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Suck Says Mozilla Is Dead
tetrad writes: "Suck admittedly isn't the most optimistic of sites, but more often than not, it's right on the money. Today's article is more of an obituary. 'Mozilla is dead, or might as well be,' says author Greg Knauss. While some might argue that Mozilla still has breath in it, Suck begs to 'pull the plug,' and points to Mozilla's decreasing market share, feature bloat, and failure to release a marketable product. It also jabs at the techies running the show: 'The Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit.'" With the next MXX right around the corner, I have to disagree: besides that, I use Mozilla frequently and find that with a few minor exceptions, the latest builds are as good or better than Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic).
Yes ! Mozilla looks cool.
...
possibly better than netscape !
but netscape isn't a big deal.
developper should put the minimal line higher...
I hate windows, I really like open source project, but
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 really rocks.
is it possible to get better ???
being such an expert on experts i suppose yuo must be wrong to say experts are dead
.oO0Oo.
the fit will survive
evolution takes a long time
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
you forgot to write you own
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Um... NS 3.x lacks more than in just the javascript department... the complete absence of DHTML capabilities really hurts it when compared against even NS 4.x. Try looking at any modern CSS-enabled website under 4.x and then in 3.x..
Actually, M16 ground to a halt and stopped launching for me - that is, it would startup, but no windows. Bit rot. The engine was fine, since galeon worked.
Deleting the prefs regularly lets it work, and M16 runs *much faster* if you delete prefs regularly.
Which goes to show how broken stuff still is.
Don't ass-u-me.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Clear to who?
I personally only install Milestone releases, because I don't want to get caught up in incrementals like I did back in the linux 1.1 kernel days :) And it's not at all clear to me that Mozilla is somehow going to eat IE for lunch, or any other meal.
For one thing, IE still has a faster display engine, at least on Win32; I don't run a browser on any other platform. M16 is slower than IE5.5 for everything other than network performance on Windows ME and Windows 2000. I really can't praise the net code enough; It is tight as hell. Whoever the main architects on that project, you are my personal heroes.
Also, IE55 is also immeasurably more stable than Mozilla M16. I'll get back to you when M17 comes out.
What I'm trying to say is that that other crap just complicates the issue. Leave it alone for now. Work on the core components. And all of that other crap should just be plug-ins if it isn't already because I want it out of my browser. The only things I actually want IN it are Navigator and the Mail/News components, whatever the hell those are called today. Everything else can go hang.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...IE5.5 under NT under VMware
The windows market is much the same. Mozilla is a total failure in the two biggest markets, the ones where people have a surprising amount of common sense.
"Oh well Mozilla does this and this and has all these cool shit features!"
"Yes, but does it browse better then IE on either platform?"
"Well.. umm... err... uhh... its got its own widgets!"
"But thats not a good thing, I like the widgets that I'm already used to."
"No you don't, we're mozilla, we know whats best for you!"
*Goes and turns on IE*
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The "Div" tag is a W3C compliant STANDARD that is completely independent of IE (per HTML 4.0). The Layer tag, to my knowledge, has always been a Netscape thing, and it was deprecated as of HTML 4.0.
/Azure Khan/
So, if you're still using Layer tags in your web design, then they probably need some additional schooling.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
Netscape's been undead for quite a while...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I have tried all the browsers out there, and by far the best is Opera 4.0. The 4.0 version just came out, and it features none of the BS that other browsers have, just the good features.
It's only 19 dollars for an educational license. Sure, it isn't free, but it is worth the extra money to have a browser that isn't huge bloatware.
Opera is less than 2 megs, and features pretty much everything important that Mozilla and IE feature.
www.opera.com
And no, I don't work for Opera, I just really like the browser.
-----------------------------
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I am not sure it matters when - or if - it is finalized.
The world is moving on. Internet appliances are getting in bed with IE, Opera, Netscape or other browsers. These alliances will not shift because Mozilla is finally released.
If web sites continue to support standards sufficiently to be viewed on all modern browsers, Mozilla can be used - the question then is who will use it.
If more and more web sites decide to cater to 90% of the market - that 90% that has IE, then Mozilla is truly dead. Nobody wants a browser that cannot be used to view many sites.
That said... I am writing this on my main PC running Win2k. I am using Opera 4. I hate IE. I hate sites that only work with IE. I complained to news.bbc.co.uk when they changed their site format and it had problems with Opera (me and others). The BBC corrected their site.
I don't see why not - they already have the auto-crash feature for every other web-site.
I actually tried it on my P120 at home ;-) Well, drank some cups of coffee while waiting it to start up. Worked pretty fine after it started up tough. (Tried M16 as far as I recall) But considering the huge startup time I had to get back to Netscape 4.7x (which starts pretty fast)...There is no way that Internet Explorer is going to be installed on my machine! (Yes, at work I'm forced to use it *sigh*)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
make comment
make post
Funny, a minimal IE5.5 install is right around the same size as the zipped mozilla download (*not* the install). What does that get you? A functional and fast browser as well as several OS level upgrades.
Opera 3.62 is 1.5MB and doesn't consume 30MB of ram to load a webpage.
The day mozilla is lightweight is the day they change the meaning of overweight to mean "only programs bigger then Office 2000", or in real life terms, "only people larger then 400 pounds".
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Then they could take advantage of the cross platform swing interface stuff (instead of creating their own version of it), and the code would be more simple and maintainable.
Sure, it would be slow, but it's slow now! A java app will just get faster and faster as JVMs improve (and as CPUs get faster). And if they just focused on making a functional browser (instead of a whole new platform) I bet they could get it running pretty fast in java today.
- Isaac =)
What's really interesting is that if we assume 1 month for each milestone from here on out, Milestone 22 of 22 is out in December. What timing!
ufdraco
when
it
is
written
like
this.
Don't these people have anything better to do than attack other people's hard work? Sheesh!
You obviously don't know anything about marketing. Technicals merits only sells to techies. Look at how Mozilla look. The mere fact that it is ugly is enough to make people use something else.
Compared to Netscape? Have you actually tried running Netscape on anything less than a PIII w/256MB of RAM?
YES.
Every day.
and MUCH LESS than a PIII. (How about a P133 with 32MB?)
And speed was very acceptable. (Netscape(4.5) under Linux is marginally slower than under Windows, and under Windows, is about the same as IE.)
Mozilla, OTOH is S_L_O_W.
I dunno, maybe its not them, maybe its AOL's hatred of Microsoft...
AOL wanted "Titanium" to be its own damn platform, but they failed.
If they give the users a choice, give me the browser, or give me the platform, do you think their goal would be achieved?
You mean NT for Alpha, not Tru64 Unix.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
The Linux world needs a coherent vision of component software. Shell pipes aren't good enough. Neither is the duct-tape world of Perl. If the Linux world had such a vision, the open-source community could write to it and make real progress. But it's very hard to retrofit architecture.
Right on the money brother. Librarify everything and then your apps are small programs that use a collection of well defined interfaces. The same interfaces would be used by other applications in the system. The rendering engine should be in a ansi c portable shared library. The drawing routines for the windowing system would be abstracted into a common set of interfaces making gui libraries portable. The browser would use a shared library for accessing http resources, or ftp, nfs, smb, smtp etc. Programs would be small. The interfaces would not only abstract the implementation from the caller but also the developers of the libraries. This is perhaps the most important because people can work on their individual pieces of code without worring about dependancies.
Reduce everything to primitives and freeze it into high quality shared libraries.
KidSock
>> What we have is a bloated, buggy, slow monstrosity that makes open source look bad.
> 'Open source' is a style of development, not a specific entity. Mozilla has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with the developers and the goals of the project. Think about it like this - Mozilla is written largely in an OO language (C++). Does Mozilla's so-called 'failure' make OOP look bad?
It would if OOP was just beginning to gain acceptance in the commercial world as is open source. Besides, splitting hairs doesn't matter. Management will still stay "no, we will not open-source our project. Look at what happend to Mozilla."
KidSock
If so that would have been a dang funny Netscape joke.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Agreed. Releasing features incrementally is the way to go. It's what open source projects REALLY excel at. The Mozilla team codes a browser (and maybe a mail client). The ship it, it works, people improve the code, etc. THEN someone decides that they really want to use MathML (or whatever). So they write a module, or perhaps it makes it into the mainline code for version 2.0. Then version 3 adds more stuff, 4 still more, ..., until version 20 is reached and Mozilla does everything from text editing to version control :). The point is: give people a 1.0 BROWSER, and they will decide if it should become enormous and all-encompassing (Mozilla Communicator?). "Release early, release often" is a mantra for bug-fixing, not for the introduction of partially-implemented features.
Can you imagine if EMACS had worked like Mozilla? A list of milestones dating back to the early '80's, actually documenting the impending introduction of every possible feature? Nope, it just grew as it matured. But the most important thing was that it was a stable, effective text editor before it became a newsreader and e-mail client.
> Also, some of the features feel like something
> to attract windows users who are willing to
> sacrifice actual functionality for cool looks.
That's a first. Of all the insidious, evil or decadent character traits Windows users have been accused of, being suckers for eye candy over substance must take the cake. I'll keep that in mind the next time I switch pixmaps in IE5.
Of all the things you CAN accuse Windows users of, don't even touch eye candy! Not when there are certain other OSs that shall remain unnamed where developers would much rather spend time on endless theme development, and theme engine development, than on actual functionality and usability.
Regardless of all the themes, KDE still can't use some sensible window metrics. Why the f**k do edit boxes have to VERTICALLY resize with the window, and why do they have to be so FAT to begin with?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
As far as I can see it, here are some of the pros and cons:
Pros:
One Platform Construction -- no longer will web designers have to design two different copies of their pages in order for them to look good to everybody
Standard Feature Integration -- Pages could be coded using the same components. No longer would workarounds have to be created to deal with unsupported tags (iframes/layers)
Faster Version Upgrade -- It seems to me that if everybody is using the same browser, people would update their version more often, so more people would have the latest and most sophisticated version. (why, i don't know, but this is just a feeling i have. Maybe it's because they won't be confused with IE 4.0/5.0/5.5 / NS 4.0/4.6/4.7/4.73 etc)
Possible technological advancements -- This is probably the most uncertain of the pros, but if the manufacturer of the browser had complete freedom they could add new features that would make design and browsing easier, and more fruitful. Of course, this leads immediately to our
Cons:
Complete Monopoly Over Web -- Whatever this company said would be the law for viewing the web. If they didn't put a tag in, it wouldn't exist on the web.
Loss of Innovation -- The usual lack of development that occurs when there are no competitors. We're on top so why do more? (Of course this hasn't really stopped NS from stopping its innovation, but I digress)
What do you guys think? Would having a market that is overwhelmingly dominated by one browser (be it IE or NS or whatever) be a good or a bad thing?
There is a working and useable version of the kernel out right now though. Nothing mozilla has released even remotely resembles a useful and working browser (no, "it sucks less then Netscape 4" != working and usable).
This sort of expansion and feature creep is ok if there is something thats usable out there right now, like if they made a working browser and *then* went to add all the extra stuff. Thats totally different then making all the extra stuff at the expense of the browser.
The comparison isn't really valid, because I have a fully functional and quite happy kernel running right now, so if they want to add more features, why not? The same can't be said of Mozilla, when comparing it to IE isn't a total joke anymore, then maybe.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Interesting that this /. article follows another KDE2 announcement. I'd have to say that I've given up on Mozilla and Netscape, and switched to Konqueror (KDE's browser). Once it is fully compliant, Netscape will no longer need to be installed, and neither will Mozilla. Suck seems to have got it right.
I was an avid suck fan for a long time, then they starting printing pure shite a couple years ago(ie: incessant inside jokes, irellevant commentaries, etc..) and I lost interest, along with a lot of my friends who were just sick of not having a clue what the hell they were talking about.
The beautiful thing about a browser is that if they release a crappy version of something, or change/add something you really hate, you can use an older version of it usually without too much hassle, or do what most people seem to do anyway today; use more than one browser.
People make mistakes, yes. Look at Cherry Coke, Clear Pepsi and Guinness light (ugh!). But companies fix/get rid of these things, eventually producing better or more consistent products and services, and people forgive and forget.
I'll believe Mozilla's dead when I see it. If Macs can survive and thrive again as they have, I'm sure Mozilla can as well.
I will still use mozilla... M16 is pretty damn stable.
Hell people said UNIX was dead a few years ago and now look....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Sadly I must disagree with suck this once, one of the few times that has happened. It would seem extremely obvious that in this case he has no idea what he is talking about - the only truth here is that it "ain't no IE". Perhaps this is a good and a bad thing, but the only thing that keeps me from using it all the time is flakey (to none) java support - not that Netscape Communicator is much better. Yet even if Mozilla isn't prime then what *is* prime? Gnome? KDE? Star Office? Microsoft Anything? I'm so sick and tired of hearing people complaining about free software being "prime" - as if not paying for it makes you complain *MORE* than if you paid for it and it sucked. Sure, Mozilla is dead, and also very much alive by a different perspective. Perhaps we will see Mozilla go where we want it very soon and mabye not. But until mozilla.org goes down I don't think it's time for a death knell.
What a load of crap! I just downloaded M16 and ran it. Firstly, I couldn't just type in a URL at the top of the window like you normally should be able to. I have to click FILE --> open web location... After I finally got going, it rendered 7 pages before crashing.
:p Try a nightly build. M16 is old.
My, what a polite young man you are.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Bring Out Your Dead!
I'm not dead yet.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
the most interesting UNIX netscape bug i've seen is on DEC, i once got an error message stating that there was a negative number of windows open.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
This is exactly what I've been saying since the inception of Mozilla. The probability that this software product will actually be released when promised as they intendend is very unlikely. Perhaps they should have tried to implement a basic browser then added the cool features on for version 2.
There is no spoon.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
I'm using 3.62 right now, haven't made the move to 4 permanently yet because of some nagging issues still. It is useable though, which is far more then can be said of Mozilla.
Definately worth the money if you want an actual small and fast browser under Windows.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
because it is really the next version of the AOL client.
AOL needs mozilla and needs all these extra features included. AOL needs the flexibility to rapidly deploy a client on whatever platform comes in the future (set top boxes, web pads, kiosks). They also want to stop supporting MS with the IE integration (limiting the clients to whatever MS supports). When AOL upgrades all their users (how many bajillions now?) no one will be saying that mozilla is dead.
G
I know there's other browsers out there - Opera and others - but none compare with IE, most unfortunately.
This is not good for the future of Linux. Why will anyone want to use Linux if, in a few years, the best we can say is that "Yes you can access MANY web sites" (but not all - and a diminishing number at that).
Mozilla is a pritty bad develupment setup.
But Mozilla is showing out in the open is what is happening to Netscape, IE and pritty much any web browser who dares compeate.
Feature creep.. that standard is being set by the web standards themselfs. Changing rapidly. Java is even worse for being hiddiously complex.
Mozilla is bleeding badly... this is the state of the web today.
What most projects (commertal, open source etc) do is at some point enter a state of feature freeze. They deside what will go in for an offical releace. If only neat stuff is dreammed up shelf it for later.
You really can not do that on a web browser. The target must be the standards. That is a moving target.
Personally I'm still working with HTML4. No Java or Java script or anything.
Most of the time my HTML dosn't go past HTML2.
Standards are being dumpped on the web now that it's populare and well intrenched. This is making it difficult to produce anything that works halfway decent.
Part of Mozillas problem is they are trying to produce a browser with all the features.
That won't happen...
and how can you get your develupers to stop adding "cool shit" when you need them to keep adding "cool shit" standards....
Feature freeze Mozilla.. including standards... now... fix bugs.. add standards changes later.
Eventually someone will replace the web with something new. If that new item learns from the mistakes being made today they'll maintain a standard client and make new standards easy to implement.
I don't actually exist.
Mozilla is not dead he shall rise agian. With AOL behind Mozilla. In no time it will get alot of it market share back. Imagine what would happen if AOL start a direct mail campaign with Netscape. They could easily start gaining back the market share they lost.
It's not a case of "It sucks" even though it's Alpha code, or even "It'll never be completed" because it's late, it's a case of "Look at what they have created so far. It truly sucks, and we can't see it getting any better. Please, can we have a real browser that doesn't suck up the sort of system resources that would make ASCI White fall to it's knees?". See?
Uh...suck...oh for the sweet love of God...suck??? I mean.. don't get me wrong suck might be correct... but I hardly think that suck is the website to go to when you are looking for hard hitting news...
Sure, Mozilla the browser is way, way overdue. It's so far overdue, that I am begining to defend sites writing IE only HTML - IE has 90% of the market, after all. (I don't like it, though)
That's not the point, really. The point is that once Mozilla is stable we will have a truly cross platform, lightweight and fast alternative to the MS Active X architecture.
Sure, Java isn't bad, but for GUI apps... well, even Java evangelists aer concentrating on the server now.
Mozilla/XUL really is cross platform. Applications written using XUL will appear identical on all platforms (even the Mac!).
Mozilla is lightweight. Everyone complains about the "huge" download, but lasttime I checked, it was between 6 and 7 megs. That's for the browser, and the entire XUL operating environment. Try getting a JVM and class libraries that small, let alone an IE/Windows download.
Mozilla is fast. Okay.. it's not that fast, but the nightly builds have been getting better, and the HTML rendering is fast.
Anyway, Mozilla isn't dead. I doubt it will ever (with "ever" = the next year or so) suprass IE's market share, but it will begin to make an impression in the application development market very soon, now. I'd say within 6 months there will be more websites on XUL development than development in something like FLTK.
A few months ago (when I last had windows installed) I tried Mozilla under windows, and I had exactly the same problems. I did not submit bug reports, I was just pissed off that fundamental features like that (and filename expansion) were non-functional.
I still use Netscape. I can see myself using Mozilla when functional (read basic) features are built in.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
... then WHY does Netscape still own the code to Mozilla? The NPL is halfway OK, but it still has clauses that make it incompatible with the GPL.
I had been using Mozilla nightlies for most browsing, but now I'm posting this with Galeon. At least with Galeon + Gecko I can get reasonable performance on a K6-450 & 196MB RAM. Mozilla was OK as long as I didn't cause the GUI to redraw, like using a menu or multiple windows.
I still hold hope for Mozilla, but if Netscape's NS5 code was tossed out and rewritten starting with Gecko, then I question Netscape's copyright on the whole Mozilla project. It seems a little charitable to contribute to a non-GPL'd or non-BSD type license, owned by a Multinational Corporate Entitity like AOL.
Compile your own copy with the IRC client excluded...
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is.
