Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
It's quite obvious you haven't tried any of the nightly builds or the milestone releases. If you had, you'd know that mozilla is fully compliant with CSS1 and html. CSS2 compliancy is partial, but it's better than microsoft's incorrect implimentation.
As for "slow performance," optimization is at the bottom of the list, behind getting things feature-complete and getting to zarro boogs. Besides, mozilla _is_ fast. But you haven't tried it, remember?
As for "inevitable crashes," I dare you to state that IE never crashes. I also dare you to say that _beta_ software never crashes. Besides, mozilla doesn't crash that much. But you haven't tried it.
As for bugs, there is a massive public database that anyone can access to report bugs. Several of the bugs I have reported have been fixed, and several more are being worked on. Again, this is old hat to mozilla regulars... but you haven't tried it.
Hype is one thing, but in this case there are avenues to decide for yourself exactly what the product is like.