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Netscape 6/Mozilla Beta Release in 25 Days
liber wrote to us with the press release on Yahoo! regarding the upcoming release of Netscape 6, aka Mozilla. It's a beta, not a full release, but the piece does a good job of talking about consumer anticipation, as well as the big companies that are behind it. Don't wait until the crowd hits. Get started now.
Did someone say MS ASTROTURFER ?
oh of course. that must be it.
idiot
1) you are right
2) mac sucks, therefore you suck
3) get out of 640x480. dork
I did try the nightly build, and it keeps crashing on the first URL I give it. And that's the windows version which has always been considerably more stable than the linux one. Anyway, I'm posting this with linux M14, and I'm sure last night was just bad luck. Now let's pray that his gets posted. This text box isn't behaving all too predictably... (especially backspace behaviour).
The original opensource release of the Netscape code was Version 5. Mozilla has been re-written, hence the version increase.
I had gotten the impression from a month ago that it wasn't anything really new, now that I see the new press release that there's a little more to it than that.
Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.
Microsoft's latest OS is selling well
INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000
Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings
New operating system is a hit
Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"
well I'd switch to Outlook express if it were there for linux..... speaking of which I might just switch over to solaris from linux (although $75 is not like the free download linux is).
Hmmm, MSIE 5.0 on Mac rocks, Netscape 4.x is pathetic everywhere.
>Is it just me or did that article sound like a press release straight from netscape....
Umn, maybe because it WAS? And said so in the Slashdot article?
liber wrote to us with the press release on Yahoo! regarding the upcoming release of Netscape 6
(Emphasis mine....)
"We have enough Linux and Windows people, but no Mac people. This means that some days, the reopening of the tree is delayed an hour or more while someone is found from inside Netscape."
Dear AOL,
Thank you for your invitation to join your QA department. I am currently employed at a different company, but I am willing to consider your job offer. Please send details as to my salary and benefits.
Yours Truly,
Anonymous Coward
Ladies and Gentlemen, if you're beginning to get "that feeling" like I am do not doubt your intuition any longer:
the turd-minions are thick and heavy amongst us today. Special orders from their Dark Lord I suppose.
How does it feel to be Bill's butt boy, and to have everybody know it...
Whatever. IE is far and away the best browser for the Mac
twas pretty cool wasnt it
Fat chance you'll get the second item after implementing the first.
You're not a troll, after all. You're just an idiot.
NT
I agree with your opinion of M14 I don't understand how they put it out of the door. In my opinion it was even more unstable than M13. However I picked up a nightly build 2 weeks later and the difference both in speed and stability were quite impressive. Though the back button is still not fied :( . So I would recommend picking up a recent nightly build.
You are kidding, right? There are many, many places where mozilla is broken in HTML 4.0
TFOOT/THEAD don't work right, and don't support many things that have been in IE, and HTML standard for years (valign, for example)
BLINK is still in there. that's not standard
no ONSCROLL for TEXTAREA (or most anything)
TBODY - no align support
I could go on, but that's just little quirky html stuff. What about XSL?
Face it, we will never have a 'standards' browser, because they will slip in legacy stuff (like blink) to support old products, and standards are a moving target.
AFAIK this was due to some non-threadsafe class implementations. These have now been fixed in the nightly builds and will doubtless be in M15. It's now very stable on SMP. I've been running the latest nightly build all day without a single crash. Bet it crashes, now that I've said that.
Maybe so. But IE 5 has been available and running stably for a year now - Mozilla is still alpha code. There are almost NO sites that Mozilla would render "better" than IE 5 at this point. Why? Because all us web designers have to make sure our sites work with the crap they call Netscape 4
Yup. That's about the long and short of it.
a) he is a troll. So are you.
You're obvious enough aren't you? Better sell it, Microf00l!
Reference your mozilla website; it says there XUL is pronounced "zuul"
So there.
Yeah if you like surfing through a Win32 compat layer that'll go down on you harder & faster than rabid Krakho'.
I must say, I didn't believe the original poster. I tried M14 and it sucked very badly. It crashed constantly and was all around a pain in the ass in every department.
I'm running the latest nightly build right now and it's MILES ahead of M14. One thing people need to make sure they do is delete ~/.mozilla. Leaving old configuration around tends to cause very strange behavior.
I must say... I'm much more impressed!
I just downloaded a beta copy of NS 6, and noticed that it has trouble rendering most of the DHTML scripts currently out there. For example, I used NS 6 to go to the DHTML code library Dynamic Drive, and virtually no scripts there work in NS 6. I hope that changes when NS 6 officially comes out, or else I'm ditching it for good.
You gunna sit there and tell me you've found a case in MOZILLA where this happens? (resize triggering reload of file) I don't think so.
As a long-time Netscape fan, I have to say that I think it is possible for them to re-gain the 'browser crown' from Microsoft. It's taken them way too long to get this out of the gate though. I hope they don't make the same mistakes they did before (like releasing the customisation kit about 6 months after the prog was released - this is what seriously increases use in the big companies).
Personally, I hope it works out well for Netscape. They developed the best browser first, and lost their crown partly due to uncompetitive practices.
Go for it Netscape!
Yeah, it autodetects so good it can't tell an plain ASCII text file from a Word doc? Give me a break.
Besides, it doesn't matter if you think that autodetection is better. It is specifically prohibited in the standard unless a Web server gives no MIME information at all. If IE autodetects, it is not compliant with the HTTP 1.0 or the HTTP 1.1 specifications.
1) I had problems with the "Mn" release. 2) So go to www.mozilla.org and report the bug. 3) I had problems with the "Mn" release. 4) So go to www.mozilla.org and report the bug. 5) I had problems with the "Mn" release and noone has fixed them and I have posted to slashdot 100 times about it but STILL noone has fixed it... waahhhhhhhhhhh wahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I wouldn't be surprised if an IE 6 beta was made available really, really soon... Mozilla will not be in beta form in 25 days. IE blows the door of Mozilla and the IE 5.5 beta makes the current Mozilla build look like it was developed for a highschool project.
IE tries to autodetect because a lot of stupid webservers send MIME type of application/octet-stream instead of the actual mime type. If IE didnt do this, it would be broken with respect to a lot of webservers out there.
Add in all the fancy CSS and XML and Gecko stuff you want... I don't care. All I want is a browser that doesn't crash. Please Please Please build one that doesn't crash. Fix memory leaks and bad pointer dereferences. Fix the last 25 or so crash reports that I submitted. BUILD IN SOME EXCEPTION HANDLING! Why not? All I want is a browser that doesn't crash. On Linux. That's all.
"We have enough Linux and Windows people, but no Mac people."
Read as: We have enough other people used to their machine crashing twenty times a day that they won't mind crash-testing ANOTHER company's software for us for free; now we just need to sucker in some Mac users.
Yours truly,
someone who can't be bothered with slashdot enough to make up an account,
If a copmany is going to be producing a product that is of as low quality a mozilla is the onus of testing is up to them. If they want to test their mac version go have AOL buy them a couple of dozen. The idea of 'bailing out' AOL cause they have to 'dig up' someone to test the mac build is worthy of ridicule. If they really want to compete with MS and the new features that is in their new 'release grade' (and i use that loosely) browser then they have to get on the ball not beg for charity. Pardon me while i cry crocodile tears.
I will agree with you on that. The current Netscape is horrid. Right now, I have a friend working on a web page. It looks great under Mozilla, IE, and even the KDE web browser, but Netscape can't handle it. Mozilla is the best gamble on the future of web browsers. Even more so than IE, since it's open source.
of this post being moderated down to a -1 is being released today.
I can't believe you! you fucking troll!
xand xdon't xget xme xstarted xabout X!
Cause that's what we ALWAYS say when someone preannounces a product 25-days-before-even-a-beta-will-be-available.
Right? RIGHT?
~ sig11
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Netscape 6 is Netscape's proprietry version of their own open source mozilla code that uses their new Gecko engine. Mozilla.org is a non-profit organization that is developing a new stable freeware browser using the netscape 4.x opensource code. Netscape 6 is the Netscape Communications corporation's new browser release that is totally unrelated to Mozilla.org. Netscape 6 is what the folks at Netscape have been working on for the past two years, not what the folks at mozilla.org have been working on in their spare time. Mozilla is free, but Netscape 6 is going to be the compact new browser that's supposed to help AOL take over the consumer online world.
Can somebody please explain the relationship between Mozilla and Gecko? I mean, that article didn't even mention Mozilla, they kept talking about Gecko. What the f**k is Gecko?
How does it feel to be Bill's butt boy, and to have everybody know it...
If Linux has friends like this, I'd hate to see its enemies...
Hmm... works fine for me in Internet Explorer!
I'm sorry, but as a long-term advocate of Linux and the open-source movement as a whole I have to say that I'm truly fed up with the way the community, and especially /., has fallen for a hype machine that Microsoft must envy.
Yet again we have another story which is just a pointer to a company press release full of marketroid hype and company propaganda. And I'm sure this story will be inundated with posts saying little other than "woohoo", "Mozilla roolz" or "IE sucks!" It's time for the Linux community to wake up to some harsh facts, and unless they do so then Linux will end up as the next in the line of operating systems abandoned for the "next big thing".
The Mozilla project so far has produced more hype than code, and what code there is is buggy, unstable and nowhere near usable. When this beta comes out, thousands will rush to download and install it, only to switch back to their old browser a few days later as they get frustrated with the slow performance and inevitable crashes. It's a crying shame as otherwise it looks like a good browser - maybe the next attempt will get it right. And as much as we all hate Microsoft, at least Internet Explorer works and is compliant with all but the latest W3C standards.
I doubt I'll bother with this release, but I'm looking foward to the day when we see a great browser for Linux which delivers performance rather than hype. Thank you.
tkThere tkAre tkStill tkOther tkOptions...
No you don't. IE on Mac and Solaris is a big pile of poo. Let it stay on its poo platform and die along with the shitheads who tried to assram the world with both.
Yeah I mean you, you shitheads! Better sell now!
Man, /. is not worth even reading anymore. All you script-kiddie wannna-be's have ruined it
Uh... I always thought Mozilla would be Netscape 5... but it says Mozilla is Netscape 6 ?! What happened with Netscape 5? Did they left it out because they were so damn far behind schedule?
Gecko is a small, speedy, standards-compliant, open source embeddable browser engine, which is being developed in the open via mozilla.org by Netscape and other developers.
