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Web Standards Project Blasts Netscape
Spasemunki writes "Mozillazine is running a link to (and commentary on)this letter written by the Web Standards Project, blasting Netscape for failing to deliver on Netscape 5/6 in a timely fashion. They argue that the inability of NS to produce a ready-for-prime-time, standards compliant browser has made it harded to coax other developers into adopting standards, and that the zombie-like continued existance of Netscape 4 in its various .x's represents an ongoing offense to standards compliance. These criticisms have been around for a while, but the WSP sums them up well, and gives Mozilla advocates (myself included) some things to answer to."
Sure, blame the MS monopoly on Netscape's market share MozillaZine.... blame it all you want.
I'm a former Netscape supporter. I didn't leave because of the Monopoly. I left because Netscape hadn't released anything that didn't suck in well over a year, and Mozilla was ages away from being usable.
Its been a year since then, and whats changed? Netscape hasn't released anything that doesn't suck in well over two years now, and Mozilla still isn't usable compaired to IE.
Thats where the biggest loss of market share has come. People like me aren't computer gods, but we're vocal enough that we do make a difference. People come and ask me for browser help, and I use to tell them that they could solve many of their IE problems by installing Netscape. Do I tell them that anymore?
Of course not. Now I tell them that they can solve their Netscape problems by installing IE.
Its sad, I'd rather support Netscape. But when they ask me for advice on whats best for them, 99% of the time the answer is IE. Occasionally I recommend Opera (which I'm using right now) to people I figure will like it, but its definately not suited to the average user.
So please, don't try to pin the blame on the monopoly. In my experience, far more people have switched then have never heard of Netscape. Many of those have switched because people like me were forced into advising them to switch, because Netscape gave us nothing to work with, while Microsoft does.
(its probably also important to mention that yes, many people haven't herad of Netscape these days. But why would you hear of it? Don't blame the monopoly. Blame lack of word of mouth. Napster spread like wildfire because people were talking about it. Nobody is talking about Netscape because it sucks right now. If Mozilla.org can come out with something better then IE, people will start talking and it'll catch on. Trying to hide behind the claim of the evil Redmond giant when its really Netscape's own fault is pretty silly there MozillaZine.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
When AOL includes Netscape in their client, the tide will turn. Suddenly there's another 22 million users you have to take into account. That comfortable, "lazy" approach of desinging for the IE extensions just won't cut it anymore.
I find this amusing because these are Microsoft's tactics. So many people are tied into one software solution and so they really are forced into using certain applications. AOL really is trying to use the Microsoft strategy by distributing applications such as Winamp, Netscape (Mozilla), AOL Instant Messenger, and ICQ with their popular Internet connection software. I guess I just find it funny that someone from a community advocating open standards and free software (as in speech,) is suggesting that the tactics that AOL will use will benefit the community.
Can it really be that hard to write a browser?! Why do they have to put in all that extra cruft, the mail/news reader, editor? Why is the footprint so bloody huge and why does it take so long to start up?
On my Mac (I also have a Sparc and a K6 so I'm not some idiot Mac zealot) I started running iCab. It is great. The binary is less than 2MB, it can run happily in 5MB ram, its fast, doesn't crash as often as Netscape and NEVER takes down the whole computer. It supports java and its java script support is improving. It is quite usable and standards compliant.
Why can the company making iCab release a stable, fast, *usable* web browser and Netscape, with all its power can't?
Andrew
The following is what I posted to the WaSP mailing list:
/massive/ internal pressure on the developers face to get the thing going fast. And they are doing a fantastic job. I drag down a nightly build every couple days. The bugs are ticking away steadily.
/all/ of CSS? Not only do the people building it need to be expert web designers (which is enough for most people here to handle on it's own), but they have to be expert programmers as well. I am still grappling with understanding CSS2 and looking at the code, and thinking about how one would do some of the things the specs ask for...it scares me. I really respect what they have done. It's no coincidence that Mozilla rocks most the competition on their standards support, they really do have a Next Generation layout...and it's still in it's first iteration.
/their/ timeline? I mean, for me, sure...I think it's all fine and dandy to say to the browser manufacturers "if you make a _web_ browser, please make it support _web_ standards, this is a community whose value is in interoperability, and we would like you to support that interoperability". But I draw the line before making demands on /their/ timeline. It's /their/ bloody product...they can take damn well as long as they want and WaSP can just bloody well wait. Being that it's /their/ product, they can also innovate however they want, and prioritize however they want - Netscape has been kind enough to publicly state that they have prioritized on standards. Be thankful Netscape is building a /free/ (as in speech) browser for you at all. And the free software community is very simple...if you want it done faster... help! (put your money where your mouth is), or at least show some bloody gratitude already.
/giving/ to the software community. Thank you for helping build and support an /open/ community around your offering so that I can see things progress, and help is whatever way I can. I appreciate it.
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Even being a rabid (frothing at times) web standards supporter, I don't like this.
Being heavily involved with the web, I have been following Mozilla extremely closely since the day Netscape released the code. I have downloaded and tinkered with the code, to help understand how things work, and to hopefully/eventually help them fix bugs.
