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Mozilla's Future Uncertain
Wednesday June 30th, 1999

Benj, Ben Marklein, Geoff Elliott and J.R. have some distressing news. Apparently Sun is considering changes to Mozilla's licensing model, because in the words of Alan Baratz of Javasoft, "I'm not sure Mozilla.org is working all that well."

Alan actually mentions the possibility of moving Mozilla to the Java community licensing model, as if it would be a better option. I think that they should seriously consider every other option first. And then reconsider them again.

UPDATE: Apparently AOL has nothing to do with the comments made by Javasoft's Alan Baratz.

I agree that the GUI must be good looking to get users to switch, however, a browser doesn't live by GUI alone. Even more important are the features and functionality. That's the part of the project being worked on the most right now. The current default UI is made to be functional and nothing else. The idea of having a very good default UI has already been talked about at MozillaZine.org. (It's in the Old News section now and is the largest thread they've ever seen over there, I do NOT recomend taking the time to read through it as it is very redundant [It's more of an argument than an informative discution, but a few good points came out of it]).

You can change the layout using chrome.

Also gtk themes work on the Linux version. Of course you may be SOL if you cannot download any software.

...because it feels about an order of magnitude slower than Communicator 4.6 on this Linux box.

Ah, but you must remember that this is still an alpha (or pre-alpha, even?) release. There is still a lot of debugging stuff in the code.

I guess that when those are removed and there is some optimization done, it will be much faster.

Also, at this point (I think) it doesn't do caching correctly, which of course lowers performance.

Wait a few Milestones, I'd say, and then see whether the speed has improved!

And as for the outlook of the browser, that is very much configurable by the new XUL standard. Check out MozillaZine's ChromeZone for more information.

/Bergie

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M6 Out!

Well folks, I would say this is not completely unwelcome--4.6 does seem a little more stable than 4.51 was, although even so, I still can't get it to run more than a few minutes without crashing. And worst of all, unlike the current Mozilla SeaMonkey project, 4.6 is still proprietary, so don't even think about trying to go into the code and trying to fix the bugs yourself... If you don't like the bugs, tough--you'll have to live with them. Personally, I think Netscape has got to be the most unstable, bloated piece of software I've seen for Linux yet. I think the Linux platform is desperately in need of a better browser. I say, while 4.6 is a nice interim measure, at the same time, I hope Netscape isn't spending too much in the way of resources on the 4.x line still, for as Jamie Zawinski said, Netscape sunk a huge amount of engineering effort into the 4.5 release in 1998, and that was a huge blow to Mozilla.

And on this front, I would say that Mozilla SeaMonkey is currently our best (and maybe our only) hope of getting a better browser for Linux... And what could be better? It is even open source! I therefore would like to call to all of you to help with the Mozilla project. Let us prove to Jamie Zawinski that all Mozilla needed was a little time.

I am one of the people who is contributing. Admittedly, I am not much of a coder--I only just completed some introductory C/C++ courses. But you do not even have to know C/C++ to do things like file bug reports, or even just give tips. For example, check this out. These open source tools were suggested to them by me.

Or, check out bug reports, like this. I submitted the patch that fixed that bug.

My point is, you don't have to know much about programming to help. And I think Mozilla deserves all the help it can get right now. So please, let us help Mozilla.

In case you people want to know what Mozilla is like... Let me say:

1) It is a radical departure from the old Netscape, and about time, too.
2) It is STANDARDS based. Example: ALL CSS1 properties are now supported.
3) It is truly cross-platform, unlike IE. Cross-platform UIs are built using a form of XML, in .XUL files. These are really cool.
4) It will support Skins (or Chrome), much like WinAmp. Skins anyone??
5) Also please check out MozillaZine. They have some chrome available there.

Z.

java isn't supposed to be C++.

Thank god!

the whole point of java is "write once, run anywhere". compiling to native code does not advance that.

You say this because you have chosen Definition #3 of what the word "Java" means ("a virtual machine") and ignored the other equally true definitions.

Java is also a language. It is a good language. I would like to write programs in it.