Gecko is HUGE, SLOW and HALFBAKED standards-compliant.
Not only that, it's butt ugly, crashy, and, well, useless.
When they started Mozilla project it looked good, however it's no longer small and fast. I'll stick with Netscape 4.72.
ho hum. Netscape is a has-been. Like Linux. Like Slashdot.
What ever happened to the GTK+ defaults? IIRC, back when mozilla was fast it used the GTK+ default widgets. Now it uses these damn "skins" that seem to slow down performance greatly. Is this a coincidence or what? Should there be an effort to make mozilla use the GTK+ default widgets? I personally think that would be great for two reasons. One, because it would (probably) be faster). Two, because it would look like the rest of my desktop.
Come out tonight Come out tonight.
MS TRollz won't ya come out tonight,
Oh wait,
you already have....
Between the Corel announcement and this one, the turd-minions of redmond are a-swarm! Don't travel abroad without garlic braids, vials of Holy Water and your shotguns!
I'll give you that mozilla runs fine on my single processor i386 compatible machine.
But there are pretty glaring issues for some people with mozilla. Example: people with smp boxen. Last I checked, you couldn't even get it started. You were totaly screwed in multiprocessor environment. (This is just one example, and it may have changed, but please understand that not eveyone has the same success as you. The damn thing has never even compiled right for me, I just run the binaries.)
In conclusion, mozilla is not a simple piece of software. It is so huge and complex that you cant just say it is "ready for beta". It really isn't for a lot of people.
AFAIK, it has none of the new code that is currently present in Mozilla 5.
Something called "Netscape 5" was never released except in an attempt to rewrite history. The original Mozilla release was called "Mozilla" at the time.
Look, we know that version numbers are all marketing, so it really doesn't matter. We'd all run it if it was called version 4.8 or version 48. But since Netscape is a Slashdot fave, we'll propogate some bogus story about Netscape 5 being sorta released a couple years ago. Whatever. Just if Microsoft pulled the same versioning tricks (as they always have), we'd bitch (as we always do).
Let's just be honest and admit this -- Version numbers matter most nowdays as a way to impress pinheads. Our acceptance of Netscape v6 as a legitmate version number is just our way of supporting the Netscape marketing machine.
2) My guess is they'll use Chrome to change some of the UI. You're right about it needing a multi-level back button, however
3) View->Sidebar will turn it off. However, provided they add more sites to it, it would rock. I can go through about 10 sites in a minute and check to see if there's any new/interesting. And you can always just leave it minaturized when not it use.
Okay, now personally I've got a lot of things to do in my life at the moment and I don't want to have to download a new version of Mozilla every night just to fix yet another bug which prevents me from running it/looking at page X/whatever. The few times I have been bothered to get the latest nightly build it's been a waste of time - there's still any number of problems stopping me from using it.
And yet I still get told that I'm wrong for criticising Mozilla, even though it's like the boy who cried wolf. The blind zealotry of a large proportion of the Linux community still astounds me. All people here are saying is "No! No! You're wrong! Mozilla is great!" and overlooking its flaws. Saying get the new build every night isn't saying it works - it just says people are working on it. When (and if) it gets to the point where it doesn't need a nightly build then I might consider it.
Do you trust a browser that cant count? 1,2,3,4,6. Do they know the ABCs?
1. Netscape 6 will be the version of Mozilla officially supported by Netscape and will have a different UI. Mozilla and Netscape's browser are independent projects. 2. Gecko (the rendering endine) and XUL (an XML language for describing UIs) are more likely to do what Java applets promised to do, i.e. implement fully functional and efficient web-based applications.
I think what you meant was:
Welcome to my kill-file, luser.
HTH, HAND.
Easy, simple steps -- yes, even you could do it:-
1. Moderate DOWN all posts questioning or saying negative things about Open Source, no matter how reasonable or accurate they may be.
2. Moderate UP all pro Open Source posts, no matter how stupid or inaccurate.
3. Moderate UP all posts from people saying nice things about VA Linux/Andover/Malda.
4. Watch VA/Andover/Slashdot stock $$$$ rise
and have a really good laugh at all those suckers who let them get away with it.
I'm more than tired of attempting to try and develop pages for both Netscape and IE.
Face the facts people: Netscape is dead.
AOL bought, raped and pilaged a good browser comapany and the releases nowadays are nothing more than netscape 4.04 with more ADs.
Netscape sucks with standards. No offense since I know most of you are rabidly anti-MS. But, last i checked, Netscape can't have a background image in a table that doesnt get copied into every embedded table. Netscape cant follow CSS as well as IE (you cant have a static background, text changes on onMouseOvers and the like).
Netscape crashes when DHTML places DIV tags outside the window and a ton of other irritants to web developers make cross-platform developement a nightmare for webmasters.
If Mozilla gets better, Fine. Great. Super spiffy. But don't feed this line of Bull that Netscape is better than IE at following standards.
Excuse me, but I do have a full-time job to do as well as open-source coding you know. The time I spend coding for my own enjoyment is generally spent doing kernel patches, which I think is more worthwhile to Linux than an ugly, buggy browser. And let's face it, Mozilla certainly isn't short of interest - you'd have thought they'd had enough people to get round to fixing some of those bugs.
So cut your yap and stop complaining about me not working on the code myself. I don't see you saying anything about what code you've produced.
Nothing mysterious about it. M$ Astroturfers with moderator points.
I found that setting the Netscape history size to 0 neuters the autocomplete feature.
I use IE 5.01 right now because it's faster and has a cleaner interface than Netscape 4.x. But, I'm looking forward to Netscape6 for 2 reasons. 1. It's going to be much smaller and a more efficient design than Netscape 4.x and IE5. 2. It'll be more stable (no more having to reboot windows because IE5 freezes). I used Netscape up until IE5 was released and it was clear that MSFT had finally made a better browser, but now I'm looking forward to going back to a fast, clean, efficient, and most of all NETSCAPE browser again. I hope Gecko is as good as they claim.
eAnd eit ealso egoes efor ecommerce eand ebusiness eand esolutions eand ethis eand ethat....
eMy eopinion...
oh of course. that must be it.
idiot
Come on, guys, please pay attention and moderate reasonably.
And while I'm posting, a lot of people said to use IE or I don't know what other browser. But nobody thought about, what if you don't have a choice as there isn't a good alternative to Netscape on Linux.
I would gladly switch to a more stable browser with CSSI and Javascript and a stable Java VM and blah blah blah but as long as there isn't one, I'm stuck.
--
People using html in email should be shot.
Are there builds for other platforms somewhere? I'd love to try Mozilla, but I'm on Tru64 Unix, which doesn't seem to have builds on mozilla.org.
I did try downloading the source a milestone or two ago, but after dinking with it for a little while, I saw that it was going to take a bit of work to get it built, and since WSU doesn't pay me to build Mozilla, I had to move on.
If there's a Tru64 build, though, I'd be happy to use it and file bug reports....
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Well, I'm by no means an expert, but I'll try: M14 was a Mozilla milestone like other milestones, and there will be other milestone releases in the future: M15, M16, etc. After release of M14 and a few days of additional bug fixing, Netscape went onto a Mozilla branch in order to prepare for release of beta 1 of Netscape 6; Netscape will do more bug fixing on that branch, and will then combine the Mozilla code with Netscape-proprietary code (from what is known as the Netscape "commercial tree") to create the Netscape 6 beta 1 release.
Mozilla development and bug fixing continues on the trunk, with contributions from both Netscape developers and others, and is planned to result in an M15 milestone release sometime in April and an M16 milestone release sometime in May. As I understand it, Mozilla bug fixes made by Netscape on their beta 1 branch are being rolled back onto the trunk, and Netscape will use future Mozilla milestones as the basis for future Netscape 6 beta releases and then Netscape 6 production release. (Presumably they will work on branches as necessary to create those releases, just as they are doing now with beta 1.)
In a side issue, once M14 was released the security/crypto developers at iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions (the Sun-Netscape Alliance) used an M14-based branch to add and test changes to Mozilla needed to invoke SSL functionality provided by the separate Netscape Personal Security Manager binaries. As I understand it, those changes have now been rolled back onto the Mozilla trunk and will be in M15. (I think Netscape 6 beta 1 should have those SSL-related changes as well, since they were originally taken from the Netscape commercial tree.)
For more on Netscape's Mozilla-related development plans see the netscape.public.mozilla.s eamonkey newsgroup, in particular the recent posts "Netscape Feature Complete proposal: use 5/2 checkpoint target date" and "M15 will be the next checkpoint build from mozilla" by Jim Roskind of the Netscape client development group.
"It still crashes occasionally, without warning, and comletely unreproducably..."
And this is different that Navigator 4.7 how? *wham*
Anyone run a rendering "benchmark" yet? :P
--
: remove whitespace to e-mail me
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Would whoever moderated my post as Flamebait kindly explain exactly what in that post qualifies as such? I see absolutely nothing which would provoke a sane person (or whatever passes for sane on Slashdot ^_^ ) to flame. Indeed, every last one of the responses to this message has been calm and to the point, with no hint of flaming (or even a spark, for that matter).
Or is this just another abuse of the moderation system? I have plenty of Karma to burn so I'm not worried about the one-point loss, but I fail to see how this post could be construed as flamebait. If you disagree, then I'd honestly be glad to hear what exactly was so inflammatory about my post. I honestly don't like flaming, even though I'm guilty of it from time to time (I very much doubt that anyone here on Slashdot can honestly say they haven't flamed, on this forum or elsewhere, at least once in their Net career). So please, and this is an honest invitation, tell me what it is that angered you so much.
You know, come to think of it, at some point the Slashdot heads ought to sit down and clearly define what each of these terms mean. While you certainly can't include everything (then again, the rarely-used Overrated and Underrated are, to my understanding, catch-alls for just that sort of situation) but it would make a useful tool for moderators and meta-moderators.
It's hapend before.
:)
Or was I the only one to use Gnome-1.0 ?
Or rather fail in the attempt to use
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
where's the 5.0 gone , to
Nothing is said on mozilla official Web site . And going beta just a few weeks after being Alpha is being crazy they're going to kill the project IMO.
none Yet.
NS 4.72 isn't exactly quick on its feet either. Every Unix graphical browser that can handle modern HTML is huge and bloated, AFAIK.
