Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has an interesting post today about how WordPress can max out the CPU of a server (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html). In the article he discusses how WP is really slowed down by the fact that it generates every page dynamically each time they are accessed (which in hindsight makes sense). But by just adding a caching plug-in it can really improve performance. During the course of the article he gets into the fact that WP should just roll this functionality into the base install given the increased performance.
This isn’t the first time I have heard this about an open source project. Firefox could be picking the top 10 plug-ins and integrate them into the next version. That way there would be official support for the features people want.
I had problems earlier this year with TinyXML not exporting very small floating point numbers in scientific notation. After trolling the internet I found that someone had already submitted a patch for that same problem over a year ago. I’m not sure why the TinyXML patches aren’t being integrated but I wonder how many other people have had the same problem. It makes me feel bad because the community involvement is really what sets open source apart and some projects just don’t take advantage of that.
2 users commented in " Why Don’t Open Source Projects Take Improvements From Their Users? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback“This isn’t the first time I have heard this about an open source project. Firefox could be picking the top 10 plug-ins and integrate them into the next version. That way there would be official support for the features people want.”
Except that most of the point of add-ons is that most people don’t agree on what the most important or most desirable features are.
I’m a pretty serious browser user, but there are at least 7 of the top 10 (by usage) that I absolutely wouldn’t use and actually would find to be an encumbrance and a barrier to efficiency.
Most people feel that way. There really aren’t that many “most people would like this” features out there and when they do show up as add-ons, we certainly do incorporate them (most times working with the add-on author to integrate that feature set and possibly even that code into Firefox).
Know where tabbed browsing came from? Yep, a Mozilla extension. Know where session restore came from? Yep, you guessed right again, a Firefox add-on. Tab enhancements like scrolling, overflow, drag and drop, smart switch on close? You bet. All add-ons that proved to be widely applicable and useful.
Want more examples? Try the AwesomeBar in Firefox 3 yet? How about our new download enhancements like pause and resume, search, and other goodies. Full page zoom’s another. Spellchecking too! The list goes on and on. A very large number of current Firefox features were first proved out as add-ons.
But it was never a “let’s take the top ten add-ons as measured by downloads or usage and incorporate them into Firefox.” That would be silly because most add-ons, popular or not, are not really things that the majority or even a strong minority of users would find useful. Many would be less than useful, they’d be in the way.
So to recap
1. Popularity among users of add-ons does not equate to “features people want” if you’re thinking about the 170 million people using Firefox today and the 200+ million people that will be using Firefox soon after Firefox 3 ships, so you cannot just add the top 10 into Firefox and have a generally useful browser.
2. We are integrating add-ons at a pretty amazing pace (and have been for about 8 years now.) The majority of new features in each Firefox release either came about by integrating an existing add-on or by implementing a feature inspired by an add-on.
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I kinda agree with Asa about Firefox. Besides, I think part of Firefox’s charm is that it’s a lean, mean browser. Add too many features and you’ll be back at Mozilla
But regarding WordPress, I really think caching should (and will) be a standard feature of WordPress 3. Or whatever the next major release will be.
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