Slashdot Mirror

score: informational ?)

score: informational ?)

the first couple of times I just downloaded the FAQ, tarballs, INSTALLING, whatever, and I'd plod along following the instructions and after wasting a few hours I discover: no motif, no build. jerkoffs, why didn't they mention that before? The only place that little message was "documented" was in a make error message.

so, things have moved a bit since then, but "fool me once..." ... now when I get the urge to work on it, I go and read ahead as much as possible, last time was last summer. Always, I get this queasy feeling that the people inside the project have carved out a little world for themselves that makes them happy, but an "outsider" is going to have to go through a maze of twisty turny passages to get there. This is a big project, and it's a big maze, so the fun of contributing seems way off in the distance ...

OK, I didn't want to shoot off my mouth without checking again. Here's today's report. It's brief because they managed to disconvince me again in a couple of sentences. From the hacking docs, and my quotes are paraphrasals, not literal.

1. Mozilla has "a great build system that has scaled to 100s of developers, so follow the rules and don't break it." OK? OK! I can follow rules.

2. "Confirm that your code works on all the different platforms before checking it in. Don't break the build!" OK? Nah uh! You guys don't have a build system, you have a makefile called from a shell script. Asking me to build on more than one platform is too much. I actually write code for multiple platforms and I think it's too much. What about all the people who don't? E-mail code to a pal and have them test it? Sheesh, that is primitive, not to mention I don't have any pals on Mozilla... yeah, I could hang around ... Look, build just the tiniest bit of support for it into the source repository, and organize a buddy system for me. If one person breaking something wastes 100*1 man-hours (mythical? :) then spend that time to make the build system deal. That way you won't have to excoriate me for breaking the build before I've even downloaded the source. You could say, happy things like, "come on in and contribute, we'll help you, we'll make it easy for you, we'll show you how"

ok, but forge ahead, Mann, perhaps it'll be ok. ...hmmm, I don't know about this, there are a lot of tools to upgrade. No, not their fault, gotta have tools, but certainly not something I want to contemplate if this isn't going to work out...

Oh look! the instructions for Linux (the largest open OS platform) Redhat (the largest distro) are labelled "out of date". So, I'm going to be on my own here... I think I'll check back in a few months, maybe after the release.

ya know, if it's three guys in a garage, sure, they can't keep it all going and porting is the sort of help they need. but 100s of engineers with a paid staff are telling me that this is a great system? They want me to help them, and contribute under a license that the FUD tells me is suspect to begin with? Fine, then roll out the red carpet for me by making it as easy to get started as the linux kernel. "make config ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules " Then, after I've played around a bit, if I have something interesting to say, give me a way to share it. But just 10 minutes of scrolling through their stuff on top of the time I've wasted in the past tells me that they love working on the "cool" parts of the code and don't pay much attention to infrastructure, infrastructure that is by definition huge and important because this is a crossplatform system with hundreds of engineers.

Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. I'm not? No, I'm not. They are writing a lot of code and giving it away, how could I criticize that? I think it's great! I think they are great :) :) But if the shopkeeper wants to know why I came in and browsed around the shop and then walked out without buying anything...

It's not them it's me? Yep, probably that's it, the system is working fine. They successfully sent away somebody who shouldn't be working on it :)

but at this stage, in randomly browsing you should not crash more often than every hour or so.

if you find that you crash too much on a particular web site (or mail host or ...) the best you can do is searching BugZilla (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/) for a similar problem and/or submitting a new bug with a decription of what happens.

regards.

Verify here. They submit their changes all at once because they work in the same timezone and building. Everyone knows that incremental changes are far better then huge change sets. This doesn't occur if people checkin from different time zones. Also, how many collegues do you hate if they work your building and how many do you hate if you only are touch via mailing-lists?

I just submitted this to slash, but I doubt it'll get posted as a main article...

Mozilla is now unoffically dogfood status according to the latest status report. The evaluation of whether it's dogfood or not is if at least 50% of mozilla.org are using mozilla for at least 50% of their browsing time. After that, bugs start getting fixed faster as people are really using the product (and pressuring their peers to make it better).

For those that haven't tried a nightly build - do so. It's incredibly unintrusive (just installs in your $HOME directory - and can be deleted just as easily), real stable, and is great as an every day browser.