As a software engineer I can say that a modern web browser is probably one of the most complex pieces of software. Period. This letter, and many of the postings on this list, make me feel that the WaSP is a group with many people who don't have enough understanding or appreciation for the complexity required to do what they ask.
A layout manager at the level of HTML 2 is a moderately hard programming task, but doable. HTML 4 is where it gets interesting, tables on their own would be difficult enough. The CSS box model adds a _/significant/_ amount of complexity. CSS2 makes this even harder. CSS2 scriptable via DOM (DHTML)? ECMAScript alone is a monumental undertaking. Dynamic reflow? Then start throwing PNG w. Alpha transparency in, Z-ordering, etc...creating solutions for all these things and rolling them together into one working piece of software...it IS monumental. And implementing it is the classic 10%/90% scenario...the devil is in the details, especially with things like CSS. It's hard enough for a someone to understand the bloody specs, let alone implement them.
The thing that gets me the most is....what do you think they are doing? do you think they are not trying? do you think they don't know that their market share is trickling away by the minute? do you think they aren't already aware that it's been years since 4? or that there browsers very existence very possibly may be on the line? Trust me....they know. If you follow closely you will realize that there is already
The other factor is people. It's easy to say "well, you're this big company with all this money, throw more developers at it" Even forgetting the fact that "more doesn't always equal better, or faster", I don't care if you are AOL, Microsoft, IBM, or whoever...finding developers skilled enough to work with a task
that complex is next to impossible in this industry. This list probably has one of the highest levels of, say, CSS know how...how many people here could claim to have an understanding of
And who is the WaSP to make demands on
I would like to take this opportunity to say to the people at Netscape and Mozilla. Thank you for seeing the error of your ways, and doing your best to deliver a standards compliant product. Thank you for what I see as a tremendous amount of effort over the last year to Do The Right Thing. Thank you for spending an enormous amount of resources building something you are
Netscape did that for years, creating their own standards as they went along.
They stopped doing it because Microsoft not only implemented the standards and Netscapes variants, but created their own as well.
Thats the difference, Microsoft made it so their browser could do the standard stuff, most of the Netscape stuff, *and* the Microsoft stuff. Netscape hasn't been able to compete with that.
They were beaten at their own game.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm actually using Netscape right now, and I can expect it to crash any second if I open up any more windows. That's why I continually save posts like these. I've lost too many to keep track of, but it was enough for me to eventually dump Netscape.
It took about six months for the inertia of using Netscape over IE to slow down and for me to finally realize that the change was imminent. Outlook's Import utility clinched it, as I could now use Outlook to import all my email. I have Netscape 6 Preview 1 installed, but it looks more like a nearly completed building with the scaffolding still up than any kind of useable browser.
As Stroustrup said, "C makes it easy to shoot yourelf in the foot, whereas C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off." Yes, IE crashes every now and then, and it usually takes the whole system with it, but I don't have to deal with the maddening experience of several crashes per day. Which is worse: the boulder in my path?--or the grain of sand in my shoe. I'm not quite sure, but I've chosen the boulder.
About the only thing I miss is Netscape's status bar. They did a great job with keep the user informed about how the page was loading, while IE happifly reassures me that the page is "opening..." And IE's dumbed-down error messages aren't exactly helpful, but I've been using Guidescope as a local ad-blocking proxy and it seems to help some with DNS errors and the like.
So I'm sorry that I don't use Netscape anymore. I'm sorry that I use a browser that doesn't adhere very well to Net standards, and in some cases even flaunts them. But I'm not sorry that Microsoft built a better browser. And Netscape didn't.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
You severely underestimate the fine people at Netscape. Check out the xmlterm project. Yup, it provides you with a very cool xml-aware xterm thingie that models your interaction with a shell as a (dynamic) xml document. So you can cat (or xcat) html documents and have them rendered onto standard output...and re-compile your kernel for you in a subshell.
Babar
You're forgetting something - the half-life of web applications is frighteningly small.
Websites tend to get rewritten and redesigned every year or so in order to stay 'fresh'.
Open-source parasites really tick me off. If you want it fixed, do it. If you don't know how, learn. And if you can't or won't do either of the above, then how exactly are you qualified to say what is good development practice?
"Chrome/skins" are merely a side effect from deciding to use the rendering engine to render the UI.
The choices the Mozilla project faced were:
1) Write three front ends
2) Make Mozilla dependent on a non-free toolkit, creating a financial barrier to contributing
3) Base Mozilla on the 1.x-4.x codebase
4) Write a new XP toolkit with three local implementations.
5) Render the UI with Gecko.
What choice would you have made?
Steven E. Ehrbar
I've been following the Mozilla milestones and I seriously doubt that a stable Mozilla will be produced by the end of the year. The Gecko rendering engine has been rendering pretty-good HTML for at least *one year*. From what I can see, the problem is not the underlying HTML rendering technology, it is the application environment built around the technology.
