Slashdot Mirror
Netscape 6 Fails To Support Web Standards
Steve Chapel writes: "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide author David Flanagan has posted
an article
and a petition requesting that the final release of the
Netscape 6 browser
based on the
Mozilla open-source project
be delayed until it fixes the
problems
with support for current Web standards." It seems clear to me that Netscape cares a lot more about shopping tabs and similar deadwood - things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user - than they do about putting out a decent browser. Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Er...
Almost all of the reported errors have fixes available but are being kept out of the final release build because of the possibility of introducing new bugs. This seems like a very standard development stage, especially for a product so obscenely overdue as Netscape 6. As a developer, you have to draw the line somewhere in order to get the code out the door. This means there will be bugs in the release. Even in a corporate-sponsored open-source project. This is news?
Also, most of the bugs mentioned are DOM/Javascript bugs. Can I be the first to mention that IE's DOM, while functional, requires pages to be coded NOT to W3C specs? If you were to code a DHTML or Javascript page to the published specs, it would be more likely to work on Netscape 6 beta than IE 6 beta. That said, most extant DHTML pages will not work on Netscape 6 at all because they are all coded to IE specs.
Yeah, I'd like a perfect browser too. But considering that I'm stuck using Netscape 4.xx/Mozilla nightly builds/Opera/Konqi on Linux, I'd MUCH rather have the almost-perfect browser. The longer we wait, the less relevant web standards become. And the less useful a standards-compliant browser will be when finally released.
... there's really no appreciable difference betwwen IE and NS for the vast majority of users.
...
They use what's installed
I don't think standards support should be the only priority of a browser. Standards sometimes contain errors and sometimes even security holes. Also, most webpage authors read the source of other webpages, and Mozilla doesn't tell you when a webpage uses nonstandard HTML or contains a typo in the tag formatting. (Last I heard it doesn't even validate XML??)
:)
Also, it should be noted that Netscape has been favoring disabling features (such as css borders) over supporting them with many bugs. Disabling them makes sure they won't be used incorrectly due to buggy implementation, and that's a good thing
ECMAScript is the leading motive for unusable, invalid HTML and exploits of security and privacy defects in user agents, and writing documents that require it should be discouraged with large blunt objects.
Ok, maybe the traditional glass house metaphor doesn't apply, but a new one might. The thing is, these bugs are out in the open, so it's easy to see the list of problems. MS Internet Explorer has its own problems with standards compliance. From what I've heard, the 5.5 and 6.0 releases are even worse than previous ones. AOL/Netscape have taken a lot of heat for not shipping a browser -- at some point, they've got to go ahead and ship. (Look at XFree86 4.0/4.01 -- it's certainly far from done: it supports way fewer video cards than previous releases.) People are always whining that it's too little, too late. Well, you can have everything if you want to wait a little more, or you can have the most compliant browser available now.
so what if its pro-microft. If its a valid assesment, it should be posted. The fact that I and prolly most slashdotters disagree with it is another deal altogether.
...they came first for the HTML editor,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't use the HTML editor.
Then they came for the newsgroup reader,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't use the newsgroup reader.
Then they came for the e-mail client,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't use the e-mail client.
Then they came for web standards -- and by that time no one was left to speak up...
the truth is that in the near future, the majority of web activity will NOT be from you computer. What sickens me is the one dimensional thinking that pervades whenever we get these MSIE Vs. Mozilla Vs. everyone else.
The truth is that web access in the future will be seamless. The majority of the population won't even know it exists. They'll access it through PDA's, cars, washing machines, and what have you. And the most important truth of all is that devices won't have the 100+ megs to run windows and IE. Will they run Mozilla + linux? Maybe. But IE is not even a consideration for the majority of these devices. just look at the current developments. We have intel with the dot station running linux, indrema running linux + mozilla, and Gateway/AOL developing a linux + mozilla combo as well.
just my 2 cents. think about it.Actually, it's possible to get Netscape working again without rebooting:
Under Linux (and presumably any other Unix):
skill -9 netscape
Under Windows:
Ctl-Alt-Del
Choose Task Manager
Select Netscape (it will probably say [Not Responding] next to it)
Choose "End Process"
Wait a few seconds
A window will popup saying that Netscape isn't responding, and asks if you want to kill it or wait. Choose to kill it.
If that window doesn't appear, go back to Task Manager and try again.
-----------
-----------
100% pure freak
Unfortunately, they already DID take their time. It's been well over 2 years. It's getting there, but that doesn't cut it...
Time to grab KDE2/Konquerer I think...
Erhm, actually, slashdot is just a news site (ok, not "just"... :). The articles have different opinions about x, y, and z, (kde/gnome, mozilla/ie, qt/gtk, insert your religious war of choice here), but that doesn't mean that /. is doing anything wrong. Rob and gang do a great job of posting stories and news from people with all sorts of different opinions.
The sad thing is the mozilla team (and project) could lose all credability, funding, and support from AOL (*bleah*) because netscape 6.0 sucks. I've used netscape 6.0 and it does suck. Mozilla does still suck, but it doesn't suck nearly as badly. Unfortunately the populus of the internet are going to see the "new and improved" netscape 6.0 as the final realization of the netsape/mozilla project, see how it sucks, and cut it off at the knees. IMHO Netscape should go away. At least the AOL netscape 6.0 abomination with the crap that they've put in. Mozilla should live on as it's own entity, and not be "netscape's mozilla project". Kinda like guilt by association, and I don't know how to solve this (other than praying that they don't screw up netscape 6.0 too badly and that mozilla can keep on going with the coders and so forth that they have now) :(
Here you go!
My appolagies, it's opera that doesn't support CSS then. I know that konqeror has some things it doesn't do, like link color (/. looks *weird* with blue links!). Stability issues have also kept me from using it (last I used were pre-2.0 debs). It is quite possibly the sweetest file manager I've used yet though, tied perhaps with efm because of efm's wackasscool command line interface :)
I've had it do that whole kill-explorer thing, it'll come back semi-cleanly but everything in the tray is gone (indicating that the main explorer shell has been restarted) and eventually everything goes to shit and I have to reboot. Granted, I don't use it a lot...
I'm going to turn Michael off in my preferences as a protest against this article, and I'm seriously considering not being part of this "community" any more. After all, anyone who could even consider using IE has nothing in common with me.
M.
Yes, that's right, I have 256 M and no swap used... Yet X claims to use more than my system memory. Again, don't trust top.
That's not quite fair. The reason that X shows up so big is that it has memory mapped memory from your video card. My "top" looks similar. I have an X server that blindly maps a huge area of RAM off my card even though the card only has 16 meg. Top can't know this. If you want to see what your X server is mapping, do an "strace X" from a console.
Since when did Mozilla become the typical X-based productivity app? For that matter, since when was it a productivity app at all?
You're giving up just when the going is getting good. I used to use a Windows box when I wanted to write a document (other than a paper with a good LaTeX template) or put together a spreadsheet. I don't have to any more.
While GNUCash is a little basic for my needs (preferred financial sw right now is Quicken under WINE), its basic functionality has come a long ways; perhaps more importantly, its scripting hooks (Python! goodie!) let me do things My Way without using VBA. (Yes, I really did do VB; I'm not just complaining to be trendy. Threw away a half-finished app after getting hung up for weeks on a runtime bug under VB4).
Getting fed up with Mozilla is no reason to believe that having good X-based productivity apps ain't gonna happen.
Posted by polar_bear:
You know, it's almost refreshing to see someone recommending a Microsoft product on Slashdot - it's a nice attempt at being even-handed. However, suggesting that we switch to IE is a bit impractical for those who are using Linux, *BSD, and other OSes that Microsoft doesn't support.
Konqueror, on the other hand, is a viable alternative to Netscape. I'd recommend it quite highly.
Across four machines (two being gateways and one being a Dell), I've never had a Win2k box stay up for more than six hours without destroying itself. Driver conflicts, twice the 'defrag' utility corrupted the FAT32 drive. Once I actually managed to get a program installed (WinZip) before it died. Another time it died the second I downloaded and played an AVI. Some driver bug in the i740 stuff. After which the drivers had corrupted themselves on the FAT32 drive.
;-)
Do not discount other people's experiences because you've had luck, just as I don't discount your experience just because you haven't had problems. With completely stock off-the-CD drivers I've had it self destruct on four machines, and seen it run perfect without a crash for four months on a fifth.
All I'm saying is, my odds have been much better with Linux
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Yep. And MS-Windows 2000 (hell, even MS-WinME) is clearly better than Linux-- and will remain so.
IE is clearly inferior to Mozilla (not Netscape). Mozilla is attempting to be 100% standards-complian-- and MS-IE is trying to push Unix out of the back-end (as IE "works best" with MS-IIS and ActiveX). Mozilla is as fast as IE at rendering, and presents a better-looking page (IMNSHO). It is in the process of gaining full DOM support-- something IE isn't even concerned with (because once everything is MS-IIS on the back end, MS doesn't give a fuck about standards).
No, thank you. I'll support the better alternative. And IE has hardly "already won the browser war." First, there's plenty of room for browsers to co-exist; and second, the burgeoning field of portables is transmogrifying the browser playing field tremendously.
Thank you for your support.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Sure as hell I'm not gonna waste my time at beta testing propriatery closed-source program.
Let them pay for beta testers.
Bob.net?
"What are the three words guaranteed to humiliate men everywhere?
In Republican America phones tap you.
No crashes or segfaults from Mozilla nightlies for the last two weeks here. Java is still troublesome, but it always has been, so that really doesn't bother me. As for bug reports, at least I can report bugs without it costing me $50 to tell some M$ flunkie that IE's stupid CSS support still doesn't work right. In otherwords, please take your fud elsewhere.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Check out two of my favorites:
Here
and here
JavaScript shouldn't be considered a requirement for "Internet Standards" anyway. Most of points of the article seemed to be whining about JavaScript, and yet the first thing I do when I sit down to use Netscape is to disable JavaScript.
Lynx, naturally, doesn't require that extra step. This Is A Good Thing.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
Slashdot -- News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
I don't see the word "advocacy" in there anywhere. Do you?
enable javascript... it will fail.
---- perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
What do you folks think the market-droids show potential advertisers?
Statistics showing that the number of posts is up, up, up.
More posts means more eyeballs means support for the advertising rates.
Has any one but me noticed that the banner ads are often coming from such paragons of internet whoredom as doubleclick, et al?
Moderators: moderate as +1 Insightful, or get a backbone...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I give IE credit for being a good browser, perhaps the best released browser right now. I've used IE4 and IE5, and although they had problems, Netscape had just as many if not more. IE5 definitely wins some points. Unfortunately all of this advice is worthless. IE runs only on Microsoft OS's and some Apple OS's and whatever other proprietaristic companies Microsoft can make a deal with. While IE6 may be the best browser, Windows and MacOS (before X at least) are not the best operating systems. This means for a "full-featured" browser in a worthwhile OS it's Netscape/Mozilla or nothing. I'd rather deal with browser inconveniences than OS inconveniences, especially if one way gives me source for both and the other source for neither. However, if there were an IE for Linux, even though closed source, I would probably be using it right now. I'd still be waiting for Mozilla to complete though, which is what I'm using right now. The bugs I experience are slowly disappearing, but there isn't any alternative. (Unless someone wants to donate a machine for Windows...)
I can't comment on Internet Explorer, I don't run Windows or MacOS presently.
Konqueror is good enough that its become my primary web browsing application based on its increased stability, improved performance and adherence to web standards over Netscape.
There are some flaky bits, but for the most part they don't effect me (JAVA and JavaScript support seems a bit suspect at the moment)
I don't care if an application is Open Source or commercial, so long as it works for me. Konqueror does the job admirably.
i think you spend a little too much time in slashdot:[000000]. loosen up before we have to find a VAXman;2.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
It is a good idea to switch to the MSIE6 beta, since it obviously won the browser wars. Can someone give me a link to the MSIE RPMs for Red Hat 7?
thanks
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
It's been ported to Sun and HP UNIX. It also runs (albeit dangerously) under WINE. Honestly, it would make my day if they ported to Linux. Netscape pisses me off quite a bit. MS simply had the foresight to make their browser more than a simple browser. It's really an engine for Internet Applications. There are a LOT of things I like about Linux, like being able to suppress idiot prompts. Abide by Netscape, I cannot.
Try viewing that page with IE5.x with script debugging turned on. (may require script debugger and Windows Scripting Host) Even their own browser complains about errors in the scripts.
You figure they could at least make it work properly in their own browser.
nope, i didn't. i checked.
i finally tried konqueror (thanks, debian apt) for the first time a day or so ago and was astoundingly underwhelmed. it is fast (about the same as mozilla at rendering, it seemed), and it looks pretty nice (icons excluded), but it did not do javascript and CSS well at all. mozilla is not fast (interface-wise) and robust yet, but i see much more polish and potential there. konqueror was a nice alternative browser to try, but much less usable than mozilla or even the old netscape. even many basic navigation menus did not work -- which did in IE, NS, MZ.
...but to advocate a browser that is only available on two platforms...
Mac, Windows, Solaris, HP-SUX... that's four without dividing up the myriad windows platforms.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
This is exactly what the internet doesn't need. When this happens the internet ceases to be the internet, it'll be MSN, and you can forget about surfing on you PDA, your Internet Appliance (unless it's Windows based) or your UN*X box.
--
Niklas Nordebo | nino at sonox.com | +46-708-405095
--
Niklas Nordebo | nino at sonox.com | +46-708-405095
I don't quite see it. Just because you told Windows not to load IE, what makes you think it isn't loading some component of the browser anyway? Regardless if you told it not to. Did you see the source? I highly doubt that. It's a real tragedy that ppl on /. can tell everyone exactly what's going on inside the Redmond OS without being privy to the source code.
Personally, I sleep well at night knowing that 99% of the software I am using has its code open, where anyone (including me) can know exactly what's going on. That's why Mozilla wins it in my book, I don't care if IE comes up 5 seconds faster, Mozilla is and will be the better browser.
Come on. 6.0 doesn't need to be perfect. No first
release of a commercial product ever is.
Because we live in an open-source world, we are used to waiting through yet another 0.99pl6-94 revision in order to make 1.0 perfect but this is not how it works in the commercial sector.
There, you ship it today and then fix it tomorrow.
Tuomas
By the way... please name one other product Microsoft has controlled forever where their product and their primary competitive product is free and easily downloaded on the web. Windows VS Linux... Linux is good, but I don't see it taking over that fast. Or why are games Ported to linux but written for Win98?
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
Yeah, but only people whose lovers shop at Wanda's Whip Emporium.
Clearly, you haven't been using Mozilla regularly. It isn't yet as good as (say) IE 5.5 for Mac,
:p)
Wow, and I was feeling guilt pangs from IE because I started using it on my Cube to support my nice wheel mouse..
(And Outlook Express, which is oddly stable
To think M$ products work better and more stably on Macs than on Windows.. figures...
Any chance on an IMAPS gui mailreader besides OE or Nutscrape on Mac (or Nutscrape on unix-style platforms)?
Your Working Boy,
I stand by my opinion that IE and Win2k are excellent products.
Their bloat offends my aesthetic sense. Also, IE5.5 crashes hard and often on my Win2k SMP box.
Still, I can play Homeworld and AOEII on my W2k harddisk. And with cygwin, I can almost get useful work done in Windows..
Though OE suXX0r when it comes to imaps and selfsigned certs.. and don't ask about nntps...
Your Working Boy,
I have no idea where you are getting that from.
-Harvey
Say what you want about IE, but IMHO, it's a wonderful software product. IE has been running on my Win2k box without a crash (that goes for Win2k, as well) for several months now. Netscape, on the other hand, crashes on my FreeBSD box hourly. Sometimes, it even takes my X11 server with it. When Netscape renders pages 1/2 as fast as IE, I'll switch to it.
It's important to remember the difference between Win95/98/ME and WinNT/Win2k. These are two different product lines. Apples and oranges. Minivans and sports cars.
I'll be the first to agree with you and say that Windows ME is complete and total horse dung. I cannot wait until every home user is running an operating system with a server-quality kernel.
Win2k, however, is a different beast. My Win2k box has *never* crashed on me in the 10 months I've been running it. The TCP/IP stack seems quite fast and solid and the usability over NT has improved beyond words. It does, as you mentioned, require a lot of RAM. Perhaps a problem for some but I think the average CompUSA computer will be equipped with 256M RAM by the time Whistler (Win2k-based home OS) goes on the shelf.
By 'embracing, extending and extinsguishing" the W3W standards Gates is attempting to turn the Internet into Microsoft propriatary turf. To use IE would require the use of WinXX, which would require leaving Linux or dual booting. I gave up dual booting a year ago. I will not return to WinXX nor will I visit /. again.
The quality of the postings to /. have put me in a mood to do this, but this 'story' was the last straw.
Please delete my account.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I completely disagree that Mozilla is any good. Granted, I am not into downloading the nightly builds, but I have tried out the milestone versions. They constantly crash (even more so than Netscape), they don't work the way I believe a "milestone" browswer should, and did I mention that they crash?
;)
I have an adequate system to handle Mozilla, I don't like Netscape, but there isn't really another choice on the non-Windows/Mac platform.
I am not against IE for being made by Microsoft, I am against it b/c it is only made for Windows/Mac. We need a decent browser in the UN*X world, I just hope it ends up not being IE
Not all of us run Windows, so we can't beta-test IE 6 unless MS suddenly decides to start supporting platforms outside of Windows and Macintosh.
/usr), but with the permissions set so that only root can execute the browser.
Actually, there is a version of IE "for UNIX". It's actually for Solaris (and maybe HPUX too?), but the only page that says this is the download page. Everywhere else they say "for UNIX", to make it sound like they support just about every platform in common usage...
I tried out IE for Solaris. It's missing a lot of the features of the Win32 version. If you install it, you'll also see that Microsoft doesn't quite understand this "UNIX" thing... half of the install goes in your home directory (rather than somewhere in
Agreed! Mozilla might be able to render a 700-post Slashdot nested table in 3 seconds, but it takes as long to open the bloody-freaking "File" menu.
Also, the GTK-style right-click widgets are simply not as efficient as the Motif ones. (Here's one place I feel Motif wins.) In the Motif-based Netscape's, I can right click, and while holding the button, slide over and select "Back" and release, all in about a half-second. In the GTK-based Mozilla (and Netscape 6), I have to click, release, wait for the window to pop up, select back, click, release. Slow.
Another annoying tidbit of Mozilla (and NS6) is that it blacks out the screen when it starts loading a new page. On NS4.7x, I can click on a link, and keep reading the current page (I can even scroll up and down) while I wait for the other page to load. In MZ and NS6, as soon as it gets a byte from the remote webserver, it blacks the page out. No more "pipelining" my web-browsing as I visit lagged sites. Slower still.
And then there's the small detail that refreshing under various pop-ups and pull-downs is hit-or-miss, and the whole GUI packs up and goes South a couple times an hour, and it all just doesn't add up to an efficient, enjoyable browsing experience.
Anyway...
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Is it showing 135MB for the RSS or the SIZE on xmms and kdeinit? If the RSS is that big, then top is confused. If the SIZE is that big, then perhaps one or both applications is (a) memory mapping some devices (sound card, perhaps) and that mapping is being counted towards the process, or (b) one or both is leaking / allocating large amounts of memory but never faulting it in.
Memory that's allocated but never faulted in won't show up in RAM or in swap.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
No, subliminal.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Cool -- I guess I will never view your website then since I DO NOT HAVE FLASH installed. And see no reason to do so.
It's your choice though.
If you don't like the mentioned incompatibilities you are free to go to www.mozilla.org and follow the instructions to get the source, then fix the incompatibilites yourself and submit a patch.
If you don't want to do that then stop complaining!
--
I don't get it. Whether Flanagan's article is factually correct or not (and I hope mozilla/Netscape developers come up with a response), why does michael feel the need to turn it into a flame? I think it's pretty impressive that Flanagan could dig into mozilla's bug database and find a selection of bugs to highlight. I also think it's a positive side-effect of the open source process that he feels that he can launch a petition to suggest that certain bugs (which, again, he can point to directly in bugzilla) be fixed before the commercial Netscape 6 is released. Besides, what difference would such a delay make to us who are handy with an ftp client? We can download the latest build, either from the commercial tree or the mozilla trunk whenever we wish.
I think the most absurd part of the article is the notion of "signing up" to have the right to download and help test a beta of IE6! It seems so... backwards.
Look again. CSS support is quite good in Konqueror.
Don't confuse it with KFM.
-- Thrakkerzog
Netscape does seem to dominate the market for educational and academic users. Very possibly because it has always been free for those purpouses. The schools here in Helsinki go as far as to prune out IE from their machines. Here at the University of Technology we do use IE on all the Win'2K machines, but the are vastly outnumbered by Solaris, Irix, Debian, HP-UX, Tru64 UNIX, AIX and probably others.
So IE seems to have quite some way to go if it intends to dominate schools, universities (and quite possibly other centrally administered computer systems) and not just computers used by people who don't know or care how to install a new browser if there's one preinstalled.
Say, why are they specifying Mac_PowerPC ? Maybe my next mac will be an x86 box, or an Alpha...
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Yeah, I'll switch to IE6 .. when it isn't available on my platform.
Yeah, IE6 is entirely focused on standards compliance.
And oh, Netscape 6 is completely uncompliant... Have you EVEN LOOKED?
Thanks michael, I've filtered you from my slashdot banners. Obviously your ability to sift intelligently through internet news is even more poor than your co-editors.
Amazing.
-josh
He's using Win2k. Not all versions of "Windows" are the same. NT and W2k are designed for use on servers, and if they can keep dell.com running, I don't see how you can say with a straight face that they are not reliable enough for mission-critical web browsing.
Yeah, you're right. We can't have large companies building high-quality products.
Yeah, you're right. Large companies always make better products than individuals and other small groups.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Yeah, it sucks when people make general statements from only a single example.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
My Web Page
Just that. WTF are these people thinking. As if they didn't have enough to worry about. Is/will MS able to claim more thorough support for standards? Irony of ironies...But then this is from the people that gave us the tag. Somebody buy 'em a ticket on the Clue Train, please. hell, I'll pass the hat...
If internet explored worked on UNIX like it does on windows, I'd use it on Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and any other system I use. It's definetely better than mozilla which is a extremely slow memory hog. It works slower on K6-2 450Mhz than netscape3 worked on my 386 back then. Some one should really focus on profiling before it's too late. I've just tried M18 yesterday, and it's quite unusable at that point. I respect the OSS movement, and myself prefer OSS products; use FreeBSD and Linux at work and at home. But this is clearly the case when Microsoft has done it better. Sorry guys, face the truth. Anti-M$oft prejeduce is not better than Anti-Linux one.
--Roman , remove spamless. to mail me.
They could, but if its of the same quality as the SPARC/SunOS port it'd be a wasted effort.
After two days of truss'ing I finally figured out It didn't like NFS mounted home directories. Once I actually got it to run, I found it didn't like NIS either. Forget trying to use a proxy, half of the pages come up unavailable the first try.
Once I managed to get it running and bringing up pages directly, I experienced frequent un-repeatable crashes and many repeatable. It even crashed trying to bring up Microsoft's home page.
Another big concern is the lack of updates. Not one security or bug fix has been issued for the UNIX ports, not because the problems don't exist, but because they apparently didn't feel like it.
As far as I know, its also IE4 not 5 that is available for UNIX. You are probably better off running Communicator 4.76 or Mozilla, I know I am.
Bottom line is IE/UNIX appears to be just a marketing tool. It's not really usable from a application standpoint. Buggy and Unsupported are not two words you want decribing your web browser.
You need to copy the registry entries and maps from a windows install over to wine. Without windows, theres no IE on wine.
Even when you do get it running, there are serious bugs. Go do some research or better yet try it yourself.
The WINE developers have done an excellent job but there is still no substitute for 100% native applications, especially in something as heavily used as your web browser.
Trust me, if an IE/Linux port would be anything like the Solaris port you don't want it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's because not all of us have a clue
And Mozilla/Netscape 6 under Windows *STINKS*. Even on nightlies.
Um, you mean the browser I'm happily posting with right now? Seems fine to me.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Dude, that doesn't mean anything. Whatever compliance problems IE5 may have, Netscape is much worse (if you can keep it running long enough to find out). Just try developing a website that uses a broad set of constructs from HTML4 and Cascading Style Sheets and see which browser actually displays what you intended. I guarantee IE will win hands down. Another thing worth pointing out... IE has frequent updates... Netscape? still waiting (unless you want to use an unstable, incomplete beta that still isn't as good as IE).
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
It's called "SmartUpdate", and works with XPI's.
That has been available for a long time.
Right before PR3 shipped, a "Netscape" branch was created. You needed nsbeta3++ permission from the PDT to check into the branch before PR3 came out. After PR3, you needed an attached patch, a Review and a Super Review to get from [rtm need info] to [rtm+]. At that point, if the PDT approved the bug getting fixed, it moved it to [rtm++], and you were allowed to check it into the branch. If the PDT didn't want the change, it marked it rtm-, and that meant that it wouldn't be allowed into the branch. In the whole process, the patch was usually checked into the trunk right before it was moved to RTM+.
So if it gets rtm-'ed, it will NOT be in Netscape 6.
All of the problems that we're having management wise with Netscape 6 are due to their crappy PDT. This does not really affect Mozilla, and most of the bugs listed in that article (in fact, I think ALL of them), have been fixed in Mozilla.
Michael: Your bias is disgusting. Mozilla will easily be a better browser than IE. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Netscape 6.
Netscape does NOT have a "shop" button.
Repeat:
NETSCAPE 6.0 DOES *NOT* HAVE A SHOP BUTTON!!!
And btw: All of the netscape developers hated the "shop" button as well, and
there are regular barbs made at it.
For some reason, the milestone versions have ALWAYS sucked more then the
nightly builds when they were released. The Nightly builds are always much better.
So I guess what I want to know is, do any of these browsers have the features and/or speed of Mac IE 5?
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
How would the masses ever have found out about client-server architecture if it hadn't been for Netscape?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
IE better? Then why can I install most any plugin (shockwave and flash) into netscape without a fight while IE under NT fights and fights and fights (even though permissions were correct) so I downgraded the whole office to IE 4.0 and then the plugins worked/installed again.
IE=good??? only to the blind appliance user.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and who really cares about css and all that other junk.
I like 4.0 also.
all this crap being stuffed into the html standard is just to give coders more bloat instead of creativity. Hell some of the best sites I have seen are HTML 2.0 compliant! if they can do it that way then what the hell do we need this other crap for?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hey, mozilla/netscape may not be perfect, but the mozilla project is doing fairly well right now, IMO, and I think there's nowhere to go but up from here. It is, after all, all we've got(with a few minor exceptions). Maybe when MS decides to do officially release their linux port, things will be different.
Now, on another note - let's have moderation for actual stories that are posted. Or perhaps for the commentary the poster tacks on at the end - this way, we could moderate jackass contributors like michael down to the level they post at - flamebait.
-lx
You think AOL wants to continue being beholden to MS? Maybe you'll work for yourself instead of other people someday.
No, they probably don't like MS that much, but they'll surely miss having their icon in the Online Services folder, once they switch... But then, maybe 20-30 million subscribers is enough to call it quits on that.
I tried the Solaris version of 5.5 (or whatever the lastest unix one was) and it sucked! If you wanted the same functionality (browser and a mail/news window) it used about 40% more RAM then NS... that's assuming you got that far before it hung. IE tended to hang hard usually within seconds of starting up (under 2.5.1, 2.6, and 2.8), sometimes hanging my entire X session.
It also had a nasty habit of crashing CDE at random intervals.
Personally.. I'm glad there's no IE for Linux, and even if there were, I'd stay as far away from it as I could.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Want to see how slow IE is when it doesnt have any help from the OS? Go to 98lite.net, download ieradicator, install it, reboot, run explorer now
Not quite as smooth is it?
Windows runs faster, just might need to find another file browser, Winfile.exe is still around.
I Don't Work Here
or IRIX, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, etc....
(I tend to diversify my UNIX experience. I've got most of the bases covered.)
http://www.logicprobe.org/systems
Netscape (okay, actually Mozilla nightly builds) have not crashed on me once in the last three to four months. I use it frequently. My only problems have been slowness and an occasional freak out on some complicated designs (only on the Win32 version - Linux version hasn't run into this yet). Maybe I'm not stressing it out enough to see it die.....
You might be interested to learn that IE runs on Solaris, HP-UX and Alpha : See IE On Unix.
So far IE 5 runs on five platforms (six if you add Win 3.1/NT 3.5.1).
"nice collaboration software like Lotus Notes, or Exchange"
WHAT?? If you really *really* need collaboration software, then I guess Notes is okay, but EXCHANGE? This thing is a security hole waiting to happen, not to mention an administrative black hole. On the up side, it's collaborative capabilities are strictly a huge pile of steaming fecal matter.
There are at least a thousand system out there that beat exchange hands down, and many of them are free. Exchange coupled with Outlook is probably the worst combination I've ever seen. Notes is fine for collaboration, but it's email client is still the electronic equivalent of a hot poker up the rectum.
I wish corporate IT types would wake up, look around, and discover that "popular" or "free with MS Office" doesn't mean "qood" or "useful."
How about "exists for my OS" ? For an actual advantage I mean ?
I can't believe that an admin on Slashdot would suggest that people here choose MS Internet Explorer over Netscape. For one, most of the people here use unix based operating systems (or at least it seems the case to me) and IE doesn't run on a x86 arch. unless you've got Windows.
On top of that, while Netscape might not support every standard at least it's faster than IE 5.5 and it doesn't come up with generic error pages when it can't find a page. I've seen IE unable to load a page that Netscape could on the same machine. I'm not talking about displaying correctly, just loading _something_.
Maybe it sucks, but as long as it meets my minimum requirements and it's still fast I will continue to use it as my browser.
Folks, if i'm off base here, let me know.
--L
In any given week either IE or NS is "more secure", depending on the most recent security warnings. One could argue all year about which is inherently more secure. It often really comes down to trust issues and the tradeoff between apparent bugginess and featureset / browser religion. Neither of them is secure, neither of them is brazenly insecure (again, one could argue all year).
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
No problems with lynx 2.8.4dev.10 on linux.
But Michael is a total fool for saying it the same way as Joe Columnist would put it "IE has won the browser war." I know he doesn't necesarily think that IE fairly won the war, or that it's a good thing that any browser should win any type of (expletive deleted)war and have a majority which would discourage further diversity, but he is a DAMN FOOL for using the same words that other people do (Joe Columnist) when they actually do mean that IE maybe won fairly and that single-product 'markets' are ever good.
I HAVE NO SYMPATHY FOR YOU PEOPLE ANY MORE!! You Slashdot editors bring the flames on yourselves!!
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
Yes, i can judge IE because I have to use it at class (v5.5) and it stills screws up the machine (2000) when you get a bad java script, or somthing or another.
But you also have to think WHY people use IE.
Your average user is an idiot. They have NO
idea and don't want to bother dling a browser
when one is stuck in their OS, and you can't get
rid of it. The ONLY, and ONLY reason why you are
seeing those statistics is because of the monopoly
power. Is because billy boy stuck that thing in
his OS and called it a platform.
I think we should all go back, and look at the
number of win95 users, b4 M$ tried to monopolise
the browsers, and see how many of those 95 users
ran Netscape.
Im running Mozilla M18 on this machine. And to tell you the truth... The graphics on M18 bring out a noticable better quality than IE on the collage's machines. ( the themes on M18 kick major ass lotta options )
This is all a question of monopoly power rather than browser preference.