Okay, first off, the speed and memory size of Mozilla is dependant largely on the chrome that Mozilla is using. I know this is a typical 'advocates' comment (don't you love it when logical, rational statements are ignored, because they come from someone stereotyped as an 'advocate'?); but here's some evidence (yes, not perfect, but marginally better than pure opinion - I suggest grabbing a nightly and seeing for yourself):
Mozilla with the 'Modern' theme (from `ps aux|grep mozilla`, removing children and the grep itself - these numbers are approximate, I forgot to write them down :-) - but it was ~37 MB):
nconway 539 0.0 23.2 37040 27612 pts/0 S 23:30 0:00 ./mozilla-bin
Mozilla with the 'Classic' theme (again, same totally informal test procedures, same box, same prefs et al):
nconway 557 0.1 16.3 26816 20776 pts/0 S 23:34 0:00 ./mozilla-bin
The theme switch shaves off 13 MB of memory (and the 'Classic' theme isn't even designed to be particularly lightweight. A stripped down, simple UI would doubtless be much smaller).
As to Mozilla's performance, it is obviously subjective. Benchmarks mean nothing, so what other kind of performance measurements are there? Mozilla performs fine on my Celeron 500 with 128 MB of RAM; on my P120 with 48 MB of RAM, it is slower, but (IMHO) still acceptable, and I prefer it to Netscape 4.
Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
I don't have a copy of Netscape 4 on this machine, so I can't judge, but IIRC, Netscape 4 tends to use much more than 26 MB of RAM (especially considering memory leaks).
You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Fine, you don't have to. But I use a kick-ass browser every day - last night's Mozilla build.
I'm tired of seeing feature bloat and lazy coding produce SLOW as molassas (on anyting but the latest and greatest machines) browsers.
Here's a quick summary for you new folks:
Mosaic 1.2: "fast" but barely functional web browser.
Mosaic 2.0-2.4: Marginally better than 1.x
Mosaic 2.6/2.7b: Improved, jpeg support but by this time Netscape was out and blew mosaic away.
Netscape 0.99-1.12 Cool as shit compared to Mosaic, talbes, forms, included basic newsreader pretty darn fast on any machine.
Netscape 2.x: Faster than 1.x, Java support, completely redone newsreader some minor improvements
Netscape 3.x: Fastest Netscape ever, table background color support, great newsreader. About the only modern shortcomings are javascript incompatibilities, and lack of IMAP support in messenger.
Netscape 4.x: Slower than any other netscape version, bloated, buggy. Has PNG and IMAP support, and better email client but crappy newsreader.
Mozilla performs for me about as well as Netscape4.x. Why can't they get the performance to match Netscape 3.x? Do we really need all those silly features?
Please list the bugzilla number. Doing that will add traffic to that bug, which means that someone will probably fix it. (maybe me).
From their web site:
platform version
Win 3.1 4.08
Win 9x, NT 4.08
Mac 68k 4.03
Mac PPC 4.08
AIX 3 3.04
AIX 4 4.08
AIX 4.1 4.74
AIX 4.2 4.74
BSD 2.1 3.04
BSDI 2.0 4.74
Digital Unix 3.2 4.04
FreeBSD 2.2 4.74
...
I'm actually not going to type them all in, but suffice it to say that not everyone has the choice to use the most current version of Navigator... Some of us (windows and mac) users need to use the full Communicator...
Now if you want to take a look at the overall plan here is a layout of the Milestones As you can see they are at the end of what you call the feature creep, when in actuallity they are at the end of the development cycle and headed into bug/hunting performance tuning.
And the last "milestone build" released was M16 --a week late, even, but that's forgivable. That was on (according to Mozilla's site) June 13, 2000.
According to the milestone roadmap you pointed out M17 was supposed to be released three weeks after M16 was released, the end of June and M18 a month later. Where is M17?
This was supposed to be one of the first milestones to push for feature-completeness and optimization. Here's a chance for Mozilla developers to say "OK, we're done innovating, now we push to get our browser ready for prime-time" and they're dropping the ball.
Mozilla has turned into a big "develoeprs-only" party. Everyone talks about "just downloading and using the latest nightly builds" but for the casual end-user this is not an option. Yeah, I've downloaded the latest nightly builds and I haven't seen any of this great stability that everyone else is reporting.
I'm glad that Taco and others can use Mozilla as their daily browser -- wish I could share in the fun.
Jay (=
Ok...let's just for a second say that Mozilla is 'dead.'
Now, for one thing, what does this mean? Since it's open source, does that mean that you should hunt down the source, wherever it is, and delete it? Does it mean that active development should be stopped, and changes should no longer be re-submitted?
No, obviously not. Mozilla is open source; it's code is out there. There's no way to 'kill' it, you can't 'pull the plug.' When no one is developing for it, then maybe it's 'dead,' but I somehow doubt that the flagship open web browser will be left to rot.
The author of this article doesn't know what he's talking about. What does the community get by 'killing' mozilla? More developers for Konqueror? I doubt it. A stable version of Opera? No. C'mon...if you don't dig Mozilla, then don't use it, ignore its active development and its builds, improving by leaps and bounds. Without Mozilla, what is there to wait for? IE 6?
Maybe Mozilla isn't pretty, but it's starting to do a lot of things better than Netscape, especially Netscape for Linux. Sure, Mozilla has issues, but let's face it: the author of this article browses using IE for windows, and he doesn't care if the entire web is written using proprietary IE stuff, breaking compatibility with every other browser out there. I really have to wonder about anyone who calls for Mozilla to die. Who profits from Mozilla's death? MS does, that's for sure. Does the community? I don't think so. I think that Suck is great, though: especially for under-informed windows lusers who are eager to laugh at anything, especially at stuff they obviously don't understand.
This article is worthy only of our wrath.
So, who wants to take the Mozilla code as it exists today and fork it?
We'll freeze the feature list right where it's at now. We'll wipe out all the bugs that cause crashes. Then, we'll use a garbage collector to get rid of memory leaks.
Then we release a nice stable browser a year before the other Mozilla is ready.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
If you think that mozilla is wallowing under the problems of feature creep you are doing one of two things. 1) Smoking crack. 2) So uninformed you should be taken out in the streets and beaten with a wet noodle.
In three months of nightlies I have yet to see a new feature come into mozilla. What I have seen is buggy features become working like they should.
Recently skin switching has made its way into mozilla. This feature has been planned for since the beginning of the XPFE project with its XUL and whatnot. Skin switching is the closest thing to a `feature' that I have seen making it into the tree since M16.
Only a few more of what most people term `features' (you people really should go look at BugZilla the bug tracking system for Moz to see what is a new feature and what has been planed for) that are going to make it into moz are proxy auto-config, SVG, MathML and several others that only aren't in the nightlies because the builders don't want to push larger binaries. In fact most of these are almost done, but just have a few bugs to be worked out before they can be released unto the masses.
Remeber, before you open your mouth, keep your facts straight, check out bugzilla to find out what features are `creeping' and what appear to be creeping because you don't bother to adjust your build configuration.
The author is a daily downloader of Moz nighlies and finds it very strange why other people don't think moz is so very cool
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
marotti.com
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
Ask my friend's wife what she thinks about Moz on Linux. She crashes it almost hourly with just plain-jane web browsing.
She visits a lot of Java/JavaScript sites and Moz blows up bigtime on a lot of them. She doesn't use the email/news/etc. parts, just the browser and she has a worse time with Moz than she does with Netscape.
She went to Moz because of Netscape's problems. You're telling me that she wants a browser that has everything, including the kitchen sink, fifth wheel and ottoman? Give me a break. Mozilla started out as a browser. Now it's an OS with a semi-functional browser.
I believe we've tried Galleon, Opera, etc. Yuck. Or doesn't support the basic Java/JScript. Linux needs a decent browser. Moz was supposed to be that.
How's that phrase go? Get it working, then add on. Not the other way around. They have gecko. All they had to do was put in a basic Java/JScript component and a few widgets to operate the browser and 99% of people would be happy. Don't give me the bullshit statement that they are taking the long hard road to make it better. It's already componentized; it does not take much to take the individual components and encapsulate them with XUL or whatever the fuck it is they're doing now. The could have released Moz months ago in a beautiful fast browser and then started the XUL/MozillaOS extensions to make everyone happy. They didn't, and that's why I agree with suck.
Moz is dead. Long live whoever's next. Hopefully those who put so much time and effort into Moz have learned something and if they get another opportunity for such a high-profile project they won't drop the ball again.
Don't forget skins! It has to be skinnable!!
---------------------------------------
I for one am completely sick of the attitude among computer consumers and users now that the occasional crash is ok. It is not. No wonder these companies get away with releasing buggy sheit all the time... most people don't care as long as it doesn't crash more than once or twice a day. Any crash is not acceptable.
F /...
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
IMHO, Mozilla is what a BIG open source project should look like.
This comment reminds me of what some refer to as the "long term investment". Quite frankly we don't _really_ need a competitor to IE right now... like we don't need another Windows.
I suspect that what we want is a better internet. Not just bandwidth, but usefulness. And that may not come from MSIE "page holders" and "go buttons". It may only come from evolutionary developements (he said using poncy pretentious words).
Linux seems to have this quality -- its open to people changing it -- unlike windows that seems closed to people changing (ie. exclude people from using non-MS products). Perhaps Mozilla, in developing an architecture (poncy) that can include all these "cool features", is really proving itself available to many different possible future uses.
I suspect MS sees the browser as the platform, otherwise, why would they be so "innovative" about it?
use galeon, its a GTK interface with the Mozilla engine.
the only problem I have with mozilla is the scrolling, it's painfully slow.
---
Didn't I hear that AOL was going to use Netscape (hence Mozilla) in some future release? If so, that would give it quite a shot in the arm. I've got some sites where 50% of the visitors come in via AOL.
> Personally, I'm excited about Mozilla. Contrary
> to this Sucky writer, I see strong planning
> from the ground up: Cross platorm; extensable;
> standards compliant; component-based; pretty
> well documented...The Suck guy would rather
> just have a browser that works. But for what
> platform? With what level of compatability with
> other products/standards?
I hate to break this to you, but if it's a
browser that doesn't work, it doesn't help much
that it's a highly-compatible high-functionality
browser that doesn't work.
Chris Mattern
Because Nyetscape 4.x on Linux crashes within a few pages. (Not that 3.01 is perfectly stable, but it's more stable than 4.x.)
It's obvious that Nyetscape's engineers have neglected stability on UNIX. (This is not just a Linux problem; the IRIX and Digital UNIX versions are just as crash-prone and bug-ridden, only with their own entertaining twists; anyone see the spawn-dozens-of-tiny-windows bug on IRIX?) Then again, they're not alone. Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in for Linux is also extraordinarily sloppy (a plug-in which seizes the audio device when it loads, and locks up your browser if it can't get it, is just not good enough; I don't want to shut down my MP3 player whenever a Flash ad loads on a web site). Which is not to mention the utter lack of a Shockwave plug-in. All in all, browser companies have a beggars-can't-be-choosers attitude to UNIX users.
Had I a faster computer, I'd buy VMWare and run Netscape or IE on Windows under Linux. This would paradoxically be more stable than Nyetscape on Linux, and would also give me access to Shockwave pages like Sissyfight.
It's a sad state of affairs when one has to go to such lengths to get a decent web browsing experience.
As a community we say all we want is a small, fast, compliant browser. I have news for everyone, this is not what we want. If this had been true, when Galeon was announced a hundred Hackers would have jumped on it a two weeks later we would have had a small, fast, stable and compliant browser. Instead everyone yawned and said wake me up when it supports java. The fact of the matter is we have browser evny, we want our browser to support java, activeX, plugins and just for the sake of it we want it skinable as well. If Mozilla is dead it is because we as a community nailed it to a cross and jabbed a spear in its side.
-Numbersyx
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
So what is stopping Netscape -- or anyone else -- from shipping a working version of just plain browser, developed on top of Mozilla platform and let the guys at Mozilla.org put all sorts of cool shit into it for as long as they like?
no idea.
Once upon a time, Linux was at 0.99 for a long time and it would never have been able to get where it was today if it had stayed there. But it went to 1.0 and plenty of features have been added since then, that's what major version revisions are about after all. The Mozilla team needs to realise that development doesn't stop at release and that it might be best to save some of those "cool shit" features for the next go round.
Mozilla's first aim should have been to get out a fast, stable HTML browser. Newsreaders, Inastant messengers, mail clients, and all that crappy chrome should hve been put on the back burner or at the very least, kept is a separate development branch the same way linux has stable and development versions running at the same time.
Rich
You looked at Mozilla, an in-development project, FIVE MONTHS AGO and presume to declare that it still sucks? Sorry, that has to be in the top twenty stupid things I've heard anyone state. Computers suck. I know, because I used a PC Jr ten years ago and it could hardly run anything. This industry isn't going to go anywhere. (This bit of snarkery brought to you via Mozilla build ID 2000073021)
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
This is a project that needs to shit or get off the pot.
Bullshit. This is a project that needs to continue its steady pace of development, which has already yeilded an impressive base of code.
I'm sick of having to use a crappy 3+ year old browser in linux.
Then don't use Linux. Point your fellow ex-linux-users to a local Gateway Country. Or maybe you could stop being a whining pussy and start coding.
If you don't like your operating system, and you're too candy-assed to make it better, you're the one who needs to shit or get off the pot.
-------
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
If they aren't going to realse a BROWSER anytime in the near future(and looking at their rodemap, they aren't) We need to rally behind a project(like Konquror, or Nautalis*) and just forget about Mozilla and leave it rot.
Wow, you're going to RALLY behind another browser! Don't do too much "for the cause," you might give yourself a hernia.
What exactly does it mean to rally behind a project, anyway? Does it mean you start bitching about the other open source projects you have not contributed anything towards?
Oh, I guess it does since you already started!
-thomas
"And like that
I'm in complete agreement. The people who thought the Netscape garbage scow was going to be turned around overnight need Ritalin added to their water supply.
The only feature of Mozzila that no one here speaks for seems to be the integrated mail client (and all the other platform riff raff). I followed BugZilla for a while and the mail client sucked up *tons* of debugging resources. I suspect that this was a political requirement, and not a choice made by the Mozilla team.
In most other respects, Mozilla's decisions stem from the nature of the open source development process. You don't gain support by telling people that the product doesn't work on their favorite platform, doesn't support their native language, and has an interface which doesn't conform with their cultural expectations.
Bloatware: an application which supports any feature which I myself don't require.
Linux supports diversity via a plethora of distributions. Mozilla supports diversity via XUL and its comprehensive i18n implementation. These things didn't come for free.
The people who are grousing about Mozilla suffer from the syndrome I call "majorism".
Identify the group with the largest political clout (ie5 users on x86 Windows) and judge by the standards of this group alone. Despite the fact that this group is *least* in need of an alternative product, and least likely to adopt one even if it came along.
It's true that Mozilla made plenty of mistakes. But as far as I'm concerned, Mozilla had the courage to make the right mistakes, and I still believe that courage will pan out at the end of the day. Stability, agility, and beauty were deferred in the name of portability and process.
A year ago Tiger Woods make the decision to correct his back swing (he thought it was too loopy, if I recall the "technical term"). For a year or so he wasn't exactly setting the world on fire, and I read no end of editorials written by people who'd fallen off the Tiger wagon. "Sure he's good, but he isn't great." Where is he now?
In my book, great is when you value your potential more than your short term success. No one ends up looking as foolish as those who judge too soon.
Dude,
Opera on Linux is deader than a dodo. As far as I can see, there has been no development on it since "Technology Preview 2" came out early this year. Remember the noise that they were making last year? The guy who ran the project wanted to release the first beta by Christmas so that he could "get a bonus". Well, the beta was a joke, so they retroactively renamed it "Technology Preview 1".
Mozilla is way overdue. But the sad fact is, there is no other viable browser being developed right now for Linux. Konqueror is cool in what it does, but not for regular use as the main browser.
Hari.
And, as a side note, why do so many people think that mail/news are usuless. When I'm on a new system, or borrowing someone's laptop, mail becomes extremely useful, even with the HTML-based access to my e-mail that my ISP, Earthlink/Mindspring provides. Again, I have to ask the question, "who are you people to decide what's useful for a browser client?" You are not the only bloody users, are you? There are a large number of people who do use the mail/news client from the 4.x series.
Right back at you
Who are YOU to decide that everyone NEEDS the email/news client? Give me a plain browser and the option to download the mail/news client (and IRC client, and XUL templating, and the MozillaOS extensions, and that kitchen sink module while you're at it) and I'll (as would be 99% of the people bitching about Mozilla) be happier than you can imagine.
But no... Mozilla developers figure that since it's all cool to have this stuff, they'll make everyone have it. That is where us people who bitch about not having a plain browser are coming from.
Mozilla is being built as a 'next gen browser platform on purpose'. Make no mistake, Mozilla will be the most feature rich, standards compliant, powerfull browser when it is realeased, you only have to read the spec/features to see that. /*NOTE: replace(AOL, AMAZON) ;) */
/* AOL owns Netscape. */
BUT:
It is not an accident that all these features are being built in Mozilla and appears to be holding up the project. Didnt we already discuss this? Ill save not post my point a second time instead, here is the link to my post.
For those without the time to read the other post, here is a synopsis:
#include profiteering _corporatist_pig_UNethics.h
if (AOL_M$_Exploder_Deal_Valid(date()) == TRUE) {
AOL_Propaganda_Machine(stall);
Mozilla_Production(Continue);
else {
AOL_Propaganda_Machine(FirstRelease_PR_Hoopla);
Mozilla_Production(Finish);
}
They have gecko. All they had to do was put in a basic Java/JScript component and a few widgets to operate the browser and 99% of people would be happy.
The Mozilla team is building a huge project. They want to get it done and out the door. If you are complaining so much about a light browser then build one your self. You said your self that it is componentized Isn't that is the idea of open source... "If you don't like what is out there fork it!"
The Mozilla team is under the direction of AOL, formally Netscape. They want a huge browser with mail, skins, and widgetX with the kitchen sink. Mozilla is doing an awsome job with that requirement. What is even better as you pointed out is that they have made zillions of componets. All someone needs to do now is glue the components they want together and release a light browser. The Mozilla team has given us an awsome resource to allow for the light browser and give AOL what they want. For that I give the Mozilla team tons of credit!
BTW. I've been learning as much as I can about Mozilla reciently and the gtk+ widget for embedding Gecko so I can hopefully, with my 7 years of C experience, contribute to Galeon. So I know a little about what I am talking about.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
There's always the PDA market.
I don't see anyone declaring WinCE champion anytime soon.
-pbk
XPI is mozilla's cross (X) Platform Installer. It uses a combination of zip files with javascript and RDF to keep track of what you have installed so you can easily add and remove pieces of the browser.
What uses XPI? Well, the win32 and linux installers use it to install the application. This means that if you don't want to install ChatZilla (which rocks by the way, full IRC client in a 400k install, IIRC) you don't have to. Same with mail/news. Even the PSM comes as an XPI. And skins? Skins are wrappable in XPI.
