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The SVG master of mozilla, isn't he from IBM? Isn't he contributing code to mozilla continuously?

"...the absolute priority that Firefox 1.1 be able to update itself in small background-downloaded increments..."

8:) Also people building from the source -- I get my G4 optimized copies originally from here but now from elsewhere.

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Netscape 7 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant firing of all 50 Netscape developers by AOL only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Mozilla.org leader Mitchell Baker states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Firefox are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Firefox posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Firefox users. Camino posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Firefox posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Camino. A recent article put Netscape 7 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 7 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 7 usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.

Fact: Mozilla is dying

Be sure to check bugzilla.mozilla.org to see if the issue that you're experiencing is a known issue -- and write up a bug if not.

You can also try running one of the nightly builds (see, for example, The Rumbling Edge) to see if that gives you a better experience. Nightlies are untested and may have even worse bugs, of course.

According to Mitchell Baker--MoFo's Chief Lizard Wrangler and the new MoCo's President--the Foundation already generates revenue through "search relationships". No prizes for guessing who she's talking about.

I do have a BIG problem about IPOing. Once there is stock publicly held, the stock holders value is required to be maximized.

While the Mozilla Corporation will be a for-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is keen to stress that it is not selling out. The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in.

I think one of the underlying reasons for this is Google. It's not explicitly stated that this is the reason, but that's what I read between the lines when reading the FAQ about the reorganization. After reading Mitchell Baker's blog, I'm almost certain of it (though he doesn't explicitly state it either).

I think we will be seeing some more serious collaboration between Mozilla and Google now.

Safari http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005 _04.html#008042 is compliant.

Most likely we won't have Acid2-compiliant Gecko available sooner than compiliant Opera and Safari. Some of Acid2 fixes are scheduled for Gecko 1.9.

Considering the amount of money Microsoft could theoretically pump into development on the next version of IE, wouldn't it make more sense for them to be the first to pass the test (and by doing so provide implied compliance with the standard)?

Microsoft won't be the first to pass Acid2, not unless all that money's going to buy A MAGICAL TIME MACHINE...

--grendel drago

Not really. MS showed no sign of slowing IE down

Huh? The thing is ancient, recieved a slapdash, contractually-obligated upgrade for OS X, and that's it. It was widely rumored that MS had given up on IE/Mac as early as 2000. When software goes for 5 years without a major upgrade, it a bit of a clue that nobody's working on it.

MS is Apple's largest ISV, and most evidence indicates that Mac Unit works fairly closely with Apple.

MS was fairly tolerant of Apple while they didn't represent a threat

For the most part, Apple just isn't a threat to MS's business. I'm sorry if the truth hurts.

"You never hear Firefox users down on Opera"

Heck, even Mozilla employees keep putting down Opera and even lying about it :(

"Lots of people don't like the interface (its not really like firefox)"

"its Javascript implementation (while getting better) is barely as good as IE"

"and the fonts look terrible everytime I've tried to use it in Linux."

good work

It fails the Acid2 Test pretty spectacularly - but then what doesn't!
 
  Certain builds of webkit don't.

The development builds supports SVG already. There has been basically a broken implementation around for a while, but they rewrote the SVG back-end for Mozilla 1.5. Link here.

SVG in Mozilla should really rock when they get Cairo implemented! Its Mozilla's bridge to OpenGL 2D acceleration.

Will the OSX version of Firefox be Cocoa based?

What exactly do you mean by "Cocoa based"? How would you be able to tell that it's Cocoa based if you see it? Does it need to be Cocoa based to be good? Apple's own Safari isn't written in Cocoa, in fact, it's written in a convoluted KDE-to-Mac wrapper. That Safari's user interface is so seamless is a testament to Apple engineers.

If you mean "written from the ground up in Objective-C against the Cocoa framework", the answer is no. If you mean "uses Cocoa widgets and form controls", the answer is no for the upcoming 1.5 release, but yes for after that. But as I said, if you can't tell that it's Cocoa, it's probably not important whether it is or not.

Or, run Camino or OmniWeb.

According to Asa: Acid2 is not on the list of requirements for the next major Firefox release [... but] one of our Gecko experts [says] Asa, I think it's safe to promise that the next major Firefox release after [that] will pass Acid2 :-)

Gecko (the rendering engine) for Fx 1.5 will be version 1.8. They are going to branch Gecko 1.8 soon and start making advances towards Gecko 1.9. Acid 2 fixes will be in Gecko >= 1.9 and therefore will probably not be in Fx 1.5, but will probably be in Firefox 2.

For more about all this, see Roc's post in his weblog.

The zooming they mention is very likely to come some day - it is actually being worked on - see this blog post. Might even happen for the Firefox 2 release (formerly known as Firefox 1.5)

Here you have an unofficial MSI for firefox. It also has an administrative template, so that'll ease a lot of the corporate deployment needs.

BTW, if you didn't know, part of the 1.5 work is related to create an official MSI.

Try this link from the Mozillazine knowlege base for making Firefox and Thunderbird the default browser.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Default_browser

Asa Dotzler must be damn pleased to be ahead of the game.