I think the problem with Mozilla is not that Gecko is slow, but rather that the app build around it is SLOW. I'm thinking about taking the Gecko stuff and writing a small, light-weight browser (and _not_ a news+email client! damnit...) around that. I'm heartened to know that other companies are using gecko, since that means it is possible to use it without the rest of Mozilla, and that it doesn't suck. If it sucked, all those companies wouldn't be using it. Especially not the cell-phone companies.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I absolutely agree with you. email and news reading also has to go. That's what mutt and slrn are for.
:) I haven't written anything big before, but I'd love to try. If anyone wants to help me write one, email me: peter@llama.nslug.ns.ca and we'll figure out what language to use, how portable to make it, and all that jazz.
I've been thinking for a while about writing a web browswer that uses the gecko engine, but doesn't have all of Moz's crap plastered all over it. Now that I see some like-minded posts, I am most encouraged
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Is this the same as when running Netscape 3 or 4 on Win95 the page reloads if Quickres is used? You mean it isn't Microsoft's fault for once?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Doesn't it check with the operating system to see what the association for the extension is? For example, install Win95, then try to open foobar.doc from My Computer or Explorer (the File Manager replacement, not Internet Explorer). Wordpad will pop up to try to open it. But install Office97 and it'll change the .doc association to default to Word instead. It's all a matter of how your associations are set up. I've had IE call up Netscape to open a .htm file, because I had that extension associated with netscape.exe and not with iexplore.exe :) I suppose you could even change your association so that doubleclicking a .doc file caused it to try to open in Freecell.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I am dieing to see the full blown mozilla. What is great about it AOL as the power to push it as the next browser they can get Netspace/Mozilla back as leader in the Browser Area. I predict that it will be about 50/50 in 18 months. If you don't think how aol user are out there and how may non AOL user have AIM.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
I don't see you saying anything about what code you've produced.
;-)
Right, because I choose to do coding for other projects, notably Wine. I do submit bugs for Mozilla however, and it's really not a time-consuming process to do so. Heck, it's kinda fun having a bug open, sorta like a Tamagotchi except you get to kill it at the end
I've been using the daily build since M14-crypto. Most are really good. I usually dl them in the morning, do really heavy browsing (a viewing developed pages), then I leave all my mozilla windows running until the next morning. Memory does not appear to leak, and only on rare occasion do forms get quirky. oh, and the Mozilla cookie manager is awesome. (I'm on linux 2.2.14/rh6.1)
Jungleboy
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
First it was "It doesn't run on my XYZ box!"
:)
Now it's "It doesn't run fast enough!"
You can never win.
-- Thrakkerzog
Anyway, that aside.. does this strike anyone else as a marketing ploy? Mozilla isn't ready.. yet they're making an announcement. I thought the open source credo for releases was "when it's done". Maybe I'm mistaken... OSS proponents can be influenced by money and prestige. Suprise.
I got the mpeg of that around here somewhere...
Okay, can someone with real knowledge of the situation brief Slashdot on what the heck is going on with Mozilla? In particular:
M14 was released while still listing something like 500 bugs in Bugzilla. What happened? Why?
Bugzilla is still full of bugs in the M1? department, are these being addressed actively, or has all the recent effort gone into a different branch?
Speaking of branching, how many different branches are there right now? And who is working on each?
This is the kind of PR I would most appreciate.
People that are agitated over the skinning thing have No Clue(tm).
It's not a skin. You can do a completely different UI with XUL. The age of applications over the web has finally arrived.
The point of having their own wiget set is that I, the web developer, can finally have my web site look the same no matter where it runs. If you're tired of motif/Win widgets messing with your careful layout, you know what I mean.
One example of how it's not a skin is the Zope Mozilla Initiative, a project to turn Mozilla into an IDE for zope. Let's see you turn WinAmp into a mp3 editor!
With mozilla, you can develop an application, implement the UI in mozilla, and poof! You've got a web application that can run on almost every OS out there!
This IS revolutionary, certainly moreso than anything from Redmond.
~mindlace
Slashdot must be one of the more frequently tested sites with Mozilla.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
Netscape took M14 and added AOL/NS specific code (ie: that shopping icon, AIM) and focused on fixing any show-stopping bugs in M14 - this is the Netscape v6 this story is speaking of.
The Mozilla folks are pressing ahead with M15 development of will be the Mozzila browser. This is what I run - the nightly pre-M15 builds.
The additional functionality incorporated into Mozilla's browser will be fed back into the Netscape codebase at a later time. This lets AOL/Netscape get a decent enough browser out the door as v6, while letting the Mozilla developers and users debug the addition bells & whistles. Once those B&W's are debugged within Mozilla, then AOL/Netscape will incorporate them into the "branded" browser as a point release (ie: 6.1, 6.2, etc).
So there hasn't, up until just recently, been a parallel effort. That was just established a few weeks ago with the release of M14.
As for the NS 5 version, that's the horrendous code-base originally released as Open Source to the Mozilla project. That code was scrapped in favor of developing the Gecko-based product(s) in development now.
As for the Mozilla browser being a "dead project" - you are flaming here bud! I think the additional support scheduled for Mozilla will give it a leg up on the Netscape branded product. The issue is that the PHB's at large corporations want a "commercial" browser - hence Netscape v6. Since Mozilla will be the leader of new support/features - to later be incorporated into Netscape - it's far from dead... It's the innovator AOL/NS is relying on!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
I think Mozilla is (will be when it's ready) fine piece software and that it shows that open source works (or that it can work). Still, I'm so incredibly sick of all this hype surrounding Linux and OSS.. I wish the zealots would just shut the hell up and leave people alone. If they want to help, write code or docs, just don't run around yelling how Linux will dominate the world and how open source is The Way Of Future(TM). Why, oh why did Linus have to mention (joke about) world domination..
For some darn neat cross-browser (Well, at least Netscape >= 4.5/ IE >= 4), check my brother's site</plug>
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
eBut eyou ealso eforgot eabout eE efor eEnlightenment eEpplets... e!
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I'm sorry but he is so right, the linux community is so close-minded sometimes.
as far as i understand, when something is declared beta, that just means no new features are being added and that development efforts are focused on fixing bugs. is it really inconceivable that mozilla can reach this point 25 days from now? and what does that have to do with stability? final candidates ought to be stable, not betas.
-- Adam
About a month ago (while M13 was current) I switched to Mozilla as my main browser. It wasn't quite as good as Netscape, but the added happiness of "helping" more than made up for it.
Then I tried M14. Holy crap does that browser suck. Sure, a lot of things were fixed--but something (or somethings) fundamental was sure broken: I got crash after crash after crash.
I downloaded a nightly build from a couple of weeks later (later than the branch, not later than the M release) and it had the same problems. This had all better be fixed before "beta". And as someone else points out, change the fscking default theme.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Good luck on replacing MSIE in AOL. The main reason for IE to be with AOL is the fact that AOL gets to ship it's product with every windoze version. If AOL gave up that market share they'd stop getting the boat loads of stupid customers they have. Practically all of AOL's market is for the underaverage to average users as most of us know.
In fact, if you recall AOL bought Netscape. You'd think that since AOL now runs Netscape they would throw their own browser in their own software. Well, it hasn't happend yet and don't expect it to happen very soon.
I can only guess, but I'm sure that the "microsoft fee" they fork over to have the browser included sure pays off.
What's even worse is that AOL keeps growing and they offer a below average service in my opinion. I hate to say it but I did some tech support for AOL. It bugged me that for every person that wanted to cancel their service ten more would wonder how they put AOL on their computer. I've even talked to people who knew how much AOL sucked yet they still kept their AOL accounts... retards I tell ya! The newbie market can make you a lot of money, and AOL has it cornered nicely.
It hasn't been said yet, but it seems so obvious...
The reason this is version 6 and skips version 5 is because IE is at version 5 now and has been for quite a while. Netscape (read AOL (read AOL/Time-Warner)) is tired of MS staying one step ahead on the release numbers. They're trying to leapfrog the IE version. There's no way MS will pull together an IE 6 in 25 days. And maybe they can justify it with this XUL thing and claim that it's a huge leap past IE in functionality?
Whatever... version numbers are meaningless, and unless they've been holding back on us big time, the Mozilla technology will not be ready.
- StaticLimit
No..
Netscape has already stated that it will NOT support any proprietry TAGS, and DOM elements, including their OWN layers and the coressponding JS.
IE's proprietry document.all i not supported either, using W3C's document.getelementbyID() instead.
to bridge Mozilla and IE is fairly straighforward, and can be done via a few simple wrappers. However getting netscapes old code to work, may require a bit of work.
I, for one, think mozilla is not as far away as some are suggesting. Lately I have, almost unconsciously, been loading up mozilla more often than netscape 4.7. It's as fast or faster and the gecko rendering engine allows me to get some content before a page is fully loaded. At work with windows it crashes *much* less often; I almost never boot up netscape there. I've seen supposedly production programs that are buggier than mozilla.
Try a nightly build! They are constantly improving.
I would like to comment that you probably won't be seeing Gecko as the Konqueror engine, at least for KDE2. From what I remember, kdelibs is due to go down as feature freeze at the end of this month. They may not be able to get engine switching going on in a week or two. All the more power to them if they do. But they currently have rewritten khtml again for Konqueror. It would be nice to see engine switching in KDE2, but I wouldn't put too much cash on it. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, all the more to you as well.
Oh come on! I am / was a huge Netscape fan. I own
a Netscape jacket and I cheer out loud when I find
an old Netscape 3.0 reference card in a bookshelf
at work. I've followed the Mozilla project since
day 1 and I've downloaded nightly builds every
week or so, and every single milestone. It's CRAP
in it's current state. The mail client is totally
unusable and about 2-10 times slower (yes - just
check the official numbers!) than Netscape 4.5,
which in turn is about 5 times slower then the
mail client in Netscape 3.0.
The browser has some potential but is still very
buggy. 100% CSS1 and what? 90% CSS2 means
absolutely nothing to the average Joe Sixpack who
just wants his sites to work. What reason does the
average user have to *switch* to Mozilla /
Netscape 6.0 when IE5.x works great on all sites
and hardly ever crashes. Joe Sixpack could not
care less about Open Source - in fact, he has
probably never even heard about it. Something to
do with some Norwegian guy named Thor Linusson or
something, right?
Now the most important part is the way the browser
looks. Now I know many people don't like the looks
of Netscape 4.x, which I personally find quite
nice. IE looks pretty boring.. But Mozilla! The
current default skin has got to be the ugliest
user interface I've ever seen! It's absolutely
HORRIBLE. I've shown it to many people, and not
*ONE* has liked it. Not one!