So, who becomes resident talking head now? Shaver has done quite well for mozilla both within the open source community (he's done some kick ass fud damage control here on slashdot) and to the world at large. And look at his checkin logs from bonsai (which is apparently down for maintenence at the moment). Happy to see that he'll still be involved with mozilla.

• As you say, which license would be picked is ambiguous, and has significant implications.
• Compare to Mozilla.

  Not all of Mozilla was Netscape's to give away. Notably bits from Bitstream, RSA (now Network Associates), and GUI stuff from sundry vendors.

  Even if Apple "open sources" all of their code, that doesn't imply that Adobe code is treated similarly.

  And I frankly worry more about Adobe doing "evil proprietary stuff" than I do about Apple. DPS, Type 1, Postscript, and PDF are more pervasive than MacOS. Greater danger lies there.

• What precisely is the "operating system?"

  Much of the old "GNU/Linux" controversies come out of the quite legitimate issue of which parts are Linux, and which parts are "GNU."

  Similarly, there has been much arguing over whether Internet Exploder is part of the "Windows Operating System."

  And the ambiguity strikes again here; "the whole OS" could vary from merely being some bits of Mach to being inclusive of MS Office and OS-X development tools, WebObjects, and OPENSTEP.

As the Linux X11 porth of Opera is written using the Qt toolkit and Qt is also available for Windows development why don't opera use a cross platform codebase for their front end code which'll work in both X11 and Windows and just keep any platform specific networking code that needs be between the platforms. This would help keep the Windows and Linux versions of the code in parity as only the networking code would be platform specific.
--
This message posted using Mozilla M12

Then there's JIF, which is basically just GIF with LZ77 compression instead of LZW. Unlike PNG, it supports animation. It doesn't have PNG's nifty features, but then it's designed to be an interim format, easy to add to an application that already supports GIFs. Adding features would defeat the purpose.

A request for support has been submitted to the mozilla project as Bug #21445"

this is not possible with linux, as paragraph #7 of the GPL prohibits distribution of the software in this case.

another license which is more free in the patents issue is the MPL/NPL. here the original author grants the user a license for all his patents necessary to use the software.

somthing which really should be changed, is that the open source definition doesn't mention patents at all. software is not free unless it's free of patent alfortihms or comes with a license to use them.

software is protected under the copyright- and the patent-law. ( unlike physical machines, which are just protected by patents ). the copyright-law is necessary for free software to be able to enforce the copyleft to keep it free. the patent-law doesn't bring any benefit to free software. and we should as soon as possible start to learn how to deal with it.

patent-law gets promoted to foster innovations. i think this is plain silly. look it the innovations which where used to build the internet. the internet's basement is free software (apache, bind, sendmail, linux, *bsd, perl, php, majordomo, ... ) and all these didn't get developed BECAUSE of patent-law, but DESPITE it.

we need to deal with patents in all open source licenses and in the open source definition! write to Your congress-guy today!

From the "well-articulated view":

I correctly predicted Mozilla source would lack SSL and lack JAVA when shipped.

Wow! He predicted something that has been known by anyone interested in Mozilla since the openning of the source code... (And if you don't know the reasons for the lack of SSL and how Java is supported in Mozilla, then find out.)

It's great to get Opera for Linux too. As we so often want to point out: the freedom to choose is important. Also Opera and Mozilla will definitely battle each other and result in better products.

I downloaded both. Opera starts up fast. I pressed enter and there was the window. Then I visited slashdot with it. The front page loaded fast and it also showed this topic nicely. The feeling I got is that Opera loads slashdot pages faster than Mozilla but Mozilla renders the page faster. Just resize the window to see the difference. However, Mozilla's slowness with big Slashdot pages come from early incremental reflow code and still unoptimized table code. However, some new code has gone in lately to make Mozilla faster.

Opera also lacked features. If you click on submit buttons, nothing happens. Also it has big problems with some web pages. But as programmers know, this is very normal at this stage.

Check out the latest Mozilla. The Linux version has become a lot faster lately. It also crashes a lot more seldom and renders pages better than ever. There's still a lot of bugs left but this one is almost good enough for daily browsing. And as Mozilla could use some good testers, report the bugs you find at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org

In a nutshell: Opera is still far behind Mozilla. It's not possible to use it for daily browsing. Mozilla is almost there.

