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One thing that Mozilla has proved to the software community is that Open source projects can survive. And they can make a decent (if not in billions of $) profit. I think the main reason behind Mozilla's success are the developers. I am not talking about the on and off developers, but people like Asa Dotzler, Doug Turner, Christian Beisenger, Mitchell Baker, Boris Zbarsky, Brendan Eich, and the other drivers of Mozilla and not forgetting the countless others who are developing applications *using* Mozilla. Three cheers to everyone. I think the Mozilla foundation has evolved a wonderful business model for any entrepreneur looking to build software based on OSS.

One thing that Mozilla has proved to the software community is that Open source projects can survive. And they can make a decent (if not in billions of $) profit. I think the main reason behind Mozilla's success are the developers. I am not talking about the on and off developers, but people like Asa Dotzler, Doug Turner, Christian Beisenger, Mitchell Baker, Boris Zbarsky, Brendan Eich, and the other drivers of Mozilla and not forgetting the countless others who are developing applications *using* Mozilla. Three cheers to everyone. I think the Mozilla foundation has evolved a wonderful business model for any entrepreneur looking to build software based on OSS.

Well, the one thing that I'm really left worrying about is protocol handling: that document allows the file:, about:, and a few other protocols. However, this link shows you how to alleviate that problem as well. I'm also kind of worried about what happens whenever the user tries to download a new filetype, and is given the option to save to disk or select a program -- they could, for instance, select Konq or xterm when downloading (say) .Z zipped files, and there's no way I can set up valid rules for every possible file type -- after all, someone could make one up. What I really need is a method of denying any downloads but images, .pdf files, or HTML/text. I'm still looking for a solution, and if I find one, I'll be sure to send you the information.

It should be somewhat more secure, though, than an unpatched Windows installation using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. And I'm hoping to beat the computer around for the rest of the week and find new holes to fix before deploying.

the user didnt have to click there is a thread in mozillazine about a page that showed (its now something different) the Install me Dialog over and over again until the user clicks "Install". this will be fixed in 1.0 (and is allready in the current nightly) but this was just as scary as those ActiveX horror on some pages (and again: thanks mozilla for fixing those stuff as fast as they do)

To make Firefox render pages faster than IE, start by typing "about:config" in your FireFox address bar. Look for nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to 0 (zero).

The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page. By default it is 250 milliseconds, and even though by setting it to 0 (like Internet Explorer) makes it _seem_ to display pages faster, it ends up taking more overall time than with the default value.

You can also make Firefox faster by:

1.) Setting network.http.pipelining to true
2.) Setting network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
3.) Setting network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a number between 1 and 8

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The "maxrequests" is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. 8 is the maximum Firefox allows it to be, but it may bog down yours, or the server, connection, so it is best to leave these options on their default values.

More information about these and other tweaks are available at the MozillaZine's Firefox Tuning Thread.

Umm... find out a little more about what the browsers are doing.

There's always a trade-off between rendering speed and quality. Do you start to lay-out the page before all content has been fetched, thus incurring unsighltly redraws and reflows as new content invalidates the current best-guess display? Or do you hold off on painting somewhat to allow more content to arrive, and thus a better initial layout?

Gecko-based browsers give you full control over this, so you can tune it to your network performance. By default, it always waits 250msec (or is it less now?) before displaying anything. Of course, it ain't twiddling its thumbs during this -- it's building the page, but not showing it to avoid ugly reflows. Jump into the prefs (type about:config and find initialpaintdelay) and set it to 0 to make it render immediately.

It's psychological. That inital pause where nothing appears to be going on may make you think Gecko's slower than IE. But the time from initiating the load to a mostly-complete layout may well actually be smaller than IE.

If you really want to learn about this stuff from a guy who's as close to being a guru as you're gonna get on this subject, check out this post on Dave Hyatt's (Moziila/Apple developer) weblog.

See this thread for prefs.js tweaks you can use to make pages render more quickly in Firefox (and Mozilla, though not all these tweaks are available in Mozilla).