I know there are skins and I know there will be
very cool skins indeed some months from now. The
problem is that Joe Sixpack doesn't know or care
about this. He installs the thing, wonders where
in the "start menu" it showed up, starts it -
not touching the preferences - and says "HOLY
SHIT DUDE!! THAT'S ONE FUGLY BROWSER!!" and quits
- never to touch the thing again.
I'm sorry to say it, but this is what 99% of the
people out there will do. Why? Because of some
details.. A crappy mail client.. An unpolished
browser and the ugliest user interface ever made.
Beta material in a month? You've got to be
kidding!
Now if someone makes a negative comment - stating
what most of us agree on anyway - that Mozilla
in it's *current state* is horrible - why do you
want to moderate him down?
Maybe it's time you step back a bit and look at
things objectively?
I thought I was the only one that had noticed that!!!!
Not quite. The Ghostbusters reference has been there from the start. Check out the following bit of XML code from a typical XUL file:
Nice...
It has generally become accepted that the 4.0 browsers were essentially similar in terms of features, so the WinTel masses have been trained to compare the NS and IE browsers by version number.
I did read your whole rant, and I am sorry to think that whoever moderates it (as of yet no one) will probably kill it off.
You make many valid points. Though while I was using M14 on Win32 I didn't have nearly as many problems as you seemed to have (I only had one reproducable crash involving the bookmark editor), I do agree it is not as good as IE. At this point it is not even as good as Navigator 4.07 on Win32.
I also agree from what I have seen of it that it should not be beta'd yet. But, the people who are in charge of this project DO know what is possibly riding on it. They have been careful from the very beginning, and if they say this will work, what choice do I have but to say "oh?, ok."
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Whether or not you are a troll is nothing to do with what your opinions are. It's how you voice them that counts - someone who shouts "LINUX ROOLZ" is a troll and so is someone who shouts "IE ROOLZ".
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
jYeah, jsame jgoes jfor java jdevelopers.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
YES!!!
I thought I was the only one that had noticed that!!!!
Well, the whole point of Mozilla was to magically fix all of Netscape's problems. These problems which never seem to be fixed are causing Netscape to lose more and more browser share everyday. A hopefully buggy beta netscape may prove to be disasterous to browser share.
This is a namespace definition straight from any XUL code:
p er/there.is.only.xul"
xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekee
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
- but of course, I can't install anything without everything... bah!
sure you can. I use netscape navigator 4.72. Navigator is exactly what you want, just the browser and not any of the crap. If my link doesn't work for you try a real ftp client (eg ncftp) with passive mode off (in ncftp that is 'set passive off')) Infact I have netscape navigator configured to use Mutt as the email client with a little package called altmail. I don't have a url, but search freshmeat or the netscape site if interested.
tia!
from what ive seen, most 'look perdy' scripts arent that complex, and arent too hard to make cross browser. This summer I made a javascript layers thing that did popup windows that i could theme (sorta like a webpage windowmanager) and it went cross browser (had to write 2 versions pretty much hehe) but I think that you can sell the cross browserness as a feature, more than you can any eye candy... i mean, you can tell them that it should work pretty much anywhere.
As far as mozilla goes... heh, I hope that it gets everything working soon, because so far, its only a project, not a product.
Well, learn to develop cross browser stuff... try to keep away from using scripting languages and do stuff on the server side instead. There ARE ways to make things work without sacrificing portability...
"Netscape 6/Mozilla Beta Release in 25 Days"
:-)
Beta means all known bugs are fixed. Will all known bugs be fixed? No. Heck, a CSS layout problem I submited has been targetted for M16, which is at least one revision past the beta. They should be calling it "Netscape 6.0 Alpha" based on the M15 build. Not a beta release.
Netscape has rushed things before. At least the code is fairly open, and can be worked on by people who do not need to heed insane deadlines. I look forward to a stable release "when it's done"
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Odd tho that all my open source software works better and more efficently then your commercial shit. So what have you coded? Probably nothing, or probably too embarresed to admit it. Wouldn't want everyone to know that you can code worth shit now do you?
The first thing I did after installing Mozilla (Win32 version) was look for a way to change the looks--reduce the size of the top navigation bar, change the color scheme, anything. Someone can sit there are say that the looks don't matter, but when the navigation colors and icons are so egregious that they distract my eyes from the current webpage I'm looking at, there is a definite design problem at hand. Things like the navigation bar should not be a visual focus. I use my web browser to look at web pages, I don't go to web pages so I can look at my web broswer.
Of course, then it crashed when I tried to view a page's source code, so I only still have it on my computer as a novelty. Ugly, crashy, I'll pass. Netscape 4.7 may not be the most stable piece of work, but it's definitely more dependable than Mozilla is.
Oh, and irony alert: The bug reporting program wasn't working properly either. I made an honest attempt to report exactly why it crashed, but I stopped trying to get it to work after the third of fourth crash.
re: Mozilla doing a reload in resize
The reader was, possibly, commenting on a reload that happens on a resize on Netscape 4.7x (and possibly older versions), if the http headers told the browser to *not* cache the content (see section 14.9 on rfc2616, for HTTP 1.1). However, not having u sed the Mozilla engine, I do not know if this problem is evident there.
Obwhythisbecomesaproblem: many dynamically-generated pages tell the browser to *not* cache the content from the servers, so the clients won't get a stale page from the cache. This is often a Good Thing (tm), but, as another previous reader(?) pointed out, can cause problems in certain situations.
Perhaps you wanted to have YASH on your box? Perhaps you wanted the extra convenience to be able to run netscape from a root xterm and be able to have the "convenience" of not having it *be* a security hole on a single-luser workstation ? I have no idea.
Weren't we talking about Mozilla, and not Netscape 4.x, which is, imho, ergonomically superiour, but does suck in the rendering engine?
Oh, one mo re thing. On Win32 (Win98, WinNT 4), on my ThinkPad 600E/Desktop Box (*), NS 4.7 (**) *seems* to be happier than IE5. Then again, I *do* like NS more than IE5, with all the "fixes". Then again, the Java VM on IE is tonnes faster than the Netscape version. I hope the Mozilla version of the Java VM becomes faster.
(*) 366MHz Mobile PII, 128MB RAM, Internal V.90 Software Modem, or Dual 300MHz PII, 128MB RAM, decent video card . %0 A
(**) I'm sitting behind a V.90 dialup connection. Do you seriously think that I'm gonna "upgrade" to 4.72 when 4.7 works "most" of the time?
--
The shareholder is always right.
Just in case someone tries to toss "release early, release often" into the fray: remember that mozilla puts up "nightly builds" several times a day, and that many people grab the builds (and code) every day, and report both transient bugs and bugs that have been around for a while (usually not without checking to make sure they're not submitting a duplicate bug). At this point, there are plenty of people using mozilla and finding bugs (perhaps too many -- people spend time maintaining the bug-tracking system bugzilla, and a lot of that time is marking duplicate bugs). The bugathon is evidence that they're trying to get other people on the Internet to help find duplicates and, more importantly, simplify bugs into test cases that allow a programmer to be certain when a problem happens and when it doesn't.
It's not going to help mozilla much to have lots of people using the browser, although I wouldn't expect permanent damage as long as Netscape makes it clear that this is a particularly buggy (and not feature complete) beta.
--
The shareholder is always right.
The browswer is the thing. I want a browser and nothing else. Mail, News, HTML builders bla. They are just taking up resources.
Focus and dominate.
I suppose this is AOL's influence who wants to brand everything and want newbees to think that AOL is the internet or at make them think that AOL internet is better than the other internet.
I was using it on Windows 98 and NT4SP6a boxes. Bah!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I never had this problem before v4.72! It is a bug and others have had this problem... I was using the Windows 32 version. Are you all having this problem on other platforms? Post on Netscape's newsgroups if you have this problem!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
In gtop, you can just right-click on a process. That brings up a menu to send it various signals. Won't work if netscape is suid, though.
They're saying the code they started with and later scrapped was Netscape 5 and thus this iteration is 6...
Mozilla is going to be the first browser that doesn't (tries not to) violate the `official' specifications on how web pages should be formatted.
Unfortunately, this means that pages that were written for browsers that violated the specification will need to be rewritten. If you spot any bugs, or what you think are bugs then they should be reported at bugzilla.
marotti.com
Opera (win32) doesn't support complete styling of the H1 element (as of one month ago), the size stays the same: segment7 - main page but it does do a hell of a lot better than MSIE* or NS4 at style sheet rendering.
marotti.com
That's arrogant. Yep, but that appears to be the position of the mozilla project. They've decided not to support the ILAYER element, among other things.
If you really want something that is supposed to support a standard can you expect it to be 100% backwards compatible? There will be differences between how NS4 did this one thing and how IE4 did the same thing and how the HTML spec says its supposed to be. Who is the real authority here? Nobody, but the Mozilla project chose that the W3 would be the reference (yes it isn't the perfect choice, but there really isn't) and that is what they are sticking with.
In the C programming language there is a certain specified and exact syntax and grammar required to get a program to do X. In HTML there is no absolute requirement on how to do X. You can do it by the standard, you can do it the NS way, you can do it the IE way, you can do it via the standards, you can do it...
C requires the use of a compiler that will be expecting input in a certain specified manner. HTML does not (and if it did the web wouldn't be near as far as it is today) but this has brought all the problems and breakage you suffer from between using old broswers and using a new browser.
marotti.com
This rapidly becomes obvious while using the browser. Opening the preferences editor is the pime example, click on one of the options in the tree panel and it may take a moment to render the forms on the pane. Resizing the window will cause the page to reflow just like the browser does, and if you watch a build that has a console turned on, you get:
...
WEBSHELL+= 5
WEBSHELL+= 6
messages as the main UI window gets drawn, when dialogs show up, when you use the DOM and CSS to show/hide form input elements, etc.
marotti.com
I built from source on FreeBSD-current (even less bug reports/fixing there) and my only problem (with building) was that gcc2.95 outputted some poorly formed assembly that forced me to turn off optimizations for one source file.
I'm writing a heavily CSS'd and HTML4.0 strict web site that mozilla has yet to crash on when rendering. I've been writing a script for it using the DOM that adds and deletes elements including forms and input buttons that are attached to DOM to add more elements. I've probably seen one crash from a bonehead programming mistake and that's it.