Want more information about XPI? There's a tutorial written by kerz at MozillaZine
Oh, and by the way, I use Moz full time, and so does most everybody else on #mozillazine (irc.mozilla.org)
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
marotti.com
Hmm.... I guess what you are saying is that Mozilla does not have a goal. You are implying that the hackers think of something and say "gee man that is soooo cool lets put it into mozilla." If you had taken half a second and checked things out Mozilla has a decient plan and there is no feature creep!
The reason Mozilla is taking so long is that they are developing it right! That is the nice thing about open source development. You don't have a manager breathing down your neck!!! They can take the time to develope a tool for doing somthing rather than hard coding it. This give you 2 things... A good implimentation of whatever you are doing and a good tool to do that same thing in a different place or somthing similar. Not to mention offshoot projects like galeon. You want examples here they are...
Now if you want to take a look at the overall plan here is a layout of the Milestones As you can see they are at the end of what you call the feature creep, when in actuallity they are at the end of the development cycle and headed into bug/hunting performance tuning.
If Mozilla had done what the other commerical browser companies had done we would have ended up with a semi good browser that would have been hell to improve/upgrade. But Mozilla took the long hard path and when the upgrads come out relatively quick and painless everyone who cried the death/stupidity of Mozilla will be crying its brilliance.
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
It's what everyone here has been clamoring for - light, fast, standards-compliant browser.
Is it GTK-only, or is it Gnome-ified? It'd be great to see it ported to Windows, to see how that community receives it...
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M17 is on the mozilla site, lok under nightly builds, M17 was branched from the tree last week and is getting final bug fix patches, the current tree is M18 ( pre-M18 ) and is even faster than the M17 branch , which is faster than M16
try downloading a nightly M17 ( and or M18 ) build they are all better than M16
try the new 'classic" theme (edit/preferences/themes)
mozilla is really getting very good
basic, fundamental things are broken in m16. no way can they release this. I wish they would fix these "little" things before implementing Platforms and Skins and Kitchen Sinks.
if only they had released a nice, working standalone browser, they could have had lots of positive press and had plenty of time to implement the rest in version 1.5. Somebody get them a project manager.
What are they DOING over there??
Check the milestones page , I quote: "M16 - Feature complete check point - the annual cinco de mayo checkpoint and party"
looks like they are partying and can't code for at least a week because of a massive hangover.
---
Not in a great while have I seen a piece of drivel that is so uninformed. This even beats the WaSP letter from a couple weeks ago.
Clearly Mr. Knauss does not understand what the Mozilla project's ultimate goal is: a 100% standards compliant browser.
Sure, XUL allows users to change the icing on the cake, but everything else will be reasonably necessary in the era of embedded applications.
Netscape attempted to create a platform before, but the market, technology, and tools to make such a thing useable didn't exist when Netscape 4.0 was released. Now they do, and Mozilla is in a position to regain its marketshare, integrating everything a web developer could want to use. internet Exploiter continues to evolve never-closer to standards compliance.
He has a brilliant sense of timing, too. M17/NSbeta2 branched last week. I read the status report from July 29...there are hardly any beta2 bugs left.
When Mr Knauss begins using Mozilla 5.0 this fall and realizes all the "cool shit" is worthwhile, I hope he writes a retractment.
Dracos
"Integer: a number that represents any valid floating-point value"
Web browsers on the other hand are used by everybody. We're talking about everybody who uses the internet uses the web, and changes happen here on timescales of 3-6 months, not years. You don't release a new version (a real version, not just x.01-x.02 changes) within a reasonable amount of time and millions of people feel the effect.
This is a project that needs to shit or get off the pot.
.NET project.
I'm sick of having to use a crappy 3+ year old browser in linux. Based of MOTIF no less. The Mozilla project was soposed to bring the best browser of them all to every platform know to man. This was years ago.
Where is Mozilla now? It doesn't even have helper aplication support for Christ's sake. This is the broswer that the zealots scream USE MOZILLA, IE SUCKS! Internet Explorer is buggy? IE has the stability of a linux kernel compared to Mozilla.
This is a project that will never have a stable product. Why? Who the hell needs another crappy IRC client? Unstead of a stable browser, the Mozilla developers would rather work on things like an "application enviroment" and making it's own widgets. Seems like the mozilla project bought into the Mircosoft idea that the browser will be the OS. Like they will be the leaders in some sort of open sourced
Linux needs a decent broswer TODAY. I've already known people that have tried linux, and gave it up because there wasn't a decent broswer. It's hard to use IE 5.5, and then take two steps back and use Netscape 4 on linux.
So the Mozilla project needs to shit or get off the pot. If they aren't going to realse a BROWSER anytime in the near future(and looking at their rodemap, they aren't) We need to rally behind a project(like Konquror, or Nautalis*) and just forget about Mozilla and leave it rot.
*Nautalis using the only decent thing to come out of the whole Mozilla project, Gekko
Mozilla does not have what the Linux kernel has: a chief who knows when to say NO (well, mostly). Without tight editorial control, the Mongolian Horde (aka the Bazaar) approach to development leaves us with what we see in Mozilla: featuritis, bloat and no shipping product. The release-often mantra is followed, but only nominally: we never had a usable and useful release. Heck, even KDE's old kfm (not Konqueror) is more usable than this bloated, buggy, lumbering monster.
I say we should plunder the carcass for parts. Of course, someone is already doing that (Galeon). I wish them well.
PHTHthththBWAAAAAhahahahaha...
Good one, CT. I needed a laugh this morning!
Saying a browser is as good as Netscape under Linux... that's a lot like telling your girlfriend she is "thinner than Rosanne", or saying that a movie was "better than Waterworld".
he he (snort)... Good thing I wasn't drinking milk when I read that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Moderators please be Gentle but... Scene 2
MORTICIAN: Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER: Here's one -- nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whop!]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right.
[clop clop]
MORTICIAN: Who's that then?
CUSTOMER: I don't know.
MORTICIAN: Must be a king.
CUSTOMER: Why?
MORTICIAN: He hasn't got shit all over him.
I completely disagree about your point on technical matters. There are few products that stand exclusively on their technical points. These few products are ususally technical in nature (medical equipment, scientific instruments, CAD software, 3D modelling etc). Browsers are not technical... their user distribution includes millions of people who don't give about any technical properties.
Mozilla won't fail because too many developers have invested their time and effort into it. It won't fail because non Mac/Win _need_ a free browser that can be upgraded and worked on. But they *needed* to get a stripped down browser out a year ago. They should have had a subteam that worked almost exclusively on just the browser.
Why? Because the browser market is all about marketshare. IE owns the market and whatever people say about it, IE 'only' features are rapidly creeping into web pages. Standard response from webmasters is to 'upgrade' to IE5.x. Just as many commercial vendors won't develop for *ix/BeOS/*BSD/etc because of lack of marketshare more and more webmasters will eventually ignore any complaints.
I don't think it's ever going to totally crap out unless MS releases a *ix version of IE (now *THAT* would destroy Mozilla). Having more than Mac/Win targetted is probably a key part of Mozilla's success.
There's basically two ways to go about software: theirs the idea that you get it out fast (this is a Mantra in Net business) and polish it up, or you 'do it right' and get it out "when it's done" (eg. Half-Life). Without either a) strong community support or b) a _stunning_ product any delays in the second method are going to result in weak acceptance. Remember that bugs are going to be present even in the "when it's done" approach.
The first approach has several things going for it. The necessary frequent releases to make things better give a good sense of *progress*. This is sorely lacking in the second model no matter how open your process. Why? for the most part people will trumpet about new releases and generate lots of news. Internal milestones or beta builds don't have the same impact. Also, this approach goes with the "foot in the door" principle. The more you make your presence felt the harder it is to ignore you. MS uses this approach to *great* success.
I just downloaded Mozilla and tried it out. First time since M13 or so. It looks nice and works alright. It's not very polished or optimized yet. I haven't tried any of the other modules that it has and I don't care about those. I wish we'd have had this one year ago. It's such a shame.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
For example, I use ICQ, telnet, IRC, FTP, and email. Why would anyone expect all of their standard daily tools be built into one, huge, bloated, takes-forever-to-load-because-of-all-this-crap "internet" tool?
Mirabilis does. Have you taken a look at their ICQ2000a client? Looks like they're making room to give you ads too. Too bad KICQ doesn't appear to be actively developed anymore, it was one of the best.
What made IE so Succesfull and capture the mass market? Microsoft's huge marketing machine.
Microsoft basically put IE on everyones desktop you had no choice. AOL put IE on your desktops too. Now Netscape has a huge marketing machine as well,AOL. If AOL chooses to switch browsers 23 million people are going to be running netscape 6.0. Why? because they don't care as long as the can do what they want to do. Now that will put a huge dent in IE's market. What about Internet appliances, mobile computing, Unix Linux and the whole load of platforms that netscape/mozilla supports.
Basic functionality is a relative thing? If mozilla has to capture the end user into switching to it, It has to have something that IE doesnot. If Mozilla didn't have a pasword manager, form completer, auto complete and other stuff that IE already has and people have come to use everyday. Nobody will swtich to it. Mail, News, Composer and all that are a part of communicator. If they suddenly ditched all the pieces that made communicator and just released navigator they risk loosing the faithful user base that uses these tools daily.
I think that the mozilla team is extremely focused and are doing an excellent job. They came up with a completely new technology, tools and a pretty close communicator in two years. That is an accomplishment in its self. They broke away from the evils of porting to a million platforms and APIs and came up with tools that will make netscapwe 7.0 easier and faster on a tonne of platforms. All that in two years and a skeletal team, management changes and a loss of 1500 developers, is an achievement.
patience people. I am posting this from a nightly build of 07302000 and It has reached a long way from when it started. All the best mozilla, excellent work.
Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
Bad news. XML+CSS has been dead for at least a year. XML is the future of browsers, but it's going to be XSLT that drives it, not CSS. CSS is a pitiful means of delivering XML, even if the CSS rendering engine does work right. There are loads of useful, real-world, right-this-minute, client-side XML uses that CSS can't even begin to address. Mozilla has missed the boat on this one.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Ok...let's just for a second say that Mozilla is 'dead.'
Now, for one thing, what does this mean?
It means that the end-users have waited for so long for a product that meets their needs, they'll go somewhere else (even to *gasp* proprietary software) to get things done.
As an open-source project, Linux got by under everyone else's radar until it was complete enough to meet the needs of end-users. The same goes for Apache; it didn't get big-name recognition until it was already kicking ass in the server world. But Mozilla has the dubious distinction of being a big-name project from the time it was announced and the end-users who were hoping that in a few months' time they'd have a brand-spanking new browser are being clued into reality.
It's like watching the O.J. Simpson trial; everyone expected a quick and easy Perry Mason-style show, and instead they got a real trial -- complete with a real trial ending. The people who pinned their hopes on having a Mozilla-style browser "real soon now" to check the onslaught of MSIE have realized that it's not going to happen, and they feel like they've been let down.
By all means, make plans to standardize on Mozilla. AOL can make all they plans they want to switch their users over Mozilla (though I would point out that they're still using MSIE in the meantime). Just keep in mind that Mozilla, by their own timeline, is at least six months away from a theoretical 1.0 release. Hope developers can hold off their customers for that long...
Jay (=
Opera doesn't do Unicode. Last year that was bad news, this year (when XML is everywhere) it's terminal.
... Who in their right mind is going to use the built in IRC client?
You have to look at it like this: there exists an entire group of people who thinks the internet *is* their web browser. If the functionality of a program doesn't exist within the web browser, as a plugin to their web browser, or as a program that works with their web browser, they probably won't notice it. Some of these people have been heard saying things like "I don't use AOL anymore, Internet Explorer is better."
So for the crowd who can't disinguish between an online service and a web browser, this is a really big deal.
Mozilla DOES give you the option to install or not install everything except the browser. Use the Installer download and you can choose not to use mail/news, Chatzilla, etc. Of course, there's no setup utility for Mozilla like Netscape uses for 6, so you do have to download it, even if you choose not to use it. I suspect that this will change at some point, though.
And, as a side note, why do so many peoplethink that mail/news are usuless.
Nobody is claiming that they are useless. I (and others) just feel that if we want to read mail/news, we can fire up a mail/newsreader. They are almost completely different activities, so why should they be in the same app?
who are you people to decide what's useful for a browser client?
That's the whole point - everybody wants a decent browser - there are already xp toolkits, there are already mail clients, there are already newsreaders, there are already xterms and IRC clients - you get my point. There is a severe shortage of cross-platform, standards-compliant graphical browsers.
Like this is news. Why should it take more than two years to come out with V5 of Mozilla? Please. IE is miles ahead of Netscape now. I can't wean myself off of 4.7x, but IE 5 is pretty killer, especially on Macs. Once I cen figure out how to configure it correctly, buh-bye Netscape. I've tried some of the Mozilla builds. It sucks BAD. The interface is shit. It's still buggy. Frankly, I consider Mozilla to be dead in the water. This isn't exactly big news. Netscape has been floating like an old tire in a scum pond for two years. This is too bad. What a cool product this used to be... = (
Where did you find that info? The charts I've seen haven't had Deus Ex in them at all.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
.. I don't know bout you, but while I support the ideal, I'm just bloody tired of the effort in getting the thing working... Is that criminal to say?
:|
Which is why I'm still using 4.74 Communicator. It may have bugs, it may not have lots of whiz-bang features, but I can do SSL IMAP and read The Register with it without having to think. Something as commodity as a browser needs to just get the hell out of the way.. Part of the "problem" is that Communicator is good enough for most users' needs.. Maybe Galeon will do it for me, if I can find an alternate GUI SSL IMAP client for Linux..
OK, maybe I'm whinging, but at least in the US, the customer is always right
(pre mod'd down for your convenience)
Your Working Boy,
Where were the doomsayers? They were writing the featured articles for websites and on the front covers of magazines. They were going on about "xx million lines of code" and "will it ever be out", in a way very similar to what they're saying about Mozilla. There were a lot of Windows 2000 doomsayers out there.
However, Microsoft actually managed to get a good product out there (for NT, anyway). We'd better hope that Mozilla 1.0 is relatively as good.
I am aware they are threads, if that is what you are hinting at with that link.
Originally targeted as a Quake 1(!) killer, Tim Sweeney and Epic started this game during the times when 6 degrees of freedom was still cool. Do you want to talk about feature creep? How about 16 bpp textures, colored lighting, volumetric fog and halos? I seriously doubt any of those were even in design consideration in 1996. And didn't it set quite a few records in missed milestones? A four-year development cycle might as well be a few millenia for a game, I'm surprised (and glad) that they stuck it out.
According to Suck's logic, Unreal [s/Unreal/Daikatana/] should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold {s/sold/wished it sold/] a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Daikatana
We're just trying to get it out the door.
Mozilla's been pronounced dead enough times that I don't think many people actually take notice anymore.
Read up on 'second systems effect'. They decided to rewrite everything, and overconfidence lead them to throw in everything at once while doing so. If they had half those things done, and people were now starting on the second half, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
HTML 4.0 layout, Javascript, and Java. That is all that they should be focused on. These features would give us a perfectly workable browser. Mail and news should be the next project, get them done and stable. Then worry about that XML stuff that nobody uses anyway. Then worry about the kitchen sink. One or two subsystems at a time, no more.
The question isn't if people will hack on mozilla. The question is how many of the current projects will ever be finished. All or nothing development often gives nothing. Eventually people will learn.
Well hate to say it, while it may have been 2 years from the time netscape released 4.x, it took about a year for the mozilla team to finally bury the ghost and start from scatch. Anyways Necko landed around July 8th, thats where I would really say the current project started. And it should finish sometime around the end of 2000. Maby its just me but there is alot currently to show for only a years worth of development. And just wait and see what is out by the end of this year.
> Has Mozilla been tested on SMP machines at all?
A bit. Not enough.
Suckdot, because 100k geeks make a lot of impressions.
(posted from Mozilla. Which I support fully as it is the only hope I have for a good surfing experience under Linux)
--
+&x
No, that's no what they need to do. There is a real need for a cross-platform integrated internet application, which is precisely what Mozilla is. I use Linux almost exclusively at home from a dial-up account. It is an enormous hassle to have to configure a separate mail client like mutt to read my mail, a mail transfer agent such as Sendmail( a real PITA to configure) or exim, better but still mangles my headers, Fetchmail (so I can get mail from my POP3 account without having it deleted or having it downloaded over and over), and then a separate newsreader.
I really want the one stop shopping approach to the ineternet. After doing all of the above and having problems with all of the aformentioned programs misbehaving in various ways, e.g. random segfaults on Fetchmail, and mutt complaining about metamail or was it the other way around I went back to Netscape for mail reading, and the bulk of my newsreading too, because it was at least reliable and painfree. I would like some thing more powerful though and Mozilla promise to be that, its amil program already crashes far lesss on me than Balsa, Kmail, or even Pine did. Yeah I tried 'em all.
We're approaching Milestone 17.
A month behind your own schedule? And M20 (where it probably will be usable) is 3 monthes ahead. That means - good if we see something usable this year.
As for moaning suckers - why you just started to care for them exactly when they propose something harmful for the project? Why won't you just listen to moaning suckers that say "give us our browser *now*"? Competing with Microsoft is great idea, but I need my browser much more than the "we would be almost as good as Microsoft if we had our browser, but since we can do even better, no browser for you"? Why the heck I care for Microsoft, I care for browser for my Linux!
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Oh come on, the Mosaic logo with the four (I think it was four) rotating panels was way cooler than any web browser logo since then. The stars
around the "N" was nice, but the Mosaic logo was still better. Too bad it didn't make it past Netscape 0.9b (damn lawsuits).
And don't even get me started on the giant pulsating "N" in Netscape 1.1.
The last paragraph of the Suck article is really from last Thursday's "All the Summer's a Stage" by 40th Street Black. ...
The technical opinions of someone who cannot handle copy'n'paste should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt
A lot of people download and use Mozilla. However, it is not ready to ship and should not be advertised as such. If they followed your advice, they'd be mercilessly flamed for misrepresenting the product, and rightly so.
I last used M16, and it seemed far too slow overall. Yes, it is better than Netrape, which is basically dreadful, but Linux lacks a top quality www browser. Hopefully Konquerer will change this, but I still dream of a *nix port of IE.
> You people were supposed to make a browser
In which case you would have said you don't need to switch from IE5 86% marketshare to yet another browser.
Mozilla is *extremely* important because:
* There is no open-source featurefull browser. Try to execute IE5 on an ARM. This means that one of the biggest market (internet appliances) for Mozilla IS NOT HERE YET.
* Mozilla is cross-platform. IE5 mac and windows are very different beasts. Other platform have no browsers. There is a market for the bnrowser used by all those extra platform, from linux to beOs, via MacOS X (because Ie5 in classic is hardly clean), Hurd or OS/2.
* Mozilla is standard compliant (or will be). How can you expect standard emerging if the only implementation is proprietary and have no incentive to become standard compliant (quite the opposite in fact). Do you like de-facto closed standard ?