If you are a FireFox fan, the Mozilla team would like your help:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005930 .html

• A ~4Mb download
• Much faster at rendering and downloading pages (especially with user-defined speed improvements)
• Less of a memory-hog than IE (IE is only any good because of it's integration with Windows)

The Surfin Safari webpage shows David Hyatt's public weblog discussion on the matter of the Safari HTML extensions, it is a very interested read. (David Hyatt is the lead engineer at Apple on WebCore, Safari's rendering engine.)

Nah, I understand the difference. The reason I bring it up is because it was mentioned explicitly with regards to concerns similar to yours on Surfin' Safari. The point being that the native code is contained in the plugins, rather than just being located arbitrarily on your computer or the internet.

I also suspect that the plugins for Dashboard items will be bundled all together, much as Applications are in OS X, so that other webkit applications can't access random Dashboard plugins. But that's just a guess.

=Brian

Sadly, this article: not so funny. However, since we're talking about Dashboard, I recommend going to Surfin' Safari, the weblog of Dave Hyatt, lead programmer of Safari. Since WWDC, he's been talking about Dashboard, what it really is, and the development path they're taking.

Dashboard is actually going to be a WebKit application, with some HTML Extensions to let you do things like put a transparent mask over the window and call local code. He's discussing putting the HTML extensions into their own default namespace right now, as well as submitting them for standards approval (well, some of them). It's a very interesting weblog, and certainly worth having on the RSS feed if you're at all interested in the development of Safari and webkit.

=Brian

Firefox is being patched at exactly the same rate--it uses the latest stable branch in its nightly, and Mozilla and Firefox, save technical difficulties, are kept on constant synch.

Security issues are patched by releasing new binaries, and today also via XPI.

How do I know? I read Mozillazine's status reports.

By the way, for non-Mozillazine readers, the XPI patches an existing binary that is not 0.92 to be equalivent to the patched binary. It is not neccessary for 0.92 or above. (for historical purposes.)

Nearly two years ago, not that many users were using Mozilla. In addition, AOL had something to say about the priorities. When you have marketing people driving the direction of software, you end up with bug-infested stuff like IE. The world is lucky that Mozilla has reached it's current state in spite of marketing people.

Safari is based off the Konqueror engine. For more on Safari read David Hyatt's weblog here.

For all the GMail users out there, some must have extensions
- GMail Notifier
- GMailCompose

The biggest problem is that for many Windows users, there seems to be a serious bug that prevents them from installing extensions at all- it may be related to the uninstallation between .9 and .9.1. The relevant MozillaZine page is here

It's not an IPv6 issue directly, but disabling IPv6 fixes it. It's an interaction between glibc and Firefox which results in a lot of reverse-lookups. Disabling IPv6 is a workaround which happens to get Firefox to revert to older behavior which avoids the problem. See this.

The fact that they continue to hold such a low market share makes it really unnecessary for a virus writer to target them, when they can infect 100000 times the amount of machines on a Windows OS.

There's the market share argument again!

Look, I won't bore you with the usual Apache has over 2/3 of the web server market share and all that. No, luckily (in this case?!), we can now highlight Mozilla as a product which still has a low market share in the browser market - as we all know - you see, recently we've seen malware target this particular browser, trying to trick users to installing a malicious extension via XPI.

Mind you, this is not a bug being exploited, but the usual "let's hope the gullible user clicks the 'OK'-button" type of trick. It will not install without user intervention!

Anyway, the bottom-line is that the market share argument is getting old, IMHO. But more importantly, this problem has been handled excellently by the Mozilla developer and user communinity. Blocking of onload-activated XPI installations has been implemented promtly as well as an extension website whitelist (though this one is not activated by default as of yet).

There really isn't much to open source. While WebKit is mostly closed source, there's nothing really to stop an open source developer from using KHTML or Gecko instead. That just leaves Expose. No way would Apple open source that. Crown Jewels territory.

See one of developers' blogs and read the entries titled "Dashboard".