No, honestly, relax; put the kettle on.

Firefox 1.0.5 was the first release since 1.0.4.

This is release 1.0.6

1.0.5 was released on July 14th, six days ago.

...it's worth clarifying that this release fixes one, and only one bug.

There's no (known) security vulnerability here, so if you're extension free, or see no effects, you can shrug this one off.

I wish I could better manage less-standard header fields in the message list in Thunderbird. I recently posted this question to Mozillazine:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2947 61

Can anyone tell me if this kind of Spamassassin integration is possible?

Huh?

Calling it an update, when in actual fact its not

I assure you, every user in the world who is not insane considers "removes a vulnerability that potentially allows any website to read your hard drive" an "update".

I also assure you that if you want to engender trust among your users, removing as immediately as possible bits that would allow any website to read your hard drive is the way to do it.

If upgrades that incidentally break features are illegal, then every single software company in the world would be in jail by now. The legal reference you are vomiting all over this comment tree has nothing whatsoever to do with what WebMonkey did today, it concerns something different.

If you're so incredibly upset that a point release of a minor third-party extension for a minority web browser broke something minor in the process of fixing a truly huge and dangerous broken aspect of the previous point release, then the thing to do would be re-install the previous point release, not come make 30 posts whining about it on slashdot.

the update mechanism is different under linux

I have not used the firefox extention functionality under linux, but the documentation indicates you are flat out wrong here.

In any case, if you wish to turn off the automatic update notify feature for extensions, instructions on how to do so can be found here.

Here's some good info that colfer from this MozillaZine thread dug up:

1.0.5 is mainly a security fix, but I have seen a bunch of non-security fixes creep in also, such as removing the default checkbox "yes" for "make firefox my home page." This looks like a big cleanup for the 1.0.x branch, before 1.1 takes over.

I don't know about the security fixes, besides the medium-risk frame/window spoofing thing (with 1.0.4, you should not open untrusted sites at the same time as sensitive sites...). Here are the non-security fixes (non-security as it seems to me) checked in since 1.0.4:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28373 0
"Save As" dialog tries to overwrite link/shortcut (.lnk) file instead of opening the directory/folder

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29521 0
Tab title different from window title on initial load at gmail

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28377 7
Right arrow key after selecting autocomplete result no longer uses selected item

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29123 2
update installer packages should offer unchecked check box for setting start page

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29106 4
Helper app dialog incomplete for non-nsStandardURL types

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26553 6
(64-bit only issue)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24563 1
Crash loading (particular) .ico file

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14181 8
Table with large rowspans and colspans hangs the browser

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28800 6
Drag image across browser windows --> crash

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29505 2
Obscure Javascript crash

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29627 0
Default user agent problem (AIX platform only)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28081 3
Crash on OS/2 platform

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29377 8
bookmarks toolbar missing in 2nd opened window, links in second window possibly cause crash

Sounds somewhat similar to XUL. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2630 28

Is the Mozilla Foundation making money by making a Google page the default home page?

Yes. They also make money from most of the built-in search engines. Though they claim that decisions are made with the user, not finances in mind (e.g. Google was already the default search engine before the revenue deal was struck).

Would the Mozilla Foundation ever start inlcuding the Google Toolbar in Firefox builds by default? I don't think so. There would be too much backlash from users. If this backlash ever got too much, someone would just fork it and remove the Googleness.

Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker talked about commercial relationships a while back. She (not a typo) emphasised that while the Foundation may make deals regarding defaults etc. in the branded versions, they will never enter into an agreement that affects the actual code (e.g. adding - or removing - features because some company pays them to).

One of the few Firefox 'features' that really annoys me is that each update requires a full download of the installer package.

And I predict a blog post from Asa about how Firefox had this feature before Opera.

Thanks to google's summer code we can hope to have a functional BitTorrent client built with XUL/XPCOM.

Included in Firefox? :-)

Check the Mozilla development projects that have been accepted for Google's Summer of Code program:
http://summer.mozdev.org/projects.html


And the MozillaZine news about it here:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 874

Firefox is simply fastest on Windows, period.

HOWEVER... the latest nightly builds (from the development branch that will eventually become Firefox 1.1) are much faster than the official 1.0.4 you are probably currently using. Also, if you have a newer G4 (PowerPC 744x/745x series... 1GHz or better "G4+") or a G5 you can grab an optimized build for even more performance.

Grab the G4 version here:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/

Grab the G5 version here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2565 17

As of this posting, the newest version for each is the 20050704 (July 4, 2005) build. I am posting this from the July 3 G4 version, it zooms compared to Safari here on OS X 10.4.1.

Could we please stop linking to worthless ZDNet already?

Here's the original weblog post. Much more informative. And you don't need to worry about slashdotting it either, Mozillazine is quite used to us by now, what with an average of hitting the slashdot frontpage about once a week.

Some background on Josh, btw, while I'm waiting for my timeout to be able to post again to expire: he was hired by the Mozilla Foundation specifically to work on making Firefox better for the Mac.