But yes, stop and ask WHY/HOW b4 the ANYthing is judged.
ETRN x
Because i proved you wrong?
Ya, that makes me stupid.
ETRN x
Yes, netscape won the browser war.
It supports many more platforms than
IE, which only runs on winx and MacOS.
I don't run IE becaue i don't run windows.
Netscape works fine for me, and I don't have
any problems with it. In fact if you compared it
to how it effects the platform that it runs on.
Netscape would win by far. IE locks up your whole
winx OS, making it a peice of JUNK.
The only reason %60 use IE is because M$
tried to monopolise the market by putting the
peice of shit on their peice of shit OS.
In my site's stats Netscape is beating
IE by a good bit.
The %60 you are seeing is only recorded off
sites that are interesting by one OS using
group. M$ users.
Look at some of the Linux sites.
Netscape outranks IE by far.
People should stop and ask WHY/HOW b4
they start judging statistics.
ETRN x
In fact, IE comes installed on OS X beta. However, I jumped for joy when iCab came out: it's the fastest browser for big Slash pages. It also helps that I have graphics turned off :)
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
You must not have used konqueror recently. I have been using CSS on my website and it does about the best job of any of the browsers so far at displaying the CSS. I validated both the page and the CSS using validator.w3.org and konqueror most correctly renders it. Konqueror however does still have some table issues that are being addressed. Considering how good this browser has gotten in this short of a time span I can't complain. It is fairly stable, fast, and standards compliant. It needs more work in places but I now use it almost exclusively. IE is just not an option since I don't have windows. Couldn't justifty the cost of continuing to use it when all the work I have to do is done on unix type boxes.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
When I first opened konqueror on kde2 I was very impressed. It is a fast browser. The kde folks are really doing well on this one. I figure in a few more months they will have most of the rest of the display bugs worked out.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
You must have an issue on your end I just tried netscape 4.76 and konqueror 1.9.8. Both loaded the ms page just fine.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Not when there's been no activity on it for over a year! get real dude. If express were in real competition, there'd be a LOT more development going on.
Instead, maybe Galeon, or Skipstone (a web browser written in Perl) would be better choices.
-- DuckWing
Well I guess I got reamed pretty good... Thanks for the clarifications guys. 25M is still a lot for a stupid browser =)
tf
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Was I the only one double-checking the calendar to see if today wasn't somehow April 1st?
A pro-Microsoft comment from a Slashdot editor?
I'd better sell my stock.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Man I was getting so pleased with Mozilla and the nightlies, especially after Java finally arrived in a shaky manner on Linux. Then a room re-organization left me using an NT box, so I decided to put Windows 2000 on it (months after buying it for review/evaluation). 2000 + IE is astonishing. It's incredibly fast, works on every site I hit, and, when my cable modem went down, and I wanted to revisit an interesting, uh, "graphics intensive" site, the "work offline" feature brought the entire freakin' web site back to me. I was stunned. Of course, it's a lot of caching to disk, but I have a lot of disk (4Gb fits all my apps, CAD, Visual Age etc.), and the functionality was tremendous. Sure, I don't like the desktop model per se, as it's tricky to support and overly complex (even with Perl based maintenance), but damn does it make the computing experience a joy.
I think that the comments are rated within score by the order that they were posted in.
Select:
Tools-Internet Options-Advanced Tab
Scroll down to Smooth scrolling. Uncheck it. This should help with the way ie scrolls.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Has anyone thought about what having an open-source project behind this browser means? Netscape 6.0 will not be the final release, it will be the first in a continuous series of easily updatable (through XPConnect/.jar/etc., like every project on mozdev.org) standards-compliant open browsers that can be customized for any situation. Netscape 6.0 is the first of these; it's Netscape for consumers using separate browsers, with AOL properties. Use Mozilla instead, switch the chrome, do whatever you want, just remember Netscape isn't meant for the developer, Mozilla is.
But what about AOL's 60 million users? AOL will switch from using IE to using a Gecko-derived browser natively, which instantly migrates half the US internet population to Netscape. AOL patches their software almost every time a user connects, so for all of these users, the patches can be integrated piecemeal, and they *are* relatively minor problems.
Remember, Netscape 6 != Mozilla 1.0, it's roughly Mozilla 0.9 (look it up). People have been writing article after article slamming Netscape for not releasing a product, something, anything, "before it's too late," and now that they are, they're being lambasted from a different direction. Let them release the damn thing already!
Tsk, tsk.
That article is undoubtedly referring to IE5/Win, which is a completely different browser to IE5/Mac. IE5/Mac is very compliant.
:)
Dunno, I got the RPMS from the kde ftp site and haven't had any problems with them. Everything is nice and snappy, and haven't had any problems so far with it. Then again, I also have 384 meg of RAM so that probably helps ;)
AOL has used IE as a default browser for some time now, but this is scheduled to change with the final release of Netscape, if i'm not mistaken.
naww..I think that IE has not beaten Netscape by any means. In fact, at our school, we only have netscape, and that is the same at some colleges i have visited. Netscape might not be as popular, but it hasn't lost the browser war.
My job at UIUC entails installing and configuring software to run on our lab machines (nt 4.0). In past years, IE was not installed because it required a lot of special installation steps for which we had no time. So when I started, netscape was the only browser available in our labs. That's since changed, with our staff having more time and (presumably) a less demanding ieak. But Netscape (4.x, at least), is far easier to install in a lab environment, and I suspect that's why you see it. Netscape's prevalence doesn't mean it's a better browser, just easier to maintain.
For the recourd, I use IE when I'm in windows and Mozilla M18 in linux. I can't stand Netscape 4 for any platform.
chris
Be sure not to patch your machines tho; IE wont install on a patched solaris machine.
Just deactivate Javascript and Java and netscape is fairly stable. You rarely need it. If a site _has_ to have Javascript to run, just use one of their competitors instead.
Speaking as a lynx user, could we have a link for linx please?
dave
Ranting about communism? You are a BAD troll, no cookie for you!
dave
Whoops, then another browser comes along without these annoying things and at the same time works better, so the majority of users use that. I'm not discounting what netscape did, i'm just basically saying that right now netscape is dead.
If mozilla takes off, then fine, but mozilla is not netscape (it crashes even more than 4.0 on my machine). That's the way things work, jimbo.
Moderators, even though later posts may say the same thing much better than this one, that doesn't make the earlier post redundant. That's why there is a time stamp and a CID (the number on the parentheses)...
"or the lack of conformity to standards"
um, WRONG! Mozilla (and Netscape's product based on the Mozilla codebase) is considerably more compliant than IE on win32.
the masses don't want source code. they want programs. they don't want to read the code, they just want to get on th' durn internet'n send s'me o' that new-fangled e-mail.
;-)
In my opinion it's our unspoken obligation as programmers that do care to write programs that also DO care about standards and excellent written source code. Because we will end up using those programs as well.
And face it, those "th' durn internet'n send s'me o'" programs just do not fit our needs.
Only those dumbass-pointandclick-users. That's why OutlookExpress works for all my friends , but not for me. That's why IE works for others , but not for me. It just fucks up every known standard about email, and leaves the door wide open while doing it
Maybe people don't care about source code , but I think that people DO care about CRASHES. Or at least they should care.
So let us write the code , opensource it and live happily ever after...
blaah !
I seem to remember from those days that my win3.1 NEVER failed me ! Never had to reinstall it ( unlike win95/98 ) Maybe that's why I love X ;-)
blaah !
Because it points out that most of these bugs have been FIXED in Mozilla, but not in Netscape, because Netscape doesn't want their release schedule to slip...
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
Is a statement really an opiniion? And when you state your "opinions" as facts then your asking for a flame. It's your fault you are getting flamed IF: 1. you word it in a nasty/rude way or 2. your "facts" fly in the face of what has already been "proven" in general opinion. If you had a litle more discipline and didn't fly of the handle, at the drop of a hat, you might not have people making you feel "inferior". As for making a million dollars... big deal. Money should help you, not be your goal. As for the "freedoms" we enjoy... your attitude is the reason we are in danger of losing them.
That's strange, NS4.7x's unreliability is exactly what drove me to drop it the moment I became aware of the PSM module for SSL/https support. I haven't used 4.7x in a couple months, and I'm much happier with the results.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Actually, I had a chance to try a Mozilla nightly under Win95 recently, which is what I based my statement on.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
When I used BeOS religiously (that ended a few months ago), I couldn't use Mozilla, Netscape, or IE. That didn't make the piece-of-crap browser that came built in with BeOS any better than the others.
Without argument, IE is a better, stabler, and more generally capable browser than Netscape and Mozilla (although the latter is closing in fast). It's a better product, period. Just because you can't use it, because of the platform you choose to operate under, doesn't make that any less true.
Wow... somebody hacked Slashdot again!
Next story... "Stallman linked to Communist party"
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
People forgot computing was supposed to make our lives simpler. Whatever happened to that?
:->
This!
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
The Web was not designed to be WYSIWYG. HTML is for content markup, not visual markup.
Nice to see that at least one person understands what the web is all about.
If you need absolute control over the look of a page (why?), use Flash or some other plug-in.
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
Why is it that when I run into the occasional "insightful" post I have no moderator points available?
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I've been checking out mozilla for about the past year. (Or, since my sense of time is horrible, let's say from M12) It was barely useable (slow, crashy, ugly) as of the beginning of that time, at least on my underpowered machine. Even installing it seemed like trouble!
... not to say that it won't (like M18) eventually start to clog my memory, but so far I'm drunk on it. (Niggle: I wish it had more themes, and I'd like to change my throbber picture to be whatever I want it to be, but hey.)
Now, as I've gotten better boxes to run it on, and as builds keep coming, the situation is different. M17 was nearly OK, M18 pretty good, but I'm (for instance) on the latest nightly right now and it has been beautiful
The distinctions between nightlies and milestones I think is troublesome though -- when I think of a "milestone" I expect a place to rest, a moment of stability, perhaps certainty. Instead, as some other people have said, it often seems like the *nightlies* are the place to find the nicest behavior, which to me is pretty counterintuitive.
Ah well. As to being made by MS vs. platform availability, well, I find the nature of the code important too, but heck, no reason that MS couldn't make a great open-source browser (or anything else)! They're just some guys in Washington State, after all.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
On a machine that has only Netscape and IE (that is, of course, a Windows machine) I have lately switched from using Netscape as my first choice to using IE. Partly this is curiosity -- for a long time, many people have been telling me how wonderful IE is compared to anything else, and I used it so little that I could do little but 'hmmm' at this claim. The other part is that netscape (at least 4.XX varieties) are ugly. What I don't like about IE (and which actually keeps me swapping between them, when I use a Windows machine) is the way it scrolls, and they way it renders certain pages oddly for me. The scrolling has a strange delay to it which is really off-putting.
... (that's what I'm posting from). Mozilla with the Modern theme is pleasing to look at, scrolls nicely, and generally rocks.
However, all this aside, there's a good two-part reason that I don't actually use IE that much: a) it's not available for Linux or BSD, and b) Mozilla rocks!
Anyone who hasn't tried it should check out the latest nightly builds
I disagree with Michael that MS has won the browser war.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I wish I had mod, so I could moderate that up as Funny. There's still some damn good AC stuff on /.
his main argument is that MOZILLA supports the standards and has bugs fixed while NETSCAPE doesnt. of course mozilla is not the *official* browser but implying that both of the code bases are non standards compliant is bullshit. I hate IE, am happy with mozilla and wouldnt touch netscape 6 with a ten foot pole. as most other people will be. the better browser will always be mozilla. netscape 6 is just a hybrid patch/fork from the mozilla codebase.
Did you actually say that a Microsoft product is somehow better than an Open Source product? on Slashdot? Are you crazy?
M$ isn't necessarily better, it's just everything AOL gets its hands on (including Netscape) begins to suck. Examples:
Winamp: Used to use 6 MB of memory, now uses 11. No changes whatsoever, except that the randomizer now sucks.
ICQ: Later versions caused several people I know to have to reinstall windows. Version 98a was simple, small, and stable.
Netscape: Versions 3.x and 4.0x ran faster than hell and never crashed. Version 4.75 has been turned into a e-marketing nightmare and crashes randomly, requiring a reboot to clear the invalid page fault message. Also eats 22 MB of memory.
AOL software itself: destroys all other dialup settings as it takes over your system.
M$ should thank AOL every day for allowing them to win the browser war and giving them a good start in the instant-messenger war. Too bad mozilla can't get organized enough to return browsers to the speed and stability that they once had. If Netscape 4.0 had the encryption and plugin support that 4.7x has, I'd be running it right now.
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
IE 5 gives you the option to not install VBScript support.
Hands in my pocket
IE for MacOS, unlike IE for Solaris/HPUX, does not run an API emulation layer. It's the only version of IE that beats Mozilla at ECMA/HTML4/CSS1 compliance.
Hands in my pocket
So you just give everyone write access to PSM???? Um, that's stupid. This means people can modify it out from under you, which is not so good for an encryption and authentication module...
Maybe it's time to scrap Netscape and look at other open source browsers like this
I'm running KDE2 right now, using Konqueror as my web browser. I'm not having any problems. It doesn't crash on any of the websites I view. It manages to properly display everything I need it too. It supports JavaScript if I turn it on. It does SSL. It doesn't do Java right, but I care not. It even will use my true type fonts.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I'm using the current Debian unstable KDE 2.0-final packages, and I haven't had any speed problems.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I'm not having any such problems with the 2.0-final debs. The links on Slashdot are green.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
You don't seem to understand - the problem is not that YOU will have a standards-incompliant browser if you download NS6 (after all, as you say, YOU can always patch).
The problem is content developers - content developers ALWAYS have to build towards the lowest-common-demonator. That means as long as there are people out there using NS 6.0, content developers will NOT be able to support all the new DOM/CSS features that it's SUPPOSED to support. We won't be any better off than NS 4.7 (and in some ways - worse, since it breaks stuff that worked in 4.7). That's what this article is about - content developers being screwed over because NS6 is rushed out the door.
Of course, if NS6 had a bad-ass auto-updating system built in (so that even your grandma could patch it) this wouldn't be as much of a problem. Maybe some of their developers should focus on making THAT a priority.
This is great and true....But, should top not have an X-windows option or something? Or is this just an XFree86 problem? How hard can it be to tell how much memory a program is using?
Give OmniWeb another shot. Beta 7 was put out recently and it is much improved. I suggest you get the .tar.gz, and do not use StuffIt on it, as StuffIt blows on Mac OS X; use either the command line or get OpenUp from Softrak.
Everyones so obsessed with who won the browser war and which is a better browser, in my opinion people will continue to use alternative browsers as long as they exist, which is why we need a push for standards compliance.
Why should anyone care how quickly the browser they aren't using is loading a page or how often it is crashing? The only thing that should matter is how well it renders pages designed for the world wide web.
End users will continue to use Internet explorer, I-cab, Oprera, Lynx, Galeon etc... and as long as they all support seperate standards the jobs of all us people designing for the web will become more of a pain. As it stands only Mozilla and I.E. 5.5 for the mac even come close. So let's at least give them kudos for working towards a common goal.
That's IE 5.5 beta on the OS X public beta.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
WOW I didn't know a subject post could be Troll, now how do I moderate this puppy down.
then why do we insist on writing code for them?
How we know is more important than what we know.
no.. we write code for them.. that's why things go to 1.0 status way before they are due to, because we are trying to impress the population at large who don't give a shit about the code.
How we know is more important than what we know.
SkipStone is not writen in perl. A tiny download helper it used to use called Skipdownload was originally writen in perl but has long since been rewriten in C.
Sure, sounds like a great idea. Only problem is I can't seem to find a link to the source on its page, so I can compile it on my SparcLinux box. Anyone know where they are hiding this? (presumably to prevent newbies from submitting stupid bugs in something that is a beta)
> Time to grab KDE2/Konquerer I think...
:-), some small mem leaks, but not very destructive ones. And I can tell you, it's _way_ more compliant with the standards then IE5 on Mac, (at least in terms of HTML 4 and CSS). Don't have Windo$ anywhere near to compare it with decent/recent IE5.5/IE6beta but I'd really like to.
Yeah, and get something even less compliant then NS6.
I am very happy with the nightly builds of Mozilla, so I am not going to. I've been using build 2000102708 for about a week, not a single crash (I don't have a Java plug-in installed though
Regards,
kovi
have you ever tried using CSS in Netscape? if you had, i'm shure you wouldn't have posted that...
or are you maybe thinking of some lame feature that nobody uses but Netscape that's not even in the W3C standard?
Indeed I have, which prompted me to make the statement. And, actually, I was thinking of the lame features that nobody uses but IE.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Oh, well. You have your opinion, I have real-world cross-platform design experience. To each his own.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
IE 5.5 still can't get CSS right. Netscape 4.75 (and 6.0) does it better.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
OOooooh, that's sick. (awesome!)
As for what it does with defective clients, hey, who cares? After all... who's got time to make sure everything works on everyone's newsreaders... (and if they do have trouble reading news with it, hey, maybe they should just upgrade to tin, xnews, slrn, or trn! ;-)
What about all of you? Would you use IE if it were ported to Linux?
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Look at what MS is doing with IE6 -
Microsoft IE 6 to cut off some more air supplies
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
My deciding factor in choosing a browser is the ability to access all of my web site bookmarks at once. Netscape stores all of it's bookmarks in one file, "bookmarks.html" (Linux) which you can easily copy and trade with friends. Not so with Explorer which actually creates a miniature file system to emplement bookmark storage. (Creating these hundreds of folders which can NEVER be accurately converted to an .html file.
Which browser is more compliant with standards: Internet Explorer
Which browser stores its bookmarks more convientantly: Netscape
Which do I use: IE on the complicated sites (like www.imaginers.com/iw/ which Netscape won't fully render) and Netscape for the majority of my browsing.
It's called "sleeping with the enemy".
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Quick somone call fuckin CNN and see if hell froze over fsck i.e. I choose not to have a browser that my OS is dependant on for normal operation. I might beta test it if it ran on linux though.
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
Of course no product is bug-free, but that's not the point. If I counted right, there are 6 out of 9 of these bugs that have fixes in Mozilla, but the Netscape people refuse to patch NS6 because they fear it might delay its release.
There is nothing in this article against Mozilla standards compliance. Reading it may have helped.
(...)your browser will be the default browser for millions of AOL users.
:-)
;-) ? They don't seem to trust their own product...
Well, I've been on AOL for two weeks like 2 years ago, and they keep on sending their CDs via snail-mail. Told them to stop, but they don't seem to listen, well if they want to waste their money on me I don't really care
Anyway, what's amazing is that the last two 'offers' I got were shipped with IE ! Hmmm, didn't they buy Netscape some time ago
First off, I don't like michael's comments on how great IE is. IE is a lot farther off on standards than a buggy Netscape 6. In fact, IE 5.5 was WORSE than IE 5.0 in some areas. I doubt IE 6 will be much better.
This will be another addition to a long list of mistakes Netscape has made if they do not take this suggestion and run with it. They are closing the tree too early.
The example of the cellpadding really shocked me. Try the testcases linked from the bug report. That is something that is unacceptable of a software product like Netscape 6. It is a regression, and MUST be fixed.
Personally, I will be using Mozilla instead of Netscape 6, but for 99% of time it will be the other way around. Please sign the petition, and add your comments to those bug reports.
It's time that we gave Netscape some hell instead of Netscape giving us hell with a buggy browser.
EverCode
Forcing buggy software out the door doesn't seem like it would reflect well on the open source; the fact that fixes were available won't matter -- people will just see that the magnum opus of the OS world has failed to deliver on its promises (counting Linux as a product of the Free software world, &/or predating OS in the current definition of the term). That won't help us.
Further, IE is waaaaaay ahead on the main platforms (Win & MacOS) anyway, which while not really doing anything to help the Linux / BeOS etc users, means much more in terms of number of users, revenues, etc -- the thing business cares about
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
As a developer for a mid sized ISP, the Netscape vs IE thing has gotten way out of hand. It has come down to writing 2 pages to get stuff to display with some sort of equality across these two products.
Don't get me started about IE for the Mac. There is actually 3 distinct browser types I need to be aware of.
Performance wise, IE has it...hands down. Try loading slashdot in IE, then wait to see how long it is in Netscape from download time to rendering. Amazing difference.
Its a different standard, slower, and I have been waiting too long for the new "features" to smooth out in Netscape.
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. " Ben Franklin
I am a very strong Mozilla supporter, but...
Does anyone know when or if the GD Mozilla product is going to work?
Is this product going to at least come close to IE when it is done?
It's a fucking browser, not quantum mechanics, get the GD thing done!
- I like pudding.
Hopless? Mozilla is already a damn fine product in it's own right. I don't have ssl support enabled, but that;s all that keeps me from removing netscape from my machine completly. It hasn't died on me in a little over 2 week of heavy usage. It's a far cry from hopless. I don't know whether java support works or not, I haven't noticed any problems in my surfing, but I don't visit many sites using java.
treke
Browser works fine here, although start up does have a bit of a delay. I can't comment on the mail client, I'm perfectly happy to continue using mutt for my mail.
treke
...are you allowed to say that on /.?
This is not a troll. I repeat, this is not a troll.
"Moot point. The UI is completely customizable. People will release all manners of UI replacements to choose from."
Most of which will be no better than original terrible UI. Some of the replacements will be nifty for maybe five minutes and quickly become irritating as time goes on. To this day I wonder whether people actually use half the skins that are released for various software or whether it's simply a penis-sizing competition for graphic artists, w4r3z d00d3z, and anime zealots.
"The biggest complaints I hear are that Netscape is bloated and it takes too long to load up. MSIE would have the same problems if they hadn't embedded everything into the OS."
As others have pointed out, this is simply a myth. I use to run 98lite and had IE seperated from the OS. If I wanted to run it, I could. The load time was the same. In either case, it was faster at loading than Netscape's browser.
"Yes, Microsoft is currently winning, after illegaly leveraging their monopoly."
Sorry, but a lot of machines come with both pre-installed. People still migrate to IE regardless.
Microsoft did use some aggressive business and marketing tactics, but all in all IE won out because it was simply better.
BTW, I fully support the current anti-trust ruling, though I think baby Microsofts will be far more dangerous to other operating systems, office suites, and browsers than they currently are as one mother Microsoft.
I don't. Konqueror / KDE2.
well, a 'free' gives you a snapshot of mem usage before you start it, and after. If you don't run anything else, you get a general idea of how much memory the app uses. It wont be perfect, but it will give you an idea. People dont care how much an app ACTUALLY uses, they want to know what the difference is between using it and not using it. Oh well. I found skipstone uses only about 7 megs and loads fast - crashes a bit, but I can manage.
That would be , not .
I have been noticing that a lot of the people who post something that says "IE sux Mozilla is your god" (or along those lines) are posting as Anonymous. Whats up with this? Another thing, if you all have noticed that the news posts that are on slashdot are usually viewed through the eyes of a judge. They never make snap judgements, and they give those poor bastards of Microshaft developers some credit. If something is just better (RIGHT NOW DAMN YOU!). Just let it go... you know Open Sourcers 'round the globe will come up with something better. I mean hell mozilla gives me shit about SSL sometimes(SOMETIMES YOU BASTARDS!), where as IE (yes I do run a microbox so's i can plays my games and cuz support for the ol' geforce ain't all that great under linux, and cux work makes me :| ) has not failed with out a hitch, i mean hell i don't think it has crashed in at least a week, where is shmoezilla crashes like Cobain on heroin (sorry bad metaphore, bakspace key brok3n... shit SEE!). But anyway my point is don't be so quick to judge something you haven't tried or tried once and tossed it to the side because it had a Redmond badge on it.
thx
-are you naked and fat looking at streaming porn too?
It spent less than a day installed on my machine.
PDT has been pushing for crash fixes or kludges(over security or standards compliance fixes), and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, it has made recent Mozilla trunk builds quite stable as well as branch builds.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Schools use Netscape because it's easier to prevent students from doing things they shouldn't to the computers...
A couple of months ago, they were all crying: "Come on NS release your browser now! We can't wait, you'll lose everything if you don't." Netscape decided to hurry up in the process, yes some bugs are marked rtm-, but this doesn't mean that this won't be in the RTM, this means that this is not top priority for RTM.
This means that at worst these bugs will be corrected in Netscape 6.1. Hey they start to listen to you, they start to behave like M$!
GFK's
Who cares about Netscape anyway, we all be using Mozilla.
does the app start to open and then nothing happens? that sounds like the conflict between itools and omniweb. trash the itools, and omniweb will work. (and work well)
If what you say is true..... then I still don't care.
No, Netscape and IE are the real source of the problem. If they hadn't both tried to develop an "embrace and extend" approach to html and had evolved along with standards, then your situation wouldn't be so bad today.
<p>
Of course, you are using cutting-edge technology that isn't really guaranteed to work, so you really shouldn't be bitching about it. And the reality is that not that many people are going to develop for your platform for the foreseeable future. So maybe you want to pass along a request to the Proxiweb makers that their browser gracefully decode these "pixel-positioned" sites. I mean, what's so freakin' difficult about that?
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
Umm, when did Slashdot become linux based? This is the same attitude that people have towards Google, that it is a linux search engine.
--- I hate my sig
Just use the better software. Currently, that means IE.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Since when has the education world been bleeding edge in IT? Sure, on the academic side they're researching multi-node, super-parallel, high-availablity, chrome-platted computer-go-fasters....but when it comes to their IT department they're using Windows 3.11, Mac OS 7....and NETSCAPE!
ÕÕ
I would agree that IE works quite well...
In windows.
I don't use windows. I use linux. I NEED a browser that will do the job and that's not IE. Therefore I will need to rely on netscape to produce something that is compatable, fast and a good alternative to IE.
So I say, the browser wars must go on...
and then, in big, bold letters:
"Re-designed User Interface; Built-in AOL Instant Messenger; What's Related; Shopping and Calender Tabs"
I mean, those are all, I suppose, things that someone likes, but are they compelling reasons for most people to get interested in looking at NS6? Not really, from what I can tell. The main reason I care about this is that I want to see the installed NS3 & NS4 user base disappear, because both those browsers suck to design pages for (css has a tendency to crash both browsers, even though, if the browser can't handle a given stylesheet it should ignore that stylesheet; do they ignore those stylesheets? No, they crash or put garbage on screen most of the time, which means that I can't put the styles in my page for the benefit of non-broken browsers [or I have to rely on browser-detection which is a P-I-T-A]). The NS4 users will probably not be such an obstacle to get them to upgrade, but getting NS3 users to upgrade means you have to give them a real compelling reason to upgrade (which, I believe, fast-modern-standards support is, but AIM is not), and you have to give them a browser that is small and fast enough that it works practically for them (most of the people I know who still use NS3 do so on older computers which can't handle the bloat of IE4/5 or NS4, a market which I'm hoping that Mozilla will be lightweight enough to handle.)
Tony
I think it is safe to say that the Mozilla organizationis making a serious effort to be standards compliant and to support as many of the standards as they can. Is it easy, no. Will it be perfect, not yet. I don't think, however, that some open bugs herald the downfall of Mozilla.
Wait till 6.1 or Mozilla 1.0 or whatever and watch it improve. It is still far more compliant than IE - and will remain so.
Tony
Agree, however there was a port to some UNIX systems too (namely HP-UX & Solaris) that was done last year by a French company if I remember well, using MainWin, a library enabling developpers to port their Windows applications to several types of Unix.
Now as MainWin is available for Linux too, I guess it wouldn't be too hard for M$ to port IE to Linux too, if they wanted to !
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Of course you won't get no error, Lynx doesn't support Javascript !
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Are you really? or is that what MS says to avoid legal trouble? Wine will run IE 4 and IE 5, both of which are claimed to be embedded. I don't believe it. Perhaps it's embedded some, what MS product isn't, but it's far from being a siamese twin with Windows.
Please say what you really mean: your company is not going to support the HTML standards
IE is more standards compliant than NS 4.x simply because they release new versions more often that comply to new standards. Sure, when NS 4 came out, it supported the standards, but the world has changed since then. You'll see that both browsers add on extra elements to DOM/CSS/Javascript/HTML but when they are released, they both pretty much follow the standards as closely as possible.
I am using Mozilla right now and think that it's coming along nicely. However, if there is one app I want from MS in linux, it's IE, and that's because it IS standards compliant, is updated frequently, is free, and runs fairly fast without being integrated into the OS as tightly as they'd have you think.
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Um, last time I heard, AOL was bigger than all other US based ISP's combined, and their prices aren't going down any time soon. How's THAT for a cash cow to milk along Netscape?
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
This is the main reason I try to use mozilla when possible. I don't need to logout/login every time my browser dies.
-Andy
Actually, he was right. Please see the post by ppanon... he is also correct. IE has been merged into Windows 98 in devious and subtle ways... it's not just a matter of it being the shell that Win98 launches.
To do an accurate comparison, you need to run benchmarks on an OS that predates the merge of IE and Windows. For this example, I used WinNT 4.0 workstation:
IE 5.5 load time: 24 seconds
Mozilla nightly load time: 21 seconds
Well, guess my mother in law can skate to work now since the whole place has frozen over.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
"Executive Summary: IE5/Mac is the best browser ever released on any platform. But key pieces of the standards puzzle are still missing."
Wasp on IE5/Mac - reference where I got the quote above.
WaSP on Gecko - talks about how much better the world will be once we have a standards-compliant web browser.
An open letter to Netscape - Slams Netscape for taking so long to come out with 6.
WaSP is not necessarily Netscape's biggest supporter.
Duh. Linux sites. No IE for Linux. Linux users go to Linux sites more than Win users. Linux users mostly use NS. Therefore, NS > IE. Just like IE probably(heh) outranks NS on Windows sites. (And as someone who runs some general-purpose sites that don't have anything to do with OS's, non-OS-specific sites tend to get hit mostly by IE). Perhaps you should take your own advice "and ask WHY/HOW b4 [you] start judging statistics."
---
We write code for us.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
That's not the way it's supposed to work. But at least you know who to complain to if something like that happens. I personally don't have that problem and I wouldn't let it get to that point. Something is ready when it's done and not a moment before(ala kernel et al).
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
There is a huge amount of money flowing towards Redmond because people like their products and buy them. Duh.
Actually, because most people don't know any better and just want to 'get on the internet' and do wordprocessing etc..
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
IE used to have easy menu access to let you put the current site under "Restricted Zone" or "Trusted Zone", and it disappeared after some version, without explanation, and for questionable reasons.
As a better replacement, whether you are using Mozilla or IE, at least for Windows, immediately download Proxomitron before it becomes illegal.
(it's just a matter of time before some phuckdup company uses the DCMA against it)
As for the Unixes, anyone tried NoShit/WebFilter and know if anything new is going on about them?
I know they do roughly the same thing as the Proxomitron, but as a modification to the NCSA web server?
Gimme a break - I think a single purpose filtering proxy is definitely doable, and can make a nice opensource project. Anyone interested? Please reply here.
So I have KDE installed on my penquin box, but I've never tried konquerer, so I'm like "hey! I'll give it a try!". I can't find it anywhere on the desktop, so I'm thinking I've got to install it..
So I bring up Netscape and go to http://www.kde.org and type Konquerer in the search box.
It comes up with a few matches........... and then the Netscape window crashes and goes away...
Ironic, yes?
Trains stop at a train station. Buses stop at a bus station.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Just think about the huge amount of money flooding every day towards Redmond and think again how great Win2K and IE really are. It amazes me how people praise those products and forget at the same time the incredible amount of resources it takes Microsoft to create them. To me Win2K is less than impressive in that light.