My vague understanding of the system is this: basic Dashboard widgets are just webpages, and as such run as the "nobody" user, giving them zero access to the computer on which they're running.

It is possible to write widgets with actual native code in them, and those, I believe, need an admin password to install/run the first time (just like any other app).

For further reading, see Dave Hyatt's webpage. Specifically, his latest post on Dashboard.

I'm with you on the problems with Konfab. I'm not used to programs running so slowly as to make my computer impossible to use, and I'm running an old 1999 iMac.

My vague understanding of the system is this: basic Dashboard widgets are just webpages, and as such run as the "nobody" user, giving them zero access to the computer on which they're running.

It is possible to write widgets with actual native code in them, and those, I believe, need an admin password to install/run the first time (just like any other app).

For further reading, see Dave Hyatt's webpage. Specifically, his latest post on Dashboard.

I'm with you on the problems with Konfab. I'm not used to programs running so slowly as to make my computer impossible to use, and I'm running an old 1999 iMac.

Surfin' Safari

He makes the excellent point that Dashboard/Konfabulator-type of widgets have been done in browsers, too.

My comment about Watson/Sherlock stills seems applicable: don't whine, give us a better product. ;-)

As for many of the animations, fades, slides, etc in the widgets themselves., they simply look so damn cool because of Safari's rich support for CSS3 used in conjunction with DHTML.

1. Widgets were not invented for Konfabulator.
2. Widgets as a layer of the desktop was not invented for Konfabulator.
3. Widgets as an Exposé layer was only implemented in Konfabulator last Friday, pointing to parallel development rather than a ripoff.

MozillaZine's discussion notes several problems this will create. Notably, extensions and themes that are compatible with 0.9 won't appear properly.

In general, it seems that 0.9.1 was released too hastily.

Can someone point me to an easy-to-read article that explains the problems with IE, what alternatives like Firefox exist, and how to switch? I want to send it to everyone I know, urging them to switch away from IE.

Here you go!

Seriously, though, this article from Forbes is a little dated, and doesn't mention security, but isn't bad. It's worth trawling through Mozillazine's archives - I couldn't find them just now, but I seem to remember a while back they had a whole bunch of "why switch?" articles.

I can think of one major reason. Security. Actually, given how bad windows security has been lately, I'd recommend that most users not use windows unless their geeks and know how to keep it clean, and free of Spyware. I already install mozilla whenever I come across a Spyware infected machine. There is some Spyware that infects mozilla on win32. (The user gets a warning about installing XPI, but it's not even as menacing as IE ActiveX warnings. On the other hand, many Spyware programs install themselves via security holes in IE)

Running as non-root on a Linux machine is much safer for the naiveté surfer then running windows.

We'll have to see how XP SP2 fares as far as protecting users from all the people who want to rape them.

Also on many other news sources.

There is also more info about the nice little Minimo project (to produce a Gecko-based browser with a tiny footprint).

Also on many other news sources.

There is also more info about the nice little Minimo project (to produce a Gecko-based browser with a tiny footprint).

Here's a very good link for both this and mailto: links in Firefox. I agree that this is a MAJOR design flaw in Firefox and Thunderbird.

Why are they still developing Mozilla instead of just developing Firefox, Thunderbird, and the core?

Because Mozilla is not simply a web browser. This is a misconception that a lot of people have. Before anything else, Mozilla is a technology. Other products such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and a slew of other third-party applications use Mozilla as their base platform. The fact that the technology and the application suite are both called "Mozilla" is very confusing. Although I can't find anything on this anymore, the old Mozilla web site explicitly stated that Mozilla-the-application-suite was for reference and testing and that external parties were responsible for making complete software packages. For a quite a while, they even refused to make binaries available. Bottom line: end users shouldn't be using the Mozilla suite unless they are testing or developing the underlying technology. Well, in theory.

Firefox, Thunderbird are still pet projects.

They are hardly pet projects. The big push began over a year ago to make Firefox (then "Phoenix") and Thunderbird the main focus of future development. The main difference between Mozilla and Firefox/Thunderbird is that the latter were specifically designed to be fit for use by the general public. The Mozilla suite will still probably be around forever as it's the implementation of the technology that the developers hack upon.

