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Send Some Mo' Zilla
Michelle Head sends news of an interview with Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org, even as 10,000 readers submit news of Mozilla Milestone 4,734,018 , available now for your downloading and crashing pleasure. Now you can crash with java.
ForumZilla is a XUL application that provides a Usenet newsreader-like interface to web discussion forums like Slashdot (although you can't read Slashdot with ForumZilla yet). Get more info at the ForumZilla web site:
http://www.forumzilla.com/Argh. We've finally reached a point where one can develop web pages that look good in both IE and Mozilla without spending 80% of our time on tweaking the HTML/CSS to comply with the different "interpretations" of HTML/CSS in those two browsers. And now you're actually suggesting of fighting this stupid time-wasting war again?!
There's only one way to go: embrace existing standards (like XHTML, CSS and the DOM) and don't extend them with proprietary solutions that work only on one single platform. Everything else is just a continuation of the nightmare that we have experienced in the past. If a standard needs an extension, this extension should be developed by more than one party -- proprietary solutions are a truely gruesome and bad thing.
Just my $.02.
One thing really disturbs me, however. The performance under Linux on a comparable machine is substantially worse than on Windows. I'm primarily refering to the responsiveness of the widgets. The menus are sluggish under Linux where they are blazingly fast at updating on Windows. Opening the sidebar is quick and speedy under Windows but under Linux it's slow and ugly.
I'm not posting this in order to bash anyone or the project in general. I'm wondering if anyone has some feedback on the reason for this. Has there not been as much work at improving performance on Linux as there has been for Windows? Will this improve in the future?
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Celebrate the finer things in life
if I go to the trouble of having a seperate page for 100%CSS1 browsers, it'd piss me off to have someone's "customized browsing experience" break my dhtml
There are professionals who can help you deal with the disappointment of not having total control over the experience of those who enter your site. In the long run, letting go of this need to dominate others will inprove your happiness and self-esteem.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
> Now for my weekly (-1 troll) post.
/.ers may be happy with a pile of app-components (apponents?) that we can built our Rube Goldberg contraptions out of, but not everyone else on the planet is. For some, a browser is just a make-do until they can get a WebTV. Or maybe just an ordinary TV.
I don't think you a troll, but I do disagree with you. (Or rather, I see why Mozilla might disagree with you.)
And that is because, for Joe Consumer, the PC is an internet appliance. Mail, newsgroups, Web sites - that's the internet experience for most people, and thus the PC experience for many. Why confuse them with a pile of separate applications?
Many
--
Give me a candidate who speaks out against the war on drugs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As linux matures, the programs get bigger. So, it is only logical that development starts to suffer from the same problems windows develop suffers from. I was reading something about the KDE release candidate yesterday. Somebody was complaining that he couldn't keep konquerer running for more than a day.
That doesn't surprise me, it just takes a certain amount of time to do proper field testing. Open source is not a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Software quality problems don't just go away when you GPL your source. So yes, as linux is maturing you are experiencing the same problems windows has experienced.
To get back to mozilla, everybody is complaining that it takes ages for mozilla to be released. However, I think less then two years (I'm counting from the moment they threw away the old netscape sourcecode) is very reasonable for such a complex product. The main competitor (microsoft) has only done minor bug fixing and minor feature additions to their product in the same time.
Jilles
AOL has a few very good reasons to want to integrate Mozilla into the AOL client.
First, if they sell a custom box running AOL on Linux, the profit is all AOL's.
Second, relying on IE and Windows creates a massive strategic weakness for AOL. Microsoft can and does try to direct users to Microsoft content rather than AOL/TW content. Furthermore, AOL is vulnerable to whatever new tricks may MS decide to roll into IE. Depending on your fiercest competitor (who wants you dead) for the most important chunk of your software, with no plan B, would just be suicidal.
Third, AOL-TV. Mozilla lets AOL move in directions that Microsoft doesn't want to go, or more likely doesn't want AOL to go.
Some people built a thing called Forumzilla, which is pretty close to a Slashdot-cruiser written in XUL. I haven't heard of any plans to roll it into the standard Mozilla distribution, though.
It sniffs the DOCTYPE. If it looks like a "modern" document, then it applies standards-compliant rendering, otherwise it applies "backwards compatible" rendering (called "quirks mode").
For most pages out there, applying standards-compliant rendering would produce a real mess.
IE doesn't have tons of debugging code. If you compile from source with the debugging stuff disabled and without mail/news, you get a 6 MB tarball. My main problems are that it still (as of the 10/6 snapshot, anyway) doesn't have "don't underline links" active, it doesn't have that IE feature that when you go back, you go back to the spot on the page from which you left, and... well, I forget what the other one was. I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
The option is there, and I think it works. It's called "underline links", so unchecking it should work.