I downloaded the Opera binary to give it a run. I was impressed by how small it was and how small of a footprint it has while it is running. However, it's important to remember that with Mozilla you can create a small web browser as well. Everything is embeddable so you can create whatever interface ( with whatever size ) you want. Everything is modular so if you don't want it, you don't have to load it. Here is a screenshot of the "simplebrowser" test program. It's simple. It's small. The nice thing about Mozilla is that you can design any interface you want around it since it's completely embeddable. You like the Opera interface with MDI? Write one! There's nothing stopping you.

I also found it interesting that they called this a "beta release." Mozilla is more stable and has a greater amount of its final functionality impelemented than the current Opera release. We didn't want to call the Mozilla M12 release "Alpha" because we weren't comfortable enough with its level of stability (although we consider it almost there.) Yet another example of the redefinition of the word "Beta." :)

I use Windows becuase it's easy to install a program, becuase it's easy to see what im doing, where im going and how to get there. I use it because when i want an mp3 dbasing util, i can download a single package, and install it with a mouse click. I don't need to hunt for an obscure library file, i don't need to make sure that it will run with the Window Manager i want to use, i don't need to decode version numbers of updates to work out what i need and don't need. This may sound lazy, but i don't have the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this. Most of the market that Linux needs to reach out and grab is like me, the computer techs are sold, the geeks and nerds are sold, the average user ? not yet, they will, but not yet.

Please don't get me wrong, i love the concept of linux, open-sourced, free, community built and driven, and i would switch back in minutes given the chance, but linux really needs that single element that MS still has, Gloss and simplicity.

Linux is definitely worse from a simplicity stand-point and I think the people who consider it a non-techie desktop replacement are getting way ahead of themselves. I use linux on servers and my desktop, but I'm also not going to be scared about using installing the latest Netscape (or compiling it for that matter). The reason why I consider Linux a win over Windows is that, although it may not be as simple, it's much more predictable. I've never had a Linux system where an application magically corrupts itself to the point where you need a fresh reinstall of the operating system.

What I've been eyeing as a potential desktop OS replacement is BeOS. It's got a very slick and polished GUI and, unlike Linux, the user never needs to go near a command prompt if they don't want to; if they do, they'll find a well equipped command prompt with all the usual Unix software (lots of ported OpenSource stuff). They just aren't forced to use it. It's got very solid multitasking and handles a heavy load much better than Windows (it's a tossup between BeOS and Linux on my machine as far as scalability goes) with very well developed multimedia support, too.

The best part, however, is the speed. Installing it took something like 15 minutes, which consisted of telling it which partition to use and most of the time was spent copying files off of the CD. A 5 second reboot later, everything was up and running - no plug and pray, no hardware configuration dialogs. The only config I had to do was providing my IP address to the network driver. Everything else was auto-detected without more than a second's delay.

The bottom line: BeOS is fast, extremely stable and it's got a very easy GUI. My mother could install this and use it without training even though it's also got enough neat technology that I find it interesting as well.

(A few weeks ago, I summarized my experiences installing stuff on my new PC.)

And which browser might that be?
That browser would be Mozilla, now in M12, soon to be M13 and will be ready for cross-platform, open-source deployment. The M8-M12 Milestones are very impressive

_____________________________________

• ftp://mirrors.xmission.com /mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.utk.e du/pub/netscape-source/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp:// sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.mozilla.org/pub/m ozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.ua lberta.ca/pub/Mirror/mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  

• ftp://mirrors.xmission.com /mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.utk.e du/pub/netscape-source/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp:// sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.mozilla.org/pub/m ozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.ua lberta.ca/pub/Mirror/mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  

Check out bug 17325. Then make an Bugzilla account and vote for this bug. As you can see, the slowness comes from incremental reflow and yet not optimized table handling. They have checked in some new code to improve it but it's not yet optimized.

You can also change settings to control incremental reflows. Slashdot is still a pain to read but it should help with other sites.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/r eleases/m12/

There's a bug report in for that, number 18172. It appears to be some weirdness in the XPCOM code, and I've compiled it on my 3.3-S box with the stock gcc and gotten the exact same crash. The code in question is gcc-inlined assembler, though, so it's a bit over my head.

-lee

Markus
--

Just compiling and seeing if its working, that is at least compiling clean, isn't helpful tinderbox takes care of that automaticly.

But yes, on any release, be it a kernel or a new redhat or mozilla /. should have a 48hour embargo on publishing it, unless they get permision from the maintainers of course.

2. Why won't crypto be included? To me, ssl is a core functionality of a browser, as any purchases I make using a credit card better have ssl.