* Mozilla is a platform. This have far reaching implications. Very very very far reaching ones. Thin client/fat server made more powerfull and portable. Internet apps would shine in Mozilla browser. Expect corporation to use it for internal business apps. It is a credible alternative to java that enable to deploy very powerfull server-based applications, with little client logic.
Cheers,
--fred
You don't need HTML editing to fill out a webform. And I think we can ALL agree that HTML mail is a bug, not a feature
Amen to that.
How did HTML editing get in there anyway ? If it's a "cool feature" that some over-zealous geek thought should be in there, despite the deadline pressures, then why HTML editing ? Is there a single web-monkey out there, worthy of their prehensile tail, that needs or uses a HTML editor more complex than a basic text editor ? Scrape 'n Dump Tables ? That's a freebie for Runtpage and "My Little HomePage" on Geocities, not a tool that a real HTML geek needs, wants or would use.
Besides which, HTML authoring is dead -- XHTML is where it's at, and the faster we can start ignoring the legacy browsers, the easier XHTML/CSS authoring gets. If you aren't already doing it, start writing compliant XHTML today (no, it isn't incompatible)
We should count our blessing that some little pointy-beard didn't think that a Flash editor would be cool too.
But Navigator has been abandoned at 4.0.x, where as Communicator at least makes slight progress and to 4.73 in two years...
I have only one thing to say. It's open source. If you think its going too freakin slow, mirror the source, then speed it up. Branch off or whatever it takes to get it done quicker.
witty sig goes here
Those being:
Galeon IS a good idea. But they're still limited by all the folks on the Mozilla project who are doing God knows what over there... (How late is M17 now? Approaching five, six weeks IIRC?)
(Oh, and for all of you folks who talk about it beating Netscape: THAT AIN'T ALL THAT HARD TO DO.)
-Jo Hunter
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
...when a generation of neglect and the resulting poor education shows it's ugly face like this...damn what did your parents teach you, anything?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I use mozilla quite a bit, though I must say that the newer versions, well, yes, some of the features are less functional and more eye candy. Also, some of the features feel like something to attract windows users who are willing to sacrifice actual functionality for cool looks. I prefer to focus on functionality, but Mozilla pretty much, for me, "does enough." The project could take a look in several other directions.
As for dead...
Waning in popularity. Remember last year? It was HOT. EVERYBODY was grabbing a copy of Mozilla. What happened? Mozilla was pretty much Netscape, and everybody was like, I already have Netscape, look, it's just a different Netscape, who cares, I'm keeping Netscape. Also, people went on to diffent projects. I'd say that the real hardcore computer science population are the ones who, for the most part, don't give a shit about the "World Wide Waste of time/bandwidth," and would prefer to use different, more useful programs over the internet. After all, who wants to use a java chatroom when you can use IRC and have more actual usefulness and more actual conversation, who wants to "surf?" People don't read well written novels, you want to randomly browse through shoddy webpages? The thing about the Mozilla project is that out of the actual "geek" population, the actual slice that is REALLY REALLY REALLY concerned with a feature laden webrowser, enough to spend serious time on that rather than other projects, is slightly fewer than that of other projects in relation to the number of people that the project was really looking for.
That said.
The Mozilla project is significant in many ways, especially the scale and type of project that it tried to be, as well as the product that it outputs (a good browser is a good thing, I DO use SOME webpages). Also, it's not necessarily dead. A lot of people don't want to see it die. A lot of people would contribute if they think that it needs help and if they think that they can actually shape it in some way. In short, people love Mozilla, and they will at least try to save it.
Eh...
Every tech journalist, web site, and semi-interested geek would download it and check it out. They're going to compare it to two things: the previous Netscape Communicator and to MS's Internet Explorer (the more dedicated might also do a sidebar on Opera, Lynx, or some platform-specic browser but this is really a two-horse race between Mozilla & MS IE.)
So how does Mozilla compare? Not well - yet. It's almost baked but it honestly isn't there. It crashes a little too often. It still chokes on the odd bit of HTML. It's interface is butt-ugly (though that can be changed pretty easily.) Some features only work erratically. In short it's gonna look like a well-intentioned failure next to IE.
Sure Mozilla has more potential but 99% of those reading the reviews and trying it out for themselves don't give a fig for 'potential'. Yeah it will adhere better to web-standards (though not nearly as completely as many had hoped.) Yeah it's much smaller then IE. Yeah it's potentially much faster. Yeah it's nicely componentized so parts of it can get reused into many, many other applications. Yeah it has many included tools like chat/irc/ldap/etc. that are better then their MS equivalents (if MS even has equivalents - conversely none of the included tools are really as good as the dedicated tools already out there.) But when it comes to that crucial all-important 'first impression' - well, it's gonna get it's tires kicked but they'll drive out of thew showroom with their good-ole MS IE.
Why? Because Mozilla still isn't done. Sure if you're the first in the market you can toss out bad code and the market will lap it up but then they've no other choice. In todays market there is another choice - a massive, mature, ubiquitious, free, no-risk (well, excepting security-wise) choice. It runs well on the #1 & #2 consumer & corporate desktops (Win & Mac.) Up against that Mozilla better look good, run good, feel good. It had better do all of that on all of the platforms it's released on (and "sucks less then NS on linux" isn't gonna get you much.)
The last thing Mozilla needs to is a premature release and to look like a looser next to MS IE. Sure under the hood it may not be a looser, and in six months it may not be a looser, but why take the hit for releasing something not ready when they can wait a bit more and really knock everyones' socks off.
Just hope that it's not too late and that it really does knock everyone's socks off.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Try a nightly build. M16 is old.
Maybe so. But it's two years and four months in the making. Methinks it ought to do a bit better. It certainly isn't as good as you say.
sig: sauer
"Try a nightly build. M16 is old."
Maybe so. But it's two years and four months in the making. Methinks it ought to do a bit better. It certainly isn't as good as you say.
No, you're right. It's better. Why should I err on the side of exaggeration? Two years is fsck-all for a software project of this magnitude. Please get a clue.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Um, then why am I using Navigator-4.73 for FreeBSD? I _never_ use Communicator precisely because it has all the cruft in it
Mention something against Linux, open source, or Mozilla, and you get free advertising from Slashdot. Imagine all those ad-banner impressions!
What they're saying is true, though. I've been using CVS Mozilla as my primary browser. It is much slower, bloated, and intensive than Netscape4. I fail to see how it is any better than Netscape 4. GTKhtml is looking pretty nice, but it's depressing that the mozilla people fucked up by being even more bloated than Netscape 4 (!!!) and reinventing the wheel for everything including the widget set. Of course, the mozilla programmers are not good widget set programmers.
Seriously, where were all these naysayers when Microsoft was more than two years late shipping Windows NT 5.0 (nee Windows 2000)?
Feature creep, delays, more delays, more feature creep. The product eventually shipped, and people are installing it. Mozilla deserves at least the same level of patience.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's not just skins! It's XUL! It's really really good, even if it does make the whole browser as slow as treacle running through a pin-hole! You can build whole applications on top of it (Ed: Why? What the fuck do these people think the Operating System is for?) and...and...it's just cool! You suck anyway, you should get a PIII like me, cos it isn't *designed* to work on your punny PII 450 anyway! Whaaaaaaaaaaa!
This is all true. Honestly.
Why not just grab gecko and make a real browser around it and send the mods to gecko back to the mozilla team?
I'd like a good mail client from Mozilla because the only halfway decent GUI mail client for Linux is Netscape's and it's not very good. I use Pine, but I have my non-geek family and friends on Netscape Mail because it can filter without the pain of procmail and handle attachments more easily than V S E Y Y xpdf filename.
Kmail bites, though I'll be checking out the one in 2.0. Arrow is promising but scrolling is about a pixel per second. I would never unleash Balsa on someone who just wants the computer to work -- it is alpha. Postillion? TkRat? Mahogany? Exmh? Again, not for a real end-user.
Something of Pan's quality, but for mail.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
ok i've just got the latest build, ssl seems fine ok, but the editors realy shot.
they must be doing somthing interesting.
posted by a live browser with a dead editor.
mozilla thge reseration.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Mozilla needs a short list of goals. They need to focus on a strict set of features for it and get those working without bugs. Even if it has the same features as Netscape 4.74, at least it's stable, it's open source, and it's done. All the extra stuff like chat clients, skins, and gaming platforms(!!!) can wait until the basic foundation is laid. There's something wrong when Mozilla's developers are spending their time working on "cool shit" and their email client deletes mail from the POP server but doesn't bother to fetch it first (or fetches it and sends it nowhere...
Personally, Netscape 4.7 works fine for me. I use the browser and the email/news client. If Mozilla just had a standards compliant web browser and a simple mail/news client, it would do me just fine. Finish that part, release it, and add the "cool shit" later.
Mozilla is not dead. It just needs some Aderall.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
>You open source zealots bash Microsoft hourly for such actions as those.
And sence Microsoft rarely releases an update more than once every 2 years it's bashing the same product hourly...
Of course it's really bashing the bug fix released last hour to fix the preveous bug patch to fix the preveous etc etc and the original bug is alive and well.
Linux for the techs
MacOs for the rest
Windows for the tinyboppers...
I don't actually exist.
> Seems to me someone should rip out the good,
> core browser parts and build a fast, compliant
> bare-bones browser.
Guess what --- they're doing that.
Mozilla/XUL really is cross platform.
What's the "platform" ? To me, it's the combination of browser and OS, not just having the same menu layout. With my web-author hat on, I care about platform issues like "Do my users have web browsers with reasonable client-side XSL ?". I don't give a damn about the user interface; that's the user's problem and it won't break my pages.
If Mozilla's "platform" isn't as capable as IE's, I'm not going to start using it. If it's no better than IE's, or it doesn't have a huge market share, then I'm not going to write for it.
For me, Galeon is mostly half-working. Javascript not working on some pages, and some pages with non-trivial markup get messed-up.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Don't tell me about the god damned nightly builds. The last time I tried one it wouldn't even run on my box, so I deleted everything even remotly related to mozilla and tried it again (coming down on my butt slow 56k modem) and it still wouldn't run.
Did you delete ~/.mozilla??
*** ToughLove regards Anonomous troll with bemused and slightly scornful expression.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Less features -- more standards adherence!
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
This article finally got me off my butt to check out all this mozilla stuff, and though this post will likely be buried under hundreds of other posts since it's a late comer, here's my $0.02 anyway.
My first impression was not good. After unpacking the binary tarball and trying to start it, I was greeted by a bazillion debug messages on the xterm that opened it, and it took longer than gimp on a 486 to start, and I have a P3-500 w/256M of RAM. That had me worried. Then the interface.... No comment here, but I have a custom theme I built in FVWM2, and needless to say, it doesn't exactly match. Though if I want to take the time, I can change it, so I guess I can live with that. So I try and fire up slashdot... All the while debug messages spewing forth on my xterm... I type in slashdot.org and press enter... and BAM! Instant webpage. I have to say, the rendering engine is *FAST* compared to the netscape I'm used to, and that's the stock w/ Slackware 7.0. So I thought, OK, try some buttons, and after a lot of wandering I got no where but frustrated with all the extra CRAP that seems to be included. I can do email. Pine. I can do news. Tin. I can do IRC. BitchX or xchat. And they all do it better.
So I thought, well, I remember seeing some things on freshmeat that are interfaces to the gecko engine. Well that would do it, only a web engice and NO crap, so off to freshmeat I went, eventually to sourceforge, and downloaded 3 different packages that are supposed to support the gecko engine. None worked. Why? Because they all want a million gnome libs, and Slack has never really embraced gnome, nor have I, I run FVWM2 as noted earlier. Now if someone could just get that gecko engine in a motif wrapper, I'd be happy.
So I guess I'm back at stage 1, dissappointed as ever. I'm either going to have to just live with Netscape or take the plunge in to overgrown gnome lib land. Not pretty either way.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
I've tried it, because I'd really like a nice new browser.
It's mega-bloat and buggy to boot. I can't even get one online session complete without it crashing. On top of which it's as ugly as hell.
Oh, and the coffee-perculator client is not functional yet either. But I'm sure they will delay the project by another year or so until it is.....
...Neoplanet! Now that's advertising placement.
Actually, nearly every real live commercial site is designed for both Netscape and IE on both PC and Mac. No one much cares about UNIX though, for an obvious reason; Browser market share. Let's face it, there are more people running netscape on Macintosh than anything on UNIX when they surf most of these sites. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that's the way it is.
Of course, Netscape makes most of the same mistakes on UNIX as it does on other platforms, which are mostly stupid things it does while rendering content, so making something work for Netscape on PC usually means it works on Mac and UNIX as well, making it less of a crisis.
For Mozilla to be specifically supported (Rather than just hoping your netscape-specific fixes carry over) it will have to have as much share as Netscape, or more. Browsers are like console systems; There's only really room for first and second place. Third place might as well be Honorable Mention.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is finding the right balance between doing things the right way and actually finishing what you start.
- My password is slashdot
It's that important.
Home users:
----------
They browse the Internet with their browser, and do so many things with it.
Even my online banker won't work without IE.
'Nuff said? No, when I said "many things" it IS.
Even the (previous) computer's killer app - word processor - will be no longer needed, you can use your browser instead (http://www.webos.com for a sample).
Corporate users:
---------------
Everything is moving to thin-client/server-based computing; which usually means the goal is to have the following installed on the desktop computer:
1. An OS
2. A browser
Then just with that they can access all of corporate applications.
Now imagine that Microsoft have the only browser supported by everyone.
Then it will be truly a Microsoft-ful world.
Apache have saved us from IIS domination of web server, so Microsoft can't stuff _their_ standards on web server.
Now it's time for Mozilla to save us from having to use a single OS.
Mozilla is short for "Mosaic killer." Mosaic was forked into IE (no less).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The world does not need another HTML editor, and you don't need markup to fill out web based forms.
The world DOES need a mail client that doesn't suck. The mail client they're working on doesn't fit that criteria. To be fair, neither does any other mail client you can get, but it's fluff that could be cut. Probably should be cut. If you want to write a mail client, start a mail client project.
XML is cool and stuff. If I set up some XML and CSS for my web page, the Mozilla users will be able to view it, but I'm afraid the IE people and the old Netscape people will be out of luck. So if I want to be cool and use XML, I need to set up some server-side translation stuff to translate it to HTML. Likewise mathml etc. I had an XML web page up here for a while while I was playing with CSS. Everyone was like "Why did you do that? No one can view it." At that point, you could view it with one of the milestones, but it would render differently with the nightly builds.
And even if they do get XML working, I'll only be able to manipulate it with Javascript. Oh joy.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I finally get it -- The whole Mozilla effort is a trick from Netscape that will make the whole world think and say: "Well I guess Netscape 4.7 is not so bad after all..." Kind of like reverse phsycology. (BTW -- I have been using every milestone since M9 and every nightly build since 04012000, just looking for a glimmer of hope) Galeon looks pretty good, but still crashes a bit to much for me.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Gee, as a Mac user, I sure am glad Apple was sensible enough to give up the ghost a few years back when it was obvious that Wintel PC's were going to utterly crush Macs out of existence! And what about that whacko Torvalds guy with his idea of an open-source desktop version of Unix, huh? What a crazy idea! Good thing he too bowed to the superior marketplace power of Microsoft and realized that nobody wants anything but Windows, Internet Explorer, and Word ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Ok, I guess our innocence died a long time ago.. netscape's innocence when they sold out to those who ruined the internet as we all once knew it. Do we all remember the furor and sadness when aol got access, so their users could spam everything besides usenet? I personally remember using tools to block aol from coming to websites I ran for at least the first year...
.. Hell I could go on and on.. For some reason I continue to use netscape under linux @ work.. I see a co-worker use IE under solaris, and could just VNC over and do the same.. some sadly nostalgic part of me remembers downloading mosaic many years ago, and later early versions of netscape.. Netscape was such a wonderful browser compared to mosaic.. why? Well mainly it had that really slow moving (on my old 486 slc 33) netscape graphic with the ring around it (which later got the stars under high traffic).. it wasn't microsoft.. it was free to get for windows 3.1, (I still had to use emacs with the web-browser extensions.. god I hate emacs) Never crashed..
As I sit here writing this, netscape under linux crashes, so I grab my girlfriend's winblows 98 box.. though winblows doesn't blow nearly as much when it comes to a web browser. Netscape under linux crashes when a page has too much java script, java period, too many frames, too many frames with lots of graphics, too many graphics,
Now what choices do we have? I love linux, I've been working as a systems administrator in linux for 4 years. How the HELL is Linux ever going to catch up without a decent web browser? What are admins going to do? Servers run linux, but browsers run netscape? I hate to say it, linux needs IE.. or netscape needs to split from aol and get funding from a company that gives a flying fuck, because aol certainly doesn't.
Oh where, oh where have all the browsers gone?
"And how can this be? For he is the
Mozilla is fast. Okay.. it's not that fast, but the nightly builds have been getting better, and the HTML rendering is fast.
Whether a webpage renders in .2 seconds or .3 seconds is irrelevant to me when a Pentium 450 stalls for a full second as soon as I move the mouse from one menu to another.
Just call it Mozilla 6.0 and release the damn thing. It'll have it's fair share of bugs. So does everything else on the planet. Features that haven't been finalised yet can just be left undocumented. Noone need know that it's not perfect and it'll shut the critics up...
HEHe Read note from top. "Please note, the dates for M17 on this document are incorrect. It is unlikely that M17 will be released earlier than two weeks from today. These dates will be updated shortly."
Now why the date itself was never changed is beyond me. You also have to realize that the M17 release is also going to coincide with the NSBeta2 release. So they wanted to make sure it was good, as public impressions will be based upon it.
But! Maybe this evaluation is not quite correct. We used to think about Mozilla as Netscape project, that should defeat IE based on its standard compliance and stability (at least, we hoped it will have it), and thus being targeted to the same general user base where IE is currently present. What if we just missed the whole point?
Mozilla, as I see it, is an AOL project, and when (not if) it's ready for the use only a small fraction of us will start using it the next day after release, but(!) the next AOL client X.0 will come with Mozilla embedded, and all those 20-something million users will get a CD with it in their mail. Not all of them will upgrade, but that would be the beginning of a slow drift toward Mozilla/Netscape.
If we consider that assumption, then probably a feature bloat, that slows Mozilla development and hurts it badly now, is a necessity for them - AOL needs all those features for their client, including IRC...
BEGIN Conspiracy-Theory
/. crowd away.
KDE Beta 3 article gets posted. Taco, not liking KDE, posts an article about his dying GPL love child, Mozilla, in hopes of drawing the
Proof behind this idea:
1) We know Taco is a rabid Gnome supporter
2) We know Taco doesn't think highly of KDE
3) Mozilla has been dead for a while.
Comments?