It doesn't. It never has. Neither in Windows nor Linux.
But I did remember the other "feature" that I dislike, and it turns out to be the one that annoys me the most.
Mozilla steals focus (well, steals the top of the desktop) every time it loads a page.
One of the main reasons I avoid Windows is because the apps are always stealing focus from what I'm trying to do. Apps should treat start up like what I'm doing can not be inturrupted or humankind will perish. They should never, ever, ever, EVER (ever) steal focus when they do something. Mozilla does it on every single page load. It's annoying. It could not be more annoying if it came with a plug-in that squirted water in your face on every page load. It could not be more annoying if it repeatedly poked you in the forehead. It could not be more annoying if it defaulted to bright pink background with flashing green text. It could not be more annoying.
Woah. I guess that was a rant.
Yes it was, but it was a rant after my own heart. I cannot tell you how annoying I find programs that claim focus to be. To use a real world analogy:
Programmers should try to relate program behavior back to the real world as much as possible (that's what I do!): if it would be rude to do it in the real world, it's rude to do it in my computer. That means interrupting me (focus stealing), spying on me, trying to fasten a radio tracking collar on me when I enter a store (needless cookies), or anything else.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I dont mean for this to sound like a troll, but...
When I first heard of of Mozilla I was under the impression that it was trying to fix all of NS's mistakes (a big one being bloat) and to be open source. It seems to have missed the first goal by a large margin (I can get versions of IE 5 that are smaller than the windows version), but the second is still there. This begs and interesting question, are OSS projects always (or ever) better than their CSS counterparts? In this situation it seems to be that the answer is no, but in other cases (like web serving) it seems that the answer is yes. Any thoughts on this?
Mark Duell
I'd personally prefer less, to 'Mo'. While they've spent years making this, and it is a great program, I would rather have a BROWSER. Not a Browser/Mail/IM/Skinnable/Everything you want but the fabled sink. The only thing missing is a kernel. Joking, but on a serious side, why be a jack of all trades yet master at none? And on top of that, you need a "big honkin' machine" to run it!
If I wanted to do everything from one program, I'd just use emacs. But I like smaller programs that do their job well, back to the old unix philosophy of the toolchest of flixible tools.
For example, I still use pine to read mail. Why? Because I like it. It's fast, uses little resources, and I can use it through telnet or ssh. Now, I don't need a mail client, but if I use Mozilla there will be one there waiting for me, regardless of whether I want it or not. And I don't.
There are already many programs that do what the components of Mozilla do, from good ol pine for mail, to jaim for integrated instant messaging, to vi for HTML editing, and any of hundreds of other apps at friendly freshmeat.net.
But I guess here's where some of the beauty of open source come in. Browsers like galeon can just take gecko and repackage to make my dream browser, fast, small, and feature free. If you haven't seen in it action yet, go here.
When I do have days that I feel like running a monolithic program to browse, mail, and chat, I'll stick to xemacs. At least then I can still hack code. :)
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
The modern theme looks like it comes from Aqua or TNG!
Hopefully it'll let me post this article properly! M17 had some problems posting to K5 and here, for me anyway...
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Yes, it's very late, and may be even later than they think. But I'm inclined not to believe those who say that the window has closed for a successful launch. It's certainly going to be a while, years maybe, before Mozilla takes any significant market share (unless AOL starts distributing it - they might be good for something).
:)
Micros~1 hasn't done anything "innovative" with a browser for years. Even Mac IE5.5, which has awesome standards support, is just a re-bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwrite of IE4 - it's what they should have released as IE4 in the first place.
Once Mozilla is released and stable (events which I hope will coincide) it's going to be much, much easier to modify and update for future standards support, look-and-feel, rebranding (AOL) than IE5. Mozilla is "front-loading" future work into this release, while Micros~2 is stuck making little patches and calling them new versions.
Imagine a web development shop landing a large Intranet contract. "Hey - how'd you like us to whip up a custom version of Mozilla for you? Not just a lame-ass IE 'rebrand' with a couple different icons, but a serious web application with support for your [insert buzzword here]?"
It's going to be a beautiful day, folks. Micros~3 has the technical resources to do something like that, but they never will. Geeks have run the web for a long time, and Mozilla's going to make it easier.
On a web development note, it's very nice to use a free (and Free) browser to check bugs in my pages, rather than the reverse (using my pages to check bugs in a free - not Free - browser).
