However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest.
> Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. is reasonably simple yet covers multiple bases.
so if you're willing to do what you do, complexity is inevitable, whether it is in a single protocol or spread across a clusterfuck of dozens of protocols.Īgain, it is good engineering and good abstraction to find a solution that gives a lot of bang for buck, i.e. So now you have two, with somewhat overlapping functionality that you can't merge if you insist on keeping everything absolutely minimalist. Gemini may be simple, but when it is too simple, you will need a different protocol or format. I'd also like to point out that it's worthwhile to think of the complexity of all the systems you require, and not just one protocol/document format. Plenty of things are designed and developed with a conservative mindset where adding new features has to be very carefully justified. Really you just need to outline some goals and rules and have the right people at the top calling the shots. If you think scope creep is an inevitable consequence of not making a protocol non-extensible, I have a thousand RFCs to show you. These projects are also small enough that if someone's not happy, they can fork and customize (and still be able to "keep up" with whatever developments might happen in terms of standardised functionality). From there on it's maintenance and bugfixes and minor features which can be worked on as a hobby by a small group without having to devote all their lives to it. I think it should be possible to design something that is more flexible, yet for which a competent programmer can write a basic client implementation in a few weekends (with some features missing but the client still being entirely usable), make it feature-complete in an additional dozen weekends or so, and also add & finish all the extras and fluff and polish over the remaining year. I evaluated Gemini, wanted to like it, almost like it, but I think it just doesn't allow me to do what I want to do. I think Gemini goes in the "weekend project" category whereas a modern browser is more like hundreds of man-years.
#Tenfourfox update software
That is also what I want from software as a user. Where is the middle ground? From an engineering perspective, I think that is the most interesting area: designing something that is small and simple yet surprisingly capable. I see this a lot: your choices are either massively obese or minimalist to a fault.
Gemini may unfortunately be the best hope in terms of what gets adoption but I feel like it swings way too far in the other direction. I want to read exactly what is necessary to assign the bug to an owner and to understand its priority - no more, no less.
I don't even really want to read your "thank you". It is incredibly uncommon for anything else to be necessary - and I say this from more than a decade of experience in enterprise and end user-facing software that gets thousands of feedback/bug reports per day.Īs part of a triage team, I'm going through bug after bug after bug. They should ideally be a bulleted list with configuration, what was done, what happened, and what the user expected to happen. Bug reports should be precise and should make it obvious what's happening to allow them to be quickly triaged and understood. That doesn't mean they should write prose in their reports. Bug trackers should be respectful, and users should know that they are just one user and be humble without demanding that things are fixed immediately or otherwise showing anger/entitlement.