A project is only truly dead when no one is working on it. Last I checked, there were still plenty at work on Mozilla. I can only hope they succeed. [It would be nice to have some option other then IE that is stable AND has the features I crave]
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
--snip-- 'The Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit.'" With the next MXX right around the corner, I have to disagree: besides that, I use Mozilla frequently and find that with a few minor exceptions, the latest builds are as good or better than Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic). --snip-- "I have to disagree! And here's evidence that the suck article is actually right!" suck... whahaha... I used to read that in UNIVERSITY, and that's just a rather addled smudge in my memory now... Next /. will be quoting Time magazine articles.
--
The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
Perhaps I should re-phrase that. The support is buggy. While working on my home page (not up yet else I'd provide a link) I noticed that it didn't render some DIV elements at all. Actually sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldn't. Nothing fancy - I just classed them to set fonts and background colors. They were rendered fine on Netscape 4.7 (on Linux) and IE 5.0 (on..well you know.)
M16 dumped on me about 4 times in 5 minutes of use. The major problems seem to be with the email, but damn. My netscape 4.7 on the other hand has dumped on me 1 time this month!
I'll see how good Konquerer is when KDE2 is stable.
It seems pretty nice from when I played with KDE2 beta 1 a while back.
FYI -- M18 is taking shape in the nighties!
no idea.
There are already other cross-platform widget sets. Spending six months reinventing the wheel is foolish and bloats the code.
One can write cross platform network apps quickly
Great. This could be done before Mozilla, too. The only cross-platform network app the Mozilla team needs to worry about is a browser.
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
No, it doesn't. Mail is plain text (yes, it is), and web-based forms should definitely be plain text as well. If the user wants to edit HTML, put in a hook that fires up an arbitrary editor to do it (such as rxvt -e vi).
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
What's the point? Neither has any place in the browser. If you hit an irc://... URL, run an arbitrary program (such as rxvt -r irc). If I want an IRC client or an "Instant Messaging" client (such as rxvt -e talk), I'll get them elsewhere.
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
Probably. This actually belongs in a browser at least.
Done by outside developers.
No excuse for feature bloat. Linus gets hundreds of patches a day. He applies maybe 10 of them. The fact that the core team didn't have to do the work doesn't mean they should just accept any old patch that comes their way.
The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works.
So would the rest of the world. Nobody's ever made one, and the Mozilla team won't either. Mozilla is trying to combine an OS, a windowing system, a widget set, a database, a layout engine, and a game console all into one. Somewhere along the line a browser was considered but it was boring and nobody wanted to do it.
But for what platform?
All of them. Very simple, really. If it doesn't build or work on any one platform, it's as broken as if it didn't build or work on all platforms. [Of course, this is not quite true. The farther from standards a platform is, the more excusable it is that it not work on that platform.]
pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use
My turn to ask "what platform?" I can assure you that it compiles infrequently and works never on sparc-sun-linux. Which is intriguing given that it works considerably better (though still poorly) on i386-peecee-linux. Since the platforms look exactly the same to non-kernel developers writing portable code, it is obvious that, despite the "cross-platform" promise of Mozilla, they aren't bothering to write portable code. Of course, it's hard to blame them really: since most of them work for AOL, they've been told that portability means "it compiles on windows 95 AND windows NT." As for footprint, I find that a 12 MB dynamically linked binary is absurd. Especially when 90+% of it is code I'll never use.
Since I'm being fairly brutal, I feel I should provide an alternative. So here are my rules for developing a web browser that works (for that matter, anything that works):
The Mozilla team has broken every single one of those rules, with predicatable results. Guys, I'll ask my doctor to cure cancer; you just write a browser.
Suck has been dead for years.
Mozilla has lots of potential. It renders nested tables as quickly as IE. It handles inline frames, XML. The problem is that sometimes it doesn't render normal everyday html correctly. So unless that changes it will die. BTW why are these problems addressed yet? The Pre-release came out several months ago and though M16 is better it is not much closer being ready for release.
And, as a side note, why do so many peoplethink that mail/news are usuless[?]
It's very simple. I already have a mail client, mutt; a news client, slrn; and an IRC client, epic. I don't need another of these, and I certainly don't need them GUI. However, web browsing is something that I DO need to have a GUI, because the nature of the content is graphical and many bits of it lend themselves poorly to text interfaces.
People are pissed off about the mail/news crap because it's simply duplication of effort, and web browsing is the primary concern here.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
should put a mod in the browser, to auto-close when encountering a suck.com URL.
The instant Opera is released for GNU/Linux I intend to do exactly that, Qt use be damned. There comes a point when you just get tired of being unable to do anything with your freedom.
-Jo Hunter
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Netscape Communicator _is_ dead as it is. It might suffice for now, but it doesn't make my point any less valid that the real question is whether Mozilla can compete with the other browsers in the arena.
And yes, I know Konqueror is there for me right now. It's one of the reasons why I don't think Mozilla will have a large impact anymore.
Not all nightly builds are good. Some are, some suck. Check out http://www.mozillazine.org; they have comments about the quality of recent builds that should guide you to a good build.
But as a fellow cynic myself, I believe they're often right. Mozilla always was a product with very little market. There are too many 'yet-another-...' products, I fear Mozilla was one. FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Ehmz, IMHO its dead when people stop pounding on its chest.
First, Mozilla is not dead. Mozilla cannot die. As long as someone has a copy of the source code, Mozilla is, at worst, "mostly dead" (a la The Princess Bride).
However, to the extent that the goal of the current Mozilla project (funded by Netscape) was to defeat IE, it is failing. This is because the people running the show are apparently living on another planet.
What a BUSINESS would do: Optimize for income. Cut the feature creep, fix the bugs, ship, start on the next version.
What an Open Souce project would do: Optimize for usability. Cut the feature creep, fix the bugs, ship, start on the next version.
What Mozilla is doing: Optimize for number of features. Accelerate the feature creep, fix the bugs, don't ship.
Don't get me wrong: I have not been a Mozilla nay-sayer in the past. But this has GOT TO STOP. I've used the last 4 milestones, and they were all "pretty good". Always "not quite as good" as Netscape. Sweet Creeping Zombie Jesus, those 4 milestones cover a span of 5 months. What are they DOING over there??
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Mozilla's not dead, nor is it dying, but really... Who in their right mind is going to use the built in IRC client?
Ship a working browser, with a built in (and better than SmartDownload) upgrading facility and then you can add in all the stupid useless modules, including mail and news, that you like in the future.
Truly, an easy upgrade is all they need. Look at Windows Update - a great many people check it on a daily basis, installing every last thing on the page that shows up, even if they don't need an input method editor in Korean, Japanese, Chinese...
This would also get rid of the problem they have with dozens of versions existing. I mean - 4.0 - 4.08, 4.50 - 4.53, 4.60 - 4.62, 4.70 - 4.73. Nevermind the people who are still hapily using Navigator 3.x.
Just get a *good* browser out the door that people can use full time and throw the rest of the stuff in later.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Don't even *joke* about that! My Mozilla will never die! DO YOU HEAR ME, GOD?
One of the most damaging aspects of not releasing Mozilla is the lack of real-world user feedback. MS has reaped the benefits of millions of hours of user experience with IE. They've been learning what works, what doesn't, what people want and what they don't.
IE has been inching toward standards compliance at a rate that makes sense for most users. Ironically, because of Mozilla's glacial development schedule IE is considerably more compliant that the competition.
Is this sig nificant?
True, it looks like there hasn't been much activity on there for a while. Perhaps it will pick up once Moz stabilizes a bit more; It must be difficult trying to hit a moving target.
If that's your attitude, then why do you have a link embedded in your .sig? Wouldn't it be better to just have plain text?
Because this is a Web-based discussion board, not a listserv. You would be suprised at the crap I receive over HTML email. I would think that the original poster would agree that HTML email is becoming pretty standard, and was half tounge-in-cheek saying that HTML email was a "bug not a feature".
I think it's a shame that Mozilla was not GPL'd, since the MPL is incompatible with GPL'd code. Galeon is currently running into some licence trouble because of this.
If it wasn't for the MPL, we could rip out anything we wanted to use and stick it into other projects. Gecko definitely shows lots of promise, but right now its use is limited for non-technical reasons.
Even if people had wanted that, they could have used an existing cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows, FLTK, or Tcl/Tk. Even supporting the cross-platform GTK efforts would have been faster. But ultimately, egos apparently got in the way, and the Mozilla team thought they could do better in a year or two with no track record of doing a cross-platform GUI as a group, even though those other groups had been working on cross-platform GUIs for years and delievered several versions, and even though the Mozilla group also had a browser to deliver at the same time.
As for Mozilla needs an editor to do mail, I think it should do neither. Maybe there should be a loosely coupled Mozilla-branded mail client and a loosely coupled Mozilla-branded editor, together with a simple mechanisms for them to exchange data (open a pipe/socket/...). The fact that Netscape comes with an integrated, preferred E-mail client and editor is a disadvantage, not an advantage, because people have their own mailers already.
Mozilla suffers from the typical second system effect and the not-invented-here syndrome. Let's hope that the useful bits and pieces it actually contains will survive in better designed systems like Galeon or TkZilla.
The message that both this Suck article and Tim O'Reilly (at the Open Source conference) have is clear: WAKE UP, MOZILLA! On OSS web browser is not an option if OSS operating systems are to be taken seriously. Netscape is a bloated cow on Linux, with more memory leaks than me. I have NS open all day long since I use it for mail too.
If a slim standards compliant browser appeared from Mozilla even without "cool shit", I'd happily use it. Browser tech on Linux is stuck in 1995. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft does a stable port of IE to Linux and then it's over for Mozilla.
Yuck.
I can't be the only one craving a crapped-out incomplete time-bombed browser that may or may not destroy every file on my hard drive.
With the exception of the time bomb, does any other commercial program you use absolutely promise not to do this?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You know, a few people have pointed at Galeon as a smaller Mozilla. I looked at the website (http://galeon.sourceforge.com). Just wanted to say I thought the project's heart was in the right place, but creating a GPL-MozPL crossbreed is going to make damn sure that the project never makes a commercial distribution -- what's the point of offering a smaller browser if you need the bigger browser installed to run it?
/Brian
OK, it could be that my reading comprehension is well below what it should be, but Suck really didn't offer a reasonable explanation as to why Mozilla failed, even though it was obvious; Mozilla has had problems because there was no focus or direction for the whole project effort. What was the Mozilla project's goal? Was that goal or target measureable in an objective way?
IMHO, I think this is why it "failed", not because of feature bloat. Feature bloat is just a symptom of a major problem in correctly managing a software development project. Skins, yet another IM package can be viewed as bloat; integrated XML parser, valuable tool, if not essential or required element in this day and age. Yes, "late, fat and ugly" is no way to release any code, even if it's Open Source, but I think a bit more thought on the why from Greg Knauss would have been better.
And it would have been even more interesting reading fodder if this problem of having simple but effective project development management practices in place was placed in the context of Netscape having had, and still having problems in delivering, and how this can and does impact Open Source development efforts.
I have no problem with Knauss's opnion, just I think he missed the point, and a great opportunity to apply it to what had happend and how it can impact Open Source. If Mozilla really is dead, make sure the death wasn't in vain, draw some lessons learned from it instead of lighting a match in a gas filled room...
I'm using build 2000073104 now and it works just fine. Faster than IE. Instant rendering after a resize which is enough to replace Netscape on *this* machine.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. What is important to understand in this discussion is that you are a fucking moron and Mozilla is great now, and getting better on a daily basis.
(Still rather ugly but we'll see if the frutti tutti or whatever skin doesnt fix that.)
Well, i use NS for all my email, so i'd like to see that with the standards compliant browswer too.
So, Suck thinks Mozilla's going to die because of feature creep and an ever-lengthening development cycle. Let's apply a few arguments to another well-known project-that-sucks, the game Unreal:
Originally targeted as a Quake 1(!) killer, Tim Sweeney and Epic started this game during the times when 6 degrees of freedom was still cool. Do you want to talk about feature creep? How about 16 bpp textures, colored lighting, volumetric fog and halos? I seriously doubt any of those were even in design consideration in 1996. And didn't it set quite a few records in missed milestones? A four-year development cycle might as well be a few millenia for a game, I'm surprised (and glad) that they stuck it out.
According to Suck's logic, Unreal should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Was Unreal buggy when released. Yes. Did multiplayer and non-Glide acceleration blow back then? Yes. Was Unreal continually worked on after release, as no doubt Mozilla will be? Hell yes. I use the Epic / Mozilla team analogy carefully, as both groups obviously love what they do, as opposed to just programming for a steady paycheck, and were/are underdogs in their respective market niches. Hopefully, Mozilla will turn out just as well.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
platforms simaltaneously..."
In other words, a feature. WWLD? (What Would Linux Do?) Concentrate on
one platform (either OS or hardware). Don't do anything platform
specific to lock the other out, but don't make everyone wait for the slowest member
Writing your applications from the ground in a cross platform
manner saves you a horrednous refactoring problem later, when you
want to port your code to another platform. WWLD here is in direct
contradiction to good software engineering practice, and stupid as
well.
This isn't a feature, it's good development practice.
I know that it's not the best choice of OS's, but it's what we use at work. I personally hope that Mozilla doesn't die, cuz it's a great browser, but more often than not, it causes GPF's and the like, but so does everything else on my box. I'm really disturbed at the news (if it's true), and just hope that the builds can handle HTML better than it currently does.
Glen
Glen
Track your fuel economy
If you need blinking red text in a javascipt rollover image on top of an animated gif tiled in the background to distract me while your embedded java applet plays music JUST so you can communicate with me via email, you shouldn't be communicating with me via email.
You probably shouldn't be communicating with me at all.
--
Erskin
geek.
And I think we can ALL agree that HTML mail is a bug, not a feature.
Maybe you and the other dinosaurs want to live in the dark ages, but as far as I'm concerned HTML mail is a standard, not a bug. And HTML postings to Usenet is a standard, not a bug.
If you don't want formatting, then use a mail/news reader that strips it out. Technology should not be held back by green-screen luddites.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My sister still runs Win 3.1 on an 8MB system. I talked her into buying Opera since neither big lizard even pretends to run in 8M. Her system falls over occasionally, but I don't think that it is Opera's fault.
Do page authors have to allow for Opera's quirks when laying out a page? Do they allow for ... etc? When I convinced at least one person to pay for a browser in a free-browser world, I was hoping for a more-than-2-way battle.
In these discussions, the only mention I've seen of Opera was a quick dismissal from someone whose sister briefly tried it. In the opinion of the "news for nerds" community, is Opera still a player?
It could be that the Mozilla Porject, without anyone realizing it has turned into a modern day Xerox PARC. It is now an R&D team with no commercial aspirations and it is up to Netscape or AOL to take the Gecko engine, debug it, merge it with the best parts of Communicator 4.x, and call that Communicator 5.0. Then people will stop whining for them to release a new browser and they can wait for Mozilla to produce something else for them to use.
I personally am happy with Netscape's mail client, could live with its Usenet client, and like having my bookmarks in one html file that I can take anywhere and use in any browser. All that really needs fixing in my mind is the aging rendering engine -- and Gecko is there for the taking. If Neoplanet can take the Gecko engine and try to shoehorn it into their browser, why can't Netscape?
And if Netscape doesn't do it, somebody should steal the Gecko code and build a lightweight browser around it. It is GPL after all, and at least one person is already trying to do just that. I say forget about Mozilla! Release Gecko now!
Does this
unsubscribe slashdot.org
Thats the whole bloody point, a minimal install of IE *DOESNT* come with a mail client, a news client, an irc client, a redefinition of quantum physics on your computer, and whatever the hell else they felt like jamming in there. Its a browser. If Netscape releases a version of Mozilla without all the crap, then life will be good. But they won't.
Mozilla's problem is that they don't have any marketing people. Someone in marketing with half a brain would be able to tell them "stop adding crap that 95% of the market doesn't give a rats ass about and release the fucking browser". Do you think most of the people they want to win over care if the browser comes with stuff that other programs already do better or that they can rewrite the Interface? No. They care if it browses better then what they have now and if the interface it ships with looks nice.
And the answers are No and No when you compare it to IE. So far as memory goes I agree, you can't easily measure just what IE is using. That doesn't give Mozilla much execuse for using more then Frontpage 2k, Word 2k, and Winamp combined.
I've found Opera to be usable on most if not virtually all sites I visit, because I don't frequent sites that are entirely eye candy. On those sites, it won't work at all, thats not what its designed to do.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
So, everytime someone tries to do something good for the other there comes the pessimists to say it won't work... Mozilla is not about market shares and not for comercial use, it's for us who think free have a browser and be able to use it without signing a nda.
Instead of saying bad things about Mozilla the guys up there should try to help or just stay quiet and use MS Explorer, how do you like it ?
Mozilla is up to 1020? Sheesh! No wonder it's taking so long!
grumble grumble roman numerals grumble grumble
Constitutionally Correct
Mozilla, as a whole, will never be very populare because it's bloated, slow, and gigantic.
For Unix/Linux users the Galeon browser will become THE browser, becuase it's fast, small, and ONLY a browser.
Since Galeon is based on gecko (the mozilla rendering engine), Gecko will continue to evolve and become the only major part of the original Mozilla project that "survive".
OK, Mozilla is big and bloated and Opera fits on one floppy (still?), but I was kinda hoping that Mnemonic would get closer to being stable... at least to the point of being able to use it for reading Slashdot ;-)
:-(
However, now www.mnemonic.org seems to have turned into something else entirely... I've been away for a week, but I can't find this mentioned on any news sites...
Doesn't anyone care about Mnemonic anymore? Has it been dropped because of this? Is everyone flocking to Mozilla instead?
pastie
'Open source' is a style of development, not a specific entity. Mozilla has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with the developers and the goals of the project. Think about it like this - Mozilla is written largely in an OO language (C++). Does Mozilla's so-called 'failure' make OOP look bad?
And I don't think Mozilla is slow. It isn't 'bloated' - it just has a lot of features. If you don't need all the features, Mozilla's clean modular design lets you eliminate them (e.g. Galleon).
the poor performance of the Mozilla project
How has the Mozilla project performed poorly? It may have been too ambitious (which is definately debatable), but it's good code, and will eventually produce a kick-ass browser. I use it myself, 24/7 (on both Linux and Windows).
After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful.
I disagree - I think the latest Mozilla nightlies (and the upcoming M17 / Netscape 6pr2) are very stable and useable. Mozilla is very fast, and hasn't ever crashed for me since I switched from M16 about a week ago. And what's the big deal with 'shipping' a product? Mozilla is perfectly useable right now. Simply labelling something '1.0' doesn't magically make it stable.
Mozilla HAS taken a long time to be developed, I agree. But considering the scope of the project, the internal problems at Netscape, and the pure horror of the Mozilla Classic codebase, I don't think the delay is unreasonable.