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
The following is a wake up call for the Slashdot community in general:
AOL has no plans to adopt Netscape/Mozilla/Any other crappy browser the Open Source community uses as its primary browser. While this may happen for the Linux version of AOL its certainly not a planned feature in the windows versions of their client.
How do I know this? Could be that I've been beta testing AOL 6.0 for the last 6 months (for Windows and 5.0 for Macintosh) and they've done nothing but work to intergrate IE deeper and deeper into the client.
And yes even if AOL does integrate Netscrape/Mozilla into their client for Linux it won't make a damns worth of difference. This is simply due to the fact that AOL on Linux is a paradox in and of itself and can provide no reason at all for its existence. (Except perhaps to convince the Linux Zealots - AHEM CmdrTaco that Windows/IE is going to just suddenly disappear in a big puff of smoke one day and suddenly be replaced by Linux)
Another thing - why in god's name does it take TWO years to develop a browser? Just think about where we would be today if it took two years for IE to be created - wait.... ummm... hmmm... then we would all be forced to used Netscrape or maybe if everything took that long we would all still be using that crappy Linux 2.2 kernel (oh wait - we are!)
Seriously though - its time for the Mozilla team to kick it into high gear - even though I've already sworn off Linux for Windows 2k and Mac OS X - Linux requires a decent browser if its ever going to make any headway in the desktop arena. You guys can talk all day about how Linux kicks Windoze and Mac OS Xcrement's asses all day - but how many prebuilt, preinstalled Linux boxes have you seen that within 15 minutes of turning on the computer for the VERY FIRST time the average user can be surfing the web?
Also - I dont know how many of you (I would guess zero) have gotten inside looks at Windows 2001 (Codename: Whistler) but its finally going to mean the end of all this win9x instability you guys like to rave on about (I've got the latest development build of 2276). Yeah - they are combining the stability of win2k with the juicy little consumer features of Windows ME to create what the Linux Community will only refer to as in the coming years as "The AntiChrist". Theres some food for though for you guys....
Gamorck (darkgamorck@home.com)
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
> a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended
Good: the web is not about making some lame-assed and incompetent designer who doesn't have a clue about UI design make the web look how HE wants it. No, it's about ME. ME goddamn it. He doesn't make the pages for his benefit - he makes them for mine. So he can fuck off with his bullshit design intentions.
> in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Shows how much you know. Netscape 3 is *the best* browser and certainly the most useful one. Why? Easy for me to disable JavaScript (alt+o n alt+s enter - takes under 1 second) - IE takes twenty seconds while I scroll through the biggest pile of shit this side of the Windows source code repository; easy for me to disable images (just one key stroke); fast, and not bloated like v4 or v6; doesn't crash; easy to disable Java (or don't install it in the first place); tells me what it's doing when it's downloading (e.g., 36% of 27kb); nice mail reader; good ftp client. It also supports everything I need to do - cookies, JavaScript, file upload etc.
IE for me is worthless trash - FTP client always hangs the browser window; browser windows often hang for no reason; no file download status indicator; bloated and slow.
Same for Netscape 4; Netscape 6 is ok, but I want the classic skin by default, and I don't want the AOL shit (that's why I use Mozilla), I don't like the crashes, I want to be able to disable crap like JavaShit when appropriate without fucking around with slow loading preference menus, and most importantly:
I WANT A FUCKING STATUS INDICATOR.
[BTW, NN3 does do Flash and Java, but you don't get them bloated in by default; the only thing you don't get is fucking annoying DHTML, which is COMPLETELY USELESS (Java and Flash suck too, but sometimes content can't been seen without them.)]
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
I'd like to complain about Mozilla too: lately, Mozilla has gotten too fast and stable and standards-compliant. I miss the old days when everything was obviously broken, and it was easy to find bugs.
:)
Therefore, here is my advice to you: install Mozilla for Windows. No, no, don't install Windows, unless you already have it. Just make sure that you run Mozilla for Windows under Wine on Linux. THEN you get all your old bugs back, for free! Oh yeah, it still browses the web, but at least you have some real, obvious, fixable bugs. And then you get to help out the Wine project, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Be still my beating heart.
Just what I've always wanted - a browser that makes half the web look nothing like the designer intended, and the other half not work at all. Sure, having a browser written in tcl has some degree of geek-cool, but in terms of usefulness, it rates somewhere below Netscape 3.
Charles Miller
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The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
I know you need to do it for PSM. There is a bug opened about it.
Basically, any user who runs mozilla needs to be able to write to mozilla/psm/components/xpdi.dat Yes, it's a bad bug. And it looks like the mozilla guys are still arguing about whether it should be fixed!