If you want to check it out, http://segment7.net/php3/newpage.html but there is a bug that has been preventing me from extracting values from input elements, so not all of the input elements work.
marotti.com
Hello,
the PR was straight from the marketing office of Netscape. To be honest you have to read not:
"will be used by technology industry leaders IBM, Intel, Liberate, NetObjects, Nokia, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems"
but:
"will be used by Microsoft-adverse industry leaders IBM (which was pissed off by the MS-Andersen deal), Intel (this is the only company that doesn't fit my theory), Liberate (this company was founded by Netscape and Oracle under the name of Navio), NetObjects (pissed off by Frontpage and owned in part by IBM), Nokia (which was pissed off by the MS-Ericsson deal), Red Hat (which is pissed off just by MS), and Sun Microsystems (which is pissed off just by everyone and has Iplanet with Netscape)"
No conspiracy, just propaganda.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
Really nothing that fantastic, but I put together a script to automatically download and install Mozilla on a Win32 system. Put this in your system scheduler to run every night, and you're ready for testing!
This script assumes that it runs from c:\mozupd, and that Mozilla is installed in c:\program files\netscape\seamonkey
It's available for download HERE
-WD
... and don't even get me started on the whole
"resize == reload"-thing.
J.
It's getting very silly now :)
Thank You!
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
I have RH on all my machines, brand X os as well on some of them. My internet machine has only RH on it, not even a dos partition.
I crash Netscape maybe once every month? (it just dissapears). One time I remember Netscape went into some sort of loop... Not a real problem, I just run Gtop, find the netscape PID (say, 2709), then go to terminal, su (superuser), and kill -9 2709. Quick, clean, easy, no rebooting.
I have never been able to hang X or crash the whole box.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
Mozilla achieves a goal, and the team deserves praise.
It costs us nothing to give them a pat on the back, or congratulate them on their achievement. It helps no one to diss them, or try to take away their moment of glory.
Working on Linux or OSS projects in general does not require takeing a vow of poverty, or wearing sack-cloth and smearing onself with ashes. People have done good work, and they deserve to be recognized for it.
I, personaly, feel that I owe far more to the creators of Linux, Netscape, Gnome, Staroffice, blender, emacs, Mesa, and the thousands of other packages than I will ever be able to repay. Oh, yes, thanks to Redhat, and whoever did RPM's - they save my ass lots of times.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
I disagree with your idea on themes. mozilla is very themeable but it is an individual. When I want to theme programs, I first give Enlightenment a theme, then GTK, then, XMMS, then gkrellm, eterm, and now even mozilla. I know this is because it has to be ported, but I'm saying that I wish it would behave like other GTK program so I could give one theme and it would cooperate with me so theme writers don't have to port their themes twenty times after they change something. this is just my opinion and i don't know much about how mozilla themes, it just seems like an individual to me -- I would like it to behave with the group.
O.K, a few points:
a) He is entitled to his view. This is Slashdot, not Linux lovers anonymous. People can like M$ if they want to, even if you don't
b) Have you read the moderator guidlines? Just because you don't agree with the points raised in the post, doesn't mean that someone cannot say something insightful, or funny, or informative etc.
c) You didn't moderate the post, so the moderator in question obviously had diferent views to you. When you are moderating, you may moderate the guy down. Until then, live with it.
Now, can people stop moaning about the moderators / the fact they posted the "same story weeks ago and it was rejected" / "This isn't news for nerds". Thank you.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
gAt gthe gsame gtime Gnome gdevelopers gstop gputting "G" gin gfront gof geverything.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I wonder who's going drop by (I assume the male/female ratio will probably be pretty high)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
here is the Big BG pullin a GPF in front of a live audience. It's got drama, comedy, conflict, and, errrr...well it's just funny.
I always thought it was "Zuul", not Xul.... yes, my DVD copy of Ghostbusters confirms it. So there. :)
I have an original idea: let's call it Netscape (in Dr. Evil's voice) Two Thousand... and put a giant "laser" on it, and call it the "Death Explorer"...
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
Is Netscape developing their own browser? I was always under that impression, and this article supports the assumption. It looks like Netscape is putting out a release just based on Gecko. Seems to me that Mozilla will continue to develop in parallel with this release. At least I hope so, since as of M14, there are still many issues that need to be addressed...
I dont know if I made this clear but anything I do that is intended for the internet I make darn sure is cross-browser compatible. the easiest way to do that is avoid the kludge of the two DOM's etc :p. No Jscript/ECMAScript/VBcript. Server Side Dynamic stuff or bust I have been burned by trying to do flashy neat stuff for IE/NS/BrowserXyz :-)
A bit late.. BUT. All I use VBScript for is visual stuff. It will work Plain HTML. They are aware that IE4 if what the contracts were signed for and I went a step further to ensure it was all going to work without VBScript. And Unethical? Yes web changes. *shrug* I like VBScript last I checked I was not being to unethical when I put all the cards on the table and actually told them that this may not be as nice in any other IE. I told them every little thing.
Heh Heh, Yes you can develop cross platform. Yes you can even do so quickly and at an equal pace to what you can do with a specific browser. I also will not ever do anything that will not at least work in Netscape. But that does not change the facts. Facts are facts and netscape lacks support that IE has. Most of my scripts tend to be for eye candy to make things purdy... face it it takes good looking stuff to sell :p or at worst some WDDX stuff which I use Java(ECMA)script for.
I already do things as server centricly as possible but I do not see the point in torturing myself to write Javascript when yes I can do so and I am competent and capable of writing the code. But let me ask why?
I have developed 3 or 4 very big applications and every time the people I have been developing for were more than willing to allow IE to be the client. I said Netscape will be functional which it always will be.
What it amounts to is im not going to spend the time to do cross platform stuff for internal-only applications that only NEED to look good for one browser. So I pick the better browser.
I'd have to agree with that - I really see no point whatsoever in developing Netscape Composer. I've used Mozilla on Linux/Sparc for a while and think it works well. Does anyone really need an HTML editor though - it's either got to be as good as, say, Dreamweaver, or it's really not worth attempting, at least that's my opinion. I'm willin to be persuaded otherwise.
Because I stick to my guns?
My opinions have been consistent thourghout my posts -
How on earth does that make me a troll?
You're smoking crack again. Never have I claimed to be an MS employee - why would I?
Get your facts straight.
Unless Mozilla improves vastly in a month, expect Netscape 6 to get trashed by the press.
I would defy anyone to read through your comment history and not conclude you're a troll.
He is entitled to his view. This is Slashdot, not Linux lovers anonymous. People can like M$ if they want to, even if you don't
Totally true. However, he consistently posts pro-MS propaganda and tears down MS' competitors. IIRC, he actually works for MS and used to admit it in his posts. This isn't about viewpoints, it's about consistently taking a adversarial viewpoint to further himself.
Have you read the moderator guidlines? Just because you don't agree with the points raised in the post, doesn't mean that someone cannot say something insightful, or funny, or informative etc.
Totally true, but I don't understand why someone who trolls for MS is consistently rewarded for it. Hence my question. You didn't moderate the post, so the moderator in question obviously had diferent views to you. When you are moderating, you may moderate the guy down. Until then, live with it.
Also true.
As for whether or not people will stop whining about moderation, well, improved forum moderation is a need, and until it's fixed, questions like this are going to arise. --q
Apparently they have given up hopes on any inclusion of java in the linux version for the foreseeable future,, Good Jobs Guy :-/ :-?
Anyone else remember the Win 98 demo where the Great Gates was dealt a GPF? Anyone else have a sense of deja vu coming on?
I often wonder if Netscape 6 will live up to the hype that it has built up. Seems like everyone is saying that it will be the greatest piece of software ever created just because it is open sourced and the competition isn't.
They had the better browser back in the days but it doesn't mean that they will be #1 when they reenter the race. They might be up there again, but probably not for a while.
For PC browsers, IE has improved a lot ever since Netscape took a vacation to work on their tan. I really don't care if Gecko can render a page twice as fast because under normal conditions this may save you a whole 0.2 seconds. This 0.2s saved can now be put to use by your do_nothing_while_I_download_the_rest_of_the_page process. The average user isn't gonna give a shit over hardcore HTML rendering, CXNESFDK compliance, Pokemon-Style-Sheets (actually, anything pokemon is a go), or any other nerd technology.
Netscape owns the non-PC browser market but you never see people bitching that they didn't deliver a worthwhile update in the past couple years. Microsoft may have tried to monopolize the browser market on the PC but at least they are able to provide the users with support, improvements, and tight integration with the OS. Despite doing this, they still get dumped on because they are Microsoft.
As far as I know, the number of successful open source projects (relative to the number out there) is very small. It would be nice to see Netscape succeed but we can't just assume that they will. This can give open source a bad name if this high profile project doesn't live up to the hype. So maybe we should just lay off until we are sure that it doesn't suck.
Netscape can be a good example of an open source project just as easily as it can be a bad one.
The milestones of Mozilla I looked at are impressive, but not very stable...
:^).
Soon there will be Opera for linux - a browser that is fully compliant with all standards, uses very little memory - they try to make its mem usage below 5M!!!
Wish I could say that of Netscape or IE!!
Opera isn't opensource, but what do you expect it's a company - it needs to make money. Those people have to live too, they are not going to throw away their company secrets...
As long as its stable, there is a good support and I can download patches now and then, I am willing to pay for a browser that doesn't spill my time, CPU power and memory (just my money
Whenever I have to surf on windooze, I use Opera - it's fast and easy! - and win crashes less (now just every 5 minutes instead of every 2)
Don't need Mozilla yet - I'll try it now and then, and if it's stable enough - I'll use it.
I dont think it is ready yet, I get the builds just about every week, or everytime a new one comes out and it is still very buggy. I am still sceptical about this but if they think its ready(or they can have it done is 25 days) then power to them. By the way, It pisses me off how many asses are posting BS on slash now :[
Ill tell you why mozilla is taking so long, too many frills, they try to finish them all at once. The browser itself is riddled with bugs and people are working on the composer. How bout a stripped down full functional browser befor the bells and wistles.
I've heard alot of talk about NS 6 not supporting the layer tag, which I might add they invented in the first place. Is there any truth to that?
The title pretty much explains my question. BTW, sorry for the duplicate posts.
We all need a new browser. Netscrape crashes all the time, especially with JAVA. Maybe, if we /. mozilla, beat the shit out of it, and contribut fixes/bug reports, it might get stable and be usable.
