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Why are users and developers seperate?Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?
kramulous says: inf if applicable for all interpreted languages Anonymous says: First thing you'd want to do, is get rid of the artificial boundaries between application programs. SmalltalkOnTheBrain says: It's known as Smalltalk! See: <a href="http://www.Smalltalk.org/versions.html">Smalltalk.org/versions.html". kp says: Because, generally, for a specific program, users and developers *are* separate. The overlap between the two groups is hardly enough to justify grouping them together. Of the millions of users who recently downloaded FF3, how many of those do you think even know what source code is? Of those, how many have seen it? Of those, how many have ever coded? Of those, how many are skilled enough to understand how to make any changes to FF3? A tool as you're suggesting, would be large amounts of work to code *in itself* and, I would imagine, require extensive coding/modding to work with any other application. In my view, it would not be worth the effort. I think a common mistake in the OSS world is to overestimate the number of enthusiastic, able coders. *Last thought* It seems that your idea for a tool is essentially the same as the addon system. No? RKptRFpz says: GPoWY0 vkoo7wvY5Xkfak7bf1Th Linus G Thiel says: This! You should get a menu with choices: Edit code Edit text (for localization) Report bug And it would be automatically sent to Mozilla (or another project) for validation. This, of course, should be available for all webapps, perhaps with an element selector similar to FireBug's. |