For instance, chrome/skins are a nice idea in theory. But they're butt-slow in practice. I cannot believe the people who claim they use Mozilla daily. Any site with a little bit of Javascript looks like crap. window.open() is not implemented, for example.
I write software for a living. I'm sorry that the Mozilla developers are way behind schedule. I've been on projects like that too, and they're no fun. Also, open sourcing Mozilla was a great thing, no doubt. But I can't let my empathy for the Mozilla team, and my respect for Netscape's bold move, cloud the fact that the end product is terrible.
The worst part of the delays in a final release of Mozilla/NS6 is that NS4 is so horribly outdated, so horribly unstable, that users are forced to choose an alternative.
Opera won't ever succeed in taking more than a small niche of the market, simply because they want money for their browser.
The only other realistic choice is IE. IE might not be standards compliant, but users don't care.
Mozilla/Netscape is going to have a hell of a time trying to rebuild their market share at this point in the game. Netscape fell from glory while the web was still relatively young. There wasn't much legacy code out there, so switching to a Microsoft-centric web was easy. Now, many web applications are written to Microsoft's browser, many webpages are written to render in Microsoft's browser, and many companies have switched to IE as their standard platform.
Will AOL use Netscape 6 as the browser in the next version of the AOL software? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends how much of the web is incompatible with NS6 by the time it finally reaches release.
A better strategy for the Mozilla team would have been to write an IE-compatible browser, instead of a standards-compatible browser. There's just as much documentation, and there's a reference platform to compare against. The standards are quickly become irrelevant, and by the time Mozilla/NS6 makes it out the door, they may have been completely forgotten by the webmasters-at-large. At least if Mozilla was IE-compliant, they'd still be able to compete.
I know I'm sacrificing my karma to make that statement, as the prevaling attitude around here seems to be "if you make it standards-compliant, they will come", but in reality, that's not the case. "If you make it do what the users want, they will come."
NO CARRIER
The IETF is generally considered the definitive standards body for all the various internet-related protocols. They have a strictly enforced rule over in the IETF, which I think the W3C would do well to pick up. The rule is: no protocol described in any RFC can be anointed an internet standard unless at least two independent interoperable implementations exist.
The result is that the IETF has surprisingly few internet standards (even HTTP for example is only a "Proposed standard"), but the few that they do have (SMTP, FTP, TCP, IP, among others) work very well.
Publishing a standard that has no existing implementations is an invitation for embrace-and-extend abuse. Yet the W3C has done exactly that repeatedly with their various versions of HTML 3.x, 4.x, and CSS. Even to this day, no browsers on the market have 100% HTML4+CSS2 support. Those who don't know any better wonder why HTML standards support is such a mess. I wonder why the HTML standards effort hasn't yet collapsed completely in the face of such inane stewardship.
The IETF through their public decisions processes and their wise management of the existing body of RFCs has earned my trust as an internet user. I have no such trust in the W3C. Who gave the W3C the right to publish HTML standards on behalf of the community anyway?
Folks, the browser wars are not over. Microsoft may be the leader now, but once Mozilla is complete (only a few more months to go!) then things are going to change. Sure lots of avid Windows Netscape fans will rejoice with the newe browser, and sure a lot of Mac fans will use it, and you can be certain that a lot of the Unix crowd will be afire. But what's the real reason Mozilla is going to save the web from being dominated by Microsoft?
2 things actually: embedded apps, and AOL.
The embedded space is only going to get bigger, and it needs a small, stable, fast, and standards-compliant browser. Mozilla can deliver on those promises. I really think we are going to see that the embedded browser makers will flock to using Mozilla, because it's so well done. I know if I were designing a console or a web pad, Mozilla would be my first choice.
But the real story here is AOL - they are the largest ISP in the world. They bought Netscape for a reason; they wanted to have the best browser available for their customers, without having to be tied to another vendor (who is a competitor, even!). When AOL includes Netscape in their client, the tide will turn. Suddenly there's another 22 million users you have to take into account. That comfortable, "lazy" approach of desinging for the IE extensions just won't cut it anymore.
And Mozilla will have saved us all.
I think the biggest problem is that they felt they could not just build a *browser* but rather it has to be a "Web browsing desktop environment" that does everything except re-compile your kernel. I would have been thrilled to have *just* a browser and then all the other mail/news/whatever stuff later. And to be honost about it, since I don't use Netscape for anything except surfing I would have been happy with *just* a browser.
But alas... I just installed Netscape 4.73 and it's patently worse than 4.72 was. It dies twice as much on my box....
sigh...
One beautiful example of a heavy-headed hypocricy is this:
This comes AFTER the WaSP (because no single author would take credit for this piece) suggests that Netscape withdraws its browser, had never started working on Mozilla, and should have never tried in the first place. They attribute the lack of support for Netscape products to its lack of standards compliance, NOT the fact that Microsoft used unlawful monopoly tactics to bully it out of the market.
Here is a nicely written counter-attack by Chris Nelson, which gives some very interesting counter points. Don't let the WaSP get you down Mozilla, just keep on rolling.
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.
I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.
(If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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20 January 2017: the End of an Error.