Lets download mozilla and run it, beat on it, help fix it. Maybe the /. effect could help to make it an alternative?
sig removed to protect the innocent and guilty!
1) I had problems with the "Mn" release.
2) You should try the nightly builds! They're great!
3) I had problems with the "Mn+1" release.
4) You should try the nightly builds! They're great!
...
56) I had problems with Netscape 6.23 Service Pack 4
57) You should try the nightly builds! They're great!
Remember microsoft's heavy handed overraction and the brute force they used to try to push Netscape out of business when they decided that a web browse was a threat to their monopoly simply because it ran java applets and supported plugins. Wow how are they going to react when they see the possibilities that Mozilla provides as a cross platform base for developing really cool apps. If you don't understand what I'm saying do a little research and you will see that Mozilla is really as much like a web browser as Emacs is a text editor. Check out XMLTerm for an example of what is possible.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Yep, I'm afraid I have to agree here. I've been using M14 as my primary browser recently, and although it's far, far better than the previous versions I'd looked at (M10/M11), it's still not at the point where I'd say it was ready for public release, even as a beta. It still crashes occasionally, without warning, and comletely unreproducably (this is on Win32, admittedly :-) Still, it's showing a lot of promise. I just hope AOL/NSCP know what they're letting themselves in for with a beta release of this quality. The MS-sympathetic parts of the press are going to give them a really hard time unless things rapidly improve over the next month.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You bring up a good point. It makes sense for Mozilla to be open-source because its success lies entirely on platform-diversity. If Linux fails to de-homoginize the OS market, Mozilla fails as well. If Linux succeeds, IE fails, since it is so Windows-centric. Yes, Mozilla may not be the best choice for everyone today, but as soon as non-IE browsers eat up more than half of the market share, web page content-providers will have to fall back on some sort of generally-accessable standard. And that standard will always be clean scriptless, pluginless HTML.
And I concede, Mozilla isn't good enough to make everyone want to switch on its own merits. Speed and resource-wize, it's comparable to IE. And being able to do things like ActiveX are good selling points for IE.
But Mozilla can wait until the climate is right for it to dominate. The code is out there. Frankly, I don't care if Netscape(TM) doesn't make any money off Netscape. If the company collapses, and Navigator is deemed a failure. I mean, basicly Netscape is a dead company. Their only source of revenue is their sucky portal. Oh, and their soon-to-be-demolished-by-Apache-2.0 server. I have already mourned the loss of Netscape. Fortunately, there's a lot of code that's out there and can be taken for future projects. Good code, too! So, when the time comes where cross-platform HTML becomes the standard again, Mozilla will be there, waiting. When the playing field is leveled, the true beauty of Mozilla will emerge.
I'd have to disagree. I think its quite stable. It needs a lot of work though, as do most beta projects. The two main things that niggle me is the huge memory footprint (although I realise this is likely to drop when debug stuff is removed) and the lack of browser only binaries. If there *was* a browser only I probably would have switched by now. But, the mozilla guys are doing well, and I'll be first in line for the beta relase.
Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.
[Sound of loud guffaws]
Soon? Soon?
[Sound of loud guffaws]
Opera for Linux is still early alpha; it doesn't even support animated gifs yet.
Steven E. Ehrbar
There's an important point here which I don't think any of the other follow-ups have picked up on: cross platform user interfaces are hard.
Its not trivial, as many people seem to believe, to "just go down to the native widgets". While the widget sets on different platforms are similar, they differ significantly in many ways, and some (notably Motif) are very limited. This is precisely what the Java AWT attempted, and as we've seen, user interfaces produced this way are limited, dull, and generally clunky to use.
This is exactly why the original Netscape went for completely separate user interface code for every platform. The trouble with that, of course, is that n separate user interfaces are hard to maintain, and inevitably functionality starts to drift into the UI code.
The option Mozilla has adopted - and Swing, most Smalltalk implementations, and almost every other attempt to create X-platform UI have also ended up with - is to draw the user interface in some way completely independant of the platform. Mozilla is particularly interesting in using web-like technologies to do it.
Of course, there is still a problem. People who are especially fond of their native UI get offended (surprised there haven't been any 'it's not like a Mac' posts yet), and its arguably less performant, though I don't see how that can be. If Gecko is fast, surely XPFE is fast too ?
how many more times can you mention "revolutionary" or "next generation" in a press release? The only feature I really want is stability. All those new features sound cool and I really like the look and feel of mozilla, but all of that is not as important as stability. After all, I'd like to use the application on a daily basis and not just drool about the cool features...
Go and download a nightly build and give it a try. If it crashes or has annoying bugs, report them and download a new one a few days later.
.xml for example). I guess there's going to be a lot more of that as time goes by :-)
:-) and that's a big improvement - though I still wouldn't try anything too fancy when I've got a form up (e.g., hitting back and forward and expecting to still have your field contents intact.)
It does crash, but you now have to work at it. I'm doing about 1/2 my browsing with Mozilla now, which I'd say is a pretty significant benchmark. Interesting thing: I've run across about 5-6 sites that you *need* Mozilla for (any page ending with
Mozilla is quite a bit smaller than Netscape 7 and it now loads faster, though not yet nearly as fast as Konqueror or Opera.)
I can post to Slashdot with reasonable confidence I won't lose my text
There are minor formatting problems that vary a lot from build to build. I downloaded my first skin yesterday (aphrodite - looks good). Memory usage has improved a lot, but it's still got a ways to go. The bugs are down to a short enough list that it's worth keeping track of them and sending them in.
I can remember when the browser's scrolling had a one second delay and the whole UI was sticky. Now it's really fast at least on Win32.
It's fast on Linux too.
I'm absolutely positive that Mozilla will be a success.
There's no question about that. I also have a feeling that the serious hacking on Mozilla is only going to start after Netscape 6 forks off officially. Then I think you'll see a lot more latitude for *real* changes and improvements to the user interface - beyond just skins and standards - because that narrow focus on just getting the thing out the door will be gone, and the netscape team won't be so protective about the feature set (I hope I hope I hope).
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Of course, the Gecko layout engine seems much more stable than the rest, so maybe Netscape 6 will actually just use that. (Whatever happened to Gecko embeddings in Tk, GTK, and other toolkits?)
M14 is impressive, but I think it's still quite far away from being mature enough for a consumer release, even a beta. If they release too early, that could further damage the reputation of open source.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
1. When the debugging code is taken out, will it run faster/suck less memory, etc?
Well, it's hardly likely to run slower and use more memory, is it?
2. Are they going to get rid of the ugly, glitzy and only semi-functional interface in favor of, say, something with a working multi-level back button, drop-down address list and non-rounded menus?
The current UI is really just a test one. Two new ones have already been written in XUL: see ChromeZone.
3. Is the sidebar going away, please?
View | Sidebar. Magic.
Gerv
You see, when writing a cross-platform application, especially as big as Mozilla, running on som many platforms, you'll want, nay need, to reduce the platform dependent code to an absolute minimum. Given the incredibly cool, fast, standard compliant, cross-platform rederer that Gecko is, they thought: "Why not use it to render the UI as well?" So they came up with XUL (eXtensible User interface Language), which is just an XML DTD, and some suitable CSS to display the whole lot. (Just browse the chrome/ subdirectory of your mozilla installation to see for yourself)
And, while the current Mozilla has the same skin for all platforms, i'd expect Netscape to ship the final versions with a MacOS skin for the Mac version, a Windows skin for the Windows version, etc... It's just a matter of replacing the CSS.
As to websites re-skinning your browser, i've seen it mentioned by some Mozilla developer (and would be shocked see anything else), that it'd be a pref option (never, prompt, always; and in prompt mode, it'd have an "always/never for this site" option) And someone could probably write a plugin that checks for a skin with the same name as your GTK/windowmanager theme and skins mozilla accordingly (this already exists for xmms/enlightenment, IIRC).
So it's not just the ultimate fluff, Mozilla is just partially written "in itself" for portability/cross-platform reasons.
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
Well, when you try to shoehorn a reference where it doesn't fit, SOMETHING'S got to give!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
> I wish it would behave like other GTK program so I could give one theme and it would cooperate with me so theme writers don't have to port their themes twenty times after they change something
.themerc and use whatever parts applied to it.
Yes, we need a standard for themes (XML?), so that any cooperative themable "software device" could read your
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I understand your frustration with Netscape not working with CSS and the newer HTML standards out there, but it is coming. If you stick to accepted standards you won't be locking your clients in for 4 or 5 years. They can use IE for now, then switch to Netscape/Mozilla or Opera or whatever else might be down the road when it becomes available.
However, I have absolutely no sympathy for you not wanting to learn and use JavaScript instead of VBScript. It never has been nor will be a standard, it was intended to be platform dependent, and has many basic security flaws.
If you're using a tool like VBScript just to make a quick buck on an application that has a projected lifespan of 4 to 5 years you're simply not being an ethical programmer. The Web will change, browsers will change, OSs will come and go, and if your app needs to last you need to take the time to build it right, work to common standards (even if they're lower) and be honest with your customer about what the Web can and can't do. You need to give them something that actually has a chance to last and still be relevant until the end of its projected lifespan. If they're not willing to listen to and pay for that, upgrade your skills and go somewhere else. Let them sink without your complicity.
I actually DO have an SMP-box, which I have
run most nightly releases since M13 on.
(dual celeron on BP6)
It works very well, it's still not
ready for release, and it isn't even ready
for beta. However, it WILL be ready for beta
when it ships as beta.
I thought Netscape 5 was coming soon - I guess that got scrapped and we're heading straight to 6? Sorta like the Slackware 4 -> 7 jump...
The one thing I hate about my netscraper now is that I'll go to type in a URL (say: www.foobar.org), and after I've typed "www.", I hit 'f' and "www.f" all dissapears, so I'm left with oobar.org...
That and I can't unselect components from the full communicator install (previous versions let me). I refuse to use the NS mail/news clients, since they bungled them so badly - but of course, I can't install anything without everything... bah!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I don't have this problem with Netcape on my AIX or Mandrake box, but it does happen on 95,98, and NT (that silly autocompletion thing must be killing me). Of course, it is kind of nice, considering I type 's' and hit return, since it's already filled in slashdot.org. Ayeeeeeeeee only shows a list of things to page down (which could be better at times), but doesn't really complete properly... oh well until it can read my mind, I can only suggest improvements (and try to fix them in Mozilla).