I just installed KDE 2.0 and I find that the browser integrated into Konqueror is FAR superior to Nutscrape 4.7, IMHO. Give it a shot. It's fast, standards compliant, and plugins work with it.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
I just love how "Funny" comments get moderated higher than the "Insightful" ones, even with the same score. Really shows you where Slashdot's priorities are.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
Don't know if it was perfect, but I found that a Beta from a few months ago was able to render bidirectional text. I may have had to set the character-code manually, though.
I got it, and thank you :-)
I wonder if KDE is aware of this?? I'm glad I took the time to read through these threads to find thsi little piece of info. Don't know if I like that much. I have a partitioned /home directory, so it can't grow past 2 gigs.
I haven't installed Mandrake 7.2 YET, but I would
like to know if there is a way to have it auto-
matically "clean up" if I restart KDE, if not, I think it is a good idea, especially if that is where Konquerer is storing it's cache files.
Thanks for the info, and suggestions anyone??
Richard : )~
RAMWolff
I'm using NS 4.5 right now. All I want is a major bugfix! (ok plus some xml support, but I can live without that)
I dont need more features, I need a bugfix!!
All opinions are my own - until criticized
69 dollars with slowed growth is heading back up?
.NET catch on...
If you want to see a company that actually grew over the last couple months look at Sun.
Sun stock has doubled over the last year...
Microsoft stock has to almost double to reach the point it was at a year ago. And M$ sales haven't been doing spectacularly well either.
windowsMe didn't sell amazing well around here at least... windows 2000 sold ok but not stuningly well. Office has not been selling so well.
We have to wait and see how XBox, whistler and
It could be that you are right and that M$ is going to start "heading up" again... I wouldn't bet my money on it though.
I think IE has not won the browser war because it is tied to windows.
A lot of people use Macs.
And even more use Linux. And even more people will use Linux next year and the year after that.
I try not to make any predictions too far into the future. But I will say that Linux will not slow the rate of growth in the next 3 years...
I have heard that gecko is a pretty good renderrer if you do work in embeded systems... That makes sense to me. This is another area that looks like it is going to grow in another 3 years. Here again it doesn't help to be tied to windows.
Also (unrelated to being tied to windows but related to being tied to MicroSoft) when AOL's contract with M$ expires I'd bet that a whole lot of AOL users are going to find themselves switching... It's just a hunch I have.
The best thing that could happen to Linux as a desktop platform is if Microsoft (decently) ported IE to it.
You would of course never install IE on a box with confidential information on it (since it most likely would require to be run as suid root), but for John Average, who just wants to be able to navigate his favourite VBScript-driven Pr0n-Site, it would make Linux a much more acceptable Platform...
--------------------------------------
Anyone with any experience with the W3C's own web browser Amaya? Current release is at 3.21 but they have announced they will be releasing 4.0 this week. From what I have read it seems extremely interesting - maybe not as your full time browser but perhaps worth having to play around with. I'm waiting to dip my toe in till this new release comes along - but interested to hear from ppl who already have some experience with it - thanks.
Scenario: Microsoft's Web browser keeps becoming more and more popular and with most computers running windows, this is a very very serious thing...Here's why:
Censorware could easily be built in without a feature to turn it off...and as microsoft integrates windows and IE more and more, it can only get worse...
The greater reprocussion is the division of the internet between sources which will cater to microsoft/macintosh(who I remember microsoft gave money to...and there is an IE version for macs...) and those catering to open source...while open source has the advantage of trying to match standards of IE, steps could always be taken by microsoft to thwart this
In general, this gives microsoft WAY too much leverage, to have control over internet shopping, file transfer, etc.
Please feel free to add to my list, as I need to go vote, and I'm sure this is a lot deeper than I have made it out to be...
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
IE is not so much relevant to me most of the time because I use Linux. I find that Netscape 4.75 does the job pretty good with the exception of regular lock-ups. If it were not for these, and the stoopid "Shop" button which I often confuse with "Stop" during my mad browsing, I would be entirely satisfied with it. I don't mind so much table layouts that look funny every once in a while.
In my opinion, there is a real problem with IE and Microsoft. Whereas MS has been crying about their right to innovate for over a year, there hasn't been anything very innovative coming out of Redmond. Sure there may be a couple new standards, a couple of revisions to the browser and a slightly better GUI. I think that MS hasn't used their leadership position to bring new technologies. If we consider Mosaic when it first came out, it made a huge impact on how the internet is used. Netscape built on that and then there were more browsers that basically did the same thing. IE 5.5 and Netscape 6 aren't that different from Netscape 3.0.
I think that MS (and everyone else) has been busy using the web browser as a tool to accomplish many new things. A few non-MS related examples would be configuring my firewall with the web browser, or configuring a web server with the web browse. Perhaps the current stage of evolution of the Web is not about significant new technologies, but the integration of the web in the way we live.
I think that the next significant step after this will be the creation of a freenet. Actually, I believe there already is an initiative called like this which allows users to remain anonymous. A lot of the new web technologies are all about tracking people, where they go, what they do, what they say and think, etc. I don't want Wonder bread to know that eat toast because may internet-enabled toaster chats with Echelon when I am at work.
Although I don't support breaking in other people's computers, I don't care that much. Most time a system is hacked into, it's because of basic security issues or bugs in the software. I am tired of big web companies that claim to have lost billions of dollars because they were down 2 minutes. It's illegal to steal a car, but in many places you get fined if you leave your car running with the doors unlocked. The same way, those companies should be fined as well.
But I disgress, my point is that IE 5.5 isn't really that great, it's just the best so far. Thanks to the KDE team though, I will be using a new alternative a lot more.
ps: congrats on KDE2 to team
I haven't used mozilla in awile, but keeping that in mind...
IE does crash, but it crashes far less than netscape (4.x). Add to that the fact that it's generally more elegent, has better bookmark support, download support, macos integration and dosen't have a 'shopping' button on the main buttonbar... it's really the better browser.
..from the Slashdot peanut gallery. These issues are, correctly, /not/ considered PDT for the 6.0 release of /Netscape/. They will most likely be addressed in a minor release coming after 6.0. Netscape has reached a certain critical 'Put up or Shut up' moment in their development, and they feel the need to get a product out the door. If you are honestly suggesting IE 6 as a much more standards compliant browser, you really need to think about Netscape 6's siamese twin:
Mozilla 6. Mozilla 6 is including as many of these fixes as it can that do not radically affect the stability of the browser, in their own concurrent push towards a complete product.
Thank you, Michael, for yet again proving that Slashdot authors do not know whereof they speak.
(Moderators: This posting is either Insightful or Flamebait, not Overrated or Offtopic. Please moderate accordingly.)
Weapons of Mass Analysis
I think its best for Netscape to die off quietly and stop giving all these /. trolls easy ways to flame the Mozilla project.
-RickHunter
clearly I have and its far slower and crashes MUCH more often
idiot ? get outa AC dumbass
I agree, IE is a much faster and all round better browser than any netscape product I have used. that being comunicator and the latest mozilla
yup, guess what .. there are 3 platforms .. no, not as many as I would like, though you cant deny it.
great, mine runs 5 weeks easy ? your point ?? I'm sorry, if you prefer one sided and bias instead of giving credit where its due.. enjoy the world with those blinders.
I believe your "get a clue" comment was slightly hypocritical.
Which could be Mozilla's downfall: By the time a decent version is released, IE7 will be out and will continue dominance.
In all seriousness, IE will most likely remain the dominant browser for some time to come. Why? Because it already does what most people need (and more). Why would the average user bother to download some other browser and readapt to a different interface when what they're using right now is fine? Do you think they really care if the product their using is open-source or not?
Mozilla will most likely remain a niche browser that will never "hit it big" in the Win32 OSes.
NS6, on the other hand, has brand-recognition for many users. These users had NS installed by their ISPs and now see that version 6.0 is out, compared to their 4.7. So they'd download it (assuming they already haven't jumped ship to IE).
I commend Mozilla's efforts, but I feel that it's too little, too late. IE has won, IE will remain dominant.
Come on! How many times do we have to go through this!? Netscape has to release a product NOW if they want to remain a MARKETABLE, MAINSTREAM browser. Yes, /.ers will go on using beta releases liek we always have, but normal people need a real release. Corporate bosses need a normal release, and no one is going to commit to a beta version of anything.
Yes there are bugs. Guess what, every software is released with bugs, usually documented and sometimes fixed bugs. But it's a matter of drawing a line. The difference between a good artist and a great artist, is that the great ones know when to stop. Release the damn browser and lets get it out there then have the fixes in the inevitable 6.1 release.
Sheesh,
Nate Baxley
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Is that why MS ignored the internet until 1995? Give me a break, MS wanted all things to go through individual applications that you'd have to buy piece by piece over and over. Netscape popularized the web. MS suck it's head in the sand.
Make what you will of Mozilla, but keep that Spyglass away from me.
well in french minable means loser so I was surprised everyone could use it to make a joke in the USA.
Maybe it was some kind of subliminal statement revealing a lack of self esteem expressed in a "beautyfull" language ??
Beta test IE6 eh? Last time I heard of someone beta testing a Microsoft product it was my old boss testing 5.5, He did not happen to like it, and decided to uninstall it. Wham, there goes his windows instalation, right down the tubes. I wonder if IE6 will do the same. By the way, it seems that every single release of IE there has been a way to execute evil code on a page loaded without the users consent. This is more of a fault of activex then IE, but the sad part is, activex is a part of IE, and Microsoft refuses to revamp activex to limit the possibility of nasty code being ran on some poor guys computer. This isn't a Microsoft bashing post, this isn't an IE bashing post, its actually a little of both... :)
People might think IE is a better browser, people might think netscape is a better browser. The problem is: Microsoft is dealing the cards here, and it's a stacked deck, MS decides to implement some new nifty "javascript" or whatever, features to add eyecandy to web pages, this is the problem, Microsoft made it, and supports it, meanwhile every other browser ever made dosn't support it and therefore is "inferior", and has to go and play catch-up. When are we going to stop following one companies lead and start some kind of real standard here. And really in the end-all stop the browser wars.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
I personally like Netscape better for one very simple reason - searching for text within a page on IE sucks rocks. I like being able to hit F3 to repeat my search (especially from a previous page) and not have Windoze bring up its STUPID "find file" box.
That alone is worth Netscape's crashes.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
or gaping security holes?
Take your pick.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It is better for Netscape to release a fully working implementation of there browser to the masses and have a sign-up beta testing area.
Personally, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
I'm considering ditching making websites that work with netscape and aim to concentrate only on ie and mozilla - we simply do not have the time at our offices any more to force netscape to behave itself when rendering pages !
Netscape are concentrating on things that don't matter rather than on the real issues - like a browser which complies to standards and renders quickly.
Screw them I say - dump netscape and switch to mozilla or ie, the 'war' was lost a long time ago for netscape.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I develop Web sites for a living (part of a small company) so we have to create cross browser / cross platform websites as a matter of common sense.
We test on Linux, Mac & win32 and I must say, all of the web developers in our offices HATE coding for Netscape.
Nothing works right first time around - we spends hours of time 'forcing' netscape to behave itself and this is with accepted w3c tags !
IOW, a job that should take 1 day can take 2 days - should we dump netscape all together and cut out all platforms but win32 and mac ?
I'm seriously considering it for economic reasons.
Positioning anything 'pixel' wise requires a lot of coding trickery, Table and cell backgrounds render incorrectly - the list goes on.
The only thing in netscapes favour is that it is fully cross-platform.
I'm praying that Mozilla is the answer !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
The commercialization of the web has spoken (in as much as an action can speak...) The verdict is: those people don't matter. They have a very small market share and thus, unless they start suing or gaining a lot of simpathy with most people, they don't exist as far as most of the big flashy corporate (especially dot-com) websites go.
Seriously, Bugtraq is not a good point to bring up at the moment. The amount of security bugs on the Linux side has outweighed those on the Windows side for some time now.
You know, I've seen Netscape for Linux take out X several times..
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
How about we all go use a REAL browser like Netscape 4? The only time I've ever seen an upgrade improve a Microsoft product is from Nt4 to win2k (personal opinion). Look how they ruined Media Player, 6.4 was actually a little bit decent, but 7.0 takes 5 times longer to load files (seriously, 15 seconds compared to 3) and drops twice as many frames while decoding divx on my old system. I say go back to the classics. My choice is Netscape 4, but an Older version of I.E. will certainly be better than any new bloated version.
To everyone that says IE loads faster. Duh, of course it does, if you were to load Netscape or Mozilla into ram while the OS booted it would load just as fast. You'll also notice how much ram a properly configured and build linux kernel uses as compared to windows. And as for IE complying to standards, yeah its real easy to comply to a standard when you are the standard.
Whatever happended to the HP-UX and Irix versions of IE? Does anyone use them?
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Do they have an option? shit maybe they need those wacky kids that brought us winAMP that they own now to kick the NS6 team in the balls
Read my plan to save the Bengals
so the complete package should be Mozilla MiNT 1.0 when it is released, as an open source project it is required to have at least a semi-recursive acronym in its name
Read my plan to save the Bengals
I just love these piss poor statements of people who can't just shut the fuck up and admit that they either don't know or are wrong. "Well, they gotta be doing something wrong..." "Well, something starts...". This "I don't really know but I'm sure gonna piss and moan about it", "Someone is screwing me somewhere".
Read back through the posts before posting any more crap responses.
Secondly all this bullshit talk about secret api's and loading the browser with the OS- preloading components is bullshit to any real computer user/programmer. There are hundreds of programs that preload components to facilitate the speed of opening the program. Windows user will atest to how many modern apps want to put an icon in the systray (some whether you like it or not). They put their little statements in your windows ini files, the registry, the startup, as a service in NT, config.sys/autoexec.bat, hell most of this started with DOS hence the term "Terminate and Stay Resident". Should we be knocking MS for them taking advantage of a well known technique or should we be knocking NS for not finding a way to innovate on that technique.
Really WTF do I care if my OS load takes 3-4 minutes. Gives me time to get a coke, scratch my balls, flirt with my wife (not necessarily in that order). In the end I may have gained some time getting applications to load faster and be able to do some productive work once I am on the PC. I only have to recycle the OS once every 30-45 days typically because I've installed some new hardware or some particullarly irritating software (PS not all software in Win32 needs a restart - they request it but it's not always necessary, much to my satisfaction).
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Maybe michael wanted his name in the Most active stories, too :)
It's really only using 25M. Those four processes are all running in the same address space; that's how linux implements threads. Any time you see several processes with exactly the same memory information, chances are they are threads and therefore the memory should only be counted once.
I am using Mozilla M18 (nightly builds) and I have both a print button and a home button. You are right about SSL (https://) though. I am running FreeBSD, and can't seem to use the Linux PSM package even though I am running the linux mozilla nightly build binaries.
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
OK, this will be mod'ed down. But anyway...
We've got two pro-Microsoft statements in as many days (see 'Whistler' looks solid to ZDNET)! What's going on? It's almost like they pulled their heads out of their arses and realized Mozilla is not there yet! Don't get me wrong, I like Mozilla, but the fact is, it's nowhere close to IE, and even less stable than Netscape sometimes. Just get us a decent browser for Linux! (And whoever says "Konqueror", it's worse than Mozilla. I've tried it and was not impressed.)
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
As I have watched Mozilla progress, I slowly became disappointed, and thought that Linux would never have an open source alternative that really supports the newest technology.
Then I started using KDE from CVS and my hope was restored. The version of konqueror that shipped with KDE2 is very good, but the work hasn't stopped. Every day there are changes that make Konqueror more standards complient and a better browser.
If you haven't given it a try, you ought to.
You can't just add the four processes memory together, a very large portion(almost all) is shared memory. This means that mozilla is using 25megs, not 100.
I do agree with your point though, mozilla sucks. It is a bunch of big bloated crap that we don't even use.
Looks like microsoft has ported IE to HP-UX and Solaris. Check out microsoft's download site.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
I can see that your html isnt compliant either...
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
yes, and top is so accurate. i have yet to see a version of top that properly accounts for threads.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
Read the original post again. Do you know what makes a "Pyhrric [sic] victory" Pyrrhic?
hint
somebody had to respond :)
oh, and slashdot doesn't seem to like that link - the space in the middle of the url is supposed to be %20
a smart comment, bravo. it's easy to get lost in the flames and trolls.
Amazing magic tricks
ie4 was a dawg, but ie5 is great...
Amazing magic tricks
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crashes - it takes itself out. When IE crashes (even as late as v5.5), it usually takes out the whole OS (Win 98SE or Win2K - happens with both).
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You had better check your hardware. I use IE 5 and 5.5 extensively on 5 different machines, some running win98 and some running win2K, usually with about 15 browser windows open at once, and have never once had a browser crash take the whole OS down. Browser crashes in general are few and far between.
Maybe if you have active desktop or something lame like that enabled, then I suppose it could lock the desktop shell, but no sane person would use that crap.
Maru
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I stand by my opinion that IE and Win2k are excellent products
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I can only hope that you are talking about Win2K Pro and not the server-centric versions...
Maru
Using the right tool for the job is of course good sense. However one might also wish to avoid the Windows operating system and other Microsoft software for ethical reasons. Just as some people are motivated to buy other goods with the greater environment in mind (recycled paper, etc.) some do not wish to support a company which has acted so dishonestly and caused such damage in the field of computing.
Yeah. Unfortunately my CRT only supports up to 1600x1200 resolutions in usable refresh rates. Therefore I would really want to use anti-aliasing.
Anyhow, I fail to see how X the display protocol is any worse than the win32 GDI for building browsers.
Two words: font rendering. Do you have any idea how much faster GDI is in font rendering? Compare Mozilla rendering speeds between windows and linux in similar hardware. Windows version of Mozilla is much faster than any version of IE. linux version on the other hand is almost as slow as Netscape 4.x under windows. The cause? Font rendering takes time. Network transparency is cool feature and I even use it every now and then. But I would sacrifice it any day for decent font rendering. Oh well, I think I need to wait berlin.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Sure, I'm able to setup font servers and build fontdirs but why must it be so difficult? It's only a few files or if you use TT fonts it's only one file for one font. Why it doesn't work like copy the file to /usr/X11/fonts/. and be done with it? I have yet to see good font handling in any system but IMO windows and mac os have usable ones.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I totally agree. However I really know I hate NS4.x even more and therefore I would want to see NS6.0 really soon now. Solution I would suggest is to make it nag after six months or so to force people to upgrade (it's annoying but it's effective). How do you think MS has gotten rid of IE3/4 so well?
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
And I suppose you'd be in favor of reading aloud the latest Windows additions to bugtraq at a Microsoft shareholders meeting?
--
Ok, I am not denying that I.E. Isn't a great browsier but does Microsoft care to support Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD??? I dont see them releasing their browsier to those Oses... How can one state Microsoft's Browsier is soo standard when they leave out support for many Operating Systems..
> can't middle click to spawn
try shift-click.
enmity.
Oooh, big news flash!
okay, so apparently your definition of the "browser war" is different from everyone else's. true, that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. but it makes it irrelevant to argue such a stupid point.
A large portion of the government is standardized on Netscape. NOAA, one of the branches of the Dept. of Commerce just completed a switch from various and sundry email systems (Banyan, Netware) to Netscape, in all its forms: Communicator on the desktop, mail and directory servers on the server farm.
Why did we do this? First and foremost, cross-platform. There are large concentrations of UNIX and Mac-type people that refuse to run the Windows emulation overhead of IE. Second, standards compliance. LDAP is up and coming, as opposed to Exchange. Third, uniformity. No more "John J Doe@WOSF@NWS" addresses.
(The downside of this is that all those other networks (Banyan, Novell) got switched to NT at the same time)
M18 is NOT a nighlty build, it's a milestone build. the nighlty builds are the ones that are compiled every night. with the latest fixes.
Umm... "knife the baby"? Where in the hell have you heard that?
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
That was pedantic at best. Your first example doesn't really illustrate a "standard" either. The point is, if you compare IE to Netscape or even iCab, IE will have the overwelming amount of standards compliance. For some reason, people like you have to get all upset when MS does something good for a change. It's almost as if you would prefer them to do a shitty job, just so you can feel superior in not using them (which you probably do in some form anyway).
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
I'm sorry, but you're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about
Just some of the sites using css.
That was just the A's. Please think before you spout such blatant misinformation as this.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
The dreaded NN HTML editor!!!!
The only time I have ever used this is when i accidently click on "open in link composer" instead of "Open in new window", then i have to wait for the whole page to downlaod before I can close it (grrrrrr). Oh well.. I hope they fix this bug (there they should be well apart, and/or have a stop button in composer).
At least when u go "open in new window", it opens it up as whatever the last window was set as (maximised in my case). IE aways insistes on opening it un-maximized... also annoying.
Funny thing is, when i make a web-site.. IE is my best friend, as NN always stuffs up my complient code. BUt when i'm browsing other sites. I use NN, casue IE to slow for me (when i do a right click, i expect a menu instantly.. not in a few seconds).
IMHO, they both need to get there act together. Oh well.. there's my rant for the day, hope you enjoyed it.
Just because you are using a non MS product browser doesn't mean the errors are Microsoft's fault. Try the following links to see who is compliant
Netscape
Microsoft
; Red Hat
Oracle
IBM
Apache
Programming for Netscape? See this. If you're good, I don't see a problem. If you mean "writing HTML" take a look at: http://www.w3.org/! Stick to the rules dude! Keep all f*cked up new "techniques" away from the web.
Saying NEtscape won is like saying Xerox won because PARC got everyone using GUIs.
No, no, Apple won that one.
Erm...netscape has supported CSS since version 4... IE has supported CSS since version 4.... Opera supports CSS now. They all support CSS. They have for some time. Where have you been hiding the last 3 years?
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
Netscape is just a closed branch, while Mozilla remains the development branch. Most later versions of Netscape are going to be later branches from the Mozilla tree.
At any rate, that's why I wrote "debatable", not "wrong".
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Isn't it?
Seriously, let's examine the facts:
Everybody likes the web, and platform-neutral standards. I don't think that anyone would contradict me on this.
Everybody here is looking for the best web browser available.
However, most people here are only considering two browsers when considering what to use.
Neither of these two browsers supports the platform-neutral, open standards which everyone likes.
Meantime, other browsers languish and die off because no one bothers to use them.
Doesn't that sound like American politics to you?
TAE
My sig is too lon
As the register notes at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/14523.html WMP and MSN instant messenger are integrated. No choice. Which doesn't matter to me, since I use Linux, and IE won't be availble for it. I guess everyone will have to pay a Microsoft tax to browse the web not - oh, IE is free, but you have to buy a Windows box. I really hate all the javascript popups, and the first thing I am going to do when the OS Mozilla comes out is disable them. There are other features, and I won't be locked in to whatever MS wants to shove down my throat. Or maybe the originator thinks Windows 2000 and whatever Microsoft ever does *IS* the standard, even well into the extend/extinguish phase. IE is the only thing out for Mac OS X and I hate it. I really need to get Lynx running under Darwin - at least I'll be able to browse and download easily.
Personally I would prefer that most sites stop using all this extra JUNK. Probably less than one out of 50 sites actually use things like javascript for something that can't be done with plain HTML.
I just want information, not a multimedia extravaganza everytime I click something. I keep opening the document source window to try to get to see something normally instead of in a tiny peephole surrounded by various pieces of cybercrud.
Somewhere I read about the three phases of systems, the first is lean and fast and does most of the jobs. The second is bloatware where everything gets added and is cumbersome to use.
Finally a third system comes out that doesn't include all the junk is created, but it is impossible to get to phase 3 without going through phase 2. The Net is in phase 2.
If I want to know what you are selling a Palm m100 for, I just need the dollars-and-cents field, but not buried in an antialiased gif placed with a CSS popped up with javascript after baking a dozen cookies and redirecting you 20 times all this taking 15 minutes to download on DSL or cable modem.
No store in the mall puts the merchandise in the back room and spends 15 minutes entertaining you instead of selling.
Maybe it would be better to release a broken Netscape if what is broken are things that shouldn't be encouraged.
In one link: href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
It's not allways about having the most features. Sometimes you you should consider whether you are doing the right thing - like not not using propriatary software (IE).
Don't believe the hype that IE is at 80% - recent stats show it has edged up over 85%. The fight is definitely over folks - once Steve Jobs made IE the default browser on the Mac, the gig was up, there were no popular alternative platforms to exploit (and no, linux doesn't count...yet
IE is current leader and continues to be in the near future, but in the long term, something will replace it, just like it did to Netscape. Whether it's Mozilla, Netscape 6.x or something entirely different that doesn't exist yet is another matter. Very few things settle permanently to some state...
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
For the love of christ all we want is a browser that is fast stable and plays nice with HTML 4 and javascript and SSL. No one gives a fricking hoot about CSS and DOM and supporting them is a complete waste of time. I don't know know if you've been cruising the same internet as me, but NO ONE IS USING CSS.
Well well, how about these little and unimportant sites:
True, CSS isn't utilized everywhere, but it's no longer rare either.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Have fun with your nightly builds, segfaults, crashes, and bug reports. While you're filling out bug reports I'm using a browser that doesn't crash and works right now. Not in the future, not in the next build. Its all what matters now to consumers.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
...download the GPL'ed version of Internet Explorer 6 for Linux?
No thanks! I don't want IE or any other Microsoft product on my GNU/Linux system. That's one reason I'm using it in the first place. Keep IE on Windows where it belongs (or Mac if you're so inclined.)
Actually, I am well qualified to talk about software. And, I can do it without obscenities and without posting as an Anonymous Coward! :)
and how do I use that on my Debian box?
Odd. I've always found that an IE crash tends to crash the entire system. Maybe I've just used poorly configured NT boxes.
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
For those of you jonesing for a decent browser for Linux and are tired of watching mozilla continue to twitch, I strongly urge you to install KDE2 (comes with Mandrake-7.2) and give konqueror a whirl.
I had been skeptical, but I'm now a believer. Konqueror rocks! It's got it all - fast HTML rendering, javascript support, java applet support, even DHTML (although most sites are designed for broken implementations so don't expect much here). The form widgets put Netscape's to shame.
For us privacy freaks, the cookie selector lets you configure cookie policies on a per-cookie or per-domain basis. You can also selectively enable or disable java or javascript on a per-domain basis.
And the best part? I haven't made it crash even once yet. I started it last week to give it a whirl - and it's been my default browser ever since. And I don't even use KDE - I'm a blackbox man! Konqueror is the bomb. It is my new best friend.
No. No, he doesn't.
Oops. It was a joke that everyone in the United States got, but it probably didn't make much sense to the rest of the world. Basically, over here we're running a presidential election, and one of the dumber canidates had a very, very hard time saying the word "subliminal" -- for various reasons, he said it many, many times in one day, and each time it came out "subliminable."
Unfortunately, every single person in the United States ended up hearing this chucklehead say "subliminable" a few hundred times. Thank god for the American media -- always covering the really important issues that matter, like pronunciation. Believe me -- you're lucky your from some part of the world where your not going to vote in the US elections tomorrow. If you were, you'd be pulling your hair out like the rest of us.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
..for better standards support in IE. Let us not forget that. Let us also not forget what a dog IE4 was (the browser that 'beat' Netscape through tying to a monopoly OS).
Besides, the latest pre-release of Netscape 6 is just as stable as IE 5.5 on my systems and IE (and Office, etc.) will ALWAYS be faster on Windows systems. Microsoft has seen to that.
Even if IE is 20% faster (although it isn't), it's not THAT much better. The performance margin is not large enough to justify the brain-washing that goes with it.
Right Here, sit back and wait if your in mozilla
Many of the people who bash Mozilla probably haven't tried it out lately. The latest nightly loads in about 3 seconds on my machine, new windows spawn instantly (gota love that third mouse button spawning) and it is FASTER at page rendering than IE5 on my machine (and several magnitudes faster than N4). And you know what? IT KEEPS GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME. Try a build from last week and compare it to todays build. The newer build is noticeably faster. And next weeks will be even better.
Market share. So IE got 80% market share, so what, sites still have to work for Netscape users, if the business decides only to support IE you know the site is going to be some annoying signing-dancing-blinking circus, which I would rather not visit anyway. And while IE might have 80% market share RIGHT NOW, that doesn't mean we're living in status quo. If AOL decides to include N6 in some future AOL version, Netscape instantly gains 50% market share. And let's not forget the set top boxes (not the crappy old MS ones). What is Nokia's new set top box running? Mozilla!
one company would be able to control the display of all information.
I don't want all of the "internet" (just the www to those of us who know better) to require IEx.x, running on Windowsx.x, being served by IISx.x, running on Windowsx.x.
That's my personal paranoia. That's why I use NS and that's why I hope it lives on.
The browser was DESTINED to become a platform. Netscape couldn't have STOPPED it from becoming one. There are to many obvious convergent trends here for anything else to have happened.
But their goal, was for it to become THEIR platform.
And at that, of course, they failed miserably.
tj
Let's be explicit about exactly which version we're talking about. Netscape 4.75, under RH Linux 6.2, with Javascript enabled, will refuse to load www.microsoft.com with the following error:
JavaScript Error: http://www.microsoft.com , line 28:
loadPage is not defined.
Michael J.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Try using CTL-F to bring up the find dialog. You're right, though, Netscape highlights the words better making the feature less of an ass-pain.
Netscape 6 may be worse than IE, but what about Mozilla? I have been using M18 for the past week, and I haven't had it crash yet. Netscape 4.7 crashed every couple of days on my machine, and I can't say anything about IE because it doesn't run on FreeBSD. Also, Mozilla seems to be compleatly devoid of comercialization. It doesn't even have that crapload of links that I have to delete every time I install Netscape 4.7.
Netscape 6 may suck, so use Mozilla instead.
You forgot about:
Slashdot
IE is not superior for me. It will not run on my OS, which is Linux. Therefore I must run Netscape.
IE is simply *NOT* even an option for me.
Doesn't run under my OS is a *TOTAL* disqualification from the running for me. If I can't get it to run, it is useless for me.
Thast said, Netscape sucks and AOL/Time Warner is an evil empire. If Konqueror (KDE browser) would stop ignoring style sheets and anything more recent than HTML 2.0 (Javascript, etc) maybe I could use it instead. It does work for quite a few things though.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Confusion reigns. I haven't dropped support for anything, Netscape or otherwise. I was just trying to make the point that a business decision on what products to support, or not to support, should be driven by demand from customers. Regardless of personal passion about open source, or lack thereof, why should we expect a business to support Netscape if there's no money in it? That's not the same thing as deciding to build a version of a web site that works with Netscape. Even there, though, you could reasonably decide that the Netscape share of the market is so small that you can afford to ignore it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm not an SA, UNIx or otherwise, but I have used Netscape on a bunch of desktop Intel Oses, including FreeBSD and several flavors of Linux. Netscape crashes on all of them, sooner or later. Now, maybe that's really the fault of X, or Netscape, or the phases of the Moon, and not actually Unix/Linux. That's small consolation when Netscape goes "poof" when you click on tghe back button. If someone's commitment to open source is so strong that they willingly avoid use of closed source, I applaud them. Most folks, though, just know that CompUSA/Walmart/OfficeMax/WhatEver sell Windows and Linux for just about the same price.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Dropping support for Netscape is a business decision, not an act of apostasy. If the cost of supporting it is greater than the revenue it brings in, it's gone. IE5 on Windows is, by far, the best browser I've used. Sure, it benefits because it is integrated with Windows. What's the problem??
