Point One
Reaching 0.1 for our project has been quite the experience so far. Peter Evanoff and I are jumping into things we know nothing about, and still don’t really know much about, faster than we would have first imagined. It’s just really cool, the pace that we are going at.. we are definitely making alot more progress when side by side than if we were to just sit at home and try to figure things on our own. Then also there’s the Mozilla community to seek help from when we get stuck, which has helped alot when I was doing my first build. I was really happy to write it all down and share the knowledge with others.
I’m still kinda sketchy on what we’re going to come up with for 0.1. It’s going to be mostly getting our plan down, probably have a list of link resources for what we’ve learned so far and point out the general idea of what we’ll be doing.
Today’s meeting was very constructive. For our project the Universal USB Firefox, we looked up a few examples of existing “portable” Firefox versions on the web. They do some pretty weird stuff to make Firefox portable. So I think we defined the ideal concept for our project, which is in our heads now, alot more meaningful than the sort of generic description we started with on Wiki. Peter Evanoff had done alot of poking around trying to see what made these homebrew portable firefox versions tick. What were the differences between these versions and the real release for desktop. (Are they even allowed to call their own versions “Firefox Portable” and reuse the fox logo?) There was alot of confusion if we were reinventing the wheel here since these gimmicky versions exist, but I think we got over that.
Ctyler said that this was basically a packaging project, which makes sense to me, but its not entirely true. We’re going to have to find out what code to modify in order for profiles to be persistent among all platforms, we want the browser to leave nothing behind on the host computer, and ideally we want a single entry point for the user to start firefox and not have to worry about what platform they are on, it will just work.
No one really knows how big this project will turn out to be, neither do we, until we jump into the code. We’re going to find out what are the differences, especially in file structure, where things go for each version of Firefox running on different platforms, what are their behaviors. We may not need 99 failed attempts to make Universal USB Firefox, but we might as well since there’s so much to learn from it. It’s going to be alot of fun.