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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).
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
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
Suck has been dead for years.
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)
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."
"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.
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.