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I know you are a troll, but I feel that I have to say this in case anyone is reading the comments without reading the article. The main focus of the article is that numourous bugs have been fixed in the mozilla source tree, but that the patches are not being applied to Netscape 6 out of fear of a shipping delay.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
will netscape 6 have support for casscading style sheets?
Netscape performs very well on my linux destop... goes for weeks without crashing and opens links in new windows faster than any other browser I have seen. (including IE 5.x on Win 2000) Yes it has some format problems and can't handle css, but I really don't feel its all that bad, certainly not a putrid pile of refuse.
I also use Mozilla, I have to say that while it has a few bugs it really does get better everyday. And yes most people that are happy with IE won't bother to switch to NS 6.0 or mozilla.
However people are forgetting the millions of people that use AOL. Once NS 6.0 is done and stable AOL will switch over. This will allow them to make cheap linux based web pads and not be dependent on MS.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
-- Leonard Cohen
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I have become so ambivalent with regards to Microsoft. Personally, as a Mac user, Netscape sucks for various reasons. I have heard it described (and I agree with this) by other "M$" haters that IE5 for Mac is the best browser available on any platform. I can't really disagree.
And with the exception of a couple of truly infuriating bugs, the Office suite is the best set out there, IMHO.
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I'm sick and tired of being responsible for the preservation of the universe and its outlying suburbs.
MS BOB? :)
Oh boy, how soon do they forget.
Netscape added Javascript in an attempt to forestall Sun's deployment of Java. Java got added only when Sun and Netscape signed a truce along the lines: "we, Sun, allow you, netscape, to use the Java moniker on your completely unrelated scripting language. In exchange you agree to support Java on your browser".
They created the first (or one of the first) web application servers - NAS, now iPlanet.
Another one... The first server was NCSA httpd, and many web sites transition from NCSA httpd to Apache without ever going through NSA/iPlanet.
People didn't see the web as a platform at first.
True, but by the time Netscape was talking about it, others had also grasped it, not least of which was Sun with their Java language, whose existance was made public in 1994.
It was Netscape that pushed this idea, evangelized it.
This much I can give them credit for. James Clark drove the point over and over until Bill Gates finally got it, and turned "hardcore on the internet". Gates immediately promoted the underlings who had spent the previous year trying to explain this to him.
To deny that is to overlook Netscape's primary contribution to the internet.
Netscape's primary contribution to the internet is developing a cool and fast web browser which was made available for free.
Here's why: they break TCP. IE sends out a RST instead of an ACK|FIN to close a connection. No big deal, but it's against the spirit of the spec, which states RSTs are for emergency-type conditions. More seriously, IE and IIS manipulate sequence numbers when they talk to each other, in order to hold open connections and not create new ones. Basically one side sends over a packet (often just an ACK) with a sequence number greater than the other side expected. This is the signal that a new "connection" has begun; I guess this would be good for pipelined requests and so on. But it breaks the spec. I'm not sure where their support for this stuff is; I would not be surprised if it was at the kernel level, thus lending credence to their claims of integrating IE and the operating system. But it hardly makes good evidence in court.
IE 5.0 (IIRC) on the Mac platform was actually very standards compliant, but MS quickly ditched this support in favor of the newest flashy support for useless features. Netscape 6.0 and Mozilla are also subject to this 'crepping featuritis'. Unfortunatly, for the purpose of competing with IE, netscape has prioritized features over bugfixes and standards compliance
As with the drug war, the users/citizens are the true losers in the browser wars.
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
Go ahead and suggest - I'll agree with you totally, and blatantly ignore you. Come on, get a grip on reality - fully standards-compliant browsers have 0% market share, and standard-compliant pages look and feel like crap in most browsers. If I make pages that look like crap in most browsers, I'll be out of business faster than you can spell "standards compliant". So what if future will prove me right? I need to feed my family NOW!
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Amen brother!
Might I suggest that some (although not all that much) of the blame actually rests with the standards? Some of them are too vague on what the different elements should look like, leaving the developers to interpret the standard as they see fit. There's such a things as over-specifying, I know, but for now I think that they should be stricter. This does not help make IExplore/Netscape/Mozilla or any other browser standards-compliant, but it will make the standards they all claim to follow easier to work with. Why is it necessary for me to spend time on tweaking tables so as to make them look the same on Netscape 4.x and IExplore 5.x? Tables have been around for a LONG time in HTML, and both claim to comply with the HTML standards. But tables can look very different in the two browsers - ARGH! And don't even get me started on CSS...
Maybe we should go with XHTML, and then use XSLT to transform from standards-compliant XHTML to browser specific (X/D)HTML. Hey, HTML drivers :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Oh please - I know that HTML was originally about content markup, but those days are long gone. Why do you think XML is so hot? Because XML, unlike HTML, is about content markup, and content markup ONLY. HTML has content markup elements, but lots of visual markup elements too - it's a complete mess! An example - <B> and <I> are far more widespread than , say, <EMP>, but the two former are visual markup elements, whereas the latter is content markup. Superscript, subscript, textflow and above all: <FONT>. These are quick examples, all from the HTML 3.2 specs and shows thats even back then the idea of content markup was long gone. Browser providers are to blame for sure, but that's completely irrelevant.
The bottom line is: Users and content providers want pages to look the same in all major browsers, and don't want to use plug-ins. Simple as that. You may like it or not, but that's how the world works.
BTW, I know that the vagueness is deliberate, but that doesn't make it any better for me when I'm faced with the task of making a page look the same on several browsers - it's more like a slap in my face...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
You've misunderstood me - I'm not using tables for visual formatting. I was trying to make plain ol' tables look the same on different browsers some time back (IE3/4 and NN3, to be precise), and it was HORRIBLE. I agree that visual formatting using tables should go the way of the dinosaur, but when faced with "Why doesn't it look the same in my Netscape?", and having tried to explain about different interpretations of standards, different standards, different products, content vs. visual markup, not one customer have given a damn. That could be me explaining things the wrong way, I'm sure, but most other web developers I talk to or hear about are faced with the exact same demands - make it look the same, and use HTML only!
Black holes are where God divided by zero
You make some good points, that I totally agree with. But I've got a few comments...
So your web page should look exactly the same on my 24 bit 1280x1024 19in display as it does on a small black-and-white LCD display on a cell phone?! .5% if the same amount of money is expected to increase their standing in the 90% market they're focusing on.
Since when did a cell-phone become a major browser? Of course a web-page works better on a cell phone if it's adaptable but seriously, how much marketshare does cell phones have (as browsers) today? Next to nothing. So in the mind of Average Contentprovider Inc. they become a non-issue. Same thing with most other non-major browsers. Short-sighted as hell, but there you have it - if cutting a few corners will save you development time (real or perceived), most providers will happily forego expanding their market by
Is that useful behavior?
No - it's economical behavior. Cost-benefit and market analysis drives these decisions, not some idea of what is "useful behavior". Don't get me wrong - whenever I get the chance, I try to make things as adaptable and flexible as possible. It's just not in high demand.
A note regarding cell-phones: Have you ever tried designing stuff to run off both a browser and a cell-phone? You need to fundamentally redesign for both to work. A web-page simply cannot be squeezed onto a 100x40 display, no matter what you do. A page designed for 100x40 will be all but invisible at 1280x1024. Quite frankly, I don't see HTML as a terribly good way to make pages for cell-phones. WML maybe, but WAP is dying even here in Europe. Ironically, on a small device you need much more control over the individual pixels, because you've got so few of them - it's NOT irrelevant if some checkbox is 8 or 12 pixels high, if the latter choice means that your bottom checkbox needs scrolling (people generally hate that). I know that the cell-phone should adapt whatever design I make to it's visual capabilities (just like other browsers), but that's SOOO much harder on the smaller screens - you don't have that many free variables.
The web is no longer a realm primarily for hobbyists and education, it's primarily a marketplace. So decisions start being taken on that premise...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Maybe it's because almost everybody is more interested in form that content - the recent (current?) US presidential elections are a good point in case...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Mozilla should have been dead a year ago. What a joke. It's now almost at the point that nobody who ever contributed to it will even want to mention it on their resumes. "Real Soon Now" doesn't cut it anymore.
Netscape RIP.
We hardly knew ye.
Or Macintosh, of course. The OS X/Aqua version isn't half bad. IE supposedly works on Solaris/SPARC, but it dumped a core on me after two seconds.
I use Netscape because my primary computers (work and home) run Linux more or less by necessity (I'm a part-time Unix programmer and I'm too cheap to buy Exceed). And it's by far the worst part of the Linux experience. Crashes at the slightest provocation, whether FrontPage-generated pages, bad CSS, bad JavaScript, bad applets, or bad hair day. Hopefully I'll inherit an old SGI O2 and Netscape (and X in general) won't suck quite as much. Mmmmm. . . Irix. Gotta try Konqueror, though...
I have problems with IE when I have mod points, mainly on larger discussions... The drop down boxes start dragging their asses all over the screen making it very hard to read anything. Very annoying.
Please stop using words like "fag" as an insult. It is incredibly insulting.
I have actually seen IE reboot a system without warning on a Windows 98 (not SE) system. (Involving Java.) On my Win98SE when it crashes, I usually get a dialog box along the lines of "Windows is unstable, it is recommended you save all work and reboot." That isn't an exact quote, because it actually doesn't happen too often, but it does happen.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Why do I you may ask
If more people that start using NS6,
more bugs will be submitted to Mozilla
The More bugs submitted to Mozilla
the easier it makes it for people to fix these bugs.
From this flamewar I get the impression that many people don't want the Mozilla project to succeed.
I've been using Mozilla on my Win2k box and have been having pretty good luck so far. I like the new interface much more than the new IE "rainbow" interface, Although I admit it does initially load slower than IE.
By the way... Any IE-5.5 users ever have any problems on the Micro$oft website? A friend of mine who swears by using M$ claims that his Win2K box alocates a gig of virtual memory, but only after visiting M$'s website with IE-5.5. I know you can't judge a browser by just one website, but I thought it was odd.
>Like it or not, most of the world uses (and will continue to use) Microsoft Windows.
[oh man am I offtopic]
I seem to remember someone saying similar things about 640k RAM, MS-DOS, and OS/2.
If you ask me, the gig is up for windows. All the people I used to be pushing Linux onto (hey, you gotta at least mention it to them) are now deciding to take a look at it on their own volition because [they say, although I do agree] "Microsoft software generally sucks". I'm not saying Linux will be the next big OS out there, but I am trying to say that Windows has hit saturation, and then some.
These people refuse to "upgrade" from W98 because W Me has been a disaster of an O/S. You get a bunch of sucky, unnecessary, bells and whistles hold the DOS for $70 and one big headache hoping your drivers for your older hardware hold together.
Windows Update has made it easy enough to update Win 98 security holes and bugs that this isn't a reason to upgrade anymore (like it was for many going from Win 95 to Win 98).
Of course, Bill G. doesn't worry about bugs, since these (by his definition) don't exist. See: http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html
These same people don't want to go to W2k because they (like most others) don't have the requisite 256 MB RAM to get decent performance out of it [I hear it runs "ok" on 128 Mb though. But nothing spectacular.]. Not to mention that some hardware has no W2k drivers, and again, no Real DOS for "power users" (ie: Emergency Mode).
Microsoft has pushed users about for long enough, and I think the users are sending a clear message back by not upgrading past Win 98.
Like I've said before, Just my 2 cents. (I really don't want to see this become a flamewar... As a "computer monkey" [repair guy] my opinion just differs, that's all).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>takes ages to start
Netscape 6 takes me about 5-10 seconds to start. ie takes me about 10 seconds to start (that's what I figure it is adding to the time it takes for my computer to boot).
If Netscape was in my startup menu, and all I had to do to "load" it was to click on the minimized process in the taskbar, well it would be damn fast too.
>and looks nasty to boot
That's why it's skinnable. I think ie looks ugly, and find the new Netscape look refreshing myself. But (to the best of my knowledge) ie isn't skinnable, so you either like it, or leave it. (I left it).
>IE, on the other hand, is fast
Maybe for you. I find scrolling with the mouse in ie is an exercise in slowness. It's all in what matters to you.
>considerably more stable
Maybe a little more. It crashes about the same for me. Of course, whereas netscape just blows up and sometimes annoys me with its "full circle agent", ie explodes the OS.
I really hate runnnig simple items like browsers as root. Bad security policy. Running ie in the kernel gives it even handier access to my machine than root (if "root" existed in windows)... Not secure. And if it isn't at least reasonably secure, I'm not interested.
>but they make a damn fine web browser.
I suppose it depends on which side of the fence you are on.
I find Netscape also allows me to setup networked roving web-browsing profiles dead easy too. Copying them and backing them up is a cinch.
I never found an easy (ie: 3 steps or less) way to have roving profiles in ie without setting up policies and such... ugh... not fun at all for a home/small network.
Just my 2 cents.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I use CSS. I think it works just fine. Both Netscape and IE support it adequately (not CSS positioning, true) (and IE has more complete support than Netscape 4).
-Gabe
That's crap. "Mr. Gates" does not control my life, or yours, or the General's. It's just a browser, for chrissake. Not everything in life has deep implications for personal freedom.
-Gabe
Did I miss IE being ported to Linux?
--
"Government is good at only one thing: It breaks
your legs, hands you a pair of crutches, and says, 'See, without us you wouldn't
be able to walk.'" -- Harry Browne, Libertarian Presidential Candidate
It crashes far less often, and although many see this as a bad thing, it is integrated into my operating system (win 2000) very well. All of my explorer windows show the IE links bar. I can be browsing files on my drive, click on one of the link buttons, and poof, the window turns into IE and opens up the requested link.
Ahme, excuse me but i just *have* to add my $0.02 here. First of all, Netscape might suck but wouldn't it be more in line with slashdot values (ie: open source) to direct people towards mozilla/seamonkey? which to my understanding is fully web compliant?? And secondly while IE my be web complaint its not what i'd call stable, i switched to Mozilla *because* IE crashed every 5 minutes. Last but not least, IE is windows only, and since there are one hell of alot of Linux, BSD etc users here, which IE isin't made for, it makes ore sense to link to the mozilla project, which is compiled into a wide range of OS's (it looks better too! =) PLease, keep your heads screwed on the right way people. -=JaGuaR=-
Guys don't get me wrong here - I love IE too!
The only thing worse than being a slave is to be a slave to two masters. So I'm just going to bend over now and let either company shove their browser as far up my ass they can and hope for the best. I only pray they wear a condom.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Do the math and you'll see you are wrong. AOL has a 50% market share. Overall, IE has an 85-90% marketshare. That means roughly 70-80% of people NOT on AOL use IE.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Funny I thought it was News for Nerds not News for Linux users...
I have upgraded from NT to Windows 2000 and can now use the feature "Windows Update" to get patches and such. When I try it, it fires up IE and I get the error: "Error on page: object expected". This is a Windows platform, using Internet Explorer, accessing the Microsoft homepage.
Every commercial software development project, by which I mean one that is developing a product that will be put out by a commercial company with a considerable amount at stake, cares about three things. One is cost. One is quality. One is schedule.
Regardless of what you might believe, one cannot have infinite quality and timely software delivery at a reasonable cost. Netscape/AOL product managers have an extremely difficult choice to make. Do they release Version 6.0 sometime this millennium and fix bugs later, or do they delay the release indefinitely and go on fixing bugs, adding features, and so forth until no one cares any more?
For heavens' sake, folks, you wouldn't even KNOW if IE had the same problems! Why? Because they haven't opened their bug databases!! You're hoisting the Netscape managers because you have information that Netscape, or the Mozilla project (remember, the open source project that was started by Netscape in the first place) chose to give you.
I thnk that most folks who have worked in a commercial organization would support me as I make this assertion: like any other manager, a product manager must chose to make tradeoffs between quality and the schedule. In the case of the Netscape/Mozilla project, we (the community) are farther ahead than in any other commercial software project I know: we can find out about the bugs, we can fix them, and we can make the next bugfix come out sooner as a result.
Let's stop talking about abandoning the only open-source, major-league, standards-embracing browser out there, and start pitching in and helping. And don't forget to vote tomorrow, while you're participating in the process.
OS embedding to gain performance
If it increases performance, what's the problem? You can still install Netscape if you feel like it.
Disclaimer: I use IE on win98 and Mozilla on linux/BSD
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
netscape is a pile of shit - at one time is was the best browser, now it is a small shell of its former greatness, clinging to its very existence - just look at the statistics and look at the useragents hitting your pages (if you develop pages for non-geeks ...) ... let us examine the reasons for the shitiness of ns?
it's late, and i can conjure up some more distasteful morsels but what is the point ... there are other alternatives than MSIE - Opera for one, which is my personal choice - i realize many browsing the web on linux boxes may feel that they are stuck with ns, but it seems to me that with new releases of opera beta 4 for linux and the KDE browser that i would much rather use those than be sentenced to time with a crappy program like ns
you ns afficianados will flame me away i guess ... i am entitled to my feelings right - it makes it all the more sad that i really wish that ns never relinquished its top share to m$, maybe that's what makes it so much more disheartening ...
AZspot
Funny I installed OmniWeb just fine. It is also just about the best browser I've ever seen. Too bad it is only Cocoa, because it would make a great browser on any platform. Well actually I should say too bad Apple has discontinued the Yellowbox runtimes for any OS other than OS X. Get the stuffit archive in ie, let it do its mumbo jumbo... double-click the smi, and drag the icon to the applications folder.. done... If you have problems dragging it, log in as administrator or root, and then add it to the Apps folder. Beta 7 works wonderfully, the only problem being a lack of Java Applet support, and this is Apple's fault right now.
IE for Mac isn't bad at all. 5.5 Beta is great on OS X, but I still prefer OmniWeb Beta 7. They seem to do everything right. They also make more use of the native widgets and are one of the few Cocoa apps available that I'd use every day. The only thing I can't do with OmniWeb is chat on beseen.com, and I can, but it doesn't auto-update, so I have to click refresh all the time.
Sad but true... IE really has become the better browser. Mozilla is too little, too late.
I've been saying for some time that Netscape does not support the HTML 4.01 DTD correctly and does not support CSS fully either. Its such a headache trying to get compatability across browsers... whenever I do a prototype I do it for MSIE only and tell my users to visit the prototype only with MSIE. It takes so long to put the hacks into a page so Netscape will display it correctly I don't even think its worth it anymore.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
When I have problems or crashes with IE (3.01-5.5 inclusive; yes, we're still running all of them!) I have to reboot the PC to return to some semblence of stablilty. ANY application being tied so closely to the OS that killing it's process takes out the GUI desktop is a Bad Thing .
I'll stick to Netscape, although I am testing Mozilla, but the lack of support for https:// does bother me some (yes, I know it's available, but not part of the standard package), as does the lack of some features from the UI (HOME button, PRINT button?), but I am liking it better and better.
I have worked with them in the past... oh boy, are they funny!
"Beautiful is better than ugly" Tim Peters
...Therefore, Python!
No sig for the moment.
True, true, when you are at the bottom of the pile, theres nowhere to go but up!
"Beautiful is better than ugly, Explicit is better than implicit, Simple is better than complex, Complex is better than complicated, Flat is better than nested..." -Tim Peters
...Therefore, Python!
No sig for the moment.
Yes, this pretty much kills iPlanet's mail/directory server sell, unless they now suggest that you run another non-Netscape client. You'd think that someone over there at iPlanet would be verry interested in getting a patch into Mozilla, unless they are just legacying their messaging platform.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It wasn't pro-Microsoft, it was technically accurate. Michael decided not to be religious about it, just factually sound regardless of company (gasp). And, sad but true, I agree that IE is a far superior browser.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Netscape 6 fails to support web standards
Mozilla is fixed. Netscape isn't
9 compliance bugs are listed:
6 of them are fixed but not in Netscape
3 of them aren't fixed
All I have to say is that Netscape has gone downhill eversince AOL took over.
Perhaps today is a good day to die! -Worf
You people just can't admit that Microsoft might have done something good, can you? Even if it is Microsoft, there are lots of people who actually try their best and every now and then, something good pops out of their factory, and I genuinely think that IE is one of Microsoft's best accomplishments on the Windows platform. It does not matter whether IE is integrated to the OS or not. Idiots.. -- mkv@toosa.net http://toosa.net
The secret to a successful
MS creates VB, MS creates IE, MS adds VB support into IE (obviously), slashdot poster complain about IE supporting VB and how web developers like using it because it allows them to control their web site. Granted VB isn't secure, so you have the option NOT to install it when you install IE.
Where's the problem here? If you don't like VB support in IE you have two options, don't install IE or don't install VB scripting support.
where do you guys get off complaining about VB support in IE? Microsoft isn't the evile empire everyone thinks it is, and god forbid they actually have a decent product.
Atticka
No sig here...
not only that, your complaining that IE5 supports it but gives you the option to NOT install support for VB? wow.......
No sig here...
Agreed. I don't have a problem with Michael voicing his opinion on the matter. Granted, there is not much room to go into detail in a /. headline. But he could have embellished below the headline and first paragraph. He could embellish here in the user comments. He hasn't.
It's just not what I'm used to here on Slashdot. When a Poster makes some strong comment like this, they usually explain. Many times I'm convinced by those arguments. But just throwing out the opinion without any arguments is unlikely to convince anyone.
M$ is NOT the better product - they only say they are, and their tactics give them a louder voice.
Except that they are: The browser has the cleanest, nicest interface of anything that I've seen, and clearly takes the cake when it comes to graphical browsers. (Lynx gets it done with text based stuff).
And that it's not really a faster browser - we pay the browser start-up fee each time we boot up Windows.
But don't you see that, even if that is a bad thing, I'm willing to wait a couple of seconds while Windows starts to have IE load faster. Even if it isn't 'good', or 'right', or even 'legal', the fact is that IE loads faster than Netscape, and goes faster than Netscape. I have put the two next to eachother and IE clearly goes faster. I don't care how Microsoft has engineered it, they made a faster browser. If that involved writing part of it in the kernal, more power to them.
The problem is, you think that if they didn't have this advantage, Netscape would win. Clearly, Netscape Corp. is just as much of a company as Microsoft is. That's what this article is about. Netscape wouldn't make a cleaner, nicer, more standards-compliant browser, they would make one with e-commerce and one click shopping. Microsoft cannot do much worse! (Aside from security.. but that is being fixed, although slowly)
And it's not more compliant with Web standards, only with Microsoft extensions to some of those standards.
But Microsoft is setting the standards. Obviously the W3 et all are not doing a good job of enforcing their web standards. What the internet really needs, it's sad to say, but is Microsoft to win the browser wars and create a standard that everybody will obey.
What would happen if people chose their Presidential candidate not on the issues and records of those people, or the consequences of their election, but on the number of mispronounciations that they make during speaches... Uhhh... That would be Baaaaaad!
I agree.. the current state of the electoral process is horrid... but almost 1/3 of the likely voters know the names of the candidates and their running mates!
No. No, he doesn't.
--
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
Standards? Who cares about 100% standards? Hell I just want a browser that does not crash and will use less RAM than Oracle 8 with the memory cache turned on...Then I will worry about standards!
BTW -- I am posting this from Konqueror, and everything is starting to look a bit better...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Darn...I would really like to use a good browser (IE) however, I can not fall off the wagon and break my Window$ ban/boycott. What is a guy to do??
On the other hand -- This does not even come close to the Warcraft "Jones'" that I had to struggle through last time I was tempted to install Windows. (It's funny how many people fell for that one!)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
No problems with lynx 2.8.4dev.10 on linux.
errr..except that slight problem with not being able to display graphics. while it may surprise you, 99.9% of people surveyed said they like their web to have graphics.
i bet you use debian too.
Nice to see that at least one person understands what the web is all about.
[Blushes.] Aw, shucks.
Actually, I was in such a rush to reply, I skimmed past the part where allanj describes using tables for visual formatting. I thought people stopped doing that long ago. (I occasionally use Lynx, just to keep things real. :-) )
Why use a free, superior, Microsoft browser when you can convince people to download a "sparkly" plugin like Flash[?]
You're missing the point. Web browsing isn't supposed to be a WYSIWYG experience. Most of the W3C's standards are written deliberately vague to allow proper rendering on (for example) text-only browsers (like Lynx), or browsers for the blind. I mentioned Flash merely to point out that you can't force the end-user to pick a particular browser, so true WYSIWYG is a pipe-dream.
BTW, the answers to your rhetorical question include:
For the record, I use IE for 90% of my Web browsing.
You've misunderstood me...
I apologize (and am thankful) for that.
Agreed. Most of my work this year has been in Web development, so I can empathize. Sometimes, it's hard to convince managers there is a difference between content and display. I don't have any solutions; I'm just a little bitter that everyone thinks WYSIWYG is the best solution to every problem.
So what you're saying is that you'll use a less than adequate tool to do the job simply because of some bias against M$?
:)
Use the better tool instead of spending so much time complaining. And if you don't like anything out there, write your own
Somehow I doubt you've ever developed a single thing in XML or XSLT.
I use the HP-UX version sometimes. I'd be more than happy to use it under Linux if it was ported.
It does of course suffer bugs. Since M$ aren't exactly Unix-clued, they forgot that a remote display might not be 8 or 24 bit, so if you remote to a 16bit display, it crashes.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
If that involved writing part of it in the kernal, more power to them.[...](Aside from security.. but that is being fixed, although slowly)
*Cough*
But Microsoft is setting the standards. Obviously the W3 et all are not doing a good job of enforcing their web standards. What the internet really needs, it's sad to say, but is Microsoft to win the browser wars and create a standard that everybody will obey.
Now that you opened my eyes, I think we should return to monarchy, when people knew what was right and what was not, because there was only one opinion to choose from: the king's. If I could only remember why we moved away from monarchy...
What a cop out. And AOL needs money???
AOL didn't purcase Netscape to make money, there was no chance, the battle was already over at that time. They purchased it hoping that it would turn out just good enough to bundle with AOL. They purchased it to save money.
Can't believe this got moderated up.
I am a sysadmin at a school. And what he says is true.
However, the _only_ reason this happens is becase the users associate Netscape with the web (Netscape = Internet). Put a big blue E on their desktop and take away netscape, and they don't know what the hell to do.
Furthurmore, I can't see why any reputable company would use Netscape Messenger for a email client. Other than the above reason, it's only cause they're too cheap to foot the bill for some nice collaboration software like Lotus Notes, or Exchange.
They suck. Get the nightlies. Yes, they may crash on you occasionally, but the milestones seem to be crashing on you anyhow. The milestones basically say, "We need to have this, this, and this working before we can build Mxx." The nightlies have the latest features and patches, which makes it slightly more likely that it will run perfectly on your system the next day. I'm just amazed that the little thingie they like to call 'transparency' actually works as of a few days ago... my web sites look a tad better now. (I tend to use magenta for the transparent color in my images - magenta over dark blue was just not looking very nice...)
hey, does this mean it's available for linux too? and what about freebsd?
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Yes it was a pro-Microsoft statement, why do you say? Well according to this a rti cle Transmeta is teaming up with MS on the Tablet PC project. hehe Linus teaming with MS
I don't think this is a top problem. I think that it has something to do with the way X allocates memory, particularly with SHM extensions and mmap'ed video RAM. I've seen this myself.
Is there anyone that can explain X memory usage in Linux???
> Did you actually say that a Microsoft product
> is somehow better than an Open Source product?
> on Slashdot? Are you crazy?
No, he didn't. He said IE is better than
Netscape. Netscape is not Open Source.
Chris Mattern
Mozilla is Open Source. Netscape is not. You
can't be "a little bit pregnant" and you can't
be "mostly Open Source". And, as other posters
have noted, Netscape is refusing even the
simplest bug fixes from Mozilla, which means
Netscape is getting none of the benefits of
Open Source whatsoever.
Chris Mattern
...because it destroys freedom with higher efficiency?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
People.. PEOPLE! Quit preaching Nutscrape and give into the fact that on Windows, Internet Exploder is simply the best you can get. Yes it's by Microsoft, and Yes it's the root of all evil, but goddammit it works and it's pretty. Netscape crashes all the time, totally mangles alot of DHTML that's worked for years on the 'other' browser, and Netscape Corporation itself is somewhat dependent upon their browser for revenue whilst Microsoft already has green bills up the wazoo and is taking every step to ensure everybody falls in love with IE. Any corporate web developer will agree with me that Netscape is a pain in the ass to support and they never innovate. IE is tolerant and extensible with ActiveX controls that just any stupid little VB coder can produce. It's bloated, it's a bit sluggish on the first load, but it excels just about everywhere else, so go flame Opera and their 8088-friendly browser.
(takes a deep breath)
Now if only they would make IE for Linux =)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Konqueror (the KDE 2.0 browser) may or may not be standards compliant, but it looks good on just about every site I've tried. I think it does lack proper CSS support, but it makes up for it with its speed and otherwise good rendering.
-John
>Under Windows:
...unless you're using WinNT or Win2K, in which case you would simply say:
>Ctl-Alt-Del
>Choose Task Manager
kill netscape*
- Aman
I'm so ashamed for letting you "get my goat", but I'll lower my self and respond to this flame bait.
IE is not "clearly the better browser"
Not even close in fact.
You see, there are features other than bells and whistles that count.
Reliability
Adherence to standards
Functionality
Interoperability
Nope, sorry.....
Netscape in general does a better job than IE in all of the above categories.
If there are problems with Netscape 6....then by all means, lets get them fixed, since that *IS* after all, what a beta test is all about!
Well, whatever gets you through the night I suppose, but ethics do not a better browser make. I use Linux and BSD too, but I don't particularly care whether or not I can sift through the source - I never have anyway. There are some free software users who are adult enough to admit when a Microsoft product is head, shoulders and torso above the OSS equivalent. This, much as you wish it wasn't so, is clearly such a case. If you use Windows in any aspect of your life (unlikely, based upon your pouty attitude), you are missing out on a genuinely good browser because of your childish unwillingness to use the best tool for the job.
I understand the loathing of Microsoft's business practices, licensing and marketing, but it takes an immature soul to not give the devil his due when his product is simply better. So, I hope you enjoy sifting through your Mozilla source (because you can) while I'm actually browsing the web.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
I'm very sorry.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
If indeed JSP is competative in speed, then tell me why it seems to get destroyed in any benchmark I've ever seen! Granted, I don't go out of my way to find such benchmarks, but it's tough to miss as I'm trolling the geek-news boards during the day. Please - point me to an unbiased test that proves your assertion.
What bothers me the most, and is the reason for my smart-assed comment to you originally, is that Java pundits tend to tell me that Java is now competative in speed, but the actual examples I have of Java are slower than evolution. Please, show me an application of any real size that is written in Java and is quick and stable, and I'll happily eat these words.
I await your reply.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
When will companies realize that anything that does not bring value to the user (and detracts in terms of program overhead and development costs) only serve to hurt the product (and therefore the company)? Netscape certainly isn't the only one at fault here. No one seems to realize that the best advertisement is useless if no one pays attention to it.
Who said anything about AOLers switching to Netscape 6? AOL has been based on IE for some time now (including the recently released AOL 6 client), and I haven't heard a word about that changing anytime in the future.
And as for the stupid cursors, where the hell are you surfing that you keep getting asked that? Comet cursor is wicked stupid, and I make a point of uninstalling it every time I come across a machine that has it.
Also, I stopped using Netscape a while ago because it would crash every time it read a page with an unclosed html tag. The mail client was fine, and we use netscape calender at work (the bastards discontinued it!), but navigator blows. If Netscape can't hack it, let them die
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Why is his father a prick for selling cheap bicycles? Should he instead screw his customers so that his competitors might have a better chance?
with humpy love,
with humpy love,
humpmonkey
In this article, specifically, I wonder how many people would change their stories if, all of a sudden, this article was reorganized in the database with the OS and Browser displayed in the footer of each comment (grabbed out of the HTTP headers with each request). Not that they would ever *do* that, but I think it would be interesting. Would that violate privacy? Most likely. What about for an AC?