Firefox has been in development for a lot of time.

Are you mad? According to this MozillaZine article the first Phoenix nightlies became available on or around September 5, 2002. If you generously estimate that they had been working on the pre-0.1 code behind closed doors for a few months prior, that means that Firefox has been in development for almost two years. You call THAT a long time? To have a piece of software--let alone something as complex as a web browser--almost ready for 1.0 in two years is nothing short of astonishing.

That is why their development is so slow.

I have no evidence of whether or not Firefox and Thuderbird development is "slow" (or what you would compare it to in order to arrive at that descision), but based on what I have presented above, I think it's fair to say that "slow" probably isn't an apt term in this case.

Yes, there were lots of little changes.

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

Found a better one if you're interested. Thanks for the response, tho.

Check out this forum post. I had this problem on OS X, but it involved renaming a settin in the "profile.ini" file to use the old xxxxxxx.slt location instead of the new one named "default".

Hope that helps.

And here's that link!

Yeah I almost flipped a lid that I lost my mail and didn't bother to back up Thunderbird. Then I realized I'm an idiot, and the application doesn't store my user info.

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

Totally incorrect. While the Release Candidate was released on Monday, which is what you linked to, the new 0.7 is the official release two days later as no major problems were found with the Release Candidate. For more information, see here.

The correct thread by mscott, pointing out the 0.7 release is right here. This is not a release candidate but an actual point release.

More information here

You might try looking on the support forum for upgrade instructions next time.
It would have been nice to have a link to that on the main page where everyone would see it before having problems.

There was a nice post on optimizing Firefox (or any gecko based browser) in the Mozillazine Firefox forums here. These tweaks can apparently speed up page load/render time by nearly 30% for some pages.

There was a nice post on optimizing Firefox (or any gecko based browser) in the Mozillazine Firefox forums here. These tweaks can apparently speed up page load/render time by nearly 30% for some pages.

The Mozillazine forums were the place to lodge your concerns when the story broke on /. a week ago.

The thread went to dozens of pages of replies, including a few of my own, particularly from the point of view of an evangelist, since I often point clueless IE users to Phoenix when they've been victimized by yet another browser hijack.

The new default theme will make IE users uncomfrtable, probably to the point that they would rather try to "fix" IE. Yes, you can change the theme, but IE refugees don't have that kind of attention span.

Anyway, the thread was locked after 3 days and over 100,000 views. The response was overwhelmingly negative but Ben Goodger was not inclined to defend his "executive decision", which ultimately boiled down to a battle of egos. The author of Qute made it clear he would license his theme freely enough to be included as the default, but out hero Ben had already made up his mind and chose to fall on his own sword rather than make up with Arvid and get Qute back in.

The Mozilla devs are not accountable.

Personally, I hope someone with evangelists in mind repackages each point release of FireFox with Qute as the default theme so that I can point IE users to it.

Found a solution via Firefox Forums.

Now, firefox -remote 'ping()' should be firefox -a firefox -remote 'ping()'. Also, firefox -remote 'openURL(http://slashdot.org/, new-tab)' should be firefox -a firefox -remote 'openURL(http://slashdot.org/, new-tab)'. Etc.

Old extensions and themes are going to be broken so you're going to have to make a new profile and install new versions. Here are the extensions and themes that have been updated.

I tried to put the list in here since MozillaZine always gets /.ed, but it wouldn't make it past the filter.

Old extensions and themes are going to be broken so you're going to have to make a new profile and install new versions. Here are the extensions and themes that have been updated.

I tried to put the list in here since MozillaZine always gets /.ed, but it wouldn't make it past the filter.

These threads were created to show which have been updated to work with .9:
.9 extensions
.9 themes

Extensions
Themes

Keep in mind that the packaging requirements changed for this release, so not all of your old favorites are 0.9 compatible (yet).

If you want the old 0.8 theme back, you can find it here: Qute