Netscape is internally working on their own version of mozilla with crypto. Of course, this will be released as binary only with a special crippled version for non-US people.

Frank Hecker has written an excellent FAQ on this subject. It is available at: http://www.mozilla.org/crypto-faq.html

- Communicator bug report form
-Bugzilla, for mozilla

It seems that one great side effect Mozilla has had is pushing lots of open source OS's hard to fix various problems that they've had. A few months ago we saw a problem with threads and glibc on Linux that Mozilla exposed hardest and best.

Now, according to bug #14676, Mozilla has exposed some trouble in FreeBSD's dlopen() which has subsequently been fixed, making FreeBSD a better OS.

Mozilla is a Good Thing(R). :-)

Mozilla is NOT Netscape Communicator 5. Mozilla IS a free, open source, standards compliant browser that has been completely rebuilt from the ground up with things like portability, flexibility, and small size as key goals. Mozilla will soon enough be available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, BeOS, OS/2, OpenVMS, Amiga, and several other platforms. In other words, run whatever OS you want and Mozilla will be there. When Mozilla has reached a state where it is considered "finished", then Netscape will add things like cryptography, polish it up (perhpas with their own user interface), and ship it as Communicator 5 or whatever they will call it. I think it is important to realize that Mozilla is only the core of what will be Netscape 5. Because it's so easy to modify the user interface, there will be skins for Mozilla -- just like with WinAMP. Perhaps you can get matching skins for Mozilla and WinAMP. Since encryption software cannot be open sourced in the US, Mozilla does not have any encryption, but Netscape will add that on to Mozilla for the release of Netscape 5. People keep talking about market share, but I feel that when Netscape 5 begins shipping with AOL that will significantly affect market share. Not to mention the many people like me who believe that Mozilla is simply more standards compliant, more efficient, will very likely be faster when completed, and will be available on more platforms than any other browser on the planet. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but Mozilla is fast enough for browsing now -- and it doesn't even have the caching module yet because the Intel people that are working on it haven't finished it yet. Don't knock it's speed now. It's going to get faster. Wait for a beta. And finally, remember that the M12 release might be called an "alpha" release, not beta. After the alpha release, there will be a beta release every two months until it is finished. Then Netscape turns it into Netscape 5. Then AOL ships Netscape 5 as it's default browser. Please, read both the Mozilla and MozillaZine sites before spouting what you think Mozilla's faults are. Chances are, they have already been addressed there and are in the process of being corrected.

Mozilla has been planning since the summer to release a public alpha in December, followed by a beta a few months later. In some cases these two releases were called "mozilla beta" and "netscape beta", admittedly a confusing way of describing the releases, and one which was rectified a while ago.

A few months ago some reporter misunderstood the release schedule and reported Netscape would release a beta in December. Since then this inaccuracy has propagated into all subsequent news articles through the common journalistic practice of re-using previously published work instead of doing original research.

Now suddenly some reporter discovers what's actually going on, but instead of printing a retraction of earlier stories they say the Netscape beta has been "delayed". It isn't true, and while I expect it from the news sites I've been reading it from for months, I figured Slashdot would be able to figure it out. I guess not.

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself:

The Milestone Chart

Quoting from the article "[ Fwd: The Plan]" (1999 September 24) in the newsgroup "netscape.public.mozilla.porkjockeys":

"When: Mozilla beta-milestone 12/15. Netscape beta later, first things first."

Almost a hundred comments posted, and not even a single person has uttered the words 'Mozilla is dead'. Congratulations, Slashdot readers.

Anyway, before anyone decides to reply with that to my post, I figure I'll offer a link to Mozilla's Tinderboxen. This page shows whether the up to the minute builds are compiling successfully or not, as well as showing all checkins to SeaMonkey (Mozilla) in the last 12 hours. (Although you can go back as far as you want to, actually.)

I figure that looking at this page on any weekday while the tree is open can prove to any skeptic that Mozilla is just flying along. Even on weekends and at 4:00 am, there are usually a few people checking in this and that. After all... Between midnight (pacific) and now on Friday night, two people have been checking in periodically.

------

That's what MozillaZine asks us. There is a survey where they ask about readers' feelings regarding the current builds.

I have been trying Mozilla for months already. It has improved steadily but they are still making big changes there. For example they started doing incremental reflow. While it's nice, it caused some pages to load very slowly. IMO, that's still one thing to fix before Alpha.