--
if so, only incrementally. use the better browser. and that's clearly IE.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
The number of features that I used Netscape for over IE is dwindling.... I think all that's left is being able to go under File and hit Save As. IE is just so much more stable...I hate how after one thing "upsets" Netscape it won't work until it's rebooted. It also seems to support Java horribly. On the other hand, IE always gives me annoying Java debug errors cuz I have microsoft's J++ installed...And it uses all the windows default associations. A few annoyances. -Richie www.popcap.com
Dude... Lotus Notes is the worst piece of crap I've ever had the misfortune to be forced into using. ARG! What a sucky email client.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
...and build a damn browser based on it. The code is there. If Mozilla is GPL'd (and I have no idea what lic it's under) , FORK. Take the goodies, and run. The Open Source/OS's that work/**it that doesn't belong to Microsoft community needs an Open Source/free as in beer browser period. If Mozilla is not the answer. Start hacking. I guess it's about time I learned C/C++ anyway...
Monkey lover...
"...progress from M13, I STILL haven't had any better performance ... stability..."
wow, you're system must be really badly configured... somewhere around m16 it became MUCH more stable ('course i run win95, without the major ie leeches in place)
as for all these features (two levels up), i agree. almost *every* program nowadays seeems to be trying to be a swiss army knife. word will paint your house, outlook will serve you coffee, and mozilla will slice through that tomato.
lets all go back to when everything had to fit into 64k. well, ok, lotsa memory & processor power is cool, but just think how well everything would work if it was all done in assembly, by hand. sure, there'd be lots fewer programmers, but the few you'd have would at least be good programmers.
The responsibility to properly support Netscape has been abdicated by AOL. This means there is really only one browser. Which means Microsoft has succeeded in achieveing their goal of dictating the terms for internet use through domination of hte browser market, coupled with IE specific extensions provided by their development tools and servers.
As for Netscape, it is now officially a joke, in bad taste, poorly told. While just crippled by lack of support and idiotic "features" on most platforms, it is a bug-ridden crash-prone waste of disk space under Linux. Anyone saying otherwise either doesn't use it, or is a self-deluded simpleton. Is there any chance a component architecture, open source browser with support for current plug-ins and Java2 can be produced for use on linux?
And please, spare me the "XML will solve everything" idiocy.
Netscape has joined the dark side, and I get chills any time I try to use it.
/. 'michael' don't seem to understand is that there is nearly impossible for Netscape to compete with MSIE. The biggest complaints I hear are that Netscape is bloated and it takes too long to load up. MSIE would have the same problems if they hadn't embedded everything into the OS. You're loading MSIE when you boot up Windows. You have no choice. If Netscape was able to leverage Windows in the same manner with the Gecko engine, we'd all be in heaven.
/. saying how wonderful mozilla is, keep up the great work, blah blah blah. Then it's michael coming off looking like a class-A idiot.
Then why aren't you using Mozilla?
the terrible UI
Moot point. The UI is completely customizable. People will release all manners of UI replacements to choose from.
The problem is also that IE now functions so cleanly and so smoothly that Netscape is hardly a contender anymore.
As you and the clueless
I hate to say it folks, but the battle is drawing to a finish, and Microsoft is emerging as the victor.
Yes, Microsoft is currently winning, after illegaly leveraging their monopoly. Funny, I seem to remember a time when a company called Netscape was winning this war by a much larger margin, and everyone laughed at Microsoft's web browser. In other words, THE BROWSER "WAR" AIN'T EVER GOING TO BE OVER! It's dynamic. Anyone that tells me the browser war is over immediately earns a spot in my 'moron' bucket.
Netscape made some serious blunders, and while they may scoop in a few dollars before they go, they will likely disappear within the next few years.
Yeah right. And Linux will disappear in a few years. And Apache. And [insert open source project here.] Just because YOU might not be using something doesn't mean it has disappeared. Who cares if AOL drops Netscape development? It's too far along now, it will be used.
The software company I work for has stopped bothering to support Netscape because it is so divergent, and also because within the next year or so it will lose market share until it finds itself in the company of Opera and Lynx.
Please say what you really mean: your company is not going to support the HTML standards.
I'm really tired of these stupid flamefest articles on slashdot about Netscape/Mozilla/MSIE. One minute it's
It might help if the editors would just post the news instead of their opinions.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
I think you mean "subliminable" don't you?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I wouldn't be suprised. They did pull all the stops bet the farm gotta embrace the internet/kill Netscape getting it out. Then they had to keep trying to get it to beat Netscape. They put alot of effort into it to give it away free. Don't forget the cost the decision had on getting the DOJ attention and it's associated costs. This thing cost them a bundle.
The truth shall set you free!
It took them a few Billion dollars to equal the quality of an open source project. Think about the quality in open source in this regard next time.
The truth shall set you free!
What I think happened here is that michael got ahold of some of that stolen M$ code the other day, ran it, and this story is what came out in the middle of all the crashes and segfaults :P
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
i use the 6prebeta on three different plattforms. @work on a win2kdoze ( :(( ) and @home with macos9 and x86linux...
i wonder if anyone made the same expierence like my. there are huge differences between those binarybuilds...
lets say it like this
*windows-version is a crap
*linux-version is useable (but it is getting better if you compile those sources from mozilla on your on)
*but the macos version is only a dream!! it's even more stable than those common macbrowsers like the ie5 or ns4.5.
i love it. and it has crashed once since i use it. ( and i must say i'm a newmedia designer and i test all sites with it. sites with heavy javascript and plugin support)
i have tried to make my own privat benchmarks with ns6 and ie5 with specific sites on my localhost, just to see the speed the renderengines. and i must say - if you want speed - you have to use gecko. (if you are a mac user)
*mv /dev/m$ /dev null
-- xxx -----------------
However, Mozilla will still have a stronghold inside the Linux community up until the day that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer for Linux. Something not likely to happen for some time. Mozilla still has a chance, but it's going to take a lot of work on their part.
-- this
How about when you write HTML 4 code? How does it compare with the ease-of-use( or not) with IE code?
It's dirt like you who give Linux and the open source movement a very bad name. And it's also why more people aren't leaving Windows.
Would you go to a friends house if you knew his abusive alcholic father was there?
-Knight who proudly says neh!
I was under the impression that everyone was welcome here. In fact, isn't it good to have different opinions or are you moving for a completely communist world. Under your rational, noone is welcome anywhere. Who says you're qualified to be here at Slashdot? Ohhh, you run linux, your welcome. But someone like me, a Winblows user can't come and learn from comments here? It's getting harder every day because assholes like you make me feel inferior? Well we'll see when your still bickering here as I make my first million. Regardless of it's on Linux or Windows technology... maybe both. Point is you should shut your mouth and be thankful that you have the privaledge of FREE SOURCE and FREE SPEECH and FREEDOM in general. FUCK OFF!
-Knight who proudly says neh!
There are those of us (*gasp*) who don't have the luxury of standardizing to IE. You see, there is more to this world than Windows. I use MacOS X PB (iCab) and BeOS (x86) at home. Neither one of which has IE on them. There is no "Winner" of the Browser wars. I don't use Microsoft products.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Sooo michael what a great idea... use IE6... maybe you forgot that most of slashdotters like unix OSs. Tomorrow you should post "bitchX is not nice enough, let use mIRC..." (well at least he could say that it runs with wine)... How such a cool site like this with cool people like CmdrTaco, Hemos, timothy, etc... let this "Michael" be able write that? Maybe he was just looking to get the new slashdot comments record... :P
Until Mozilla gets some speed, it will never be accepted. In my mind this is the most debilitating factor of Mozilla.
/usr/doc/glic-doc in woody) takes 145 seconds on a current Mozilla snapshot!! Netscape 4.76 takes under 9 seconds to load the same file.
For example, trying to load the GNU 2.2 libc manual (a 3.4MB file - located in
Searches for text within a loaded file are also rediculously slow in Mozilla. On a long file, the closer you get to the bottom of the document, the longer the searches take! It can take many seconds for a search to advance just one line of text in a big document.
Not everything is bad though. Mozilla has definitely surpassed Netscape 4 in stability. But now work on the speed - it is more important than standards at this point.
Has anybody compared the memory footprints of the older Netscape (4.0 series) and the current Mozilla implementation?
:)
Netscape (or "nutscrape" as it is commonly referred to in WWW circles) is one of the most bloated POS applications i've ever had the displeasure of using. Who decided that it could install AOL IM without my permission? Besides the fact that placing the email client inside the same process as the browser is a moronic idea at best (Windows version).
Internet Explorer is currently being ported to various *nixes. If my sources are correct, you may in fact be able to find a version that runs on Linux as well. I hope so, because browsing the web with Netscape on any platform is a painful experience
-----
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Okay, Mozilla sucks ass. While it has gotten a lot better latley, it still crashes way too much. It dies on a number of ASP (I know I shouldn't surf anywhere that serves pages on IIS, but I can't avoid it) based site, and hangs at places like Buy.com, Maximumlinux.com forums, at ATI's web site when their java based navigation system tries to load, and a host of others. The email client is still unstable, and appears to have inherited the stupid address book bug from the previous versions of Netscape. So I am stuck with Nutscrape on Linux or booting a Winodws machine to browse the web. I spent the last 6 months using nothing but Linux, and while I am quite happy with all of the stability and power I have under Linux, the web browsing experience sucks. Plug in set up is a horror story, stability is the one thing completely lacking in Nutscrape, and the KDE2 browser actually manages to have uglier fonts than Netscape? How am I supposed to push Linux to the desktop on my network when I can't even find a decent browser? I can't tell my boss to back of on his Internet strategy while open source tries to build a decent looking or stable browser? Face reality, Mozilla/Nutscrape open source is a failure, it's way too late and still sucks. I don't like it, but IE is simply a better browser. I await your flames, rants, and taunts with much anticipation since I must be an idiot for not liking an open source project. The open source/Linux community hasn't produced a decent browser yet, and now they are set to do the same job on Star Office. At least I have 30 different text editors to choose from.
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
here,
here,
and my personal favorite,
here.
I love it when people spout that without even thinking.
Yeah, me too.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
The horror! Microsoft made a better product than netscape! Just mabey microsoft can make some good things, oh wait, the slashdotbot anti-MS F-U-D made most of you blind. M$ isnt always bad.
~ Detonating a nuclear device within the city limits will result in a 500 dollar fine.
Good point, Why use a free, superior, Microsoft browser when you can convince people to download a "sparkly" plugin like Flash. Cause Hey, flash is only $500 bucks, which isn't much different from a totally free Text editor. I was a Netscape Fan until I became a web-based software developer and realized that NS just doesn't work.
--Hi, I'm Bob--
Never mind using a different browser, www.microsoft.com doesn't even work properly with some versions of IE.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
You must be kidding.
Ever try using CSS with Netscape? Let alone CSS2?
Cascading Style Sheets are W3C supported standards, and IE is clearly the champ when it comes to supporting them. Netscape is at the bottom of the barrel and only has support for an extremely limited number of style tags.
In most cases i can agree with idea idea of keeping things simple. However, Netscape cant even support that right. Simple table tags bring Netscape's page rendering to a crawl.
If MS is forced to split any time soon, you can bet they will make IE for multiple platforms. Will people try it, or find an excuse not to?
-N
OK. I've got my Solaris box @ work and need the following:
- Browser. We develop web-enabled software, you see.
- Mail client. Must be able to do IMAP and POP at the same time.
So I struggled with Netscape 4.7x for a while, but man, the sluggishness. I mean, this is 2000. When I open a window (be it IE or netscape) on WIndows, it opens. Fast. When I click on a mail item, it shows up. Fast. So here is my kick-ass (must be, considering the price, and the fact that the rest of my toys run fine) Sun workstation and the fscking browser is like dead. So that's no good. So I try Mozilla M18 today. Guess what: lo and behold, it is even slower. I'm willing to take that for granted since I too believe in open source, but then the mail-experience starts. Having only a IMAP account works. It's not fast, but is works. I click on my mails and they (eventually) show up. Then I add a POP account, press 'Get Messages' and *poof* both browser and mail client gone. SEGV. Hrrm. Try again. *poof*.So that's not working. Luckily I have a PCI PC board in my Ultra 10, which is now used for IE browsing and Outlook Express mail and news reading. I've had it, and with me a bunch of other people that 10 years ago believed in X and Unix on the desktop. Let me tell you: it ain't gonna happen. Not as long as the only reason to run a Unix/X productivity app is political.
Flame away....
JdV!!
<Enter any 12-digit prime to continue>
Maybe you missed it, but let me inform you: The world is a web browser these days. A good browser is an integral part of my life these days, and therefore a productivity app (since it makes me productive, get it?) and for some reason noone @ netscape, sun, and mozilla seems to be able to give me the browser I need. A small example: Did you notice that all fonts you can select in Netscape under X are illegible or at least damaging to the eyes? It's a fact of life: browsing the web is a much more pleasant experience on Win32 then it is on Unix/X. I was out of the Unix world for about 3 yrs, and sort of hoped the situation had improved, but it has not.
Don't get me wrong: Unix is a great platform, but everything has its place. Its not neccessarilly the fault of the mozilla people that their app crashes, they work within the confinements of their chosen platform, and I think that X (and therefore anything built on top of it, including GNOME and KDE) is not the perfect vehicle to built web browsers that people who don't care about politics want to use. YMMV.
Getting fed up with Mozilla is no reason to believe that having good X-based productivity apps ain't gonna happen.
It is when you're waiting for ten years.
JdV!!
<Enter any 12-digit prime to continue>
What pisses me off is that we web developers have to create hokey ass hacks to make web pages with more than 5 lines of HTML display how we intend them in Netplate. (My new name for Netscape since it dishes out so much !@#$@%^.) Sometimes people say that Netplate just requires perfect code. While it is true that Netplate requires cleaner code, mine is absolutely perfect (How fucking hard is HTML, really?) and I routinely break Netscape. Even Mozilla doesn't display my W3C only HTML properly. @!$%&^#$*, our open source holy grail, mozilla, is just another fucking netplate with customary bloat et al.
Regards
Perhaps Mozilla team is also trying to take an unconventional open source project route, quality. Flame me all you like but open source projects are notorious for throwing whatever code they get submitted into the pot. This is how I compare software. Closed source software is like the food my mom makes. She follows recipes but it always sucks. Open source software is like the food my step father makes. He throws everything in the refridgerator into it and... it sucks. I am hard on the Mozilla team for just making another bloated ass browser, but I give credit where credit is due. I commend an attempt to get one of the most visable open source projects into a professional/quality track.
Regards
Isn't the whole reason we have an antitrust suit against microsoft because they forcable embedded the browser into the OS? Isn't that why windows isn't cut out for half the thing that Linux is? Because we can't seperate the browser from the os. We don't want IE ported to linux. Think of all the system files M$ would force us to install just to make it work. We'd no longer have the freedom that linux provides. If all the posts on this thread were converted into 1 line of code for Netscape each we'd probably have a better browser allready. Slashdot is becoming a bunch of Whinning Babies. We all know linux is better, We all know where the future lies. Stop flaming every post that comes up here cause it doesnt agree with your views. If I were working at M$ I'd have 3 people assigned to posting pro-M$ comments on /. all day since it would drain the opensource communities resources.
If there was an IE for Linux, I would be in heaven. I can't stand Netscape. At a job I used to work at, one of my colleagues and I were constantly bantering over which browser was better. He preffered Netscape saying that it was more stable. Yeah right. I'd say if I looked through my .bash_history file, 70% of it is probably "killall -9 netscape-navigator".
Half the pages on the Internet that use javascript cause Netscape to stop working, it doesn't fully support CSS, and nested tables can cause it to render pages in some 'unexpected' ways. The only reason I have a machine running Windows is for MS's browser. Web browsing is literally the only thing I do on that machine, as it is the only activity that I haven't been able to satisfactorily migrate to Linux. (Well, OK...That and MechWarrior 3!)
"My job is being right when other people are wrong." -- George Bernard Shaw
The problems mentioned in that article aren't only limited to the NS6 project, afterall. Mozilla has been in development for several years now, and it's kind of ridiculous that the thing doesn't even display the most basic HTML 4.0 pages with high accurracy.
Mozilla needs people to work on what really matters, and watching progress from M13, I STILL haven't had any better performance - either in speed, stability, or in page rendering. Which is why I don't use it. :P
In fact, the mistake with both IE and NS is in assuming that more is better. A simple, fast, reliable browser with no JavaScript, no Java, and no Flash animation would still be a good choice for most people. Both IE and NS fail to live up to that standard, and neither of them is getting any better. And neither, for that matter, are the web services that increasingly rely on those fancy and annoying feaures that these browsers are incorporating.
Always was until IE 5.0. NS 6.0 is more standards compliant than IE 5.5. Why all the bad press. Why doesn't this guy blast IE?
--
Here at the company I work for we use IE. I started out using Netscape a long time about but after a when M$ start put IE inside of the OS and started upgrading it to the point where I didn't care for downloading Netscape no more. I did check out Netscape 6 and I can't wait for them to get all the bugs out of it. Just remember every Windows platform from 98 on up will have IE on it(from what I know).
When I'm at work and we want to show some HTML inside of our program we use the IE Active X control... Why? Because we know every our day has it. Yeah it could sound odd but it makes it easier to program something like that nothing you don't have to tell the person to download it. Yeah, I do hate the fact that M$ have a cap on most of the computer market when it comes to me thing like that. I think if IE didn't start coming with every new M$ OS then Netscape wouldn't not have to do what they do to get money. I just think that's mean and down right evil... They knew what they was doing before they did it...
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
You know, for all the time that you morons spend posting, you could have coded your own perfectly-standards-compliant browser and followed MS's tactics and made enough money to contribute lots to the local needy tribe.
Microsoft hires a LOT of excellent coders who actually STAY there. If the /. collective would gather a few facts they would see this. Check out research.microsoft.com.
How much money do you think that division generates, morons?
If you look carefully, you find out that they developed the hated paper-clip. And some of these researchers are the same ones who advocated open source solutions and STILL DO, even while STILL IN THE EMPLOY OF MICROSOFT.
My point is, what is the big deal about Microsoft? I've always loved BSD, in all it's incarnations. I would much rather run it than ANYTHING including linux. But I've been working with BSD-based OS's, Linux, OS/2, CP/M (yes, it's still out there,) and Microsoft's Windows 2000 is the closest a third-party has come to perfecting the BSD model on the x86 platform.
And don't mention linux. Or should I say, don't mention KDE. KDE is a cheaper imitation of Windows. Don't even try to deny it. Look at the specification; it's all there.
Maybe the linuxites should concern themselves with BETTERING the bsd/windows ideal instead of trying to fucking duplicate it, and winding up looking like sodomites.
Nope, with all the reasoning IE still has a much larger user base.
Being available in all platforms is not an advantage .
Since you haven't used any of the latest versions of IE since you don't use Windows, you couldn't possible judge IE.
"Look at some of the Linux sites.
Netscape outranks IE by far"
True but IE doesn't even compete here. We're talking about the platform that both IE and NS compete in
The duality weakens
Am I on crack here? What does open source has to do with the quality of the product? Does the fact that a project is open source automatically qualify itself to be of highest standard?
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Dude, I am using Netscape 4.75 on Solaris 2.7 and it loads perfectly fine. What are you on about?
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The fact that IE has won the browser war is a big lie. You see the plain fact is that most of the US peeps on the internet are AOL users. To my dissapointment AOL6 still comes with IE. The reason most internet folk are IE users? They are mostly AOLers. If you discount AOLers I bet that less than 30% of the remaining users will be using any form of IE.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I have the latest and greatest (5.5)Microsoft browser at work. It is some of the buggiest software I have ever used. Not even up to Microsoft's usually low standards. The Mozilla beta I use at home is much more stable. Then there is the fact that Microsoft only complies with the standards that it owns and controls.
No thanks. I will use Mozilla, the one that is open, the one that has the source code available for it, the one that has the stated goal of complying with all W3C standards, the one that is recognized as being the most standards compliant, the one that can and has already been used as a foundation for custom products, the one that can run on any operating system and any hardware platform.
My opinion, the choice is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the world (and Slashdot) is full of no-brainers.
I'll often BOOKMARK a site I DON'T like, but that don't make it a FAVOURITE. I despise that whole microsoft attitude to serious computing of reducing everything to a peppy shopping experience. I refuse to be patronized by a damn browser. Netscape is the professional choice for thinking individuals with any shred of self respect. The obnoxious but pretty looking IE works only on Mac and Windoze, and so it don't really matter that it is 'compatible' with itself. Plus, IE is so full of security holes and it's much too integrated with the desktop filesystem browser so you can't make clear distinctions between web content and local information, and all these script holes walk all over that nonexisting barrier. Netscape is safe, smart, simple and it is distinctly different from local filesystem tools. I design all my sites to work with Netscape; then they work in IE as well. I could wish for greater 'standards compliance', but then again overdoing a site with flaky design is poor practice in my book. The net is about INFORMATION.
Sure I'll beta test IE.
When they write a version that will run with my OS and when they have their own Bugzilla!
Oh my god what is he talking about! Mozilla is sweet. I'd use the nightly over IE any day!
Another half-working, broke dick browser. That is exactly what this world needs. Woooohoooo! Where do I sign up? I actually think I might piss myself in anticipation.
Seriously, I have used netscape since I migrated to linux a little over a year ago. And I have not been impressed to say the least. The stability of it is about as flaky as my momma's best biscuits. I think that at this point the best strategy for them is to release a browser that works, does not bug out and shut down, and has fewer non-useful bells and whistles. They have already lost their chance at market share by putting half-assed browsers out there. It is abundantly obvious that their strategy so far has not worked that well. Maybe the should go quality instead of quantity.
I tried out one of the early version of beta 6.0 and could not get that damned side bar to go away. That, in itself, was enough to make me say piss on it and pray to the programming Gods that KDE's konqueror will be better.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
You don't HAVE to "upgrade" to something you don't like just because it is new and gets all the hype. Use Netscape 4.7 as long as that one is the best version there is for you. (like for me)
Mac users should use iCab; though still in beta it is far more standards compliant than IE or Netscape
Damn sheep....
god do i hate programming for netscape, ANY other browser looks better, ie being the best of course, this is in dreamweaver 3, there are a few things I could do to make it look better, but it already does in IE, guess its my way of getting people to not use Netscape...but I guess I enjoy the challenge of programming for different browsers
http://www.ariseweb.com - For the geek in all of us.
as a newbie /.'er, i really think its a sorry state of affairs when the one place i thought i could get away from the corporate amoeba starts pimping it, is really sad.
because of /., i started pimping linux and open source to all my friends (many of which are dissatisfied with M$), i even convinced my g/f to install Linux on her 'doze box.
since most of my frends are relatively ignorant, they all use IE and i find it much less stable than NS ever was. Sure NS crashes every once in awhile, IE crashes on me at least once a day! i'm constantly baraged with pages that fail to load, pages that don't load corectly, and more.
the one place where i thought i could find support against M$ rallies behind it. granted this is a fairly mute point compared the the grander scope of OS's in general, but look at the consequences.
1: IE is going the way of non-standard
2: web content will stop being viewable on anything other than IE (because webMasters have to code for the masses)
3: nothing else will be able to view the pages because M$ is constantly changing its "standards"
4: we'll all be forced to find a diff OS just to read /.
or ppl can stand up against the monstor and continue to support another choice
tap 2 blue, I counter that
Hey - I don't mean to condone full-fledged bashing of Netscape...it's what I use in linux, but it does need some help things I notice: Loading very LONG pages...after the HTML is downloaded, the browaser will sit there for a couple of seconds before displaying the page. And...um...anyone try to download Mpeg2 files with Netscape will find it totally garbles the file! You can find some kickass MPEG2 music videos at http://www.visionsvids.com/ and try to use netscape try out the garbling :-)
Microsoft's (I hate to say it) IE is..um...well...better at these tasks.
"How Trite"
I don't think I'd want to run any version of IE for Linux, because then that'd mean there might be a few bugs in my Slackware system!
And anyway - Microsoft is basically competing with Linux for market share (at least in the server area) and they wouldn't want to fuel their enemies with another product. I think they only make a version for Apple is because they are not a noticable "threat." make sense?
"How Trite"
"....all the other non-stadard extensions IE introduces. Frankly, the abandonment of Netscape is happening today, and the problem is going to accelerate. Unless some browser gets a toe hold in now, soon the web will be full of IE specific pages -- pages which follow no published standard, but instead are written to whatever implementation those guys at Redmond decides to give us....."
I am getting a little sick and tired of this line of reasoning. You can add what ever proprietary tags, scripts and whatnot to your browser, but unless there's a web server prepared to serve them, it wil serve you nothing! Last time I checked, Microsoft was still losing that battle to Apache, so shall we lay off of the proprietary extensions fable? OK?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The "Browser War", for anybody with a clue, is irrelevant. But of course, we must all follow the flock ... Baah, woeful sheep, baaaaaaah.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
Over the summer I worked at my school corporations technology department. I wondered why we had to install Netscape on every new computer we set up, and uninstall IE on every computer. This seemed like a MAJOR waste, considering how IE is the far better browser. I asked my boss, and he mumbled something about "Netscape is more secure, so we have a corporation wide Netscape only policy." Is Netscape more secure in any way, or is my school corporation "dumb."
I've been saying it all along... While Netscape was the Underdog and bigbad M$ came in, people just din't believe me. Now it's obvious. M$ has put it time and effort and came up with the better tools, Netscape has sold out. The only reason why Netscape always complained was that they knew from day one that they wouldn't stand a chance and that IE would end up being the better browser, simply because M$ has larger resources. So the milked the underdog thing for what it was worth [to maintain investor's confidence] and then sold out to AOL at a hefty profit. Nothing wrong with that - just BAU [business as usual]. But isn't it time that people started to boycott Netscape's mess-ups? For a developer like me, in Asia, where plenty people still use NN because of the original hype, it is frustrating that I can not use all the gadgets and abilities of the standard simply because Netscape choses not to support it Worse, they don't support things their own earlier versions supported, basically forcing me to rewrite sites each time they come up with a new browser. Netscape has outlived it's usefulness and it's expiry date was somewhere in 98. I also have a serious problem with all those 'geeks' who are unable to configure their browsers correctly. I mean, why does everyone have problems with IE carshing apart from me, the rest of our company, our system clients, and most other people I deal with that use IE ??? Lets's send the message, flame Netscape and if they don't react, torch AOL. Just my 1.14 cents...
Yes, it is faster to code for IE. It ignores a lot of bad coding.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
OK I just switched from BeOS to OpenBSD, can I use IE now?
I think it is time to redefine--or revisit--what constitutes "good" software.
Is IE an acceptable product? Of course. A rather nice product, if defined in terms of speed and functionality. Maybe not the best, but certainly a contender, as one can see by the posts.
However, speed and functionality are not the only issues of relevance in defining a "good" product.
Consider Office 2000, for example. I had always believed that Office was the only MS product that was deservedly superior to its competitors, and felt comfortable using it. I was disgusted, however, when receiving Office 2000, to find myself being required to send all sorts of information about myself to MS before I could use it. Not incredibly important info, but info nonetheless.
Is this sort of unnecessary intrusion into my life somehow less of an issue than speed or performance? No, of course not. When I have a choice between two products, such as Star Office and MS Office, that are of comparable performance, ridiculous requests for info about me become very relevant to my choice of product.
It is important to remember that privacy, security, and freedom are just as important as issues of speed and function in defining good software. All other things being approximately equal, which they increasingly are, I choose the product that respects me and my choice more.
Open source was never supposed to be only about functionality. It is one large part of its appeal and utility, but not the only one.
I think sometimes arguments about Netscape, IE, Mozilla, can get bogged down in technical details about speed, etc., which matter less and less anyway. Mozilla and IE are comparable now, will be even more so soon, and we should shift discussion back to other issues that distinguish products more.
Like it or not, most people don't even know there's a choice (despite the media linux gets). Computers pre-loaded with windows still dominate the market... you tell joe-schmoe who walks into any BestBuy, CompUSA, or CircuitCity or calls Gateway or any of those other bloated monsters that he doesn't have to use that OS and he'll say "OS? What's an OS?"
Money flows to Redmond because people are given the shaft from the getgo. This has nothing to do with liking their products, it has to do with not knowing any better.
At this point in time moreso than ever before, you can do practically everything you could do with windows on Linux. Applications are widely available for the win-converts to create/edit/etc the same files they would be creating/editing/etc on a winbox with practically 100% compatibility. Photoshop users? Use Gimp. M$ Office users? Use StarOffice5.2 ... these are just a couple of examples. If there are incompatibily issues for multimedia [ms twisting mpeg4 into asf], then know it is because the money-grubbing beast is trying to assert market-share based on the fact it is distributed on all the boxes the cattle are consuming. If they will use the format, then *bang* it is somehow supposed to be the acceptable standard. OpenSource is the only reason that cash-flow has a limit. People like you, and I, and thousands of others donate our skill and our talent in order to create a free computing alternative just as strong or stronger, just as viable or better than the one they would make you pay for.
Hell, I should know. I dual-booted between OSes for 4 years to maximize my computer's potential... now I don't bother. It's a linux box.
Mental Illness is the Road to Freedom!
I can see that you would make peace with the opposition, but come on... best bet?
I just posted this as a reply to the previous thread, seems it applies here too.
*snip* ... these are just a couple of examples. If there are incompatibily issues for multimedia [ms twisting mpeg4 into asf], then know it is because the money-grubbing beast is trying to assert market-share based on the fact it is distributed on all the boxes the cattle are consuming. If they will use the format, then *bang* it is somehow supposed to be the acceptable standard. OpenSource is the only reason that cash-flow has a limit. People like you, and I, and thousands of others donate our skill and our talent in order to create a free computing alternative just as strong or stronger, just as viable or better than the one they would make you pay for.
At this point in time moreso than ever before, you can do practically everything you could do with windows on Linux. Applications are widely available for the win-converts to create/edit/etc the same files they would be creating/editing/etc on a winbox with practically 100% compatibility. Photoshop users? Use GIMP. M$ Office users? Use StarOffice5.2
*snip*
Hell, I should know. I dual-booted between OSes for 4 years to maximize my computer's potential... now I don't bother. It's a linux box. Mental Illness is the Road to Freedom!
Then many sites don't work at all, not just Microsoft's MSDN. If they sense IE, they insist you turn VB on. With Netscape, some use Javascripts, yes, but that tends most of the time to cause minor problems (like font color or size not right if you don't override them).
I use IE only to view Microsoft's sites. Their primordial bookmarking "technology" as well as the safety & privacy problems will take some evolving before I'll use them for anything else. I'd rather put up with occasional Netscape's lockups (4.75 is a bit more stable) than get continuosly annoyed by the IE's nonsense.
I guess it's a matter of taste, like picking between Bush & Gore -- do you like your president more dumb than rotten or more rotten than dumb. I think the "more dumb than rotten" one can do less damage than the "more rotten than dumb" one.
Manually to undo the aphabetic sort on 5000 links? Thanks for the hot tip. You ought to publish your "IE Secrets," it would be a terrible thing for all that wisdom to go waste here on slashdot.
Just create subfolders and place the links inside them.
Again to restructure 5000 links manually? You probably also think it was a stroke of Microft genius to make each link be its own file, taking 20 times more disk space than the data it contains.