Actually, yeah, that's exactly it:
-Go to Blackdown's site.
-Click on "OK" when the window pops up asking if you want to get the plugin (it's the standard plugin download dialog box).
-It will (should?) take you to a page where you can download the Java plugin.
If you want to do things the slightly harder way (like I did a week ago; I jumped the gun:), you can go to Blackdown, click on Download, pick a mirror, go into JDK-1.3.0/i386/rc1 and grab j2re-1.3.0-RC1-linux-i386.tar.bz2. Then you can install the Java runtime yourself; it includes the plugin.
Of course, if you just want to get to the tarball with no searching, you can just click her e.
Have fun! I am!
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Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Why? This is a big problem in the Windows world, and now this just perpetuates it.
It's a very bad idea to require this. It prevents secure multi-user access. For example, student computer labs that I am responsible for have NT Workstation installed with feeble attempts at tough ACLS to prevent deliberate or malicious damage to C: drive. So many programs require full access to the program drive. Worse, a lot (like office 97) require the ROOT directory to be writable and then there's NT itself which requires %systemroot% (basically /bin) to be writable.
I don't buy this "you can't secure a computer you have physical access to" routine. Maybe not 100%, but getting close to that sure saves a lot of support costs over leaving a lab machine wide open...
Well, I've been using th nightlies for a while, and I must say I am extraordinarily disappointed with Mozilla M18©
Why? Well, before I go into this, lemme tell you what I like about it :
a Must faster© At least on my machine, Mozilla resembles Netscape in speed© Not bad, considering that Mozilla is incredibly more sophisticated and featureful©
b Prettier© While I would prefer Mozilla to adopt my GTK+ theme, it probably won't be too long after 1©0 when someone releases a program to do just that© That said, I think the new "Modern" theme is nice©
c Stability© This is the first time I've ever been able to say this - Mozilla is at least as stable as my current Netscape distribution© 'nuff said©
Now, you're probably still wondering why I am disappointed with this Milestone© Well, use it for a while and you migt understand© If there's one thing every application - no matter how big or small - should keep in mind© The chances that it's the only application the user has open are next to nil© As such, they should take care not to throw themselves in front of the user every few minutes© Unfortunately, Mozilla has broken this rule - it will raise a window when pages have finished loading© Not all pages© And not consistently, either© What's worse is that under Linux, the raised windows arn't focused - they're just now sitting in front of whatever you were using© Now, you have to go over to the offensive Mozilla window and click on it to focus it, and then switch back to your old app© Now, when you're coding, you've just lost your train of thought, and you might never get it back©
Before I get flames about this, I'd like to say that, *YES* I could change my focus settings© But should I? Should I *have* to? Just because Mozilla wants me to? No, of course not© While many might not think at first glance that this is a show-stopping bug, it makes Mozilla extremely irritating to use©
Ah well, I've had my rant© : I've submitted a bug report : After all that has been said, I still have great respect for the Mozilla team and all their contributors© I wish them well© I wish them happiness and prosperity© I also wish they'd fix that bug ;
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
This is cool. Now we even have trolls submitting stories. How can I mark the story as -1 flamebait?
MSIE is not open source, bad Microsoft, bad bad..
Mozilla is open source, bugs, bugs, bad, bad
Sometimes I think that nothing is good enough for some people. You're damned if you don't release your source code and you're damned if you develop your software openly giving full access to CVS.
Mozilla bashers should really look deep in the mirror. www.mozilla.org, www.mozillazine.org and especially bugzilla.mozilla.org contain everything you need to know about Mozilla. You can find out why the tarballs are big (several skins, debugging code), why the memory footprint is big (not optimized yet) and what bugs are still to be fixed (a lot). If you're lazy, stop by at #mozilla on IRC and ask. You'll get a fast answer, I guarantee you.
People, understand your responsibility. Go find out before climbing on a soap box and starting to complain. All this complaining about Mozilla crashing will hurt it's reputation. And Mozilla or Netscape is not to be blamed for it. Mozilla has been pre-alpha, alpha or beta all the time. Any programmer knows that it's still far away from a rock solid Mozilla 1.0.
However, I do use Mozilla more than Netscape now. I love Mozilla's speed on NT and how it renders correctly pages that the old Netscape can't even dream about. That's very nice for a beta-version, isn't it? Let's see how the memory footprint and stability is in another six months or a year.
The bottom line still is that Mozilla looks good. It has got a lot faster lately. It's getting better and better every week and when it's ready, it will be fabulous. I just hope that this Mozilla bashing won't give it a bad rep so that people won't even try the final product.