I guess it's good to delay Mozilla until it's ready and free of bugs. Mozilla is designed from ground up, small, fast and supports standards beautifully. It'll be a pleasure to use it.

But I couldn't but notice some fear. Some people are scared that AOL will fill Mozilla with ads and make it unusable. While AOL might do it, remember that the source code of Mozilla is free. It's right there at ftp.mozilla.org and you're free to get it any day. So we can very well build custom versions of Mozilla without any AIM or other annoyances.

According to the Mozilla page, Navigator and Mozilla are essentially distinct projects. They say that Navigator will most likely be based on submitted Mozilla code, however, and that it will be marketed as "good" and branded under the Netscape name, as well as contain proprietary stuff that can't be part of Mozilla for obvious reasons.

Or maybe try and create an open source version of Internet Explorer!!??

That would be called 'Mozilla'

------

Where have you been? Mozilla is doing exactly that.

I would love to see Mozilla become a viable browser once again. And if it takes money from Redhat to do that it peachy keen by me.

Once upon a time, Netscape was the best browser. Now web developers have learned to curse both Netscape and IE. I would love not to have do all kinds of tricks not to have to support the peculiarities of both common browsers. And money from Redhat may just make that a little easier.

Make the net easier to use with less complicated browsers intracacies makes it better for everyone ... even with RedHat's money.

• Emery Jeffreys

Earlier today, this article on Slashdot talks about their financial involvment with Sendmail and the Mozilla Project, and the previous rumors about the acquisition of Cygnus turned out to be true.

Red Hat should save themselves a little bit of cash and make an investment into TrollTech and/or KDE instead. If Qt were GPL'd, there would no longer be any justification for using the less sophisticated GNOME over KDE for "philosophical reasons". KOffice would reign, and the savings could be applied toward the bottom line. "Red Hat in the black" (like SuSE) is a headline that has great appeal to serious stockholders.

Steam wears off quickly -- Netscape^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAOL is now taking handouts from Red Hat to keep Mozilla going, just a few short years after that promising IPO. WordPerfect (on its own) has already proven to be an unwise move, and their Windows and Mac software is just excess baggage. Those users won't switch to Linux, they'll switch to Macromedia/Adobe/Microsoft/et al. Novell sure couldn't leverage the WordPerfect name, I don't think the fedora is gonna sell many more copies...

Hmm, wonder if some team outside the US could implement a SSL/TLS via DH and merge it into Mozilla...

Bite this, Microsoft -- "Sorry, you can't visit this secure site unless you use the lizard." Hehehehe...

Sorry if this isn't up to my usual standards, but I'm very pissed off at IE right now. :-)

Go and post a bug report in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and it will be fixed if it turns out to be a true bug.

Having said all that - currently I find Mozilla slow. Real slow.

There are currently some major performance issues that are being working on. They will be fixed before final release. One of the biggest is this bug here. If you want a faster and more responsive browser whilst downloading pages, go and vote for this bug now.

Having said all that - currently I find Mozilla slow. Real slow.

There are currently some major performance issues that are being working on. They will be fixed before final release. One of the biggest is this bug here. If you want a faster and more responsive browser whilst downloading pages, go and vote for this bug now.

You don't need to be a developer to make a contribution to the Mozilla project! You can see the list of bugs most voted for her e. If you want to help the developers know which bugs you most want fixed, choose a bug or two from this list or another Bugzilla list and go vote for it!

You don't need to be a developer to make a contribution to the Mozilla project! You can see the list of bugs most voted for her e. If you want to help the developers know which bugs you most want fixed, choose a bug or two from this list or another Bugzilla list and go vote for it!

• On Linux systems that use glibc 2.0 (such as RedHat 5.2), there are problems with dl functions (dlopen(), dlsym()) not being thread safe. This might cause your M11 build to randomly crash at startup. If this happens to you, try running the application a few more times. The bits posted on ftp.mozilla.org are built on RedHat 6.0, which uses glibc 2.1 and does not have this problem. For more details, see bug 8849.

./configure --disable-mailnews

more configure options

Markus

Markus

--

Well... surely nothing can top Mozilla's layout and especially CSS handling. But, darn, it's _extremely_ slow, especially with JavaScript. The "perfect" browser for me be a GNOME browser with Mozilla's power and just some speed enhancements maybe...

gzilla is now known as Armadillo, due, in part, to confusion with Mozilla.

I think we should push mozilla.