So I second all the calls for 'just a browser,' and it needs to be fast - Mozilla sucks on an AMD 450 with 64 megs, fer chrissake, if you can't get snappy response on this CPU, you shouldn't be coding - there's no reason to require more hardware power for the next generation of net appliances, or desktops, for that matter. And a browser that makes affordable hardware look good will have a definite advantage.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I don't know about you guys, but I'm still using Netscape 4.x, but not because I hate Mozilla. In fact, I've downloaded quite a few milestones (that hugeass download weighed several milestones; how fitting a name). But for now, I still think Mozilla is too "developmental" -- stability is there, but in the eyes of the consumer, it's "not done". I'll definitely switch over "when it's done".
So why does it seem like Mozilla is dead? It's probably becuase there are a good number of people like me who don't want to download megs and megs of bytes to get a browser (reminds you of those hefty IE updates... bleh). We're all just waiting for the final releases... until then, here are some reasons why downloading Mozilla right now isn't worth some of our time:
Every software development project that I have been on has been late and over budget
I've been in the business for 18 years, and this doesn't reflect on my experience.
Did you ever consider that this might have something to do with you?
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Galeon deficiencies list:
1. Where is my toolbar bookmarks and user toolbar?
2. Bookmark list is not scrollable (i.e. more than 20 - you are out)
3. Bookmark editor almost unusable - text field to narrow, no scroll.
4. Where's my "view source" window?
5. No context-menus, no "open in new window", no "save this link" or "bookmark this link".
6. Bad international support - failed to view http://simplex.ru/news/koi/ with russian charset.
7. Javascript doesn't work - example http://webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/, works with Netscape.
I can write another 5-6 points...
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Grr.
--
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
Doesn't everyone remember Suck isn't a real news organization?
They publish irreverant jabs aimed mostly at ubercool web illuminati types.
It's a collosal joke. Gosh you guys are like the folks who haven't figured out the Simpson's are a parody of a family.
timbu
Has anyone got Galeon compiled on the latest Mozilla nightly builds? Last time I nabbed that gtkmozembed.h Galeon's source code was asking for some enum items that weren't even in there... Is Galeon staying up-to-date with the nightly builds or should I just wait for M17 and Galeon to catch up to it until I compile Galeon again?
the real at&t mix
I prefer Lynx to either Mozilla or Netscape. Then again I also prefer Opera in no images mode over anything else. So I'm not really a good indication of the mass market. :)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
int *iptr = malloc(sizeof(int) * 2), i;
for(i = 2; i>0 ; i--)
iptr[i] = i;
Maybe I'm a C zealot then, or maybe I've become cynical enough to realize that computers do exactly what you tell them. :-)
Zero is a number. That was the hardest lesson I've ever learned with computers. Zero Is A Number; All Things Start With Zero.
I assume you know why that code doesn't work, but it all comes down to that premise. You told malloc() to give you enough mem to hold two ints. Then you only use 1/2 your allocated memory and write to memory beyond what you allocated because you forgot that All Things Start At Zero.
That error will bite you in the ass in Assembly and perl too, will it not? You don't need to C to have logical errors. C may not be "safe" but I'd rather have a language which allows you to shoot your head off than one which won't let you try.
...the latest builds are as good or better then Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic).
<RANT>Compared to Netscape? Have you actually tried running Netscape on anything less than a PIII w/256MB of RAM? Try loading a page that has both large tables and makes use of Java or JavaScript -- it's obvious that the developers have *really* high-end machines, otherwise they wouldn't be churning out a product that anyone without the same high-powered machine could actually use.</RANT>
Seriously. Mozilla is dead. People want a browser with a small memory footprint, not gazillions of features.
Well, that's great and all, but I believe the original poster's point was, and correct me if I'm wrong: the the Mozilla developers have spread themselves too thin with all these features and should have focused on just getting a final working web browser out the door first.
All these other features (i.e. news reader, email client, chat client, programming platform, XUL, gui skinning) are extraneous to what we all want out of Mozilla, which is a fast, stable, standards-compliant browser. I don't care if I can put a H.R. Giger skin on my browser, as long as it can do those basic things.
Something needs to be done to light a fire under the developers. Maybe articles like this will do that.
Whenever I go see if a bug is already entered, I usually find they've been trying to look for the bug "owner" for months! Where I work, it would be my head if it took me 10 months to fix a bug. In the status reports, these developers fix one or two bugs a week!
Another related problem is the massive complexity of the beast. Most conversations I see going on in Bugzilla reflect the hurdles that need to be leaped just to find somebody that has a clue. This also makes a huge barrier for entry to non-netscape developers that want to help out.
Sorry for ranting, but this project has the potential to be fantastic. If it could lose some mass and get in gear, it could be revolutionary.
feech
Have you tried a new nightly with classic anytime soon? It uses your themes colors and many other things to give you the look and feel you wanted.
What made IE so Succesfull and capture the mass market? Microsoft's huge marketing machine.
Nothing made IE a success, except Netscape making itself a failure.
We didn't switch to IE because it was good, we moved because Netscape was worse and there wasn't any other choice. Only long afterwards did site authors start to use the DHTML and other bells and whistles that IE brought with it.
Other than the gloomy predictions of doom, I initially shared the same attitude towards the Mozilla project. Creating a "platform" seemed a little misconceived, almost hubristic, and I was very unconvinced that it is the right way to go. After all, the Unix mindset is one of small, flexible tools, and Mozilla is definitely not "small".
After having investigated the project a little more, I have to say that I still agree with my initial reaction. The Mozilla project is trying to do too much. Yeah, most of it is "cool shit" (actually, all of it that I've seen is very cool), but they seem to have lost sight of the fact that, ultimately, what they need to produce is a functional, stable, usable browser. The platform and all that goes along with it are nice, and arguably necessary, but what is wrong with releasing them as version 2.0?
(darren)
While the browser itself sucks (I could tell from a 30 second test run 5 months ago), the mozilla project created a bunch of cool tools to facilitate open source development (bugzilla, build tracking, etc.). These tools, and the lessons learned, are very valuable products of the project.
Look again. I often see the press saying "it's only a matter of time before WinCE wins".
Ahh, yes. The mark of a fine application - delete all prefs and bookmarks on a regular basis.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Assuming there is such a thing, that might be true except that no two compilers do c++ the same way, and no compiler at all properly implements all of the recently announced ISO standard. So no matter what you think of the features of the language, using it is guaranteed to give you portability headaches for at least another 3-5 years, when compilers should be implementing a uniform set of language and ABI standards.
As for bloat, consider the following two programs. Both are minimally trivial programs with identical functionality. I strongly suspect that using more of the c++ features will increase the bloat, but this isn't meant to be a comprehensive comparison, just a simple test with one minimal program on one compiler.
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
printf ("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
}
#include <iostream>
int main (void) {
cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
Compile both with gcc 2.95.2 on i386-peecee-linux with default (ie no) options. Strip them. Result:
text data bss dec hex filename
847 224 24 1095 447 hw
1488 304 68 1860 744 hwcc
C++ loses in every segment. So much for no bloat.
If you like c++, fine. Say you like it because it has feature [foo]. But don't pretend you aren't trading away code size and speed, to say nothing of portability, for [foo], because that's just dishonest.
But the one thing you are ignoring is that all of those projects have actually released "stable" versions of software and moved on to their next development phase. Mozilla has yet to accomplish that!
1) Global settings -- Disable or enable javascript by default, likewise Java, animated GIFs, cookies, etc. And then let the user disable or enable them on a site-by-site basis. Having an easily accessible button to toggle these on and off would be nice (If we got rid of search, my netscape, security and shop on the old netscape panel, there'd be plenty of room for icons someone would actually use.)
2) Ability to turn crap from specific sites off. I'd like to be able to tell my browser not to load anything from doubleclick.net.
Hmm. Those are the only ones I can think of at the moment, though I'm sure there were a few more. The browser needs to give the user a lot more control over his web browsing experience, and no corporate-affiliated browser is ever going to do that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The point isn't whether or not Mozilla is better or worse than other programs, the point is that they actively *discouraged* people from downloading it. And that's too bad. They could've been simply honest, and not hyperbolized the negatives like they did.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
> The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works.
Ok, let's take a step back here and ask the pertinent question: What exactly is the purpose of writing software? To produce a product that performs a whole bunch of cool tasks about 30% of the time that you try them? Is this an exercise in feature packing? Probably not. If you can't produce something that someone else can use, you're just stroking your own ego.
I would say that the writer on Suck wants at least a product that works.
> But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other
> products/standards?
How about the ability to hook up to the web from my environment (which happens to be behind a firewall) and present most of the content that currently exists on the web without crashing. This would be nice.
> There are a tremendous number of outside developers
> who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here.
> Why should anyone stop?
Integration slowdown. Read the first chapter of The Mythical Man Month some time, the one about the Tar Pit, and it will give you an idea about how time-costly integrating the efforts of a bunch of outside developers can be.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Galeon is Mozilla-based. If Galeon is successful, so will Mozilla be. Saying "Galeon will kill Mozilla" is like saying "Red Hat will kill Linux".
Had Mozilla managed to be the tiny browser that was promised, it might have had a chance in appliances. As it stands now, there's no way you'll fit it in a reasonable embedded device. My company was looking at using it and decided to use another browser instead because Mozilla alone had a 32 megabyte footprint on our test systems.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nobody said they should advertise it as "ready to ship". They should have been honest and responsible. But that doesn't mean driving away people with a stick.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Whenever Microsoft loses a market battle, it's only until their next release. Plus the industry seems to accept that by some Rev N+1, Microsoft WILL win.
On the flip side, whenever Microsoft does win a market battle, the industry seems to accept that they have won it forever. Thereafter they cease to contest that piece of turf.
The sideline to this is that Microsoft can now put that piece of turf into 'maintenance mode', and concentrate their efforts on the next acquisition.
IMHO, Linux has been one of the few counters to this phenomenon.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The problem is, and has been, that since the Mozilla versions of Mosaic the programmers have been dashing off after "cool shit" instead of taking care of basic, functional buisiness and squashing bugs. I have yet to see a version of Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla that didn't have some essential basic feature that regularly crashed!
Yes, IE gives me non-uninstallable blue screens of death. But since the MS team rewrote the base code, it doesn't loose it's mind when you open a history window or click on "back-forward-back-back".
Getting the basic engine the handles all this stuff working properly.
Heard in the Suck board room: /. CmdrTaco hates everything we submit."
"Page views were down 50% last month what are we going to do?"
"We need slashdotted, that will keep us alive"
"How? What can we write about that will get our article on
"How about we kill Mozilla."
"Perfect!"
ROT was designed to be a Wolf3d killer. It had plenty o feature bloat and was a mildly innovative game. The only problem was it came out after Doom and it's Wolf3d origins showed.
The theme system in Mozilla is utter crap. There is in fact a way around it for those of us who want a faster interface. It's called Galeon and it is a GTK front-end to the Mozilla rendering engine. So, you have the power, speed, and efficiency of the Mozilla web rendering engine without the uglyness, slowness, and annoying subtleties of the interface.
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/
Mozilla would have done much better had they just worried about basic functionality and released it a year or so ago, then added all the cool stuff and eye candy. In the world of mainstream browser usage and web design, the game is over - and it ended about a year ago, when Microsoft completely walked away with the marketplace.
What browser is on virtually all X86 PC's (since over 90% of them run Windows)? Internet Explorer. What is the standard browser on all Macs? Internet Explorer. And what browser do pretty much all the big commercial websites design for the quirks of? Internet Explorer. I don't see a Mozilla that's still not ready for a 1.0 designation making any significant dent in that reality anymore.
Maybe a year ago there was still room. Today, if anything's going to happen to give Mozilla a toehold, it'll be the rise of Linux as a mainstream desktop OS. That won't knock Windows off its perch anytime soon, but could eventually happen, and if it does, there's your Mozilla market.
The thing is, even if Mozilla shipped a commercial-quality release tomorrow, Microsoft isn't going to provide it except at the point of a gun, and Apple won't provide it now since they've got a deal with Microsoft to provide IE as the default, and they now push Earthlink over AOL (which would be the other channel to get Apple to include Mozilla). There's your consumer market right there (Microsoft and Apple) - no Mozilla included.
And people like us are about the only people who install browsers for fun and change them on a whim. The masses use what comes with the computer, and only install the upgrades that the computer's automatic update software tell them to.
Ergo, Mozilla is toast. That sucks, don't it?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
And I can remember when it used to be such fun to read. They seem to have run out of decent material about 2 years ago, and it's been downhill all the way.
> Concentrate on one platform (either OS or
> hardware).
If the Mozilla developers took your advice, Mozilla would only run on Windows, and Linux would have no hope of getting a modern CSS/XML/DOM browser. And without that, the dream of Linux on the desktop would die.
http://galeon.sourceforge.net
What is more interesting is to see how well it will do against MSIE and Opera under Windows and Konqueror and Opera under Linux.
I predict it won't die since it does have "cool shit" others don't have and it is very very *very* multi-platform. But I also predict that their progress has been too slow to have a major impact. Perhaps a stripped-down Gecko based browser, but not the Mozilla beast.
>Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.
True, two years spent working by hundreds of developers on an existing working code base to add chrome to half-produce a semi-working browser isn't 'late'. It feels more like ass dragging. Across time zones.
Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.
Hello? I've had multiple open IE5 windows on my NT box for close to two weeks and it's never persisted above 20MB. And this was with a 16 MB memory cache and actual usage, with various DHTML and other non-static elements.
Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim.
Gee, I couldn't just drop just drop the IE object/control into (Corel|MS) (Visual|Office) *.* and have a different looking IE. Let's see what happens when I insert Geckko into a word document. *Poof*
(I want my 'Home' button...)
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
*rolls eyes*
Delete the old prefs before using a new version. Think.
Actually, your C compilers and runtime environments CAN catch such bugs using gates around the array (regions set to break-on-access). There are several libraries and tools for doing just such testing (and memory-leak checking, and other nifty stuff). Some of us use these libraries regularly.
Until you know how to use C _right_, don't complain about it.
Who the hell names a site 'Suck'?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The Mozilla code base might result in some decent browsers thanks to projects like Galeon that throw most of the crap away... but Mozilla itself is a big, dead, stinky, crash-prone dinosaur.
The sad part is that the "cathedral" proponents are going to use the failure of Mozilla as "proof" that big Open Source projects can't work.
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
So what does ESR have to say about this ?
"XUL, the Extensible User-Interface Language, gives any [one] the ability to completely redesign the program's GUI. Why? ... A cross-platform widget set?"
... An XML parser?"
... XSLT transformations?"
Because this allows developers to make Mozilla on at least 3 platforms simaltaneously (BeOS, OS2, ect, ports are pretty far along). It's not just that one can make the GUI look different, though. One can write cross platform network apps quickly (like XMLTerm, ChatZilla, Aphodite, and Zope).
"Does the world need another HTML editor?"
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
"Chat and instant messaging?"
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
"Vector graphics?
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
"MathML?
Done by outside developers.
Personally, I'm excited about Mozilla. Contrary to this Sucky writer, I see strong planning from the ground up: Cross platorm; extensable; standards compliant; component-based; pretty well documented...The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works. But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other products/standards? There are a tremendous number of outside developers who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here. Why should anyone stop?
At this point, there are native-looking Windows and Mac widgets (and "plain" gtk widgets), skin-switching is in, fairly good image and cookie managing, pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use.
MathML, XSLT, and SVG are not yet in the daily compiled binaries.
II. MOZILLA CAPUT XXVII
M$: "We're #2!"
IE is not running on linux, so it is not running on the future platform for desktop users. Netscape crashes too often, lynx doesn't show me any graphics... and konqueror ist integrated in kde, which is not bundled with debian... only choice left? Mozilla We are forced to use it, don't say it's dead!
Subject says it all.
So if we don't use Mozilla, what the hell is the unices community supposed to use? Yeah, there's a few other browsers out there but they support standards even worse than IE does!
If Mozilla is dead, then what is this browser I'm using?
As for dead... Waning in popularity. Remember last year? It was HOT. EVERYBODY was grabbing a copy of Mozilla. What happened? Mozilla was pretty much Netscape, and everybody was like, I already have Netscape, look, it's just a different Netscape, who cares, I'm keeping Netscape.
Mozilla is hot *now*. The difference between this year and last year is that people are grabbing it and using it, as opposed to just grabbing it. As far as websurfing on Linux goes, you don't really have a choice. Netscape 4.xx just can't render a lot of the sites out there today. None of the other browsers is anywhere near being fullly functional. If you want to surf with Linux, you have to use Mozilla. Period.
Not that that's such a bad thing. Mozilla is that hands-down champ at render speed. Themes are *very* cool. (If you don't think so, maybe you should think about switching to Lynx. Check out the MozBilla theme that makes Mozilla look just like IE - of course, the little picture of a borg in the corner kind of gives it away.) Stability has improved a lot and it is now most certainly more stable than Netscape 4.7 on my machine. YMMV.
On the other hand, memory pigness still sucks, some of the UI processing is slow, Java and newsgroups are still not in the standard distribution. (With some fiddling you can plug in your own JVM.) I'm willing to wait patiently for such goodies, thanks, and in the meantime I'll just keep downloading those nightly builds and using them. It just keeps getting better.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I tire of the "They'll never finish it" press that Mozilla gets. Did people expect this would be done in six months to a year? Idiots! The team was handed a boatload of source code. They went through it, line-by-line, and fixed some problems. Then they decided to chuck the whole thing (and rightly so - if you haven't time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?). They start from scratch. They begin releasing functional, though still alpha, code. Then the buzzards start circling. It just doesn't add up. You might as well say that Internet Explorer is going to flop because it's taken them what, 5 years to get to this point? And Mozilla's been around for only two? And we're going to get not only a decent free browser, but also a whole pile of (reasonably) good code to bang away on? How long did it take Linux to reach 1.0, and how long after that before the pundits declared it was ready for prime time?
IMHO, Mozilla is what a BIG open source project should look like. It might take longer to get off the ground than closed-source, but the end result is so superior, and so amenable to improvement, that it will drive its competitors into the ground on technical merits. Of course, this has nothing to do with market share; it's stupid to look at Mozilla's market share, just as it's stupid to look at the market share for IE 6.0.
Mozilla is only likely to fail if AOL/Time Warner decides to kill the project. But even then, all the code's out there, right? It'll survive in some form. THAT'S the bit that I think the doubters REALLY don't get.
I would argue that Mozilla has about as many users as Opera, that being statistically totally insignificant in any way shape or form.
Mozilla doesn't whip the shit out of anything, I could have 5 instances of Opera running in the same amount of memory. IE actually works and has a responsive GUI that doesn't look like someone puked and then turned it into an interface.
No... mozilla shows just what happens when you don't listen to the person yelling "stop adding features and release the damn thing!"
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I have found mozilla to be more stable then nutscrape 4.#, but in recient builds say version 15.5 and up there i have been having quite a few problems with it.
