...That’s a great question. I wish I had a better idea, but it is notoriously hard to deduce effort and time estimates for fixing bugs so the best I can say for now is ‘soon’, and definitely before Firefox 3 hits the streets. We are trying to get the quality of Beta Release 9 to a point that is at least better than that of Beta Release 8. Part of the delay is that we are trying to move beyond simple peer to peer file sharing and integrate Netizen with the larger Web experience. As a result, many architectural changes had to be made to support such a hybrid architecture. We were getting to a point where the existing architecture could not support any of the new ideas we wanted to implement so we decided to bite the bullet and get a lot of it done for this next release. So what is so so new about Beta 9?

We released Beta 8 in early 2007. The first few months of work after that release was focused on fixing a huge pile of networking and reliability bugs that we’ve accumulated in the first 8 releases of the software.  Though Netizen already works pretty well in high-speed countries like Iceland, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK, the next release should perform better here in the US and in other countries that have crappy broadband like us (that’s you France and Canada).  I’ve also switched the parcel archiver to be more dual-core friendly and support 64-bit file sizes. In addition to faster packaging times, this means that you will probably never have to worry about how large or how much you can transfer unless you have an 8 exabyte hard drive lying around and the bandwidth to move it.

Most of the work since April has been to update both the client and server to support not only peer-to-peer file sharing but also server hosted distribution. Beginning with Beta 9, you will have the option of storing your files with us. Though less secure than a pure peer-to-peer solution, this should make transferring parcels faster and more reliable since you won’t have to keep your Netizen client running and your computer connected to the Internet. This is one of the most requested features along with a Web based download option (which we are planning on doing).

Much of the engineering work with Beta 9 is with the services back-end of the network. We have decided to merge our client and server code base to reduce future development time (and headaches) and to increase the software’s quality. The client and server will be running the same basic code and sharing the same APIs. This will ensure that the Netizen client is going to be every bit as reliable as the Netizen Network. Putting a “Mozilla Application Server” on the desktop, or depending on how you look at it, putting a peer-to-peer client in the data center, will allow us to write more code once and deploy everywhere. Either way, it will make my life easier since I can reduce the amount of code that needs to be written while reusing more of it. So instead of spending my days (and often times my nights) triaging bugs in two different places, I can actually write some new features or maybe even release that Linux client we promised a while ago. Yes, maybe I’m being a little selfish by putting my pain ahead of my users. I love writing software but I’d rather be debugging less and going out more and talking to girls or something. So far, it has already reduced the amount of time I’ve spent debugging and increased the time I’ve spent enjoying concerts. I might even start blogging about these supposed new features more frequently. But honestly, we had to get over this hump to move Netizen forward. It will definitely make the user experience with the product even better. It’s all for the best.

We are now in the testing phase for Beta 9 and are hoping for a December release. Beta Release 10 will be released three months after Beta 9 and include a little more sex appeal with a refreshed UI and additional web enabled features.

Thanks for sticking with us during this long development process. There are a lot of things in the works. I promise that you will be able to see the difference.