Mozilla is a good project for all other Web browser projects, because it's open source. Mozilla has been over the fire for more than a year now and the code is beginning to get debuged and optimized. The mozilla project is build in such a way that non technical people can help, because to help the mozilla project you just need:
1) A supported OS (which there's plenty of a bit less if you want binaries).
2) A web connection (to fecth Mozilla)
3) A e-mail to submit bug repports.

Mozilla's nicest feature is that yoiu can help the development of it for your favorite platform even though you're not using the platform from where you browse the Net [making bug reports on the win32 version @ work also helps the Linux and others OSes versions].
If you want to get more involved you can.
First you help bugzilla by sorting bugs and norrowing their description. Everyone can do it.
You can even push the involvment further and decide to pick a bug and correct it since the source is yours to work on.

Mozilla is really getting a lot better these days, speedier, less and less bugs ....
Today a simple fix changed the numbers of memory link of one of the components from 163 to 29 ....

18.How can GPL code be incorporated into the Communicator code base?

Under our reading of the GPL, it will not be possible to incorporate code covered by the GPL into the Communicator source code base. It is also not possible to use GPLed code and NPLed code together in a Larger Work. This is different for LGPL code. It is possible to create a larger work using LGPLed code that can then be used in conjunction with NPLed code through an API..

Meaning future downloads of a dumbed down interface for your Aunt Gladis or a NIN mozilla chrome with inbuilt mp3 player.

If you can't hack Mozilla assembling a Chrome helps to do your bit to make Mozilla a better browser (...than IE :). If you want to learn more about chromes try Mozillazine's chromeZone.

I can't believe the amount of negative posts about Netscape in this topic. The story itself was already crap but it looks like all the backstabbers are busy this weekend. I can't but wonder if some ACs are here to try to boost opinions that Netscape lost because of an inferior product.

Now let's have a reality check. Netscape is not about Communicator anymore. It's been about Mozilla already for more than a year. Sure they have released new versions of Communicator, but all the hard development and hopes are on Mozilla. And believe me, Mozilla is looking better and better every day. Just grab a nightly build from ftp.mozilla.org and see with your own eyes.

Mozilla has been built from ground up. It's well designed and has some really ground breaking code. It's already faster than IE and there's still a lot to optimize. The nightly build for win32 is just 5,2 MB. Compare that to the 18,1 MB bloat of Communicator and tens of megs of MSIE. Those who have programmed know that the bigger the executable, the more it contains ugly spaghetti code. Mozilla is also perfect for cell phones and hand held devices as it's small, componentized and runs on a free OS. That gives Mozilla a difinite edge compared to MSIE.

We've been patiently waiting for Mozilla for a year already. Now that Mozilla is getting close to ready, we get to read all these horror stories about Netscape being dead. It's just FUD and if you read the Findings of Fact-document, you don't have to be a genious to figure out who's feeding these news. But it doesn't matter what ZDNet, Gartner or Microsoft say. Mozilla will ship within 2-3 months and it will be a great product.

I can't believe the amount of negative posts about Netscape in this topic. The story itself was already crap but it looks like all the backstabbers are busy this weekend. I can't but wonder if some ACs are here to try to boost opinions that Netscape lost because of an inferior product.

Now let's have a reality check. Netscape is not about Communicator anymore. It's been about Mozilla already for more than a year. Sure they have released new versions of Communicator, but all the hard development and hopes are on Mozilla. And believe me, Mozilla is looking better and better every day. Just grab a nightly build from ftp.mozilla.org and see with your own eyes.

Mozilla has been built from ground up. It's well designed and has some really ground breaking code. It's already faster than IE and there's still a lot to optimize. The nightly build for win32 is just 5,2 MB. Compare that to the 18,1 MB bloat of Communicator and tens of megs of MSIE. Those who have programmed know that the bigger the executable, the more it contains ugly spaghetti code. Mozilla is also perfect for cell phones and hand held devices as it's small, componentized and runs on a free OS. That gives Mozilla a difinite edge compared to MSIE.

We've been patiently waiting for Mozilla for a year already. Now that Mozilla is getting close to ready, we get to read all these horror stories about Netscape being dead. It's just FUD and if you read the Findings of Fact-document, you don't have to be a genious to figure out who's feeding these news. But it doesn't matter what ZDNet, Gartner or Microsoft say. Mozilla will ship within 2-3 months and it will be a great product.