I guess, my wondering who could have thought up stuff like that is over. There are obviously folks for whom sorting manually lists of 5000 items (for which there was no reason or request for the browser to re-sort in the first place), is a neat way to spend a weekend.
not only that, your complaining that IE5 supports it but gives you the option to NOT install support for VB? wow.......
You're confusing causes and consequences. In your upside-down world, the way things came to be the way they are is that poor little Gates probably noticed that many sites had Vbscript support lately, and then he said to his VPs, lets include VB support into IE.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that, judging from the replies here, the admirers of IE appear to be a particular kind of self-selected sample biased toward aversion to logic, propensity for busy needless work ("why use brains when hands will do" breed),...
IE is nice and everything, but some operating systems can't use it since M$ won't be porting it to certain systems anytime soon. The nice thing about Mozilla is that it will run on many platforms including GNU/Linux. I'm guessing that IE6 won't be released for anything other than windows or mac.
Even though Netscape does have some lame features such as AOL instant messenger and the shopping button, it isn't that bad. The thing that I really love about Netscape is that it doesn't integrate with the OS like IE does. Separation of the OS and its applications (such as a web browser) is a good thing.
We have standardized on Netscape communicator at work as well. I feel that netscape is the better browser than IE because it doesn't integrate itself with the OS. Since we have also standardized on netscape messenger as our email client on all workstations, navigator is an easy choice for our web browser. I don't necessarily like the bloated nature of netscape, but it does have advantages. Even though it takes longer to load initially, separate windows and instances load instantly as long as communicator is still running.
:( So there are tradeoffs, but I still think that it is a great program.
Of course the downside is that if communicator crashes for any reason, it takes your email and all browser windows with it
I for one will be very glad if netscape loses the battle. I do tech support for a large ISP and man... every second call is a problem with netscape.. whether it be java script errors.. the 4.76 bug, why there netscape 6.0 is giving them illegal operations and of course my favorite is the disapeering or corrupting mail folder. If i hear the words "it says illegal operation" I immediately ask are you using netscape. Its kind of sad tho.. I used netscape 4.0 for a long time then decided to give the "evil" microsoft a try and I never switched back. Well on the brighter side if netscape didn't suck so much I wouldn't have job.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I agree, Netscape is getting too focused on revenue and not focused on usability. Unfortunate as it is, it is true
-- "Hey Bob, come look! I've never seen a penguin so small!"
I became thoroughly disenchanted with Netscape's direction several months ago and was facing the dismal prospect of making IE my primary browser because it had outstripped Netscape in so many categories. Fortunately, it was about this time that I downloaded Opera in the first time. It took a little getting used to, but I'll never go back. Opera is incredibly lean and fast, and has more tools for tweaking and customizing than even a control freak like myself knows what to do with. I still keep Netscape and IE on my hard drive for the occasional WebSite that will only speak to one kind of browser or another, but for 99% of the sites I visit I never touch the old guard programs at all.
Try it, you might like it: www.operasoftware.com. (No, I am not affiliated with the Opera team in any way).
Chaucer Wells
Inspite of being anti microsoft, anyone who codes dhtml / css / javascript knows what a pain in the ass getting pages to work in both Netscape and IE is. What really gets me about Netscape 6 is after all the careful balancing work and branching Javascript code we have to use to get our features working in both browsers, Netscape 6 doesn't even support the things that used to work in 4.7. This means major code rewrites on a large number of sites just to get back to where we were with the previous version. Netscape never really supported CSS to even CSS1 compliance and 6 was supposed to fix it for good. The fact of the matter is, even IE4 has better support for CSS standards than Netscape 6. We have all these great technologies that the w3c keeps churning out and all we get are half-assed implementations. Now Microsoft's compliance isn't perfect, but its a LOT better than Netscape's. Its enough to make you want to write your own browser.
I never thought this day would come. When a nice OS-project (imho) gets banked on and a product from the gates of hell gets promoted instead... on Slashdot! What have the world become... /CulDee
There's always flash! *running, ducking, jinking*
be0wulfe
Let me start by saying NS6 is (going to be, for those of you that say it is not released yet) the more standards compliant browser than IE.
For everyone who has ever been involved in the software industry these things should not come as a surprize.
When developing software there, every time a releasedate is aproaching two parallel development paths are followed:
1. Concetrating on ongoing development toward the release after this one.
2. Concentrating on testing, stabilizing and polishing the release version.
Path 1. is being persued by the mozilla organisation and is being conducted in public (more on that later)
Path 2. is being persued by AOL/Netscape
The reason this happens is when path 2 is finished path 1 has progressed and has aquired new features, found and fixed flaws that were not apparent when path 2 started.
This does not mean these things will not be available to people using the release version, allthough it does mean it will be in a next release. The reality is when you want to release a version the line for that release has to be drawn somewhere and in real life this line has to be drawn somewhere before perfection.
I would be very much surprised if this would not prove to be the case in many other industries. I for one would not like to wait until has a car in the showroom that according to their engineers is the best possible car they can produce. And the minute they do I take pity on any of their customers choosing to buy the next model.
The only reason why netscape is being given so much critisism I can think of at this point is because the efforts leading to their next release is out in the open. This is something some people are not used to and as a result have trouble putting into perspective.
So there; the way I see it this is for the most part a complaint about software development out in the open.
As for the points in your petition:
1. Renaming Navigator 6.0 to beta and incorporate patches
This will only lead to the same discussion come the time for the new release date. See above, again there will be new patches and features in the development branch, someone will browse bugzilla and a website will run a story like this.
NS 6.0 scores better than the competition on standards compliance tests, this way you deprive us of having the most standards compliant browser at this time shipping to end users.
2. Refocus on standards compliance.
Your gripe with Netscape cannot possibly be about standards compliance. They are about to ship the most standards compliant browser they have ever put out. Arguably even the best in this field available today.
3. Postpone final release until it is more "robustly standards compliant"
Yo are reiterating point 1. Anyone interested see point 1.
That's it for me, I don't normaly take the time to post in forums, but I feel this needed to be said.
Are we slashdotters so fed up in our rage against micro$oft that we won't even give them credit when they do something right? Geeze, give credit where credit is due. IE supports more standards, uses less resources and has less anoying features than netscape and crashes less. I like netscape because it provided micro$loth with much needed competition and made them make something good for once. If you guys will remember, for a while, Microshaft was playing catchup to netscape, but came from behind to catchup and surpass them. Yes there is talent there, and IE is evidence of it, but MS has to have major competition before it uses it. Thats one of the reasons why Windoze is sooo sloppy
One simple reason, why NN 6 is not compatible to what worked in NN 4.7: DHTML in NN 4.7 was not standards compatible. DHTML in IE * is not standards compatible either.
Mozilla is W3C-standards compatible, while nearly all webpages out there aren't. Most webpages are only NN and IE compatible. But who is to blame here? The programmers of a fully standards compatible browser, or all these silly web "designers" out there who don't follow standards? Yes, to support NN + IE in it currents version they had to tweak the standard, but it is still possible to write DHTML code which will work in all three browsers.
It seems that Netscape is pushing W3C standards the hard way by simply refusing to accept old shit pages.
So you are simply wrong. IE4 has _not_ better support for CSS standards than NN6. It has worse. NN 4.7 and IE * are the same shit when it comes to standards compliance.
So if you want to stay compatible you have to code in three standards: NN 4.7, IE plus the ultimate W3C-compliant. Hopefully Microsoft will turn to the W3C-track too.
- Netscape - fast, sucks for resizing, basically a dead product
- Mozilla - slow and bloated (though beta), lots of bells, whistles, and extra shit. Nice for resizing and rendering (IMHO) but still slow. Currently this and mozilla are the only ways that you can use verisign Certs (that I know of) in internet mail
- Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) based on the mozilla browser so it renders nicely, missing some important features at the moment (cookies, ssl), but under heavy development
- Opera - small, fast light. Rendering not as good as mozilla (IMO) but more feature complete than galeon, but it's not free IIRC, so people are going to rebel against this I think
- Konquerer - fast, nice, requires KDE libs but can run nicely on a helix gnome system. No support for stylesheets from what I've seen, but a very nice file browser. Stability issues and not complete html spec compliance are problems though.
- Lynx - for the purists only
:)
- Linx - for the new purist, a text based web browser that renders tables and forms wonderfully, but it still lacks gfx and plugins and everything that make this wonderful "web" the way it is today
:)
So have I missed any? I probably have. My point is that netscape and mozilla may suck the bone right now, but they are still the best that we poor linux users have. I agree, IE is a good browser (I don't think it would be as fast as it appears to be if it weren't loaded with the OS, and because of that OS integration it has some problems that I've had as well as that whole "crash your browser crash your OS" thing, but these are relatively small issues.Personally I use mozilla for my mail and browsing, galeon for my browsing when I'm not going to slashdot or some cookied site, and that's about it. When in windows (seldom) I either use mozilla nightlys or ie (but I feel dirty when I do it).
The "problem" is, NETSCAPE 6 DOESN'T EXIST! No such thing, and won't appear for months. No one uses prereleases. There is no product yet, and when there will be one, most likely it will be based on whatever Mozilla developers will have by then -- and even now most of mentioned bugs are fixed.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What sort of old-school Unix hacker are you?
:)
The Unix answer to non-anti-aliased fonts is (and long has been) an insanely high resolution. If you aren't doing that, it's Your Own Damn Fault. You think that TrueType fonts look better? So do I, I use 'em. Or just run Lynx in text mode. That always works better.
Why the fsck is X an imperfect platform for building web browsers? It's a fscking DISPLAY PROTOCOL. It doesn't care what the app on top of it is -- indeed, it cares much less than the win32 GDI. While X allows network-based abstraction, SHM-based communications and other such stuff is also available for speed, so don't give me that kind of excuse. Anyhow, I fail to see how X the display protocol is any worse than the win32 GDI for building browsers. Please explain.
And as for Mozilla, they don't work with the constraints of X. The whole reason they're behind schedule is that they built their own platform/abstraction layer to free them from such constraints. I don't see how you get off blaming X for Mozilla's crashes, either -- or, for that matter, how a 10-year Unix guy could stand to use a graphical mail reader for five minutes.
Frankly, I get the impression that you're more the kind of person cut out to be a Windows user. If you like doing things the Windows way, Windows does that better than Unix. If you like the Unix way, nothing else compares.
Two words: font rendering.
:)
Oh, yeah. That.
What X server are you using? Text is still transmitted to the X server as use-this-font, print-this-text... it's not as if bitmaps are being sent all the way from Xlib. If you have issues with font rendering speed, it's primarily a problem with the server, not the protocol.
882 root 19 0 291M 291M 3900 R 5.5 116.8 7:30 X
/proc/meminfo
Moral of the story? Never believe top. It's inaccurate as hell.
When sorting by memory usage, I have a screen full of processes reporting 134 or 135 megs of mem usage! (kdeinit, xmms)
Guess what other system tools report:
cat
Mem: 261861376 259076096 2785280 0 3002368 112926720
Swap: 263135232 0 263135232
MemTotal: 255724 kB
MemFree: 2720 kB
Yes, that's right, I have 256 M and no swap used... Yet X claims to use more than my system memory. Again, don't trust top.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As I said, X is not the only app that's having its memory grossly misreported. There's NO WAY in hell that xmms us using 135 megs, even for all process combined. Same for kdeinit.
top is just plain confused...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It does CSS better than Netscape, at least...
Two complaints about Konqueror:
Its cookie filtering sometimes rejects even cookies you've told it to accept. (staples.com, www.nerfonline.net)
I haven't figured out how to get java applets to display in the page instead of a seperate windows.
Also, it fails to display the list of supported Linux USB devices (not linux-usb.org, but linked to from the site) properly. About the only page that has a problem, tho.
All in all, I love Konqueror. Sadly, there's an occasional page that requires me to go back to Netscape, but in most cases it kicks the crap out of NS. (Note, I've always hated IE, always will, its UI just plain sucks.) I have deleted all of my Netscape launchers from my desktop, tho...
BTW, one note: I'm a rabid GNOME fan, and I still have GNOME as my primary desktop env. But Konqueror is worth installing the KDE libs and everything else needed...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Oh come off it, IE for Windows isn't even compliant with the standards Microsoft originally *proposed* to the W3C!
You want to cry, go try IE for Mac, the closest thing to a truely standards-compliant browser. After using it for an hour you'll wonder how the same company could have put out both (except for the icon sets and registered trademarks attached).
and start beta testing it. What's that? There isn't one? Well, shit, let's forget about Linux then.
Oh wait, who's paying for your servers and bandwidth? VA Linux you say? Hmm, that's odd.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Now, before you call me a Windoze luser, I use Windows2k for my browser and to play Half-life (counter-strike), linux on my Alpha as a squid web proxy and file server, Solaris on my Sparc, and OpenBSD for my NAT'ing firewall. I like to think that I'm above all this mindless nonsense of the OS flamewars.
5 years ago people on the comp.os.linux.advocacy usenet group sounded exactly the same way most people on Slashdot sound today and it's really tiring. Nerds, ESPECIALLY nerds, should except that a person likes to use different OS's that meet their specific needs. There's nothing wrong with that! To blindly advocate an OS as the end-all-to-be-all operating system is ridiculous. Linux is severely lacking in multimedia and 3D support for example. I have a hard time even justifying a reason why I would need to dual boot my Win2k box to Linux anymore. There just isn't anything there I need that I can't do just as well, if not better, under Win2k.
So, take this all with a grain of salt and I will put on my flame-retardant suit.
Then why use 4.7 rather than 3.0???
:)
hawk, who generally uses lynx, anyway
I use daily Mozilla snapshots and IE regularly. I prefer Mozilla by an order of magnitude. IE is always asking me to install stupid cursors, playing awful music (which I finally figured out how to turn off), crashing the whole system, it doesn't have a first order accessible "Go" menu, can't middle click to spawn (what the hell is that weird scrolly thing that pops up?), I can't seem to find a way to turn off Java and JavaScript, etc. Mozilla ain't perfect, but its infintely preferable for the way I want to experience the web.
When I don't use Mozilla, I use links (no, not lynx), a very excellent text-mode browser that supports frames and tables very very well.
m.
Loki Software, Inc.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
Uh, those are just threads--they share the same address space.
It's just using 25M.
m.
Loki Software, Inc.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
Uhh. AOL is putting all of this "neat" stuff into Mozilla because they eventually plan on using it. Since they are paying for the coders, you can't hardly blame them for adding features that they find useful.
Somehow I imagine that things like AIM and AOL email are going to be very important to AOL users. If you don't like the Netscape preview, I would reccomend taking a look at Mozilla (it's different).
Standards support must be Mozilla/Netscape's top priority; anything else needs to be secondary. I'd rather have a compliant browser in a couple more months than a partially-compliant browser now. It's interesting to note, however, how few bugs are actually cited in the linked article.
About the IE comment, though... I use IE and Netscape on a regular basis, both Mac and Windows. While IE5 beats Netscape4 on both platforms, currently Mozilla beats both of them. It's progressed to the point where it's more stable than either of the two, its standards support is higher (though IE5/Mac comes close), and -much to my surprise- it's actually fast now (if your last experience with Mozilla is the Netscape preview releases, I strongly suggest you give the current nightlies another look).
That last part is actually quite a shame; if they hadn't bothered with fluff like cross-platform skinning, they'd have a damn fast browser out by now. But, so be it. It's still the best out there, and I say they should take all the time I need to just plain get it right the first time.
----------
What exactly are you smoking? michael has not presented any evidence to support his claim that IE has "won the browser wars." Certainly there exists plenty of evidence for this claim, but michael has not presented a whit of it.
michael has not presented any evidence that "[IE] is clearly a better browser." First off, there is the familiar refrain that I can't run IE because for various reasons (among them not wanting to spend $5000 to get an unlimited-client web, mail, file, and login server) I must run Linux. Hard to argue that IE is better for me when I can't run it. Second, Mozilla and Konqueror are actually very high quality products right now. Mozilla in particular when compiled with optimizations and no debug (that is to say, do not use a precompiled nightly build) is as flighty on its feet as IE. Believe me I know: I've used IE on friends' boxes, and I use Mozilla on mine. No I'm not saying this is easy to do right now, but it will be once Mozilla hits 1.0.
Finally, michael's claim that IE "will [always] remain" better than the competition is utterly unsupported, and indeed unsupportable, by any evidence. In theory his other two claims above could have been backed by evidence if he had chosen to present it, but I don't see any conceivable line of reasoning that could prove IE will be on top forever.
You're not being fair here. The two projects utilizing blizzard's gtkembed widget (part of Mozilla), the galeon and skipstone browsers, have gotten plenty of support in the form of patches, translations, and testing. I don't know for sure why they didn't contribute to Mozilla. Maybe they did and nobody noticed. Maybe they didn't feel that their contribution would make a difference. The point is they were always willing.
Amazing? Back when the project started, the goal was to release 5.0 in under six months. Even removing the first year working on the old code base, it's still very late. And as much as I'd like to use something not 4.7X, mozilla's unresponsive nature, slow loading time, cookie problems (in the widget), size, and unreliability still keep me from switching over full time.
I can't speak for any of them, of course, but there are people in every technology company (excepting perhaps Microsoft) whose love of technology is greater than their love of money.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I read the article, and it makes some very good points. It's all about how Mozilla has fixes available for a number of bugs, but Netscape has temporarily forked so they can get a 6.0 release out, and they're not applying Mozilla fixes until after the release.
A very good article, whose discussion here was completely ruined by being posted to Slashdot in an inflammatory way. We could have had a nice, intelligent discussion, but the words "IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so" sparked the usual flamefest. This was completely unnecessary, and terribly irresponsible.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Score: [-1, Flamebait] but /. ate it. Oh well.
IAAL,BIANLY
Your reply is so typical of your party affiliation. So, let me get this straight. You want my father to purposefully do a crappy job running his business so that his competitors can be successful? *laugh* The world just doesn't work that way, buddy. If you believe in evolution (hell, maybe YOU don't), you believe in competition. For the everyday Joe, competition is wonderful. The competition amongst bicycle stores here in town has been wonderful for the consumer. They used to pay $100 for a nice saddle for their bike--now they pay $70. In 1985, most bicycle stores in this country were small and poorly stocked. Walk in any sucessful bicycle store nowadays and you will be amazed. The good stores now have damned near every product on the market and they have them in large quantities, with good prices. The stores are clean and well-lit with knowledgable staff. And you say this is BAD? Fine, Nader boy, live as if it was 1975 if you want. Me, I'm happy with the low prices and selection that our free market has given us all.
As for your father, is he now overcharging his customers? Is he giving bicycles away free to push his competitors out of the market?
Actually, no. Our online sales have brought prices down in our store to unheard of levels. As I said, in 1985, you'd pay close to $100 for a really good saddle for your bike. You'll pay $70 for the same saddle . This is not just at my father's store--this is at all good bicycle stores. Yep, our competitors are (mostly) still around. They still have the moldy-smelling poorly-lit stores with high prices that they did back then. But why should you, as the consumer, settle for that?
Like it or not, this is what the consumers of this country are demanding. This is exactly why stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble are so popular. People were sick of going to the local record shop and getting a crappy selection and paying high prices for their purchases.
And no, my father's store didn't come on the scene like Border's with millions of dollars of investors' money. He started in a room of an old house with a few bikes, fixing tubes. It's really not about my father, though. There are thousands of good businessmen and women like him. In this day and age, the world of business is survival of the fittest.
I don't discount your story. On some hardware, Win2k may be flaky. Same goes for Linux and FreeBSD, believe it or not.
I run Win2k here on 40 Dell machines and I've never had a crash. You might look into upgrading your firmware on your Dells. We had a horrible time with buggy BIOSes on our machines (both Win2k and FreeBSD) until we upgraded BIOS revision.
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/ecommerce/ ccvs/
Your assertion that RedHat doesn't make closed-source software is entirely incorrect. CCVS is closed source. I think they also have some clustering/HA software that is closed source.
It matters not how good the software is. Slashdot is (supposed to be anyways) a community of open source advocates and MS is the antichrist to open source.
I disagree. Slashdot is "news for nerds", nothing else. Yes, there are many open source advocates here but that is not what this forum is about. Open Source, however noble, is not the end-all be-all. The common (but not formally sanctioned) belief amongst the open source crowd is that big business is inherently bad. This is something that I used to believe strongly back in 94 or so but since I left college and went into the real world, I'm beginning to see that there is a place for both open source and closed source.
What is good about Windows? Well, for one, it's very easy to use when compared to *BSD and Linux. As much as I love UNIX, I'd never install it on my grandparents' computer. I'd like to say that KDE and GNOME were "there" and ready to be used by folks like my grandmother but they just aren't. And really, the windowing environment is only the beginning. If my grandmother saw the disk partitioning tools included with most UNIX OSes (even the newer versions of RedHat), she'd probably keel over. Never mind user accounts and setting up networking. It just ain't happening right now. Maybe in 5 years but not now.
These people are nasty evil people who got to the top by crushing anybody who got in their way.
I hate to say it, my friend, but that is business for you. Most successful companies got that way by edging less dominant competitors out of the markey. My father, who owns some bicycle stores, is now the largest dealer in South Texas not because he kept expanding his store (he did) but because his cuthroat prices have driven his competitors out of business. There is nothing wrong with this! It's life. Business is not fair!
Giving these people absolute control of any key technology is the same as shooting yourself in the head.
Pardon? Who said that anyone has absolute control over the browser market? Have the police knocked on your door and told you that you cannot use Netscape (or links, mosaic, etc)? If you don't like it, don't use it.
</rant>
I agree with your general message.
However, as a Java programmer, I take exception to your exhaltation of Netscape and condemning of Microsoft.
The Microsoft JVM included in IE is 10x the VM of the Netscape JVM. The Netscape JVM never worked well. It was slow, buggy, and crashed Netscape more often than it worked.
The IE JVM didn't support JNI (the Sun standard for accessing native code--that is, C, C++, and the like). Other than that, it was pretty decent.
Yes, Microsoft attempted to sabotage the Java platform. But the reason the Java platform sucks inside browsers is much more Netscape's fault than Microsoft's.
--Be human.
Why? Because you're not one?
Java is a wonderful language. I was a 4-year veteran of C++ when I took up Java 4 years ago. Before that, I had another 4 years professional experience with C. And before that I had 9 years unprofessional experience with Basic, Pascal, Lisp, and Assembler. I have dabbled a bit with Cobol, Fortran, and Perl during my professional career, as well. I can tell you that I am probably on the order of four times more productive in Java than the next closest language (C++) when working on anything but the smallest of projects.
I have done client side and server side Java, and have not had *any* problems porting applications between Linux, BSD, Solaris, HP/UX, Windows, and AIX since JDK1.2.2 (yes, there were some problemsm before that, especially with JDK 1.1.6 and before). The speed for client-side programming is worse than native languages. But, as my degrees and experience have taught me, Moore's Law makes my programming efficiency far more important my computer's efficiency. And bug-free coding (the goal, not the reality) is many times more important than either (Java makes bug-free coding much easier). Server side programming, when taking advantage of the object pooling available to servlets and JSPs (i.e. not writing dumb code, from which the benchmark published in slashdot a few weeks ago suffered) is actually faster than other languages besides mod_php and mod_perl, and is neck-and-neck with those.
If you're judging Java based upon the performance and functionality of the JVM in your browser, or of the JVMs that were available 2 years ago, you're selling Java short. It's a very good language.
Oh, and you can make tons of money coding in it, too. I like money.
--Be human.
The reason JSPs do well in real terms is that they do object pooling for JSP resources. This means that each subsequent call to a page simply results in the servlet container grabbing a pre-allocated object from the pool and using it. ASP, Cold Fusion, and others don't do this. ASP+ does, and will likely match or exceed JSP & servlet performance (JSPs are servlets--they get compiled into a servlet the first time they are accessed).
r u.htm (there's a line that reads: "Not to anger anybody or wage a war, but we've found that our jsp pages used with these jdbc drivers with pooled connections are way faster than ASP pages. :)" -- the article on slashdot used the JDBC-ODBC bridge, which is an absolute no-no w.r.t. performance for anyone with a clue about Java)
. html (a more general look at performance of Java vs. native code)
m ments/threadbody.asp?aID=864&collapse=0 (Microsoft's own site--discussion about MTS vs. J2EE discusses Excite.com switching from ASP to JSP and getting "big improvements in throughput")
Furthermore, object pooling for database resources, among others, is very easy in Java. This is where the benchmark posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago fell down. The benchmark allocated a new database connection each time the page was accessed. It is very difficult to avoid this with server-side technologies that allocate new space on the heap for each request (it can be done, but it is a pain in the butt), whereas it is the default mechanism when using the J2EE javax.sql package.
mod_php and mod_perl can also do object pooling. This is why they outperform JSPs in typical settings (i.e. unless mod_php and mod_perl are poorly set up).
Cold Fusion, ASP, and most other server-side technology make object pooling extremely difficult. For this reason, Microsoft changed the architecture for ASP+, and have borrowed many ideas from JSPs (just like JSPs borrowed many ideas from ASP in the first place).
Here are a few benchmarks. Realize that server-side performance depends not only on the JVM chosen (use HotSpot), but also on the servlet container (JRun and Orion outperform Tomcat, the *reference* implementation, by 3-5x)
http://www.orionserver.com/ (click on benchmarks)
http://www.soft.lv/docs/jsp/jspjgurufaq/jsp_jgu
http://www.javaworld.com/jw-02-1998/jw-02-jperf
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-online/shared/co
Our own benchmarks compared mod_perl, mod_php, ASP, JSP, and Cold Fusion for a relatively simple app. We were dynamically pulling content from a database to build pages for a portal that we were building. We tried to be intelligent about the code we wrote. I'm afraid I don't have the exact results, but our observations were that mod_perl was the fastest, mod_php was about 10% slower, JSPs were about 20% slower than mod_perl, and ASP and Cold Fusion were about 1/4 the speed of mod_perl. The rich environment Java gives us in terms of OO development, JSP tag libraries (create your own HTML tags!), and Java's rich built-in libraries made the choice an easy one.
As for client code, most problems I've seen are:
a) running the JVM with too little memory (the heap size is static when starting the JVM, and defaults to 16MB)
b) running Java on a machine w/ too little memory (to avoid swapping, I recommend 64MB or more)
c) using an older JVM (the garbage collection on older JVMs tends to do nothing for long periods of time, then suspends the process for 5 seconds or longer with JVMs that have poor garbage collection implementations--HotSpot's garbage collection is pretty good, as is Microsoft's JVM.
d) writing code ignorant of the fact that garbage collection is automatic (use object pools to avoid garbage collection costs)
About two years ago, I was in charge of re-writing a raster graphics rendering package used to render seismic data. The old code consisted of a C++ library (shared between our C++ and Java libraries) wrapped by a thin Java layer using JNI. The pure-Java code outperformed the wrapped code by about 5-1 (calling native code from Java results in 2 memory copies of the data for each call--once to enter the native code, once to return). Our pure native code (all C++, no Java) was getting about 20 fps at 1280x1024 on a PII-450. Our Java wrappers were getting about 1-2 fps. Our pure Java code was getting about 6-8 fps (jdk1.2.x). The code was reading the data from disk, converting IBM floating point to IEEE floating point (yes, the oil industry still uses IBM FP), interpolating the data, and rasterizing the data. Once the data was cached (we cached data before the interpolation process), the speed doubled. All in all, that is very acceptable performance. This code actually exposed a floating point math bug in the HotSpot compiler that resulted in HotSpot being about 10x slower than jdk1.2.2 at the time--our code was later incorporated into Sun's internal test suite for HotSpot (we were alpha testers of HotSpot). At this company, a colleague of mine uncovered another bug in Sun's implementation of AWT (their windowing code) that resulted in bypassing hardware video acceleration for all graphic copies (like using the scrollbars). This bug fix resulted in Sun's announcement a while back that "client side performance will see performance improvements as much as 8x".
As you can see, Java's performance problems in the early days was greatly hindered by poor implementations. That should be expected with any reasonably young technology. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Java is a good technology. Current implementations are actually quite decent. Server side performance often bests native code. Client side performance can be quite reasonable. And no more seg faults and memory i/o errors. Debugging cycles are reduced to about 1/5 to 1/10 that of native code debugging. And, in the end, my time is far more valuable than my computer's. Besides, Moore's Law helps make everything copasetic (just ask Microsoft--they've taken advantage of this with every subsequent release of their OS and software).
--Be human.
Please e-mail me so we can take this offline. You don't publish your e-mail (I understand that; however, I have no problems pushing "delete" for the 30+ spams I get each day). I'd love to discuss this further.
Oh, to get an adequate feeling of performance of Java, please don't use Netscape's VM. Besides being absolutely buggy, it's also the slowest damn thing on earth. Microsoft's is much better, but there are better JVMs available now from Sun and IBM. Download the latest Java plug-in from Sun if you really want to get a good feeling of Java's performance with applets.
That said, I am not a big fan of applets. I don't really do too much with applets. I feel that either a stand-alone application makes more sense, or moving the entire application server-side makes sense. Applets can be useful for certain things (keeping an app server-side, but getting real-time updates of data, for instance).
I will argue that Java's server-side performance is now competative in speed. However, I agree wholeheartedly that client-side performance is still 1/4 to 1/10 the speed of native code. I simply value my programming time far more than my machine's performance (my 2+ year old PII-450 still serves me fine).
--Be human.
Well, that's a cute common argument, but the fact is that the editor is almost free. The parser style, and toolkit code already exists to support the browser, and the editor code itself already exists to support HTML form controls like TEXTAREA.
Dave Flanagan's petition comes too late to do any good. Large-scale software projects don't decide to ship all of a sudden. The release of Netscape 6 has been planned for months, and check-ins to the Mozilla source tree have been restricted for a long time as part of the process of stabilizing the tree for shipping.
Flanagan may be right about PDT being way too conservative, but at this point it's better for everyone if Netscape 6 ships, because it means the Mozilla source tree will open back up to continuing development by both third-party and Netscape developers. This means the Mozilla browser will get better quicker.
The other thing Flanagan misses is that the bugs he cites are minor issues with Mozilla's standards support, not major flaws. I reported an HTML4-compliance bug with Mozilla that got pushed off until after the release of Netscape 6 too. I wish it hadn't, but realistically this bug is not going to cause a great deal of trouble, especially not compared to the troubles IE causes by its lack of standards support.
Umm, no. YOU CANNOT TURN OFF PRELOADING OF THE IE COMPONENTS IN WINDOWS 98 AND LATER. Turning off active desktop does NOT stop the preload. Trust me, I've traced through explorer.exe more than I care to admit debugging stuff in Wine.
This is the best post I've seen on this subject in ages. Too bad I don't have any moderator points right now...
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
It does not properly support the dir attribute. This was a big disappointment, since there is a dirth of browsers with bidirectional support. (Note: konqueror.org claims it does have bidi support, but that doesn't seem to be the case.)
this should be taught to every child in school: it's much more dramatic, interesting and entertaining in today's service/entertainment economy to come up with a really innovative scheme to pass a math test than actually learning the material - heck anybody can do that with enough study, plus what use is what you learn? The point is that you passed, it doesn't matter HOW. The thrill of getting away with it is a priceless experience, and should you be stupid enough to get caught, the authorities will probably understand, as almost everyone has cheated and lied about it at some time - just look at the US prez and the richest man in the world. What great examples of how to succeed in life. Learning math, doing homework is for loosers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It doesn't matter what "standards" there are, they are all meaningless. A standard isn't only as good as the number of people that actually use it. Here's an example.