They seem to have made quite a few changes to xlu and the editor, and have enabled proxies for ssl if they can sort this out for version 17 then i'll start using it as my main browser again.
even in it's current state(as long as you don't do too much shopping and ssl stuff) it's far better than intranet exploder and beets nutscrape by miles in terms on functionality.
anyone who says it's dead must be using IE(though opra is quite cool) and deserve a quick attach of open frame in new window, and frequent prompting that although they have set up there settings you can still shell out and register with msn.
there are also a lot of take off projects using the mozilla engine(though i can't think of any at the moment) and if you don't like the bloat then remove it and recompile.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I pretty much agree with the article. The cross-platform development thing has always seemed pointless to me. No one will ever write anything with it because, as we all known most people use, and will continue to use, IE. Most people don't want the stuff that's held Mozilla up for so long - they just want a quick and reliable browser.
Seems to me someone should rip out the good, core browser parts and build a fast, compliant bare-bones browser. No mail, no news, simple GTK (for instance) interface. Make it as fast and stable as possible and people will love it.
When that's out of the door, then add the "cool" stuff as additional modules/plug-ins. If people want them, they will use them. If not then they don't incur the code bloat or the associated reliability and performance problems.
I've only been playing with it for a couple of days, but Konquerer, which has magically appeared as if from nowhere, seems to blow Mozilla out of the water.
I hope I'm wrong and that Mozilla ends up being the killer app we all hoped it would. But with the best will in the world I can't see it.
Except it isn't: Suck's now part of Automatic Media.
I'm getting a little tired of hearing "Mozilla is dead - IE has all of the market share". Since when does OpenSource mean "Thou shalt curry favor in the eyes of the mass-market"? I always thought OpenSource meant build the best peice of software you can, no matter what business concerns have to say about it. The guys at Mozilla are building the ONLY 100% standards compliant browser. They have doen some new cool sutff (XUL, etc.). Feature creep? bloating? tell me - how many redunant features are in the average Linux distro? How BIG is the average distro? Does suck call RedHat or Suse (with all of their 7 CDs) dead or bloated just because they are huge and haven't usurped NT and Solaris? I think it's about time that the community got back to thinking more about QUALITY and less about world domination.
Why not? Are you the guy in the pinto in front of me on the freeway because you refuse to buy cars that have japanese parts?
Truth is, Netscape had only a handful of products. It's inexcusable for them to have screwed up this badly! There have been companies that have survived against MS, at least this far.
PalmOS vs WinCE? Aol vs MSN? Oracle vs SQL Server?
Heck, even Borland C++ Builder vs Visual C++, though some may debate that.. But I think Borland has the upper edge with a better object library and a much faster development environment. Unless you are developing drivers, I can't conceive why you'd use Visual C++.
Netscape dropped the ball. They had the market and the lead. They focused on their server products, and forgot to research the market for clients. They ended up with bloated, ugly clients and releases with a ton of bugs. They refused to follow the market and support new technologies (ActiveX, VBScript). They were self righteous and got what they deserved. You may say "Why support ActiveX, it's a M$ invention!". But, in order to capture enterprise market share these days, sorry, you need to support ActiveX as well. And if you don't have enterprise market share, your product will not compete with IE.
Netscape is ugly, it's a CPU and memory hog, and hardly functional in today's market. Instead of supporting a project like Mozilla, the resources should be put into starting a new browser project from scratch.
Yes, I use IE. It's the best client for Windows (I know this is not a popular thing to say here). Opera is also a good browser, but it's not free. If it was, I'd use Opera. I used Netscape for a long time. I didn't move because I loved IE, I moved because I was frustrated with Netscape!
Easy formula to write a successful browser: start with a thin, slim browser. Add smart security overrides. Add central management features. Add support for all scripting that MS supports, if you are running on windows (heck, leverage the MS Active Scripting control, how hard can that be??). Lose the skins, stick with a standard UI. Don't bother with a mail client, a news reader, etc. Support Java and ActiveX. Support SSL. Don't load in memory the features until they are being used (e.g. don't load the Java subsystem until an applet is actually executed). That's it. I'd use it.
Microsoft does. Like it or not, their Visual Basic/COM/DCOM model successfully glues together big components into useful systems. The languages support it, the OSs support it, and the applications support it. It's not ideal, but at least they have a coherent vision.
Mozilla tries to be a layer on top of an OS which sort of does some of this stuff, but it's a collection of features in search of an architecture, not a system.
CORBA is a good idea without enough support from the other parts that have to play with it for it to catch on.
Java's JRI doesn't seem to have much of a following outside the Java community, although it could in theory be portable.
The Linux world needs a coherent vision of component software. Shell pipes aren't good enough. Neither is the duct-tape world of Perl. If the Linux world had such a vision, the open-source community could write to it and make real progress. But it's very hard to retrofit architecture.
> At the very least, it should be broken down into
> logical pieces that can be built and distributed
> seperately
They can be.
To quote a guy that works here and drive the testers nuts...
"Works fine on my machine."
=)
Honesty is the best policy... Mozilla as open source is becoming a bit of a failure.
Its time to complete the post mortem and move on.
Oxryly
Thanks for posting the numbers. That is a rarity, and I appreciate the trouble. It also saves me from doing the download myself. Unfortunately, it also pretty much confirms my previous experience: Mozilla is still about twice as big as Netscape 4. NS 4.73 takes about 15MB RAM on my Linux box:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
10169 chris 2 0 15348 13M 6092 S 0 0.0 21.6 6:26 netscape-com
There was bug that IIRC was fixed in the last week where if your cache would fill up (to the size set in the prefs), you'd start to see corruption and crashes. Most people have been deleting their prefs, etc for so long for testing, the bug stayed around for a long time. I haven't had the problem in at least 4 or 5 days.
we haven't even had a musing from ESR on this topic yet!
all poking aside, as anyone who ever stared at mozilla's innards knows, its death would only improve the state of our profession, and deepen our appreciation for software engineering, all those sleepy eyeballs notwithstanding.
- nous (a suitably insulting haiku escapes me)
Mozilla developers, does this motivate you or does it make you run over to Headhunter.net?
I've been on maligned projects before, it usually makes me work harder but become unhappier. What's the mood like over there? Is everybody excited about the next beta or are you wondering what you've gotten yourself into?
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I try the Mozilla nightly snapshots on a fairly regular basis. Stability wise its certainly coming along nicely, but it consumes resources like nobody's business. Does anyone know how much of this is due to debugging code, and how much we'll have to live with in the final release. If memory usage doesn't decrease I can foget about running it on my P120 at home.
Mozilla dead?
That is a bad thought that I try to keep out of my head for a long time now. Imagine what would happen if there would be no new competing browser. Monopoly. No, not that funny game - real monopoly. So what? So THIS: there will be NO real possibility anymore for an open source browser, because the 'net will slowly become a propietary thing. It will take some years, but M$ will have NO resistance and can do whatever they plan with IE. Slowly but surely the web would become a piece of hypothetical PassiveX technology. If M$ plays it nice it also syncs IE for other platforms, i.e. Mac. But a platform that has no IE, would have no Web.
We NEED a competing browser.
By the way: 2 friends of mine own 1 nice Mac. They have always used Netscape 4.7, but it got broken. So they initially tried out Netscape 6 Prerelease 1. You know what? They got SCARED of the completely strange interface and fleed to M$IE 5.? for Mac, which, by the way, is a COOL app. I can't help it: it's the best quality a Microsoft app had since Commodore 64 Basic bugfix 13.
Netscape'd better wake up. The current product is *not* intuitive; it doesn't integrate *at all* with a current environment (GNOME, Mac, Windows). Besides, the prerelease really had some stability problems.
If they abandon the trash they add to it *now* and work on beauty, user-friendliness and stability, there is still something to save. Otherwise, 8=#
And that would be very bad because it would practically mean that Linux would be without a browser on the long term because of the monopoly thingy I explained. And that would scare away users.
Hmm, I sound a little depressive... Is it realistic what I say?
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I could deal with Mosaic's rendering bugs because it was "new". I was amused that Netscape 1 had the same bugs. I still have a copy of Netscape 2 on one of my NT boxes because it was the last of the small browsers. Netscape 3 just left me cold. Netscape 4 has been around for too long without a proper update. I've tried using Netscape 6 beta and M16 (which I'm using now till it crashes again) and I'm still not impressed. Pretty widgets don't matter when moving the mouse inside window will cause my machine to reboot! I will be content when javascript, the bane of the universe, fails to crash my browser. If it wasn't for the security problems, I'd be using IE, and if M17 doesn't get here soon I might just have to. </BITTER>
And lets face it, it *is* dead in that market. There is no way that Mozilla can even put a dent in IE's lead in the Windows market unless they stop adding crap and release a *browser*. And lets face it, if it doesn't make a dent in the Windows market, its totally insignificant according to the stats on who is using what browser, and that means developers won't develop pages for it. If they don't do that, then there's no incentive to use it.
I find it very hard to explain to somebody why they should use Mozilla... I mean yes, the rendering engine is good. But, I don't need another mail/news client, I already have more then enough. I don't need an IRC client, you will *never* make MozillaIRC better then mIRC, I'm sorry to tell you. An HTML editor? Umm... sorry, there's lots of those already too. Chromes? Well, yeah, maybe if you made the widgets look anything even remotely like those in every *other* program inside the OS it would matter. (excluding monstrosities like Media player 7 and Quicktime 4 of course, which are great examples of what not to do) But you can't tell me that the ability to make the browser look different is more important then having a browser at all.
Lets take a quick look at the marketplace and at just what we need and don't need from Mozilla:
- Mail: don't need it, there is pleanty of other mail clients out there that are dedicated to doing mail.
- News: ditto
- IRC: ditto again
- Instant Messaging: umm, yeah, thanks but I've got no shortage of these either, I don't need a special version of AIM.
- HTML Editing: nope, no shortage here either
- Chromes: Well technically this doesn't exist, however considering the number of alternate UI's out there for Internet Explorer already (Neoplanet, Enigma, ), this is not going to win people over en masse.
- A fast and functional browser: Oh my god! I found it! We have a severe lack of these!
Now of course, why are they working on all the other stuff instead of simply releasing a browser?
I think the Manager who originally screwed up Netscape is still there, because he's doing it again. I mean come on, during IE setup I can tell it I don't want mail, use "Program X", I can tell it I don't want News, use "Program Y", I can tell it I don't want Frontpage Express, use "Editor Z". Hell, I can even tell it I don't want all the language support, VBScript, and Java.
You people were supposed to make a browser. For the love of god, actually make a fucking browser!
Until somebody at Mozilla does that, Suck and the WaSP are right, Mozilla is dead in the mainstream market, and thats where the marketshare is.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
And who is going to use that in a product? Thats like running a production server with a beta kernel.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Netscape under linux sucks. Thats not saying much.
But hey, its got...what do the kids call them these days...oh yeah, skins!!!
I mean, take a look at the Mozilla downloads page, for God's sake:
Well, sign me up for that!I can't be the only one craving a crapped-out incomplete time-bombed browser that may or may not destroy every file on my hard drive.
While Netscape's browser share has been slowly sinking like the Titanic, the Mozilla folks have been standing on deck, yelling through their cardboard bullhorns about how unsafe the lifeboats are.
Microsoft's won the browser war, guys. After years of coding for the buggy-as-the-rainforest Netscape, I cringe at the mention of their name, now. They've become an anti-brand. A name I'd rather avoid.
It makes me wonder: Shouldn't big open-source projects like Mozilla include marketers as part of their team? Some sub-group who's job is to responsibly get the word out and get people downloading?
That coulda saved Mozilla.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Yet more FUD from the rumour mill and yet more misinformation from those who really haven't got a clue. Myth killing time.
Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be.
This must be why I'm using it. In fact this must be why I'm using a build labelled 25th July 2000. This must be the reason why it has replaced Netscape on my machine. And there still appears to be very active signs of life on the mailing lists, on the status pages and the steady reduction in '+' bugs.
Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.
This is a more interesting comment. Yes - the original code released from Netscape was hobbled, and eventually a near-complete restart was opted for. Often when a project gets too big for it's boots (i.e. Netscape 4.x) a rewrite is the only clean way to continue. It hurts, it takes time and there is a long period of absence while the core functionality gets moving but it does result in a better codebase in almost all cases - you learn from the mistakes of the previous generation of code.
The second part of this comment on the "unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants" is also intriguing. As far as I can see, the basic consumer wants a browser which works on all the pages in existence. Beyond that they want it to be stable, easy to use and reasonably straightforward to configure and integrate into their setup. I don't see any fundamental problems in the Mozilla approach - it aims for full standards compliance, it has a configurable interface so that it can be wrapped in as simple or as complex an interface as wished, and its configuration uses the same UI approach as most other programs out there. Yes - it would be nice to have had it two years ago to butress against MS IE 5.5 (Windows version - the Mac version is pretty standards compliant) with its foibles and 'reworking' of the HTML and CSS renderings, but sometimes life is like that.
Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight
Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.
Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.
Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim. And there are signs of sanity on the GUI front too - the skins on Mozillazine are looking good, and there are drop in replacements to coax the GUI back towards the OS standard you might be used to (Classic -> Windows Netscape, Sullivan -> MacOS style UI).
No end in sight? Obviously someone not familiar with the Milestones for Mozilla. We're approaching Milestone 17. 19 is performance tuning, and 20 is, if I remember correctly, the first full v1.0 release. We may be quite a few months away from that (9+) but it's not quite the long unending tunnel...
Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster.
I see this one bandied around a lot. "They should have written just a browser". What often happens when you go for a code re-write (see above) is that the code gets a lot more modular. And so the Gecko engine (the rendering engine) is separable from the rest and yes, someone has already made a cut down browser-only version. It's called Galeon.
The other thing that bothers me is that the competition (i.e. MS) has built a platform too on Internet explorer. Quite frankly, if Mozilla had just been a browser we'd have had a bunch of whining suckers moaning about how Mozilla can't compete with IE because it is wasn't a platform. The idea of a portable broswer-integrated platform has not been missed by MS - they recognise the importance of it for building web applications and services. Having Mozilla available for most OS's under the Sun might go some way towards providing a base for a similar hegemony of applications on an open source base.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This is just another case of the same biased reporting that /. is becoming quite fond of publishing.
Look at the title. "Suck says Mozilla is Dead"
I like how CmdrTaco seeminly avoids taking sides in the issue, but Capitalized the d in Dead in order to emphasize his hatred for the ever-late, bloated piece of beast-ware.
And look at the verb in the title. "Says". Merriam-Webster defines the word "Say" as "to say", or "to speak". I'll not be fooled by this veiled bias.
Try to refrain from promoting your own ideas and political agendas, and just report the news, or I'll be forced to kill-file you, like I do JohnKatz!
If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" -- Will Rogers
It's *just* *like* *NASA*!
Think about it -- it's widely considered the best hope for a full-featured open-source browser. NASA is widely considered (by non-slashdotters) to be the best hope for space travel in the near future.
Mozilla has had the vast majority of browser development time spent on it. (With the exception of Konqueror.) NASA was a monopoly until recently, and they're *certainly* the biggest name in the space field.
And, most importantly, Mozilla has taken a decently fast, efficent rendering engine, Gecko, and surrounded it with 'cool shit', AKA bloat, that would make a VBScriptKiddie ask "What were they thinking?" NASA has taken new technologies and an assload of money, and spent them all trying to cram 'cool shit' onto a previously working device, causing failure rates and cost overruns capable of making Joe Sixpack ask "What were they thinking?"
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In the Linux world Mozilla is alive and always will be. Unfortunately Linux will never unseat Windows on the desktop but at best will make a small dent. I, like so many others, have given up on Linux for the desktop because we got tired of waiting for Mozilla. All we wanted was a decent, fast, stable browser with a decent email client, and this still seems a year away at best.
If it works as good as my Emacs - I will get it. Moore's law our friend.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
IHMO, the market that is set to explode is the (pick your favorite name) wireless internet/embedded internet/PDA market. This is where you have a device running something like a StrongArm or SH4, embedded Linux/VxWorks, a battery-friendly display, and flash for a file system. What browsers are currently available for this beast? AFAIK, Spyglass is it. Mozilla needs to release a browser that works, has small memory/CPU requirements, and then start working on the other "kewl shit". -- snotnose
Just curious - how old are you? My bet - 14. (or was it your IQ?) :)
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I have my own open source project at sourceforge (I'm posting anonymously for a reason) and I wouldn't dream of releasing crap like that.
The key word here is "releasing". Mozilla hasn't been released yet. It's not even officially in beta. But it's pretty good. I'm using it right now - the latest nightly build. If you let people have access to your tree every night, I'm sure there would be some builds that suck.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Mozilla being dead might not be a bad thing.
Consider this: with dozens of different modules from many different development teams, each with their own development standards, someone is bound to accidentially put in a few exploitable unchecked buffers and such. And since everything is supposed to interoperate, there will be data sharing and shell()-like activity, so insted of just dieing from bad data, grafts can share the crap with other grafts (or modules or whatever the nom du jour happens to be). And it gets better, since it's cross-platform and a lot of the code is shared, the same attack will work everywhere. And of course, let's centralize the distribution so that patches are filtered down from the coders to the developers to mozilla, that would only make the response time to a threat close to a week.
If you think you've been taking it up the ass with Outlook and security patches, wait for mozilla...
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
'Valar' is what J.R.R. Tolkien called the gods in his books. So fire and brimstone unto you. Who the hell names themselves "Anonymous Coward"?
(Yes, I know. Don't even bother.)
====
Crudely Drawn Games
They also have a really great rendering engine, Gecko.
If Galeon takes Gecko and puts a nice clean GUI on it, and 90% of people prefer it to "Mozilla" and use it instead, I'd say that Galeon essentially bit Mozilla in the ass....
Which would be more like saying "Mandrake is going to rise up and bite Red Hat in the ass, if they're not careful."
---
No, but Licq is, and Licq's QT plugin supports everything that Kicq used to. Also, there are GTK+ and console-based plugins for Licq as well.
I like it better than Mirabilis' own client!
----------------- Greg has gone about cataloging all of the extraneous features that are unnecessary to a modern day, competitive browser. Mail. News. XML. XSLT. MathML. In response to XUL, he writes, "Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature."
Why? Let's see. Could it be because at its heart is the ability to write the application to work on platforms other than just Windows? The ability to customize the application so that people like you can easily have "just a browser"? The ability to be prepared for the future by creating an application that's extensible and robust? The necessity of having a codebase that's easily ported onto emerging platforms? The ability to compete against a company who has turned their own browser product into a platform?
No, couldn't be any of those things. They're all just "cool shit", apparently. They're not important relative to having a browser that runs only on Windows that alienates 50% of the entire Netscape user-base because it doesn't have a Mail/News reader nor half the feature-set necessary to be a "just-a-browser" competitor.
Apparently cross-platform technologies such as XPCOM are a wasted effort; maybe coding the same browser independently for four or more platforms would be less of a waste of resources, Greg? Apparently cross-platform support isn't a sensible marketing strategy in today's monopoly-driven marketplace.
