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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).
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
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
/.: Bring out your dead!
/.: Bring out your dead!
/.: Bring out your dead!
SUCK: Here's one -- ninety thousand banner reads.
MOZILLA: I'm not dead!
/.: What?
SUCK: Nothing -- here's my ninety thousand banner reads.
MOZILLA: I'm not dead!
/.: Here -- he says he's not dead!
SUCK: Yes, he is.
MOZILLA: I'm not!
/.: He isn't.
SUCK: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
MOZILLA: I'm getting better!
SUCK: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
/.: Oh, we can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
MOZILLA: I don't want to go in the cart!
SUCK: Oh, don't be such a baby.
/.: We can't take him...
MOZILLA: I feel fine!
SUCK: Oh, do us a favor...
/.: We can't.
SUCK: Well, can you hang around a couple of months? He won't be long.
........
(thanks to Monthy Python and the makers of the original recording)
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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!"
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."
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.
"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.
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
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.
----------------- 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.
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.
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