I'm creating a website. I look and go "Foobar would work really well here". SoI look up and see what the "standard" way to use foobar is. W3C says foobar should be done this way. So I do it and it doesn't work. Why? Because Netscape 4.x doesn't fully support foobar. Mozilla/Netscape 6 is "working" on full foobar support. IE supports enough foobar not to screw up the page. But Mircosoft being Microsoft they have intelifoobar. Does everything foobar does, and then some.
So what choice do I have? Use intelifoobar. Why? I can make foobar strictly to the "standard". But then nothing can really use it NOW. I can use Intelifoobar and have it work with 80% of the market today. Netscape is a non factor, because it can't do standards compilant foobar anyways. I'd have to re-work everything just to support it. that 15% or so isn't really worth the effort to do something that special for.
Here's my point. If "standards" are set that no one uses. It's useless. I just used foobar in the example, but it's relevant to alot of things. If Netscape and everyone else doesnt' follow all the standards that are set by standards bodies such as the W3C, then they are useless. It less Microsoft dictate what will, and won't be used. So Netscape, do you want to follow the true standards? Or do you want Mircosoft dictate what will and will not work on the web?
You obviously misunderstood his point.
To get code into Mozilla, you need a module owner code review, and a "Super" review, done by a senior engineer. That's what r= and sr= means in bugzilla.
When people are in a hurry, sometimes the module owner will allow someone else to do a r=, as long as it is a senior programmer. So what he's saying is that they have a r=x, a sr=y, and the PDT STILL smacked it down with a rtm-, saying "Too risky" or "Not stop ship".
I am glad to know that instead of fixing basic bugs that affect standards compliance the team was instead working on an HTML editor that will get little use.
These people just don't get it, release a rock solid browser first, if the email client or HTML editor ships later, who cares? Who will remember?
-josh
But isn't that exactly the point?
M$ is NOT the better product - they only say they are, and their tactics give them a louder voice.
The cost of using IE isn't just the price of the browser, it's the fact that cookie tracking is now also an 'inseparable' "feature" of the Windows OS.
And that it's not really a faster browser - we pay the browser start-up fee each time we boot up Windows.
And it's not more compliant with Web standards, only with Microsoft extensions to some of those standards.
And the fact that their current position was gained through 'questionable' means...
Yes, I'll agree that Economic Darwinism is the ultimate decision-maker, as in all cases. But then again, isn't it in the consumer's best interest to know the cost of the products that are competing for their attention? What would happen if people chose their Presidential candidate not on the issues and records of those people, or the consequences of their election, but on the number of mispronounciations that they make during speaches... Uhhh... That would be Baaaaaad!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"knife the baby"? Where ... have you heard that?
IIRC, in the MS trial, Avie Tevanian testefied that MS told Apple to kill QuickTime and stay out of the media market.
Well GEEE mr, if you have a PowerPC, Alpha or Sparc i'm sure you can certainly afford a PC from gateway.
Let's see...I have 3 PPCs, 1 MIPS, and 1 Sparc.
Yet I can't afford a new G4. (Let alone the dual...)
Point? Surplus hardware is cheap. New hardware isn't.
--K
Ironically, my NT4 disc says that it *supports* MIPS, Alpha, PPC in addition to x86.
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You're a troll, and I shouldn't spend time om commenting it - I shouldn't even be reading your comment. I will not take you serious as long as you post as an AC.
Just a short comment...
kde2, NO CSS SUPPORT. this means no html4 complaince, not even loose.
No CSS support? Have you even looked at the KDE site the last year? You must have been living on the moon or something - Konqueror supports most of CSS AFAIK!
Further - what has CSS to do with HTML4 compliance? It is 2 seperate standards? You can easily be html4 compliant without CSS!
Thanks for the tip - I'll try it. Anyway, it isn't a big problem for me, because I go there very seldom, but I sure will send the webmaster a note...
What on earth can I do to make the software more usable? I've asked on dot.kde.org and no one gave any helpful replies, so I thought I'd ask here. I'd really like to get Konq running at a good speed, because I hate using netscape (ugly fonts [no, i won't do that stupid mozfonts hack, because those were no better than what I see right now], crashy crashy syndrome, bad HTML capabilities).
Thanks for any help,
Steve
Slashdot isn't about free software. It's "News For Nerds". The nerds I know use the best tool for the job rather than succumbing to ideological bigotry. On Windows platforms IE is, and will continue to be for the forseeable future, the best tool for the job. Speak for yourself; I never considered myself part of the free software community. I consider myself a software developer and I refuse to use inferior tools.
With web-browsers this is currently near-irrelevent
Thank you for pointing out that your point is irrelevant.
but compare "Visual Basic" to "GCC"
We're not talking about Visual Basic and GCC.
(no not M18, it's old news.)
Anyone tech-savvy enough to be reading Slashdot shouldn't be using a consumer-targetted product like Netscape 6 anyway. It's like using a $19.95 drill instead of a Hole Hawg (for those of you who have read In The Beginning Was The Command Line.)
Gerv
But in terms of stability and quality, Win2k and IE 5.01 are awesome products.
Then how come IE 5.01 writes outside of it's window? How come trivial javascript crashes IE bringing down every open browser window with it? How come it's security is so pathetic?
If IE is the answer, you're asking the wrong question.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Yes, that was the original goal. Take the NS4 source, open it, and use an Open Source process to implement the next version. Problem? The NS4 code was, after years of patching, hacking, taping, and stringing it together, incomprehensible, unusable, and basically a dead-end.
So, the source had to be re-engineered -- read "rewritten". Once that decision was made Netscape had to decide whether to go forward, and they decided to go forward, supporting the Mozilla project even though it meant a complete rewrite -- that is, building a browser from scratch.
There are times when I respect the hell out of JWZ (whose comments you've linked to), and there are times when I think he's full of hot air. This time I respect his hot air. I think he's correct in saying that NS5 could've been done in 6 months -- with a set of really good programmers (like him), familiar with the code, with the right processes in place. Unfortunately, while there are some great programmers on Mozilla, some (minority) of the really good ones were not so familiar with the NS4 source. More importantly, the process of opening the source for outside development is largely different from the closed NS in-house process. This multiplies the schedule significantly (my guess is at least 100%).
For the open development process to take advantage of new programmers it has to expose them to the code. This exposure made it clear that those unfamiliar with NS4 code found it essentially unusable.
JWZ decided to leave, and I probably would've done the same in his shoes -- he'd put in his time, he saw the fast track to bringing NS5 to market, but he also realized (I believe) that the actual track that was taken (rebuilding from ground zero) would take a LONG time. That was probably pretty depressing for someone already tired of the Big Netscape culture that had developed.
So anyway, what do you have now? You have the bulk of a browser / web platform which is >95% standards compliant, supports XML at various levels, is cross-platform, implements a portable COM interface, is open source, etc.
Additionally, you have a plethora of open source development tools that have been needed for years: bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai, etc., as well as open source crypto components and the numerous other open source modules that can be used in future applications.
And... Mozilla raises awareness about Open Source software to the point that the average AOLer is probably somewhat aware that the new Netscape is using that Open Source stuff. That's not a bad thing, IMHO.
While not making the 6-month window on the old NS4 source base is not amazing, the actual speed of development for the browser, tools, modules, and processes for large-scale Open Source development is nothing short of staggering. Of course, you're free not to use Mozilla or NS[56], but that doesn't diminish the magnitude of what has been done.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
about OS embedding to gain performance and entangle IE in the OS
:o)
And how is that bad ? I like the software I use to be more performant. Don't you?
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
I think you mean "Stalin linked to Communist party" :)
brought to you by icab! www.icab.de.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This is my top output, sorted by memory use, only browsing Slashdot. A Netscape 4.7 mail session is included just for comparison:
667 root 0 0 57616 56M 2324 S 0 0.1 22.3 0:06 X
761 toofast 0 0 25976 25M 13408 R 0 0.0 10.0 0:09 mozilla-bin
763 toofast 0 0 25976 25M 13408 S 0 0.0 10.0 0:00 mozilla-bin
764 toofast 0 0 25976 25M 13408 S 0 0.0 10.0 0:00 mozilla-bin
765 toofast 0 0 25976 25M 13408 S 0 0.0 10.0 0:00 mozilla-bin
726 toofast 0 0 15364 15M 8788 S 0 0.0 5.9 0:02 netscape-commun
Hello? McFly? There are other browsers out there... can anyone state whether they are standards compliant or not? I'm thinking of ones like the KDE browser, Opera, and others.
Netscape had nothing to do this.
Of course netscape did this. They added Javascript and Java to the browser specifically to enable this. They kept their browser cross-platform all these year. They created the first (or one of the first) web application servers - NAS, now iPlanet. They are still doing it with mozilla.
People didn't see the web as a platform at first. It was Netscape that pushed this idea, evangelized it. To deny that is to overlook Netscape's primary contribution to the internet.
Thats what the whole Netscape One(?) platform was all about.
Microsoft, on the other hand, added slightly incompatible jscript, totally incompatible vbscript, sabatoged the Java platform, and generally tried to undermine a consistant web platform and tie the web to the windows platform at every turn.
Geez, not all of us run linux. And Mozilla/Netscape 6 under Windows *STINKS*. Even on nightlies.
After all, its "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
So why is your aticle rated so high? I dunno.
Duh :)
Well GEEE mr, if you have a PowerPC, Alpha or Sparc i'm sure you can certainly afford a PC from gateway.
I don't see that as a problem. The true battle for the desktop browser has already been won my IE. Is that a hard fact to accept?
Sure in linux there are many battles going on with other browsers, but thats only fragmenting the talent and so called standards compliance amongs many products
People forgot computing was supposed to make our lives simpler. Whatever happened to that?
Windows ME or Win2k with IE 5.5 is about as simple of a computing solutino you can use. To me linux doesn't even compare.
Offtopic (-1)
Informative (+1)
Just wanted to get public attention to an html feature that even the 3.0 browsers support that seems to be missing in mozilla.
If you have an server side image map in a frame and you want it to open the links in another frame you need a TARGET attribute in the a href line pointing to the server side map file. Well Mozilla completly ignores the TARGET attribute.
This is bug 22864 Please vote, or fix it if you have the power.
(test web page at dwt's non flash page still in construction finished flash version at www.dwebtech.com
Since Netscape 6 is bazed on Mozilla, one thing I was wondering is how easy it would be to swap out the NS6 Mozilla with the most up to date Mozilla - has anyone tried that? Then at least there would be a workaround.
I've been using NS6p3 for a few weeks now, and I like it quite a bit - I think that especially with the push of Netscape and AOL behind it, it's going to be a pretty widely used browser.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmm... tradeoffs would imply that there are some advantages to using Netscape- and you haven't noted any. "Doesn't integrate itself with the OS" isn't inherently good or bad, and IE also loads instantly depending on whether you open each window a new process or not (if you do, the crash of one doesn't mean the crash of the others- and in IE you actually have this choice)
Yup, you have. And you're using NT, which can't use any the real features of IE5 (since it's basically just the hacked 95 version of explorer). On 98SE you can choose to browse in a separate process, which splits the web browser from "explorer" writ large
ppanon ; is right. You are wrong.
The same effect can be observed with IE4 under Embedded NT. Much faster [application] load than under regular NT.
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E_NOSIG
May I humbly suggest that people design to the standard rather than to a particular browser. The reason we have all the problems is because people insist on playing along with manufacturers' ad hoc extensions!
L.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote. The "Windows desktop" is explorer.exe (not to be confused with iexplore.exe, which is Internet Explorer). explorer.exe is loaded on Windows startup and preloads some IE components. However, in my message, I specifically said that if you disable the loading of explorer.exe (which means that the IE components are not loaded) and then you run iexplore.exe from a commandline, you will find that the load times are almost exactly the same. ActiveDesktop has nothing to do with it, and when explorer.exe is not loaded, the IE components are not loaded in memory.
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I never said anything about ActiveDesktop. ActiveDesktop has nothing to do with this. I'm talking about Explorer, the default Windows shell. explorer.exe. Not ActiveDesktop, not IE, Explorer. Explorer is the shell that gives you a desktop to put your icons on, puts background wallpaper on your screen, shows you the nifty taskbar and start menu, etc. Explorer is NOT ActiveDesktop!
You can disable Explorer. In your win.ini or system.ini file (I can't remember which off the top of my head) you will find a line that says, "SHELL=explorer.exe". Replace "explorer.exe" with "command.com", and a command prompt will be used as your shell rather than Explorer. Since Explorer is not loaded, no IE components will be preloaded. You can now type "iexplore.exe" in the command prompt to load IE. Pay attention to how fast it loads. There.
The next person who says something about ActiveDesktop gets hit with a pointed stick.
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David is abso-friggin-lutely right about this.
Netscape, you have the opportunity before you to mend your heavily tarnished karma by shipping a strong, stable, standards-compliant browser instead of the trash you have saddled the non-microsoft world with for the last two years. I use mozilla almost daily, and in fact, i much prefer it to Navigator. To leave such glaring bugs in your browser despite tried-and-tested patches for it is unconscionable, especially given the fact that your browser will be the default browser for millions of AOL users. you have an obligation and a responsibility to those users, many of whom are not even aware that a better version of your browser exists in mozilla, to make those patches. You owe it to the web developers who have stood by your organization and defended your actions and products. You owe it to the developers who have spent many hours of their time (unpaid, and largely unrecognized and unappreciated) developing YOUR product. You owe it to your investors.
Do the right thing.
Writing HTML is NOT programming.
dave
According to the article, most of the bugs mentioned are already fixed in Mozilla, but won't make it in Netscape 6.0, because of the brain-dead push for a 6.0 release. If you spend time beta-testing anything, it should be Mozilla, and not IE...
Right now (and probably most of this year) Mozilla has had stronger standards support than IE on win32. And it's available for about a dozen platforms. Right now IE is not the better browser when it comes to standards support, platform availabilty and source availability. IE isn't even close.
If you had been following Mozilla development with even a casual ear you would know that themeability is developed as a feature. It was the happy byproduct of the decision to make Mozilla a cross platform product. Mozilla was faced a resource crunch and decided that the rendering engine was powerful enough to lay out the UI. An XML based User Interface language was created to allow for XP UI development. This just happens to bring UI development into the same world as Web development, lowering the barrier to entry for many and lowering the time to market on UI redesign and improvement. I think that most slashdot readers expect at least a casual knowledge about the topic you're posting on. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
Standards compliance bugs important to web developers will be fixed in Mozilla. 6 of the 9 cited are already fixed or very close in Moizilla, one is likely a bug in the spec and not in Mozilla. Are you confuesed about what Mozilla is? Did you miss the last three years of slashdot posts that tried to explain that Netscape6 is a browser based on mozill technologies but it is NOT Mozilla?
(and netscape 6 for that matter) is the most standards compliant browser on the planet. Weren't you all bandwaggoning with the WaSP's demands for a browser NOW just a couple months ago. Perfect and Now are mutually exclusive. I happen to think that damn good and now is better than perfect and never. Get a copy of the latest Mozilla build and then complain but don't flame the project without geting informed first. -Asa
you didn't read it right! The article is about a few bugs in Netscape 6's standards support. If you ahd read it carefully you would have seen that some of these bugs are already or soon to be fixed in Mozilla.
-Asa
Come on. 6.0 doesn't need to be perfect. No first release of a commercial product ever is.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to fully and correctly support the standards that it set out to. This was the whole idea behind Gecko in the first place.
There, you ship it today and then fix it tomorrow.
Maybe you can do that with SQL databases and Java runtimes, but you cannot do that with web browsers. Because once they release a browser with bugs in the rendering engine, you have to work around those bugs for the next two or three years.
Even more ridiculous is that some of these bugs have already been fixed , but Netscape won't put them in the final release!
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I used to use BeOS, but the lack of decent browser finally drove me off the edge and I decided to switch to a different OS. The question then was, "Linux or Win2K?" -- In the end I chose Win2K, because the stability was there, and so was the browser. I don't care about being able to see the source to my OS, and other than that, I don't see any advantage to using Linux on my desktop.
Under Linux, I use Mozilla M18, which is really quite good, but not quite as good as IE and lacks an integrated file manager, although the filemanager in KDE 2.0 is very good, so I won't count that against it.
I am stuck without DVD in Linux, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, unless ATI releases a version of their player for Linux.
KOffice isn't on par with MSOffice. KOffice is good, and it has the potential to really take off, but feature-for-feature, MS is just better.
Now, as for the customizablility of Linux, I agree that it's nice, but I also value the standardization of the widget-set under Windows, which is more than I can say for Linux. Right now there are four toolkits that I commonly see in my Linux desktop: KDE, Gnome, Motif, and OpenStep. Under Win32, it's all the same, with very little deviation. I couldn't really care less what my window title-bars looked like, either.
Yep, one hell of a smart maneuver. Of course, they knew that claiming IE is a better browser than Mozilla would spark a flame-war, and let's face it: every time you click on "reply" you see a new banner ad.
Politics of page-views asside, however, they're simply right. IE has some huge problems in the credibility department (someone else pointed the way to the slashdot article about the built-in MSN cookies), but it's a solid browser, that while not 100% standards-compliant, has been ahead in that department for quite some time. The UI is not to my liking, but at least has some of the basic gaffs of Netscape covered.
If IE was ported cleanly to UNIX platforms, I think Netscape could safely crawl into a hole and die. Geko-based browsers are still a good idea, but Mozilla has a terrible UI, lots of standards problems, it's bloated and slow and most of the in-your-face features are driven by Netscape/AOL marketing as far as I can tell.
Heresy? Perhaps. But, a little heresy goes a long way to allowing one to apply reason instead of dogma to a debate.
his is a load of utter misinformation. Yes, Internet Explorer is loaded as a part of the Windows Explorer shell when Windows loads. However, if you configure Windows not to load the Explorer shell on startup, or to use a different shell, you can then start Internet Explorer separately (from a commandline, for example), and the load time is exactly the same. The simple fact is, IE is far less bloated than Netscape, far more compliant, and just plain faster.
The main part of IE is not the IEXPLORE.EXE executable. Instead it is various DLLs scattered throughout C:\WINDOWS.
"In all seriousness, IE will most likely remain the dominant browser for some time to come. Why? Because it already does what most people need (and more). Why would the average user bother to download some other browser and readapt to a different interface when what they're using right now is fine?"
Also part of the problem is that a lot of the others (certainly in the GUI crowd) try to copy the functions of IE, rather than doing something which does things IE is poor at. e.g. a program which has configuration settings/data file placement which makes sense on a multi-user machine or a LAN.
You missed my point entirely didn't you.
Here it goes again.
Sure there are honest businessmen (a few perhaps) but the guys running MS are not!. The guys running MS care only about themselves and nobody else. Once IE gets to over 90% market penetration it will probably stop listening to apache and in a few months crumble unix web servers. Nobody will put up a web site on unix if 90% of your clients can't get to it.
The linux community has no evil intent and probably would cringe at the thought of any human being who would do such a thing. Nobody has ever advocated that BIND refuse requests from windows machines or that sendmail should refuse to accept mail from outlook but every single new "innovation" from MS seeks to destroy well established standards.
This is the battle between good and evil not between greed and generosity. MS is run by evil people with evil motives and evil ways of working. This is probably why they will continue to crush everybody who gets in their way. The people who wrote bind are too moral to ever corrupt standards but the guys who wrote Active Directory have no morals and will gladly corrupt kerberos.
In the end unless the open source community becomes evil it will lose. Evil will always win because there is no line it won't cross.
War is necrophilia.
Yes and that's the terminology he used. He did not say "kill quicktime" he said "knife the baby". What kind a human being talks that way?
War is necrophilia.
I'm pretty sure AOL isn't paying for IE. How would they save money by buying netscape?
War is necrophilia.
It matters not how good the software is. Slashdot is (supposed to be anyways) a community of open source advocates and MS is the antichrist to open source.
There are plenty of web sites and communities where saying anything anti-MS will get you flamed to high heaven (zdnet, devx etc) and until recently this was the one place where somebody who believed in open source could express their point of view without being beaten up by MS shills. MS of course has managed to subvert this forum too. For the last month or so the one sure way to get a +5 rating on any comment is to bash linux or praise MS.
How good win2k is (mine crashes at least once a day BTW) is beside the point. The point is IE is evil because MS will leverage it to undermine linux, web standards, apache, http and anything else they don't like. MS is not run by nice people who care about humanity, the web, communities or you. These people are nasty evil people who got to the top by crushing anybody who got in their way. Look at the way talk for example. What kind of human being uses phrases like "knife the baby" the imagery alone makes me sick to my stomach.
Giving these people absolute control of any key technology is the same as shooting yourself in the head.
War is necrophilia.
I wouldn't call you a Windows luser, I would call you crazy. Are you serious? Have you used Konqueror or Mozilla M18? And you still prefer IE5.5? Yes, I acknowledge IE5.5 is mostly a good browser. But every time I use Windows I end up tearing my hair -- how anyone can get anything useful done with such a balky, fragile, user-hostile system completely defeats me. I might use IE5.5 - because it is a good browser - if it ran on a usable operating system. But it certainly isn't better enough than Moz or Konq to make up for how much Widnows is worse than UN*X.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I've used IE on mac OS X today, and it had crashed repeatedly, and was generally slow for me. I think this is simply because Microsoft was not able to leverage their own OS to build on top of.
While Netscape should not hope to compete with IE on Windows outright, it has a good chance of winning market share on the "alternative" platforms. If it can build enough of a following among Mac and *Nix users, and if Linux continues to grow, Netscape will have a chance of leveraging that market share to get its foot back in the door.
Ñ'
This is a prime example of "scratching an itch" as the thing that typifies everything that's good and bad about open source design.
Consider that it's "good" in that developers get to work on interesting problems (extensible UI/skinnability), and that it's an elegant solution (XML as opposed to some proprietary binary file), but IMHO the team has forgotten that this feature - cool as it is - doesn't meet any customer's needs.
News flash: Last time I checked, most users of web browsers don't want to spend 5 hours futzing around with a skin to make Mozilla/Netscape window look totally rad, or to test new experiments in usability design. Users of web browsers typically use them to... browse the web.
If you can keep the user's goals in mind, even if it's not your idea of what constitutes coolness and elegance and fun-to-codeness, you may not have as much fun writing it, but odds are pretty good you'll come up with something far more useful in the end.
I'll know Mozilla's worth looking into when the release notes stop bragging about marketing tabs that take up real estate, inbuilt support for AOL's instant messaging, and cutesy stuff like skins... and when I start seeing more stuff about stability and standards-compliance.
It will be interesting to see what happens when (not if!) other browsers gain popularity. Hopefully by then the web browser authors will actually follow the standards, so people can refer to standards instead of particular programs.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
Yup, that was what you said. But if that was what you meant, its a wonder you bothered.
Because it is a meaningless test. To find out how long IE takes to start when none of its components are pre-loaded you *must* install 98lite.
After the original anti-trust verdict a few years back MS distributed the IE componenets amongst a load of core dll's, and so disabling the loading of explore.exe makes no difference - the IE componenets still get loaded.
It would be impressive if it wasn't so scary...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
It isn't the issue that MS is a better browser or not (it has its flaws just as any other browser does...mainly its an operating system component as suggested by the EULA). The issue with Netscape according to the post was that it didn't fully adhere with W3C compliance. For that matter, neither does IE. Sadly, it should be remembered that due to this browser being the more popular browser due to proprietary standards which are easy to obtain due to the company's brutal market share, most content developer's are brainwashed that they should support the latest features to a more popular browser, IE. And when that one stray dog comes in with another browser, and he or she can't view content, he or she should "upgrade" his or her browser to IE. "What's that? IE doesn't run on your operating system? Well consider "upgrading" to Windows!" As on should already know, this is a silly request. Why should I use a platform that I am not interested in using...especially for the sake of losing the OS of my choice's features that I like. After all, isn't this supposed to be about browsers adhering to a standard, not bending the standard to their own will, thus ruining an experience for all of us? This is where everything is wrong. Netscape is wrong for trying to push their proprietary standards, to make their browser a more popular browser, yet when MS fights back, the consequences are much more serious, especially knowing that MS had their hands in the standards process. When I hear people complain about Netscape being the browser that should be used due to how MS is a dirty company, or that IE should be used because it is the more popular browser and to hell to Netscape and their bad business model...its all the same rap, its business. But business forgets about the common user...you and I, especially when a business attempts to control the standards to bend developers to their will. Of course there are those people who will simply scream, "Use Lynx! But c'mon, I use lynx for certain things, but not for a typical browsing session...I would rather use Mosiac. Which leads me to consider other browsers, Opera, Mozilla, etc. Mozilla is open source, resembles Netscape, yet gets screamed at because it isn't as functional and stable as most other browsers. Yet the people who really jeer and complain alot of times....don't contribute to the project, in donations and such. Then you have Opera which is claimed to be W3C compliant, but then people are mad because you actually have to pay for it (gasp), heaven forbid the people who work to make it actually eat! Good heavens! The point is, bashing these works are merely trivial, each has its own faults, just as we as people do. If Michael wants to claim that IE is the best browser, then that's fine, let him use IE. But then again, with the statement resembling that IE will forever be "the" browser, is kind of interesting, seeing that I with the same merit he uses to base IE being that kind of browser, its amazing he doesn't come up with the same sort of statements about Desktop OS market share. Oh well, continue bashing the browsers, and as soon as you do, please do send me the link for the one you have contributed for us to use. (Oh, and could you please make it available for BeOS? It's what I use :) ) Has
futang futang!
Any particular reason why my karma hasn't changed in months even though I get the odd moderation point (and almost never lose any)?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
No, I'd put Michael as a troll actually ... "definately a better browser" is almost purposely phrased to get people to yell at each other. Out with him ;-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I didn't realise that Slashdot posters had to be logical anymore ;-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Win2k is also the perfect way to turn $3000 of hardware into a $300 WebTV.
My K6-233 with X and Mozilla renders faster than IE 5.5 on Win2k.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"In all seriousness, IE will most likely remain the dominant browser for some time to come. Why? Because it already does what most people need (and more). Why would the average user bother to download some other browser and readapt to a different interface when what they're using right now is fine?"
That's exactly the reason I'm sticking with IE.
I once was a loyal Netscape fan in the early days up 'til 4.0. I was adapted to Netscape's UI and for the most part it was a better browser. I had no reason to switch. It wasn't until I got fed up with Navigator crashing all the time, poor standards support, etc that I decided to give IE a try. Ever since I have been a happy user.
For me to switch back, Navigator or Mozilla would have to be as fast and less crash prone than whatever the current IE version. It would have to be more standards compliant by a long shot. It would have to be an actual usable tool and have a slick user interface. Lastly, IE would have to become the crappiest browser available so that I would be irritated enough to want to switch.
"Do you think they really care if the product their using is open-source or not?"
I use a mixture of both. Basically, I use what works so I can get things done. I'll lean to open-source wherever possible, but I will not use open-source strictly because the source is available.
I think that this story simply proves that the time has come for moderation of Slashdot stories in the same way as other posts. The number of contributors is going up quickly, and not all of these contributors consistently post good, informative, unbiased news. The phrasing used in the submission of this particular story is such that the story itself should be moderated to "flamebait." Case in point-the hundreds of extremely angry responses on both sides of this debate which it has prompted. This is definitely counterproductive and needs to be reformed. How CmdrTaco implements the moderation of stories I don't care, but it needs to be implemented somehow.
One window using 30+ meg of ram must be in violation of something!
i am a web designer--and i totally agree that IE is better in may respects--especially from my perspective ease of development. I write IE code in .5 hours, and spend the REST OF THE DAY writing the equivelant in netscape workarounds to get it to run.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
And the number one pisser, for me, is how when you download the NS6 preview releases (and I assume that this "feature" will be in the final releases as well), when you start the browser for the first time, or create a new profile, it opens up a window entitled "Netscape Activation" with a bunch of forms to fill out. Do you need to fill out this form to use the browser? No. Does this form add any functionality to the browser? Not a damn bit. What does it do? It signs you up for the my.netscape.com and netscape email services, among other things. It's just a bunch of very manipulative, deceptive marketing crap (can we expect any less from AOL) that is going to tick people off and make them say "screw it, I'll just use IE." (or whatever browser they are already using, or, for the very few, intelligent, inquisative few, might goad them on to look for other alternatives like Opera, et al).
The worst thing about this is that Mozilla really is a great browser when you use it, but most people will probably never see that because of all the marketing stupidity.
IE has never asked me to install any cursors. Stop surfing those porn sites from work.
IE playing awful music? Blame it on the websites you go to - Mozilla is not superior just because it doesn't have the feature. And really, if you're functionally literate you should be able to turn it off. Have you ever tried to read that thing called "Help"?
Can't turn off Java or JScript??
Seriously, go RTFM!
Mmmm.. Donuts
working towards 100% standards compliance, in favor of something that supports 0% standards?
Umm.. where did you get your figures from? Did you pull them out of your ass? Maybe IE is just released every time because they need to get a new browser out to get Market Share? (I like how you capitalized that)
Mmmm.. Donuts
Just think about the huge amount of money flooding every day towards Redmond and think again how great Win2K and IE really are. It amazes me how people praise those products and forget at the same time the incredible amount of resources it takes Microsoft to create them. To me Win2K is less than impressive in that light.
There is a huge amount of money flowing towards Redmond because people like their products and buy them. Duh.
The article was about how Netscape failed to support web standards! *that* is why NS is losing.!
I still use NS as my primary browser, in spite of writing this on an NT machine, but more and more often I *have* to switch to IE cause NS simply doesn't work.
Yes I'm aware of how this is often caused by crappy html, but all too often because Netscape bugs up.
C'mon. a browser that can be crashed by a Javascript? How confident does that make you?
We are almost at the point where noone cares about supporting anything but IE on their webs.
We are almost at the point where MS can add their proprietary tags at will, since everyone is using their product.
Yes "everyone" Last time I checked some browser/platform statistics, 96.3% used some form of windows, 2.6% Macintosh and (insert drum roll) 1.1% "other" Other that means Linux, BSD, Solaris etc *combined*
That means Micorsoft can turn IE into an extension of windows, rather than a webbrowser. Skip html, use XML and hide the layout and code from the user. (We don't want open source on our webpages).
IE has not won because Microsoft has made an incredibly good product, IE won because Netscape has not had a stable release >= ver 4
All opinions are my own - until criticized
What is even better is attempting to view www.microsoft.com with IE2.0. I had a standard install of WinNT4.0 at my last job. However, I had already become addicted to the Start Menu Toolbars feature (I would make different tool bars for different projects and turn them on and off depending on what I was working on), which for some reason was a modification that IE4.0 made, and IE5.0 did not include. So, I went to uninstall IE5.0, because I knew I couldn't install an earlier version over it. After the unistall, I realized my gaffe: I didn't go and get the IE4.0 install first. For some reason, the unistall of IE5.0 reverted the browser back to IE2.0, so I figured "No prob, just surf to www.microsoft.com and get the 4.0 install". I went there and couldn't see anything. The page was completely blank. I tried ftping to ftp.microsoft.com, but had trouble figuring out where IE4.0 was. Eventually, I just got a co-worker to D/L it for me.
-no broken link
You have things back to front. The code has already forked to allow Netscape to ship a version 6.0 browser. What the article was complaining about was that the Netscape fork is cooling down to a code freeze, and locking in some known bugs. They're just a bit paranoid about introducing a regression at this stage.
I would rather them ship a 90% compliant browser than ship nothing
Indeed. Let the Netscape folks ship their NN6 browser and we can all complain that it's almost as bad at supporting web standards as IE 5. 6 months down the line they can fold the Mozilla updates back in.