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Javascript that works fine in Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x and 5.x flubs on Mozilla. And the layout is wrong, and slow. I'm not trying to be a naysayer, but i do not relish the idea of having to go make all my web sites "Mozilla compatible (TM)".
Because it's always the webmaster's fault. Even if the browser pokes itself in the eye.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Fraid not. If you've taken a look at the site recently, like for instance here, it has been made pretty clear that M15 of mozilla will be the netscape commercial beta. As for the funky numbering, there are two theories on that floating around: one, posted earlier by Col. Klink, says that Netscape 5 was the origonal OS browser developed prior to Mozilla and Gecko. The other theory says that Netscape is playing the revision jumping game to make it sound like they're keeping up with the Jonses (or in this case, the Gateses). Either way, the NS browser being built is the one on Mozilla.org. It'll be given a lot of polishing and (hopefully) a lot more bug fixes before it gets out of the back room, but it will still be Mozilla. The basis for the branding, integrated AOL IM, and everything else is already in there, either visible in M14 or lurking in the code.
Okay, at least on Win32, Mozilla is finally running about as stable and lo-mem as IE5. It crashes much less and is actually somewhat fast.
/., and I just have to say that y'all must really really be suffering with the atrocious state of web browsing under Linux to think that Mozilla is as good as many of you make it out to be. (Not to mention the fact that no one disputs that the Win32 version is the most stable! I can't imagine Mozilla on Linux. Well, ok, maybe I can--it's probably something like Netscape in Unix...)
/., when they're always returned back the top of an article everytime they click a link in the comments or read responses below their threshold, is a mystery to me. This is beyond inexcusible. I'm not even sure if it isn't beyond laughable. Perhaps pathetic is word I'm looking for. I know that this is a bug they've identified and plan on fixing, but I really hope for their sake that it's a showstopper before they declare Mozilla beta.
I have to respectfully disagree there, unless the nightly builds have somehow made tremendous stability progress since M14. I bit the bullet and downloaded at M14, since I'd heard so many good things about Mozilla on
M14 is an impressive achievement, and contains many thoughtful, well implemented ideas that will really improve the browsing experience if they're contained in a stable framework. In my experience (albeit limited and on only one, slightly idiosyncratic, machine), M14 was nowhere near as stable as IE5. Indeed, I wouldn't even consider comparing the stability of the two programs.
In about an hour of playing around with M14, I managed to crash it no less than 6 times, not including multiplicities when I was testing to see if my crashes were reproducible. (One, involving both an incorrect rendering and a hard crash on the slashdot home page, was reproducible under several different circumstances. Yes, I reported it, and although it's an awesome system, it must be said that bugzilla is very intimidating for first-time users.) I managed on two occasions to magically lose my back arrow, and despite the much-touted new rendering engine, I ran into several rendering errors. (No, they were not caused by incompatible pages; Mozilla would incorrectly render the pages inconsistently.)
Furthermore, the little autofeedback-on-crash tool that's supposed to pop up with every crash never worked; it froze (recoverable through ctrl-alt-delete) every time. Dude, when even your crash-reporting tool always crashes, you've got problems.
That is to say, you're not at the beta level yet.
Now, maybe I'm just spoiled because the only other public beta I've really participated in has been the very high-quality Q3:Arena tests. On the other hand, no, I'm not. Maybe those of you who've had to make do with Netscape for Unix don't realize this, but browsers--in sharp contrast to, say, Q3:Arena--are designed (or ought to be) to run full-time, in multiple instances, with complete stability and low overhead. IE5 is very certainly not perfect in these respects (low overhead especially), but it does an immeasurably better job of this than Mozilla appears capable of. It loads up very quickly (yeah, that's just because it loads up with the OS...but with the way I use my computer (and indeed, with the way most people with persistant net connections--an increasing percentage of the populace--use their computers), that's a much better way of doing things, and I'd say Mozilla has close to no chance of capturing my desktop if it requires the long wait and splash screen to start-up. I mean, of course I could just stick a copy of Mozilla in my StartUp directory, but...eh, whatever.)
Back to IE: it's amazingly modularized, and works quite well in that capacity. Case in point, GuruNet (or Flyswat), two little programs that sit in your taskbar and will find definitions, synonyms, and other information for any word in any program that you Alt-click on. Both use a componentized version of IE, and both run transparently without affecting stability or sucking up too terribly much memory (although that could stand to be improved). Examples like this abound.
And finally, it's quite stable. Yes, IE5 crashes from time to time, sometimes taking down the whole OS. In Win98. However, IE5 is still running full-time in Win2000, which has remarkable stability. (From what I've heard, it's at least on par with KDE or Gnome on Linux, much more so if you run Linux Netscape. Now, sure, a Win2000 reboot is worse than just restarting KDE or Gnome, if your computer is acting as a server or something...but then you shouldn't be using it as a desktop anyways.) In Win2000, you can spawn 5 copies of IE, have a couple IE-based components running in the background, and browse to your heart's content without much risk of crashing. Mozilla is very very far from that, to say the least.
Finally, IE5 is faster. Yeah, there's still debugging code in Mozilla, and optimizations need to be made, but IE5 is much much faster. Don't believe me, then take your web connection out of the equation: check how much faster IE5 renders pages out of the cache. Easily an order of magnitude.
And finally, the back button in Mozilla still doesn't work. How on earth Netscape users manage to browse
Uch, so I've ranted for quite some time now, but the point is, Mozilla is going to be most people's first taste of open-source. (Well, except for all the things they use every day they surf the internet but don't realize, like Apache, Sendmail, Perl, BSD/Linux, etc. Their first taste of open-source on their own machines, say.) If it's declared beta in anywhere near its current state (much less *released* in anything resembling its current state), it will probably be their last for some time. Netscape/AOL/Mozilla/whoever really shouldn't rush this, and the open source community developing Mozilla really ought to realize just how much better the competition really is.
"4. When will the widgets ever look like they're supposed to?"
;)
I'm working on this right now. New widgets designed in XBL have come online recently and we just need to convert the front end to use them (e.g. titledbutton is being replaced by button, which looks like the examples on that page). Quirks aside, the new widgets are kicking ass. "Download a nightly build" if you want to see some of the conversion that has been done
-Ben Goodger
FE Geek, Netscape.
Personal experience: I've attempted to use various incarnations of the milestone builds on Solaris, Irix, and Linux. The Solaris build has died every time I've attempted to run it. I think I could probably get the Irix build running except for the latest standard GTK libs I built don't have the same soname as the ones the milestone is built against (!). I did finally manage to get M14 running on Linux. Try running HTML 4.0 with CSS1/CSS2 through it sometime though - bet you don't get 5 pages through it before it dies. Seems to me that the browser is about as stable as group I elements in water ;)
I do have to admit though that for the most part M14 did what I expected it to; it is still lacking in some of the standards areas but in that respect it is way ahead of IE5.
I though some of the more recent milestone builds (circa 12 & 13) were a little slow, certainly slower than IE5, that was until I tried a build that had the message logging functions removed (these are presumably testing tools to help catch bugs etc and will not be standard in the production release) WOW! It was fast, certainly faster than IE5. As for crashes I've never had it crash on me (unless you count the times the imbedded activeX gecko control has crashed in the program I've been writing). It isn't my primary web browser (yet) but I have used it a fair bit. I can't wait for the beta release.
kWhen kis kde kgoing ktokstop kputting "k" kin kfront kof keverything ? kMaybe kI kwould ktry KDE kout kif ksuch kwas knot kthe kase. kEven kMicros~1 kdoesn't kuse ksuch kstupid kterminology. kI *ksuspect* kthat kthe khead kdeveloper's kname kstarts kwith ka "k"
Lars -
If you dont believe me I cant stand the purdies just go to my website lol. About as plain as they come :-)
Being impartial has little to do with trolling.
Mozilla looks horrible.
They'd better start working on some nice themes, because the default looks are crap. And so tells every friend I show Mozilla. I know that it's cute and looks like Netscape's portal, but it's just not pretty.
I downloaded and installed M14 last week (decided to put my money where my mouth is).   Go here to pick up a new GUI for your Mozilla.   This is one of the new features with this browser - changeable "skins".   There are only 2 out there right now and I'm using the one called "Aphrodite" (which is alot less "loud" then the "Fruity gum"), but this is what supposedly makes Mozilla different from the rest - modular enough to change your interface!   More info on this can be found at Mozillazine.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
But I doubt it will be because they're using Mozilla. Or Netscape Communicator/Navigator/whatever. Mozilla started out as a good idea. But they took the idea too far, and got way too much of a case of featureitis. The main culprit: the skinnable GUI.
Skins are Good Things, mind you. If they're used properly; that is, on simple GUI's. Take MP3 players, for example. What can you do with an MP3 player? Let's see... play, pause, fast-forward, rewind... maybe a couple sound-related options. But all in all, not a complex thing, and as long as you make the buttons identifiable pretty much any interface will work well.
But skins don't scale. Wrap a skin around something as complex as a Web browser and you start having some serious issues. Consider:
- Consistency. MP3 players are one thing. But if start up something as big as a Web browser on MacOS, I want it to look like a Mac app. If I start it on Windows, I want it to look like Windows. And if I start it in Gnome, I want it to look like my other Gnome apps. While skins can provide a partial solution, there's no practical way to make it follow the changes I make (consider GTK themes to be a prime example; I can change my GTK theme to BlueSteel and get a BlueSteel Mozilla skin, but if I change the GTK theme my Mozilla skin won't change with it).
- Performance. Gecko is blindingly fast, but the rest of Mozilla is slow. I can launch Netscape 3.0 faster on a P90 than I can launch Mozilla on a G3/300, and I've timed this before so I know what I'm talking about. This isn't as much of a problem with small GUI's, but again the problem is one of scale; stick it on a Web browser and the issues that were minor on a small GUI will come back to bite you hard.
- Interface control. This one's actually unique to Mozilla, because of another nice little feature they added: Websites can change a user's skin. I'll pass. The possibilities of exploits notwithstanding, once I have a skin I like I'd rather keep it that way.
