Technical-vs-non-technical is not a binary choice; it’s a continuum. Any one blog will try to choose one point in that continuum. Some readers will feel overwhelmed, and others overwhelmed by that choice.

Alternatively, Mozilla should (and does) publish a large number of blogs, each with a different technical level. For instance, I don’t care for Planet. However, I like to read Nick Nethercote, Taras, David Mandelin’s blogs. They discuss technical issues in terms of high-level goals, provide experimental results to defend their (re-)designs, and link to the bug tracker for further details. Great stuff for a software engineering nerd like myself.

Planet should make it easier for readers to find the blogs which match their tech level. The readers will subscribe to what they want to read.

“Open source is a bit too good with letting assholes get away with being assholes.”

Like some of those “devs” that do nothing but make mockups and suggest removing the status bar and further dumbing down the user by not insisting on meaningful changes. Mozilla needs to get a committee that focuses on producing initiative ideas and reviewing features that are currently in the product and striping out the ones that are meaningless.

Like for example how about **NO** addon is installed **AT ALL** without the users excessive permission. AND I MEAN they cannot use Firefox at all until they make a decision weather to allow the addon that snook in or to not allow it to install AT ALL. And I don’t mean disabled, I mean not installed at all. But no, the current settings just make it disabled if the user didn’t know about it.

Regarding work.mozilla.org: Planet Mozilla has never been about work for me. I would’ve read the (assuming a better signal/noise ratio) planet as a hobby even if I was employed at some deadend job. I stopped following planet kde/gnome because they are so full of noise and have lost any educational value they used to have. I got inspired to blog by planet classpath, planet lisp, (old planet kde), but the new “look at picture of my dog” planetary shift is destroying the inspirational utility of planets.

There are benefits to free speech and there are benefits to curating useful content…you can’t combine the two on a large scale.

I say flip it on its head. Start a new blog, “Mozilla Engineering” that selectively promotes good technical posts from the existing planet with a slight delay.

If you want a sterile work-only aggregator, feel free to maintain a work.m.o or whatever site, as long as I don’t have to subscribe to it and can read about the full spectrum of the community including the work-related but also the personal and political stuff on usual planet.

- A

@Nicholas: I think that Taras alludes to Asa and his cats. Asa removed his blog from Planet years ago because people complained.