Dammit, how long do I have to wait to post as AC three times in a row??? 17 minutes already. Geeze... It's easier to karma-whore than to just try and post some useful things.

Could we please stop linking to worthless ZDNet already?

Here's the original weblog post. Much more informative. And you don't need to worry about slashdotting it either, Mozillazine is quite used to us by now, what with an average of hitting the slashdot frontpage about once a week.

Some background on Josh, btw, while I'm waiting for my timeout to be able to post again to expire: he was hired by the Mozilla Foundation specifically to work on making Firefox better for the Mac.

Dammit, how long do I have to wait to post as AC three times in a row??? 17 minutes already. Geeze... It's easier to karma-whore than to just try and post some useful things.

Right, just like ASP.NET renders some output differently with Firefox. Server-side script should output the same regardless of the browser. It's bad enough we have to come up with client-side hacks for different browsers.

If you open up your machine.config installed by ASP.NET, you will notice the following note:

For updates to this browser data visit cyScape, Inc. at http://www.cyscape.com/browsercaps

If you click the link, you will get the message "This file is currently under development. Please check back shortly." Surprise, surprise. Yeah, it can be fixed with a bit of Google searching, but why is it broken in the first place? Oh yeah, it's Firefox, which Microsoft hates. Opera is configured correctly, but then again, Opera also isn't made by communists.

This is going worst as Deer Park won't accept GTK without XFT. It's too slow, too ugly, too illisible and ... http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1510 011 ... people in forums have just bogus responses like "upgrade upgrade upgrade". They don't want to understand that anti-aliased fonts are completely bogus in normal sizes. Raster fonts are better at "small" sizes, they matches exactly what it should look at, how the artist think it. When I look at vector fonts with or without AA, I just believe that my mobile phone has BETTER LISIBILITY that my pc... it's... irrationnal ! If Qt/GTK could have an option "prefer raster that vector", I will be soooooooooo happy. This is also impacting speed and comfort.

The lack of a space for a permanant right hand scroll bar means that centred sites jump all over the place, see for example (in firefox http://www.britart.com/ ).

See the crazy discussion on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540 and their discussion page http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=5693 50#569350

About time these snotty Firefox developers got some flak - I was getting people to use it until I saw how bad the rendering was.

There's a good chance your dad will be disappointed with Firefox's popup blocking, unfortunately. Advertisers have been getting around it, mostly by using plugins (especially Flash) to open new windows.

You might want to equip him with the FlashBlock extension (which seems to solve the problem for me, though Adblock might also be helping), or possibly the Popups Must Die extension. Info here.

Read at Gerv's blog. So much for the quality of ZDNet journalism. :)

What you shouldn't be surprised about anymore is alarmist stories in the media.

In fact, they were pretty thorough. When mozilla.org announced the name change, the trademark holder in the UK was mentioned; also mentioned was the deal negotiated with that trademark holder. Oddly enough, the article doesn't contain that last bit of information. Not inflammatory enough, I guess. ^_^

Gervase Markham has a response up on his blog that should probably be read if you find this story interesting.

I'm the person at the MoFo responsible for the trademark discussion with Debian. Please read my blog post on the subject to get the correct story.

I seem to remember Dave Hyatt setting us straight on that one. The iTunes Music Store does not use WebCore or WebKit to render its pages.

Just why, I couldn't guess. It seems like a natural application for it.

I seem to remember Dave Hyatt setting us straight on that one. The iTunes Music Store does not use WebCore or WebKit to render its pages.

Just why, I couldn't guess. It seems like a natural application for it.

Wha? Dave Hyatt posted his announcement on April 27. Based on the comments to that entry, the patches were available around 11:00pm that night. Zack's blog entry is dated April 28, with a timestamp of 6:12pm (I don't know what the relative time zones are).

In any event, it looks like the patches were available a good 18 hours before "KDE team went public on what a mess the whole situation was." Unless you're referring to something else?

Wha? Dave Hyatt posted his announcement on April 27. Based on the comments to that entry, the patches were available around 11:00pm that night. Zack's blog entry is dated April 28, with a timestamp of 6:12pm (I don't know what the relative time zones are).

In any event, it looks like the patches were available a good 18 hours before "KDE team went public on what a mess the whole situation was." Unless you're referring to something else?

The answer is very straightforward: bad timing. In both cases.

To really make the point, the page should include an evil-but-signed ActiveX control (the original "run once, ruin everything" technology).

Gecko (the engine used in Firefox and Mozilla) probably won't be passing it too soon. See Robert O'Callahan's blog entry here. This means Firefox 1.1 won't pass Acid2.

Which would mean no GMail or Google maps, as they rely on the very non-standard XmlHttpRequest object.

Google (and others) made a choice to use non-standard Web development because they were more interested in achieving a particular experience for what they considered a reasonable number of users.

That, in the end, is what matters. Not the Official Nod from a vendor consortium.

Are there advantages to using only W3C recommendations? Sure. But failure to do so is in itself not valid complaint. Or no?