It's a pity. Mozilla could have been The Next Big Thing, even with the cross-platform GUI libs (which could still have gone down to OS-native widgets). But then they had to go and build in the ultimate fluff: a cross-platform skinning engine, and then they had to go and build it in before the rest of the product was even ready. That was their one mistake, and I believe it may well be a fatal one. I have nothing but respect for the Mozilla team; they've made a fine program given the specs. But ultimately, I think Mozilla will be treated only as a proof-of-concept. People will still use Gecko, of course. But it'll be embedded into OS-native browsers for that task. Gnome users will have it in Nautilus (and who knows? maybe the KDE folks will put it into the next Konqueror). NeoPlanet will take it on Windoze. And for MacOS? I don't know. NeoPlanet might do it again; there are rumors that they'll be porting and using the Mozilla engine. If not, there's always the WebThing project.It's a shame, but it proves the old adage: a jack-of-all-trades is master of none. Nonetheless, I'll probably use Netscape until something better that uses Gecko comes along.
The OJI, the necessary portion to do a Java plugin, is available at Blackdown. It works with
Netscape... the same technology works with the Windows version of Mozilla, so why no Java on Linux Mozilla?
Not that I'd cry if the world forgot about Java applets. The VisualWorks smalltalk plugin for Linux sounds very interesting.
Okay, at least on Win32, Mozilla is finally running about as stable and lo-mem as IE5. It crashes much less and is actually somewhat fast.
I have a few questions about how it will turn out, though:
1. When the debugging code is taken out, will it run faster/suck less memory, etc?
2. Are they going to get rid of the ugly, glitzy and only semi-functional interface in favor of, say, something with a working multi-level back button, drop-down address list and non-rounded menus? Don't get me wrong, the UI can be sleek, but mockable is a different story altogether.
3. Is the sidebar going away, please?
4. When will the widgets ever look like they're supposed to?
(see
http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/nsGFXWidgets.html
to see what I mean.)
Anyone who can lend some insight into these minor yet somewhat crucial issues, I would appriciate it.
I'm using the nightly builds quite often and although there has been a lot of progress the last months, Mozilla would not yet be accepted as browser by the masses.
A few of the issues:
Mozilla looks horrible.
They'd better start working on some nice themes, because the default looks are crap. And so tells every friend I show Mozilla. I know that it's cute and looks like Netscape's portal, but it's just not pretty.
Mozilla crashes too often.
Don't let the Beta1 progress list fool you: these are only release-stopping bugs. There *are* tons of other serious ones that need to be addressed first.
Mozilla is not MSIE.
Harsh as it is, this *is* a problem. Even if Mozilla is better than MSIE, a lot of users will not even try it. MSIE does it's job good enough and the general public doesn't care about ethics (yet).
And there's probably even more...
But, Mozilla is open source so we can all help and address these issues. Mozilla is very cross-platform. Mozilla might/should/will? replace MSIE as browser component for AOL and gain instant market share. Other manufacturers can also ship Mozilla or even plain Gecko as browser component without paying a Microsoft fee.
Mozilla will do just fine. Thanks, developers.
Have you reported reproducable bugs on BugZilla? (I have, they were fixed, it was neat). Have you downloaded the source and submitted patches? Sitting and whining works great for closed source (where there's not much you can do anyway), but it's worse than useless for open source software. The source is out there, the bug database is wide open, get on with it.
You have obviously not tried any of the
later nightly releases. It is already
on par with Netscape 4.72 when it comes to
stability, and it isn't even beta yet.
It is _very_ usable, and you somehow imply that
Mozilla/netscape 6.0 won't comply with the standards.
This is just plain wrong.
AND... this is an announcement of a "beta".
If you do truly mission-critical stuff, you
would never use a beta.
The whole concept of beta, means not finished.
It is allowed to contain bugs.
However... beta means a very usable, if not
incredible stable release, and Netscape 4.72
is neither, so Netscape 6.0 beta would probably
be A LOT better for us Linuxusers.
When it comes to windowsusers:
stick with your IE 5.x for now, but when Netscape
6.0 is finished, upgrade.
The standars-complience will be better, and the
browser faster and lighter.
I appreciate your "cold shower" kind of thinking,
but it just goes to far, and ends up being something that could have come out of Microsoft.
I agree that the hype has been great, but the
progress made by the mozilla team is incredible.
The only thing that keeps Netscape 4.72 on my
harddrive right now, is that Mozilla still doesn't
support java. It should be included well before
release though.
This is complete speculation, but I think it is a plausible scenario.
Navigator 6 will contain the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla, but it will not be the Mozilla browser. I'm assuming that AOL/Netscape has been working on a parallel browser effort, using some Mozilla components. Navigator 6 is supposed to contain an integrated AOL Instant Messenger and porobably some other features that AOL thinks will give it the leg up on IE5 (aside from a bigger version number!).
Navigator 5 is most likely the version number for the plain-vanilla Mozilla browser without the bells and whistles. Ultimately, this is a dead project since only a minority (mainly Slashdot readers) would choose the plain version over the tricked-out Navigator 6...
I would like to make the comment that Netscape 6 is going beta in 25 days, not Mozilla. They are similar, but aren't the same. Mozilla still has a while to go before it hits beta (my guess). It's Netscape, not Mozilla!!! Anyone can release anything based on Mozilla and call it what they want, thus the case with Netscape.
Native widgets were not flexible enough for CSS1/2. They had to write their own widget, and why keep the native libraries for what? Scrolling? It's clearly better in the long run to just eat the development time, and write your own platform indepedent widget rather than keep 4 native widgets, while implementing your own. The skinnablity of Mozilla wasn't probaly that difficult to add concidering they had to write their own widget within specifications anyway.
:-( This hurts.
/. and it just died from all the select objects that loaded on the page.
,dreams as Mozilla desperately hacks a last attempt at a good browser?
I am doing some contract work just developing an intranet. FreeBSD/Apache/Php4/PostgreSQL For the server platform. (I need triggers MySQL people!)
My heartache comes in when I have to select a client. You see there is not much of a choice honestly. I can pick Netscape 4.x Which has somewhat lacking support for a LOT of goodies I like to use. Just standard CSS/DHTML/HTML4.0 that it cant even handle. And on the scripting side VBScript seems to play the nicest out of all scripting languages. It stops me from having to change coding mindframes when im doing VB/Delphi work.
The point is If you pick something IE4 is the way to go. Ive encountered some *nasty* problems with IE 4 and 5 and some Nasty problems with NS 4.x. Im at a rock and a hard place because they will be using this app for the next 4 to 5 years locking them into an investment with IE. What can I do I need to make money and im not gonna sacrifice some useability features AND time coding to make it work with Netscape I refuse.
I think this is happening a whole lot in RAD application development projects. It also locks people inevtiably into a windows platform when you throw ActiveX and stuff closer tied to windows.
I think I would jump on the Mozilla 6 band wagon Immediately if they could really put up some stable competition. But Ive used it and its crap. I tried to moderate on
*sigh* Im watching some fairly good dreams become just that
Jeremy
If you want to help, and own a Mac, mozilla.org could really do with your services testing each daily build. This is vital, as each build must be checked for basic functionality before the tree can reopen so people can go on working. We have enough Linux and Windows people, but no Mac people. This means that some days, the reopening of the tree is delayed an hour or more while someone is found from inside Netscape.
So, if you have a Mac and the spare time (under an hour, if all goes well), please come to irc.mozilla.org at 8am PST (ish), 4pm GMT in channel #smoketest.
Gerv
I am the KeyMaster!
XUL!!!
just couldn't resist...
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Is it just me or did that article sound like a press release straight from netscape with no effort put in to remove the mindless netscape drivel in order to create a balanced article? Whats Next?
Yahoo Reports
Microsoft Corp has announced that Bill Gates has ascended to the right hand of the God today. This ascendence took place at the Gazeebo of the Rock located in the heart of Microsoft's Redmond campus. Microsoft urges its shareholders not worry about the loss of the chairman since he will reportedly descend from heaven with the divine inspiration for all future MS products. First among these will be IE 6.0 which, in a stunning announcement from MS, is going to be released to beta testers in 24 days.
CEO Steve Ballmer replied to all questions about the new product at a press conference saying, "IE6 will be a new paradigm in web browsers. It will be a cadillac of browsers, large and roomy with many features." When asked about some of these magnificent features Ballmer replied by saying, "Ummm... well... It has a wonderful soothing blue screen which appears at regular intervals to calm the user and prevent them from over-working themselves. We will also be including that cute paperclip into IE because everyone loves it so much."
Confirmation of divine intervention in Microsoft's product line was made by Pope John Paul II as he stood on a pile of unrelated money. The Pope was reported as saying "Direct divine intervention is the only thing that could give Microsoft high quality products." The pope then returned to writing his next sermon on his Jesux workstation.
Source: Microsoft Corporation
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Internet Explorer works and is compliant with all but the latest W3C standards
:)
:-)
Forgot to mention this in my first reply
Here's what happens in the real world when browsers collide in W3C standards testing:
Click here for test results
As you can see, last September's version of Mozilla completely trounces MSIE 5 (and Opera, and Navigator 4.7, not that that's hard).
Apologies in advance to the page owner if they get Slashdotted
Many people have pointed out how M14 is unstable and how there's still so many bugs in Mozilla. As I've been testing many milestones and nightly builds, I'd like to tell a few things about how Mozilla has developed.
First of all. Don't run that M14 milestone any more. Go and download a nightly build and give it a try. If it crashes or has annoying bugs, report them and download a new one a few days later. Some builds are really keepers. They are nice and stable. Some builds may have more bugs.
There's also been lots of improvements in Mozilla. M12 or M13 choke on Slashdot. Incremental table rendering was a nightmare. A long Slashdot page could take minutes. But in the beginning of this year Netscape got it right. Slashdot is loading nicely and most pages I often visit work perfectly. Actually I use Mozilla way more than Netscape 4 already.
Someone also got moderated to 5 - insightful for bashing Mozilla's skins. It's pretty weird as he really didn't give any hard facs. It was just opinions. Well Mozilla is really skinnable. You can make Mozilla act and look like whatever you want. And it's not only about looks, it's also about functionality. And the most important is that thanks to skins Mozilla is really cross platform. The bonus is that we don't have to wait for Linux ports or curse the differences between platforms. Mozilla will really be the same on Win32, Linux, Mac, BSD, you name it. And when there's tens of different skins for Mozilla after a year, there should be absolutely no reason not to like skins.
Memory footprint and speed? The newsgroups are slow and Mozilla still eats a bit too memory. But I can remember when the browser's scrolling had a one second delay and the whole UI was sticky. Now it's really fast at least on Win32. So what makes you think that those slow parts won't be fixed?
I'm absolutely positive that Mozilla will be a success.