Virtual machines are cool. Security models that allow network-distributed code are cool. Serialization and agent-like behavior is also cool.

But these are not what I'm most interested in. There are a lot of people who are most interested in those things, but me, I just want to write a program that will run on some suitable number of architectures. I'm happy distributing binaries for each architecture to do that. Sure, having one binary that ran on everything would be nice, but you know, it's just not a hard requirement.

Today, I program in C.

I think C is a pretty crummy language. I would like to write the same kinds of programs in a better language.

I would like that language to be Java.

It's just that simple, and that's why this is great news.

The reason I like Java is because it's a language that both supports implicit storage management well (meaning, at the language level) and because it provides good tools for programming in an object oriented style.

Note that there is no such thing as an ``object oriented language.'' You can write code that looks like assembler in Java too, if you want. Java is cool because it makes sensible style easy.

Unlike, for example, C++.

C is a fairly crummy language, but the reason is that C is basically a set of macros on top of PDP-10 assembler, and who wants to hack in assembler? That abomination we know as C++ is a set of macros on top of C that try to bring it kicking and screaming into the early 80s, and the end result is, well, object-oriented assembler.

Not to mention that while both K&R C and ANSI C have proven to be extremely portable, C++ has proven to be anything but.

But the main problem with C++ is that it has poisoned so many young minds.

There is a whole generation of programmers who think that these broken, rusty tools that C++ provides have anything to do with an object-oriented programming style! They don't even think to question that C++ has a difference between ``virtual'' and ``non-virtual'' functions: as if a real language would have any other kind!

When I program in an object-oriented style, I do it in C, because C is a better language for writing object-oriented programs (in fact, any programs) than C++.

If you made it this far without gagging, then probably the C++ worms haven't eaten in to your brain yet, and you should go grab yourself a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and learn what object oriented programming is actually all about. (If you're interested, you can read a mini-review of it I wrote at mozillazine.org.)

Java-the-language is not without its faults, but it's so much better than C or C++ it's not even funny. Yeah, I'd rather use CLOS, but that's just not even remotely practical any more.

Ah, those were the good old days. There must be some way of implementing that in html though, then that would be sweet. The only way I can think of would be a java client but that would just suck. The only way I can think to implement it is with Dynamic DOM rewriting that was just mentioned on mozillazine today. It allows you to rewrite parts of the screen instead of doing a total refresh. In that way you could have more of an ANSI session implemented in html (which brings up the point, the more we advance technology, the more we re-invent old ideas).

Bre would get really interesting though. Imagine a game of bre between /., segfault, bedope and userfriendly. You'd have litterly a couple thousand people on each team. That would be unreal. I think the most people I've ever seen on one team was about 50 (HOD rules, ya!). And we won of course.

But one other thing, it would have to be the classic tradewars that was released about 12 years ago, not the updated one that came out about 6 years ago, that "newer" one was as good. Cloaks failed on you, way to many new ship types. The ferengi sucked, etc.

I think that's the problem right there.

Netscape 5.0 is the better product (IE can't come close to gecko's standard's compliance)

Netscape for windows is a kick-ass product, very stable and fully functional, flexible UI.

Netscape for linux needs A LOT of work. It's only
a shadow of it's windows counterpart (sad but true)

The bottom line is that for LINUX to get a high quality browser (short of starting something from scratch) either Netscape has to invest into some talented *NIX programmers or us penguins will have to become more involved in mozilla development.

http://www.mozilla.org - mozilla project homepage

http://www.mozillazine.org - information on the mozilla project

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I agree with how badass this project is. The incremental resizing reflow alone is much better than NS 4.5.x or IE 5.x. It's making very steady progress now.

Some other good resources are MozillaZine for general news and Netscaped.net for very specific information on daily progress of builds, including screenshots.

Um, it annoys me too, and it's definitely ugly, but you might want to check out the references in a similar spelling flamewar on the Mozillazine -- Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both say it's a valid spelling. Personally I'm particularly irritated by `loose' used where the correct word is `lose'. Ob-spelling-mistake: so htere.