Greg indiscriminantly lumps third-party coders' work on such projects as XSLT, MathML and ColorSync [you must have delved into the archives to find ColorSync!] with the work of the main development effort, in an effort to prove his point that they're bogging down the process. Wrong. Those efforts are independent, and they'll only go into the first release if they're completed before the ship date. If you had been paying attention, Greg, you may have realized that.
The piece ends with a curious paragraph that begins, "Theater owes its advantageous position to picking its spots, exploiting its audience and making slow, purposeful strides, even if every step is second-guessed for its cost."
They don't call it Suck for nothing, I guess.
Maybe I should just give up on Mozilla. Maybe I should resign myself to a life of banality and security breaches using IE and Outlook the rest of my days.
I think I'll stick with it. I hold the Mozilla developers in higher esteem than I do any of their sniping critics.
Don't think I like the fact that the best browser available comes from the Borg. I lie in bed praying for the day when "ECMAScript" finally makes it into iCab. But even an anti-M$ bigot like me can recognize that Micro~1's IE/Mac team have turned out the most standards-compliant browser currently available. It's not too bloated either. And since Version 4, IE/Mac has provided the kind of cookie control that is currently such big news for IE/Windows.
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
BTW, I just had to resort to using Netscape Communicator 4.7something to buy the DVD/CCA tee shirt from copyleft.net. It was the only browser which could handle the network flakiness, which I presume was brought on by the slashdot effect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Suck article misses the mark. I think the reason that Mozilla has limped along is that there aren't enough talented programmers working on it.
JWZ said as much in his resignation.
If the Mozilla project had put out a useable browser as quickly as possible, perhaps with some sexy features (I'd settle for just being able to search with the / key, without dialog boxes popping up--but I digress). Then the project might still have succeded.
What open source is great at is fixing bugs. Throw a lot of knowledgable users at a project and they'll twist the code in ways unimaginged by the developers. As a bonus they'll also write up bug reports and send in patches.
But Mozilla hasn't had daily users for most of its lifetime. It's been without talent and without friends. That's why it's limping along.
Folks, call me a karma whore, but...
Here's the thing about Mozilla, see. It's open source. You don't like it, you download the freakin' source code and change it.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm sick and tired of people bitching and whining that Mozilla sucks. Okay, it sucks. But there's a lot of goodies in there -- a Javascript engine, an HTML renderer, lots of stuff like that. You don't like Mozilla M16? Y'all do yourselves a favor, get the Mozilla code, and WRITE YOUR OWN BROWSER!
I have a problem with people who complain about situations like this but don't do anything. Me, I don't use Mozilla so I have nothing to complain about. Okay, a lot of you are busy people with lives and paychecks to worry about. You can't do anything. And not everyone with a vested interest in this project is going to be able to contribute anything more than the occasional skin (not that I think that particular feature is a terribly good idea); we're not all hackers here. But dammit, if you don't like it and you want to see some real free browser competition, you have absolutely no right to complain if you have the power to do something about it. That is why we have open source code, and that's why Netscape did this with Mozilla in the first place.
You non-programmers, you people with lives, you can't do any more than talk about the problems. The source package is huge, and a lot to wade through. But I find it outrageous that people walk around and bitch about how unstable and slow the code is and yet make no effort to even provide moral support. Mozilla is the ONLY significant standalone open-source browser out there. kfm is minimal, Opera is purely commercial, and everything else (Amaya, Arena, HotJava, Mosaic) is either dead or still experimental.
WE NEED MOZILLA TO SUCCEED. Reminding people of things like the vaporware issue (a nonsequitur since Open Source vaporware is an oxymoron), the declining market share, and the sluggishness of the *current implementation* is bullshit. If you can't contribute, tell the Mozilla people your problems. If you can, shut your trap and start coding.
Whew. Feel better now.
After that little jag, I'll put my money where my mouth is if the world wants me to. That Lions Book for Mozilla -- if someone's willing to pay me to write it (or at least coordinate it), I'd be happy to (pay because I can't afford to volunteer my time). As for the AOL issue, if there's a real feeling that AOL isn't doing right by its own software, why haven't we seen a Mozilla fork yet?
/Brian
Way too many projects (and other things) are judged by their external appearance and|or actions of a short time span. Every project that has other goals than shipping on time or producing giga $, makes me a happier person.
Things that are implemented well and sound neat or just are cool justify their own existence.
I checked out some development pages and I saw enthusiastic people talking about fine grained details of their creation. The project is clearly not motivated by greed and better yet it's not even motivated by the need for popularity from people like a certain Suck author.
Hack value is good. Well and modularry implemented features are good. Motivation by internal value|beauty is good.
Go Mozilla, Go!
Pete
Honestly, I would just like them to concentrate on the browser aspect. I'm absolutely drooling over a browser that's standards compliant. Add the email, sidebar, and other fscking features later.
Humorless sig goes here.
This morning (before this article was posted) I downloaded the most recent nightly build and it passed my smoketest. For the first time I was able to visit all the sites I visit on a daily basis (about a dozen of them) without a single crash.
There are still some things that need to be fixed before I throw away netscape:
Find in page does not work with frames.
Still a bit crashy including some on animated gifs
A much shorter list than the 10 or so things that I had on it about 2 months ago.
I hate to say it, but if you're comparing Mozilla's performance to Netscape, you've missed the boat. We should be comparing it to IE5.x. I know, I know. Open source rules, who needs windows, M$ sucks. Guess what! Most of the world needs Windows! Like it or not, that's the way it is and if Mozilla wants to compete for the market, they have to be evaluated in that arena. When people talk about market share do you think they're referreing to the Linux community? They are talking about all users, and most users use Windows. This may not be the right forum, and I'll probably get flamed to death on this, but Mozilla has to realize that it must develop for Windows and it must release a stable product to the public now! The Netscape commericals on TV present this as if it's perfect now. "Come see the new Netscape!" No, don't. It's not ready. Please, make this stable for real users now before you lose more ground. Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Every time I hear people ripping on Mozilla I'm forced to speak up. I like Mozilla a lot. I've never had it crash on me (Unlike IE), it works quite well, and it provides a very important thing. Choice. How did Mozilla save my life? Well, I was writing an windows application with a web browser imbedded. Many of the clients we were writing this application for were adamant that they would NEVER install IE on their system (I think they're kidding themselves if they think they can keep it off their system running a windows box but anyway...) This was a big problem and looked as though it might de-rail the whole project, but then in stepped mozilla. Problem solved. It has never even crashed when running as an imbedded activeX control (you can even imbed mozilla in IE and let mozilla do all your html rendering in IE!). I think the future of mozilla is in hand-held devices, set top boxes etc, but I certainly don't think it's dead. Then again I guess it's easier for "journalists" to keep a job by tearing things down. A headline like "The mozilla developers are doing a great job, Thanks guys!" doesn't really make for great copy.
I'm Mr Bug. I tend to find stuff that doesn't work by the simple expediant of breaking thinks that work fine for everyone else.
I'm told it's a talent. Mostly, it's a pain in the arse.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
IE5 on Solaris is horribly slow in drawing all its widgets out. It does have a good font system though, but for some strange reason, the title bar and window borders do not appear at all with KDE. No other program gives me this problem. And IE doesn't render the CSS on my own page properly.
To experience the W3C's idea of a browser, I tried out Amaya on Win32; though it renders CSS correctly, it's nothing to write home about. The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I doubt that the Unix version will be any better than the Windows one.
So I am (we all are) stuck without a good browser for the Unix platform. I almost feel like going back to the good old days of lynx.
If that's your attitude, then why do you have a link embedded in your .sig? Wouldn't it be better to just have plain text?
If you need blinking red text in a javascipt rollover image on top of an animated gif tiled in the background to distract me while your embedded java applet plays music JUST so you can communicate with me via email, you shouldn't be communicating with me via email.
Overstatement is a sign of a weak mind. You know that's not what I'm talking about. Just as I used italics above to reasonable effect, I can do the same in e-mail. Just because some people can't use restraint with a tool doesn't mean the tool should be banned.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Perhaps my own experience is unusual, but the speed and stability of _my_ Netscape on Linux hardly make the product a good yardstick for sofware engineering achievement.
I want a fast, clean browser with flawless CSS support. Oh, and it has to do true-type fonts, because X doesn't by default, and I hate the small fonts of Netscape under Linux.
That's not too much to ask for. Unfortunately, Mozilla sucks. A lot. I don't want mail or news clients. I don't want instant messaging. I want a good, solid browser.
I'm glad that someone took the time to enlighten him :-)))
You know, there was a time when I might have eagerly downloaded the latest Mozilla build based on your positive remarks. Alas, months of downloading nightlies and milestones have made me cynical. It begins to strike me how evasive Mozilla defenders can be. "Oooooh, wait til you try the latest milestone! It's fast! It slices! It dices!" Every time, I am appalled by the performance and size of this monstrosity. "Never mind the milestone! Just wait til you try the current nightly builds! They are oh-so-much-better!" Yeah, right. Lean and mean? Not on my machine. Whoops, they meant only Gecko. They did not tell me that the UI and (non) caching made the browser overall feel slow as a banana slug. The bloat issue is brushed aside ("RAM is cheap", "get a real machine, loser", "it will get smaller, trust me") or ignored. Or something totally irrelevant is thrown in: "you have no right to criticize! Contribute or shut up!"
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is. No one posts quantitative numbers to show how much faster it is than the last version. And of course, there is that relabelling of bloat as "features" (non-functional, of course). An IRC client? Good grief.
And what is the deal with calling it "good code"? Again, a non-falsifiable statement. Why is it good? Does it give you warm fuzzy feelings? If the code performs badly, it is bad code. If it hogs my RAM, I don't want it.
The easy way to judge performance is to compare Mozilla to that other bloated, slow monstrosity that it is supposed to make obsolete: Netscape 4.x. Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
The fact is, there is no empirical, rational reason to believe that Mozilla will have good performance. It feels slow. It is quantitatively fat. It has tons of reported bugs. Folks defend Mozilla, it seems, based on blind faith. Sorry, I am not going to give the hype the benefit of a doubt anymore. You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Navigator is a pile of garbage, and always has been for as long as I can remember it. It's bloated and buggy, partly thanks to AOL, and everybody agrees on this. Unfortunately, it also happened to be the only decent desktop browser around under Linux. Well, I think the Mozilla people should wake up : No, Gecko is not faster. No, Mozilla is not smaller or less buggy. No, there is nothing to throw a party every year for : Mozilla is a textbook example of Microsoft-style bloatware. Worse than Microsoft-style actually : as much as I hate to admit it, IE is WAY better. Now, I do have a choice though : crappy Navigator 4.7 or crappier Mozilla.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The bells and whistles I use are free -- in the FSF's meaning, as in others. Presuming that you use Java, the bells and whistles you use are built into your compiler and runtime environment. They probably aren't free. More importantly, you can't turn them off when it's release-time.
In any event, though, there's nothing "wrong" with C any more than there is anything wrong with assembler or machine code. And both of those have a useful place too (yes, in "mission-critical" situations).
Unfortunately, the nit-picking rebuttal does not address the central issue: the poor performance of the Mozilla project. After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful. What we have is a bloated, buggy, slow monstrosity that makes open source look bad. How did it get this way? It is still twice as big (RAM footprint), buggier and feels much slower than the program it is meant to replace. All the flames and posturing in the world will not change those basic facts.
Feature Creep? Delayed release? Dead?
We must be talking about the Linux Kernel!!!
Linux is dead, or might as well be! Sure, some might argue that the Kernel still has life in it, I beg to "pull the plug", and point to Windows 2000 increasing market share. The kernel is suffering feature bloat, and has failed to release a marketable product. Linus and Alan and the rest of the kernel hackers have abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for - and this is the technical term - cool shit.
Reading the comments here amazes me...if someone actually said the above about the kernel...you guys would "rip em' a new one"...but say it about mozilla and people buy in?
It will be done when it's done folks. And when it's done, you can rest assured it will have been done right. That stands for the kernel, and for Mozilla. Dead? Not by a long shot!
WaSP and Suck perhaps don't understand that Mozilla is not making this browser just for them, but instead is doing this out of the good will of the hearts of the many developers working on. If you don't *like* it, go *buy* a better browser in the meantime.
However I have to agree that feature creep *seems* to be proceeding at the same speed of progress. Mail, news, editor, IRC client, whatever, those should be add-ons, modules. Extra stuff. The should be concentrating on the core browser. I understand that a lot of the extra stuff is being worked on by outsiders, so that really doesn't siphon cycles, but all energies within Mozilla should be directed at getting out a solid *browser*. Then they can worry about the other 10% of seldom-used stuff.
Sweet Creeping Zombie Jesus indeed (somebody please petition to get that phrase in the Jargon file)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
HeUnique posted that article not CmdrTaco, I bet Taco was planning on posting that article about the time heUnique was planning on posting the KDE article... So that is a weak correlation at best
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
It doesn't seem like it should be that big of a deal with tht money that is floating aorund about hte internet. A browser that simply supports the html,css, and dom standards. Add in support for javascript and a stable JavaVM and you've got a winning product.Doesn't seem that hard since it's already designed.
So far i've Ie and Netscape have gotten close... but not quite close enough for me to even like to use. They've both spent way too much time adding their own "features" that no one uses anyway to make bloated slow products that crash all the damn time.
I always thought that AOL bought Netscape as a defense against the "nightmare scenario" of MS controlling the internet platform. The fear was that they would use the same tactics Windows used to promote MS application software -- breaking other companies apps and using inside information to give their own apps features that other companies couldn't offer.
With IE's increasing market share and the recent *huge* push for msn subscribers, aren't they almost in a position to start doing this? Is AOL asleep at the wheel, or am I missing something?
Kill, Tux, kill!
Right now, cookies aren't working, and I can't do a right-click to open a link in a new window. After that's done, galeon will be my solution.
Mozilla does have a great engine. It's a shame to see them be idiots with it.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Standards = feature overkill....
I do not believe it is posable to develup a standards complient browser with the standards changing so often
I don't actually exist.
Mozilla's goal is *NOT* a 100% standards compliant cross platform browser. Mozillas goal has become to be the biggest bloatware application in the history of computing.
Since when does a browser do Mail? News? Instant Messaging? IRC!?
A browser views webpages. Nothing more. If they wanted to create a web browser, they could have had a really good one out by now. But no, instead they want to do all this other stuff too.
Clearly, "browser" is not anywhere on their adjenda anymore.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I've been running Linux since 1993. I was 13 at that age. I liked Linux. I loved Linux. I was in fact a Linux zealot. But lately I've found myself spending more and more and more time on Windows. All the things that is usually used against Windows haven't really applied to me. The stability for once, my system easily stays up several days, I don't loose documents, and when it dies it's more often than not GlQuakes or Diablo 2's fault. But it's not really reason to USE Windows just because it's more stable than said (Linux is still 100 times more stable). Nor is it the games that keeps me from Linux.
;)) is that it's lightning fast. I don't have to spend any time waiting around for it to render a page, it does it at once. Also there's nothing it CAN'T do, which isn't something you can say about Mozilla. The same things more or less corresponds to the media player. There's nothing it can't play, and if encounters something it doesn't know off, it gets the codecs and stuff it needs.
It's in fact no more and no less than two things; Internet Explorer and Windows Mediaplayer. I'm sorry to say it but these things rock, there's nothing on any other platform that even comes close. IE is good, flexible, stable and most of all, which is the most important thing for me (and to my 10Mbps line
No, this isn't a MS rant, and I have a point. The point is, that at this stage in time, Gnome and KDE is actually quite good, it can mimic and excel almost any user interface out there (except Mac on some points, but that's another story). A user can really sit down and use it at once, especially if correctly configured from the beginning. We're also seeing Helix Codes notable performance in making updates simpler, which is deeply needed due to the horrible nested dependcies. But all this in vain if there's not the two things a normal home user wants, needs and uses the most: A browser and a mediaplayer (and a word processor, but that exists). Alot of the effort now put into Gnome and KDE should be put into this area (preferably so it can be used on both desktops) so that Linux can truly compete with and destroy Microsoft on their own turf. Because it's on the Internet the battle is finally going to be. And I'm afraid that Mozilla is a cause lost, there's to much bloat, to much legacy, and to much company interference. Better would be to start again, or focus into something like Konquerer which seems to tag along nicely (although I haven't tried it). In the end there can be only one.
No, Suck was started by some people who decided to post their ramblings while working at Wired. The copyright notice still reads "Wired Digital," which of course is owned by Lycos.
All of this will be made perfectly simple when Lycos is bought by omnipresent megacorporation Microsoft-AOL-TimeWarner-GM-IBM-AT&T in five years.
For more information, click here.
I checked the site, they're talking about the current release of mozilla being M9, it was last updated in May, (doesn't say which year). Sure, doing it in Java would make some sense, except for performance, but this doesn't look promising. Still, I like choice, and I find java solutions to problems quite workable (see VNC for a wunderbar example), so good luck to 'em. However, I use Mozilla as my primary browser, with https support, and it's working better and better in the nightly builds.
What you say in your post about the development of Unreal is certainly true. It took way too long and was riddled with bugs upon release. You stop short however of explaining what happened after Unreal's release--something that is likely to happen to Mozilla.
I was one of those people who watched Unreal's release carefully. What happened when Epic shipped a program that was unplayable over the internet and ridden with various bugs in single player was that it killed the Unreal community. For all of the copies sold that first couple weeks, all of the mods announced for the game, how many saw the light of day and were played consistently? Not many, and certainly not anywhere near the number of the game series Unreal was supposed to replace, Quake. I remember watching as Bluesnews exploded with announcements, and then became a wasteland of Unreal information.
What remained, from what I saw, was alot of bitterness and unhappy people when it came to their thoughts about Epic. I for one uninstalled my copy of Unreal and placed it on the shelf. It was only recently that I reinstalled the game, added the needed patches, and then began to play it. I was glad I did, but the game I played should have been available from Day 1. It wasn't however. It has only been recently that Epic has managed to return to favor with the game-buying public because of Unreal Tournament, although they still have yet to receive any of my money. In contrast, I had Q3A on pre-order.
Let's look at another game that fits this ananlogy: Daikatana. It too spent several years in development and upon released was also riddled with bugs. This includes at least one bug that makes it impossible to finish the game. What has this done to the public's opinion about Ion Storm? Killed it. The Daikatana community is, like Unreal's, non-existant. In my estimation it has also cost other games that have been released under the Ion Storm mantle sales. Deus Ex, a very good game, hasn't broken into the Top 20 in sales.
So what does history tell us? That perhaps these two pojects should have been aborted. During their development maybe someone should have done what suck.com is doing here for Mozilla: calling for a mercy killing. There is a certain point when continued development does more harm than good. If Mozilla uses the development of Unreal and Daikatana as a guide, that's certainly true.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?