 0.9 will be released. It could be this week. It could be next week.

We will let you know as soon as Mozilla 0.9 is released. So, please check the MozillaQuest Magazine front page (mozillaquest.com) from time to time for the latest news about Mozilla Milestone 0.9.

Mozilla Roadmap

Table 1 shows the March Roadmap revision. However, the Roadmap was revised again last week. For more information about the latest Roadmap revisions, please see Mozilla 1.0 Pushed Back to Q3 2001-- More Mozilla Roadmap & Development Plan Changes.

Traditionally, the milestone freeze time is 12 A.M. on a Wednesday. During the freeze, only bugs deemed "must-fix-for-this-milestone", typically last minute regressions, are fixed on the trunk, as everyone tries to qualify the daily builds as branch-worthy. Release staff@mozilla.org create the milestone branch, which receives even more intensive QA over the weekend, leading to a release the following Monday. (Mozilla Development Roadmap. Link below.)

About Mozilla & Milestones

The new Netscape 6 browser suite and the upcoming NeoPlanet browser are based upon the cross-platform Mozilla browser-suite. The GNOME Nautilus desktop uses Mozilla also.

"The milestones are intended to be periodic check points for progress on the project, stability of builds, porting status, and are entry points for additional mozilla (sic) contributors to provide testing and engineering help on the project." (Project SeaMonkey )

Nevertheless, pre-Mozilla-1.0 development builds now are pretty much features-complete, stable, and usable. Mozilla development work now is focused on bug squashing, improved stability, and better performance.

We have been using the Mozilla Milestone 0.8.1 release as a primary browser. It is very stable and usable for us insofar as Web surfing is concerned. We also find it to be better, browser-wise, than Netscape 6.0. The Composer module is starting to get usable also.

If you have not yet tried the Mozilla browser suite you can download and try the Mozilla Milestone 0.8.1 release for now. Check the MozillaQuest Magazine front page (mozillaquest.com) to find out when Milestone 0.9 is released.

For more information about Mozilla 0.8.1 plus download links and instructions please see our article, Lizard On The Move: Mozilla Milestone 0.8.1 Browser-Suite Released.

Resources

For more information about the free HTML editor included with the Mozilla browser suite, please see, Composer: The Netscape & Mozilla Graphical HTML Editor & Word Processor.

For more information about the Mozilla Organization, the Mozilla applications programming framework, and the Mozilla browser, please see:

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