OK, I'm going to call your bluff on this one. Give me an example of some valid CSS code that works in IE4 but not in NN6. CSS support in NN6 makes IE's look like a joke.
ie 55 was released on win98 and not on NT because of unacceptable bugs ... yet it was released on 98...
same situation than the one discribed by the article.
They both don t care about bugs. They both don t care about consumers , as long as they are caught, they only care about being first.
Which i don t care, because those bugs are fixed and won t be in mozilla (or any gekko using browser) which I will use.
And there is also konqueror, which I will use also.
And there is still lynx, which is the fastest.
I tried out IE for Solaris. It's missing a lot of the features of the Win32 version. If you install it, you'll also see that Microsoft doesn't quite understand this "UNIX" thing... half of the install goes in your home directory (rather than somewhere in /usr), but with the permissions set so that only root can execute the browser.
I've tried IE on Solaris. I can't think of another single application which had such resource usage of the system. The UltraSparc I was running on felt like a 486 when browsing with IE, and top constantly reported massive load on the system while IE was running. I kept switching back and forth between Netscape 4.5 and IE on the system trying to get a feel for the differences, and IE was taking about twice the time to do almost anything, with the exception of table rendering, where it was faster than Netscape on massive tables, and of course on resizing the page where NS 4.5 reloads the page.
Made me wonder just how far through the Windows OS the roots of IE actually went. The only thing that could account for such usage in a port would be subsidiary support services running to keep the IE browser happy in a Unix environment.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Just because I'm not willing to put up with Netscape/Mozilla flakiness when I'm trying to work doesn't mean I'm a brainless, yahoo-browsing, stupid-joke-forwarding, minesweeper-playing "luser".
But I guess since you're using the more "standards compliant" browser (as if that even means anything) I should bow before you. Show me one site that I can't browse using IE and I'll show you about two hundred that you can't touch with Mozilla. Not that I'm proud of that, it's stupid web design, but it's a simple truth. I'd rather have functionality than geek points.
--
First, I'd like to let you know that you can use the same fonts (under Linux, at least) that you see under Windows. You merely have to steal the TT fonts from a Win* installation, and then you have 3 options:
/etc/mailcap, I can configure mutt to launch external apps for viewing Word docs, URLs, or graphics. And I won't start on the security/reliability problems of Outlook.
1. Use xfstt, a font server which handles TT fonts
2. Use xfs-xtt, which handles all fonts
3. Use XFree86 4.01
I've been doing this for quite some time now, and it's great.
Secondly, I can't believe that someone who has presumably been using Unices for 10 years would be able to tolerate a graphical e-mail client. You speak of productivity, but I can get things done far more quickly in mutt than anyone can in Outlook. Also, by using
Keep in mind that IE has been in development for far longer than Mozilla has. No one seems to realize this. Remember how everything before IE4 totally SUCKED and was unusable? Right.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Change your OS. Not that hard.
Say I'm using Linux on a PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, or SPARC machine. I haven't seen versions of MS Windows lately for any of those platforms. Perhaps it's not that hard per se (head down to Gateway Country and buy a winbox), but it sure is expensive.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Red Hat Cygwin is an implementation of POSIX on Win32, with lots of ports of GNU software. It's free software licensed under the GNU GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's pretty funny. You mention playing nice with HTML 4. Well... CSS is a fundamental aspect of HTML 4! Without it, you would have HTML 4 with no colors, no fonts, no nothing really. Just a few images and Times font. Hell, if you want that use Lynx.
If you think no one is using CSS, then you're simply not looking.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
I'd really like for you to point out what IE's "lack of standards compliance" is? I love it when people spout that without even thinking. You point out what it is lacking that another browser does have. Can you do it? I doubt it.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
...to see a flame baiting post like this on /.
How can something that destroys freedom be good, even if it has better performance?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
the following is from Avie Tevanien's deposition in US vs Microsoft :
"100. When Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 3.0, it touted the ability of its browser to use plug-ins develped for Netscape Navigator. After the introduction of Internet Explorer 3.0, Apple was able to introduce a QuikTime plug-in that was fully compatible with both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 3.0 browsers. (Schaaff Depo., pp. 114-15) However, with the successive releases of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0, Microsoft Windows 98, and Microsoft multimedia software, Apple has seen a steady degradation of QuickTime's capability to play back a variety of QuickTime-compatible media file formats while operating with Microsoft's Internet Explorer running the Windows operating system. (Schaaff Depo., p. 117-17)"
So, looking beneath the top story (of the deposition) concerning Microsoft making plug-ins incompatible with version revisions of IE, at the beginning MS touted compatibility with NS. Microsoft had to come up to speed fast with development on a new product whose acceptance would depend on people being able to use it with an installed base of sites and plug-ins. Microsoft then brought every bit of engineering focus it could to bring a bag of acquired Spyglass code up to the level of a product people actually wanted. Microsoft had to compete with a massive installed base of a product which undoubtedly pleased people.
This effort was certainly driven by many of that company's connected desires but bear in mind this original effort, for IE 3.0 occurred before IE was bundled and other distribution factors unique to Microsoft's position became significant. Even if you are Microsoft, you could not use massive distribution muscle until product is at least parity with what people expect from a product. (and IIRC IE 2.x was not that)
Once Microsoft had a product that worked, it could lever other factors and advantages uniquely available to it. Absolutely key to this was that IE's shipping version worked with the installed base of the market share leader.
To me the most surprising issue with regards Mozilla and Netscape is that they do not realise that to effect a swicth of products form a massive nstalled base, you *have to be compatible*. Excel used to play nice with Lotus 123 files. Word used to do fine with Word Perfect and Ami Pro files. There are vast layers of compatibility modes in most Microsoft product, and emulaion has been a fundamental compnent of Microsoft's success (at many levels of the word, and with obvious drawbacks). (Hmm, I wonder if Linux starts hurting real bad they'll re write the POSIX 1 dlls in Win2k as lxrun.dll :) Given the advantages in development, distribution and culture (in terms of user affinity) available to a real open - source product, is Netscape exploting it's strengths in the right order?
If NS 6.0 or Mozilla can build from scratch the depth of complexity in XUL and many other modules such as MathML and SVG, could Netscape / Mozilla leverage IE features so that they have the actual possibility to be broadly accepted without every web developer retasking their skills? Individuals and companies are actually *crying out* for a cross - platform browser they can deploy without incompatibility issues. I do not for a minute believe that Netscape - AOL - SUN could not master the marketing savvy to make that (as a future reality) a serious coup. This sort of thing - cross platform standardisation - is precisely what made and makes Microsoft sweat. By reinventing the wheel, or at least broadening the goals fo Mozilla far and wide _but_not_inclusive_ of IE compliance, is the the possibility to keep the most dominant software company on its toes simply foregone?
When the Netscape - AOL - SUN alliance was announced, many here on Slashdot, including much of the press, touted AOL's ability to force a massive distribution to AOL subscribers. AOL bought Netscape for $4bln. The Mozilla team, who remain in the most part Netscape employees are ultimately employed by AOL. Of the Alliance, presuming that the old Netscape is no more, only SUN is not dependant on the Windows platform. Did AOL buy Netscape as a hedge, a bargaining chip? How possibly could AOL release NS 6.0 as a component of it's service if the press in this story and others is true? For a long while there appears to have been a inertia with Mozilla. Partly this is because of the scale of the project. But also now - in the O'Reilly piece linked elswhere, it is being reported that significant bugs are being refused form the code tree. A code freeze is all right, but surely not for a major number release? It would help if Netscape or AOL would clarify their strategy regarding this. But that may be moot already, even by the time I post this. What interests me now is if patches to add a IE compatibility layer, for wont of a better description, would be accepted. Of course there's a quick retort to that - "Why do you want to add the biggest bug ever to the tree - even if the code works?". If the alternative might be years of wait, baited breath, for a seachange in platform use or a wholesale re-estimation of web designers' skills simultaneous with a massive realignment of consumer perception as to what constitutes a "working" browser - then I say, at least, put it in.
Debatable. Netscape 6 contains some proprietary extensions, but the bulk of the code is Mozilla, which is open source.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
So, if you don't like it, GO FORK. Otherwise, stop complaining about this project. That's how simple things have been in Open Source projects, so why is this one different?
OK, there is some sense in showing your dislike. People need to get a little slap in their face sometimes. You can file a bug for that. But if you just plain old complain, and start threatening "I'll go back to Microsoft, I really will", I must say that I can only have a good laugh about that :-)
Weenies.
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 think that this perfectly describes the real underlying problem. Netscape has the wrong attitude toward standards compliance/noncompliance. Meeting the standards isn't a neat feature that should be added in the next release. Failing to meet the standards is a serious bug that absolutely must be stomped before the product is fit to ship.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
But remember, MS never gets it right before Rev 3 or 4.
Bob's son is a paper clip. (Wonder who the mother was...)
Don't we all wonder who Bob's grandson will be...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think it'd be fun to play with the code, but there's no way I'm going to put my time into it until it's GPL'd and I can mix-n-match with other GPL'd code.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
NO ONE IS USING CSS.
I probably ask my boss once a week if we can use "real" CSS in the pages we build. Far too often, he says "no, the customer says we have to support Netscape." So, we're limited to the pathetic subset of CSS1 that Netscape supports, and we make up for the deficits through the disgusting use of a writhing mass of <table> and <font> tags.
But guess what! Someday soon, our customers are going to stop demanding Netscape v4 support. Unfortunately, if Internet Explorer is the only viable browser at that point, we will build pages with whatever implemenation defined "standard" the guys in Redmond have given us. But if there is another browser in use (perhaps Netscape v6, perhaps something else), we will have a much greater incentive to write pages that are close to the w3c proposed standards, and then work within the bugs and implemenation details of the available browsers.
So, you're correct -- no one is using css. Someday soon, support for Netscape v4 will be dropped. If there is another browser available, CSS will be used. If there is not another browser available, whatever IE has will be the defacto standard.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Oh really?
So your web page should look exactly the same on my 24 bit 1280x1024 19in display as it does on a small black-and-white LCD display on a cell phone?!
The web is more powerful and accessible when it is adaptable.
Some people are disabled. Some people have limited capability displays. Some people actually run into web pages that look too bad since their browser window is too large (like me, I usually run my browser in the full 1280x1024). I also run into pages with microscope fonts under Linux when Netscape completely IGNORES my font settings no matter how large I make them to compensate.
Is that useful behavior?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
> Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so
:-)
.0 versions don't hang around long. There will be a 6.0.1 that will have those the bugs fixed (and other introduced). Most people will download 6.0.1, anyway.
I was going to ask michael to show me the source of IE6. I just realised that, due to the recent crack, it may be avalaible at various warez sites...
More seriously, this is an incredibely lame article. HOW CAN IE6 HAVE WON THE BROWSER WAR ? WHERE IS IE6 FOR LINUX ? FOR FREEBSD ? WHY IS THE LINK TO 'problems' POINTING TO BUGZILLA.MOZILLA.ORG (where there is a bold "This is not the place to report bugs about commercial Netscape products" statment) ?
I was expecting better from slashdot. If slashdot is now supporting closed-source, mac/windows only software...
How can anyone say for sure that IE6 will remain a better browser when the free software alternative is here ? This is FUD at its best.
One year ago, it was "Mozilla will never be finished"
Now it is, "IE will stay the best browser"
I urge windows slashdot readers to download M18. It starts to be rather correct (It is faster than IE5). It crashes, but not that much. I urge them to go top all their preffered sites with Mozilla, so it will appear in the logs. I urge them to use mozilla to go to sites that can be viewed with it.
If they don't, they are going to have a Closed Microsoft Web.
Btw, on the core of the issue: Netscape is in a code freeze. A code freeze is something real, not a linux 2.4 thing. Non-blocking bugs are not corrected in a code freeze. Period. Blocing bugs are defined as bugs that pose visualisation problems to the top100 sites. Trying to get NS6.0 out of the door bug free is stupid. Most
Asking NS to postpone its release is only a way to give more fule to IE6. Release early, release often. Does it reminds you something ?
Cheers,
--fred
PS: And I love the logic of 'Don't accept NS6, it is not perofect. Use IE6 *BETA* instead.
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Netscape 6 Beta Screenshot
This is a genuine screenshot produced by the Mac Beta. I would have thought opening text/html files would be a pretty important standard to adopt :)
Since we have also standardized on netscape messenger as our email client on all workstations
Yeah, I did this at my office as well. One of the biggest selling points for Messenger was it's addressing and how it integrated that with LDAP. As it is, AOLzilla apparently didn't think it all that important to support LDAP. If your office is using LDAP now for addressing, don't upgrade to NS 6.0!
There has been "talk" about getting LDAP support into a later release. I guess after 3 years waiting, what's a few more years?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I presume your grandmother is forever partitioning her Windows drive with that masterpiece of user-friendliness, fdisk? Setting up user accounts? You only need two and you create them on install. Setting up networking? No harder on my Mandrake 7.1 than on Win9x. If your grandmother had to install Windows she would probably give up after the third meaningless crash.
As for your father, is he now overcharging his customers? Is he giving bicycles away free to push his competitors out of the market? There's a difference between strong competition and monopoly abuse. How did Netscape fall so fast? Because Microsoft used it's monopoly position to isolate Netscape from it's revenue streams, by bullying PC manufacturers and ISPs, and tying it's browser to the OS, removing a large part of Netscape's revenue stream.
I think you need to read Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact. Before then, I just didn't think much of their software. After I read what they'd done to keep better software away from their monopoly, I despised them.
Lotus Notes - nice? You poor deluded fool :)
Your father is an excellent capitalist, he competes aggressively, as do his competitors. Microsoft don't. They use their monopoly to control the market to their satisfaction, and only the anti-trust trial has blunted their arrogance slightly. Now that GWB has won and the anti-trust case will be dropped, watch out for more misbehaviour.
What did you expect? I've been a web developer since ancient history (1996), and I've been plagued by such incredibly bad products as pre-version 3.0 browsers of Netscape and IExplore. Invariably, the Netscape ones were the least standards compliant (although IE2 was truly horrible), and given Microsoft's track history of bad standards compliance, that's a major accomplishment. It was not always the lesser browser product (as it unfortunately is now), but in terms of standards compliance they always sucked. This just continues that trend.
This does not mean that IExplore is very compliant, but it is more so that Netscape. I'll not dive into the Mozilla vs. Netscape issue - others already dealt with that better than I can. But my hopes for Mozilla are not as high as they used to be, since they've all but bloated their way into uselessness. In some areas, noticeably CSS 2, Mozilla M18 is the best I've seen so far and the DOM compliance is about as good as it gets (IExplore is not very far off the mark either - it usually takes limited effort to go from Mozilla to IExplore browser code, and the differences are really minor).
May I make a suggestion? The issue is not really whether IExplore is better than Netscape or Mozilla or whatever. The issue is which browser is better on a *specific platform*. For Win32/W2K usage, nothing beats IExplore. Period. For Unices of different flavors, the battlefield is much more level, and my inclination is towards Mozilla, as much out of hope for REAL standards compliance in a small package as for any concrete "improvements" we've seen (skin browsers anyone? The least useful thing I've seen for a browser in a LONG time).
I have always hoped that I could get Mozilla as a shared library (OK, maybe a couple of them), and that I could simply use Mozilla as a component in my own software. I can do that SOOO easily with Win32 and IExplore, and it rocks! No GUI, no mail/news/skin/blabla support, just a shared library with a totally cool HTML (and related technologies) renderer. Someone with the time to do that - please? I might have done it myself, were it not for the fact that other projects currently take up all my spare time. More than it should, in fact...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I know *EXACTLY* how that feels. Might I suggest that you start out writing it for Netscape, and then modify it for IExplore later? That has actually reduced development time for me on a regular basis. It's never worse, but sometimes better.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Wine plus an x86 VM where needed.
(Well, not that it will happen in many places, but you did ask!)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If you don't believe me, look at this.
And if you'll excuse me, I need to save my work, close all programs, and restart my computer.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
DON'T DO THAT! You can't really print Flash presentations. You can't copy text from Flash. You don't really want to use Flash. I'd suggest that Flash is slower to download, but I'm not actually sure about that. In some scenarios, it would probably download faster (image intensive pages that can now be done with line art as opposed to gifs), but for just presenting text, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
Seriously, do not do that! You'd also be cutting out all the people too paranoid to run ActiveX, all those who use a browser without a Flash plugin, and anyone who needed to access the page from a console-based browser. If you want to know why not to do an all flash site, visit this site and cower in fear. (Only works in IE because their MIME types are messed up.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
A "feature freeze" does not mean that you can not
apply bug fixes.
Was that a pro-Microsoft statement from Slashdot? I guess I'm dead then.
I had been making productive use of M18 on FreeBSD 4.1, until I came to notice a performance degradation...top inaccuracies aside, M18 gets up to 80% of the system within fifteen minutes of being launched.
The $64k question now is whether Case gets impatient with Mozilla and just yanks the plug on it at some point - this project is still in serious trouble.
Yes, so they could make lots of money. Instead, the made no money...actually negative money.
Saying NEtscape won is like saying Xerox won because PARC got everyone using GUIs.
Come on, use your brain.
Put a big blue E on their desktop and take away netscape, and they don't know what the hell to do.
What school is this????
*ahem* it IS a better product. Helloooooooo???? The article is about the lack of full support for web standards in the Modzilla project, at this point.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
I personally like IE better, I am not sure why. A lot of my friends ask me why i like it better and I never have a good answer.
well timmy, king of fjords, let's see... is it 'cause all your other freinds are using IE? Maybe it's cause Netscape still fundamentaly has it's head up it's ass.
"I don't see Microsoft having an opensource browser, do you? "
and won't you be....my neighbor.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
you didn't read it right!
Yes, I did. Thats why I said "right now"
"Right now, IE is still the better browser.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
pardon me, I actualy said, "at this point"
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Shure! Never said they were perfect, just better. Besides, MS stock is headed back up.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
1. Unless you're someone@netscape.com, your patches never see the light of day. Umpteen bazillion code reviews later, it's still not in the build. Then Netscape marks your bug "RTM++", some Netscape engineer fixes it, and their all happy they fixed a bug that there was already a fix for.
2. Slow load time - IE under wine loads faster on my machine than a no-debug optomized to hell mozilla. That's not a good sign.
3. Contributions from the comunity never see the light of day either. Notice that only 3 of the platforms have a MathML enabled M18 build: the MathML people have to literally beg third party people to build their code, because Netscape refuses to wate their precious time on the project. If you're not netscape, you don't matter.
4. While you are an outside developer are living in code review hell, the senior developers are submitting code without even a basic regression test. That's why "regression" is about the most frequently seen word in mozilla status reports.
5. Netscape busts the builds - there a reason that NSPR-whatever is not only worse than the nightlies when it comes out, but the previous milestone as well. It's because all the crap netscape adds fucks up the build. Everyone knows this, but does netscape fix it? No....
Posted with Konqueror untill Mozilla gets it's shit working.
IE is better in not crashing every 5 minutes.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
But that does not necessarily take away from the fact that Mozilla != good. Personally, I haven't been impressed with either Mozilla or Netscape 6. IE runs fast and well on my Win2K box. I'm sticking with it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If Microsoft produced a Linux browser that was standards compliant, fast and still free, I'd get it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
because his cuthroat prices have driven his competitors out of business. There is nothing wrong with this! It's life. Business is not fair!
When did it become ok to be an asshole in business? When did it become ok to run a business as if its survival and growth were the only things relevant in the world?
Listen up bicycle boy: Under NO CONDITIONS, BUSINESS OR OTHERWISE is it ok to purposefully ruin other peoples lives.
The idea that all is far in business is sickening, and is leading the world on a quickening pace to oblivion. Eventually the planet will have to make a choice:
1) Continue to indulge ever greedy selfish shortsighted whim of pricks like your father
OR
2) Hold everyone and their decisions accountable to the greater good of the environment, democracy, social justice, freedom, free-speech, basic-human rights (ect) that a GOOD person would do - because there are people like ME in the world who find it incorrigible to do anything that doesnt have the best interests of everyone in mind its called community and sharing and caring. Idealistic? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Raise your standards people - you dont have to be vultures and pricks to 'get ahead'. People like YOU (your father) irk me to no end - that somehow YOUR happiness is more important than the happiness of your 'competitors'. Cretin.
Now: If you feel you have a conscience, and I have mis-judged you: Im sorry, your point above digs at me like nothing else, and exemplifies one of my greatest dislikes. But it is possible I may have leaped a little at your statement.
Attention America: Today is the day, do the world a favour:
I don't fault AOL/Netscape in putting money-making devices in the browser. They have to make money somehow, and they don't have OS or office suite cash cows to support the browser as a loss leader, so they have to recognize some revenue somehow
;)
I see it a little differently - I see AOL gobbling up Netscape, and with it a massive chunk of Nerdish Karma. AOL absolutely has the resources to float an excellent Browser project - INSTEAD they are going to add a pile of cruft and dog-doo to Gecko and pass it off as Netscape 6.
Ive said it before, Ill say it a thousand more times around here: AOL has a very specific timeline and roadmap for Netscape/Navigator. Their license deal with Microsoft will be up in the new year - they have a MASSIVE amount of sheeple lusers who run AOL Browser (whatever it is) that is basically a re-branded IE. With MS's obvious goals of world-domination, MSN, MSNBC that strange 'search' thing that happens when you put other than a URL in the Address Bar on IE... all 'features' that steer a great amount of mind share and content control of the Net to MS.
AOL likely has VERY little interest in aiding MS broaden their user base. As has been said "the browser is a platform", which is becoming true (for good or ill) but AOL has an interest in maintaining their market share/$ in this 'new web-centric' world.
Heres what will happen: AOL will TAKE ADVANTAGE OF a massive OpenSource effort (Mozilla/Gecko), then release AOL(Netscape)Browser 6 to the mindless masses. If the Mozilla/Gecko/OpenSource project didnt exist; AOL would have built its own rendering engine and have released AOL(Netscape)Browser 6 (sans Gecko) on the same day. But by Mozilla being involved the rest of the world gets the OpenSource engine and a standards compliant effort (vs whatever standard AOL would have specified and designed to(probably as anti-competitive as MS))
I believe in the new year, when AOLusers are given the AOL(Netscape) 6 browser two things will happen:
1) The IE vs Navigator stats will change very quickly and dramatically - with it will come a big 'The Browser wars are not over' media bonanza, and the self-fulfilling momentum for Netscape that will ensue
2) We will have a terrific/compliant/fast/capable browser for Linux. Maybe not at 6.0 definitely soon after. (For a good reason: AOL will not risk putting out a buggy/crappy AOL(Netscape) 6 so the sheeple can say "boy AOL suxors - im switching to MSN so I can use IE it is better dude") And besides: how could they possibly add more features? - they'll have to start on killing the bugs...
Today's the day People, get out and VOTE NADER!
I use CSS. My only regret is that it's limited how much I can (safely) do with it because so far, genuine support for the actual standards is so crap and unpredictible. (This is mostly because Netscape 4 is hopelessly inadequate.)
===
i was under the impression that the only way IE was standards compliant was by embrace-and-extend a standard, modify it to m$'s liking, and then put out a version of IE that supports m$'s version only. by virtue of that, it would BECOME a standard because web developers want people to be able to see their sites. kind of a cart/horse issue if you ask me... it's backwards. the wrong people are in charge.
oh well...
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
the masses don't want source code. they want programs. they don't want to read the code, they just want to get on th' durn internet'n send s'me o' that new-fangled e-mail. they know nothing of standards compliance, and couldn't even hazard a guess at what it means because 'it's one of those computer-people things'. they just want to sit down, browse yahoo, forward stupid jokes on to their equally stupid friends, and play minesweeper.
there is, in all likelihood, far more people out there who *don't* care about open source than there are who do.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
you apparently haven't heard of iPlanet.
http://www.iPlanet.com
I work for iPlanet Learning Solutions on the Netscape campus as their head sysadmin. I talk to the mozilla crew occasionally. They usually tell me about bad patches for bugs, and the 30 billion backdoors that people try to send in.
It's quite funny, how people who honestly don't know what it's like to develop whine at them.
I sure hope this isn't considered flamebait
You're right, it is late, I copied your text but meant this as a reply to the parent thread, doh!!
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
That's OK, we OS X users don't need to surf the web anyway.
I'd like to point out that the best browser is left to the individual. In my case I run too many platforms to use IE, which isn't available for all of them.
In the Win environment I use Netscape, because IE, like all M$ products, bugs the hell out of me with second guessing.
[Bother you again with annoying prompt?]
[Beep at you for no apparent reason?]
[Not work with your plugin?]
[Disconnect now?]
There really needs to be one setting per app or overall on windows with is No, just do what I say, never ask me again.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This review is on Mozilla's recent nightlies. A good base of comparison.
Smoke a swan, smoke a fish, smoke a Swanson's fish dinner.
The downfall was in the lack of leadership and everyone's determination to do whatever the hell they wanted. Everyone started working on shit.
WHY do we need themability? Especially since the damn thing is GTK based? STUPID. WHY do we need an excessively consumer oriented interface? Web pages do that well enough themselves.
Mozilla has me utterly disappointed. It's the poster child for how badly open source projects can fail, and everyone should use it as an example of what NOT to do when starting their own large scale projects.
Stay on task. Realize your goals. Make it look pretty after it works.
This is what MS did with IE.
X11 was designed to live in very limited memory, requiring little more than the video memory and program memory itself. But most clients are simply not programmed to live with those limitations anymore and they request lots of bitmaps. Whole toolkits now make very liberal assumptions about being able to get lots of memory in the server.
Just to make it clear, IE MacOS has almost as much in common with IE winX than win98 has with win2000. They just are different products distributed under the same name.
First, they can't use most of the same code base (due to the VERY strong ties between IE and Windows on the win side), for example a whole bunch of javascript don't work on IE MacOS (*.print for example).
2, the MacOS IE team did an almost complete rewrite of IE between vers. 4.5 and 5.0
3, feature wise both are not in the same league. You have control on what you print on IE mac (bg color, size, etc...), you have a page holder on the side (überKool feature), etc...
4, standard wise they're equally not in the same league, as IE Mac has COMPLETE support for CSS-1 and HTML 4. (see http://www.Webstandards.org/macie5.txt and http://www.alistapart.com/stories/ie5m ac/ )
The mac dev. team is not even geographically near Redmond (they're in the Silicon Valley).
As for me I stick with icab; small, very fast, allows a lot of control.
-- p a n a p i c - panoramas des alpes: Mont-Blanc, Mont-Rose, Cervin, etc...
where can I download IE for XFree86 ?
Also, the bookmarks in IE are each a separate file of its own, each containing 100-300 bytes, but using up 4k-8k cluster size on the disk, which on my 5000 links list comes to 20Mb or 40Mb for bookmarks that in Netscape took 1/20th of that space. Who comes up with such idiocy?
Another problem is that you can't turn VBscripts off on many sites since when they detect IE they insist you turn them on, which becomes a safety and privacy nightmare. Every time someone finds and publicizes new security loophole in IE, which seems to be every couple months, MS fixes it and makes a new one, as if, God forbid, someone needs them in there. Wouldn't trust it the pile of junk in my backyard woodshed.
Unfortunately, each of the two main browsers is a piece of #@!~, each in its own way, although I think Netscape still has some ways to go to catch up with the idiocies, loopholes and intrusivness of the IE family. It still has few good things the big company creative genius hasn't ruined yet. But it surely is heading there and catching up fast. Back at 3.x Browsers, there was no contest. It seems NS 6.0 may have finally caught up with IE 5.5. Congratulations.
I don't know if Operah is any good nowdays. I tried it couple years ago when they just came out, it didn't work well, so I went back to Netscape.
michael: Are you kidding? You want to throw away the only browser working towards 100% standards compliance, in favor of something that supports 0% standards? This doesn't make any sense. I hate to ruin your party but Mozilla will be 100% standards compliant, but it ain't easy, and it's not going to happen overnight. In the mean time, Netscape needs to release a new browser before they lose all of their Market Share.
Joseph Elwell.
To see the leader in internet standards in action, load http://www.microsoft.com from any non-microsoft plantform. You get: JavaScript Error: http://www.microsoft.com/, line 28: loadPage is not defined.
---- perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
I've submitted my share of bugs for Mozilla (along with test cases to demonstrate them) - and some of them _WON'T_ be fixed 'due to compatibility' reasons. "It's always been done that way," they say. "Use CSS to fix that," they say. "Other browsers do it that way," they say. .swf spec is even 'open' (unfortunately the .fla spec is not). Combine that with Flash Generator, and voila - see ya, HTML, wouldn't wanna be ya.
See, here's the deal - they SAY they're going to make it 'standards compliant', yet that isn't always the case, depending on which person gets your bug report. If their 'mind'set is as quoted above, then you can forget standards compliance and commonsense layout. Unfortunate, to say the least. The big reason why I want to move to full Flash display ASAP. HTML will be quite useful and stable as a Flash-delivery framework. *not kidding* Check out the features of Flash 5 - it's gettin' scary. Detailed scripting, form fields (as of v4), etc. The
On the flip side - I'd STILL rather use a slightly-less compliant browser (Nav 6) than use a browser imbedded into Windows. The reason? Quite simple (for those simpletons out there) - when Navigator (any version) crashes - it takes itself out. When IE crashes (even as late as v5.5), it usually takes out the whole OS (Win 98SE or Win2K - happens with both).
The 'standards compliance' (such as it is) in Navigator 6 will be plenty good enough for me as long as it doesn't take out the OS with it when it crashes (don't be a fool and think "it won't crash"). My real concern isn't with whether it'll crash a lot or be 100% standards compliant (it'll crash some, and it won't be 100% compliant), but how buggy the implementation of JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM will be. Too many bugs in these (especially CSS) are what have prevented wide-spread implementation thus far (that and users who don't understand the concept of 'upgrade').
Okay, enough ranting. I gotta stop making websites for a living. *sigh*
I guess I shouldn't have expected better from Slashdot. The Slashdot community seems to have given up on free software in favour of lame games and anime, but to advocate a browser that is only available on two platforms as an alternative to a browser that is available on just about every UNIX, MacOS, Win32 and even OpenVMS is just plain ridiculous. IE will never compete with Mozilla because of that.
I would personally recommend Windows and probably MacOS users use IE - at least until there is a Netscape 6, but to see it as an alternative for the Slashdot readership makes me almost laugh.
Of course the correct response to this is: Its Free Software - don't whine - patch! If Netscape management is more worried about shipping than fixing some bugs then fork for god's sake! I would rather them ship a 90% compliant browser than ship nothing and leave us with NS4 on UNIX.
What I would really like to see is Slashdot readers and authors committing some patches instead of fencesitting and whining. You can't consider yourselves to be part of the free software community if you don't commit code (or docs or translations or support or any of the other worthwhile things you could be doing).
Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) based on the mozilla browser so it renders nicely, missing some important features at the moment (cookies, ssl), but under heavy development
/usr/lib/mozilla/psm ; chmod go+w components
For the record, Galeon does support SSL.
1) Install PSM in Mozilla as root
2) cd
And it should then automatically work in Galeon.
(something we should probably add to the FAQ)
greetings, eMBee.
--
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Actually it is a very good argument. If we were discussing cars, for example, and we lived in separate countries, would it make sense for me to tout a car that was only available in mine?
If something is not available to you, it is irrelevant, regardless of how good it may be.
If you choose your OS based on browser availability, then, no, it is no longer an irrelevant point. But choosing an OS based solely on the availability of one application seems to me to be a little silly.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for 6, and probably anything that will come in the future. Netscape has joined the dark side, and I get chills any time I try to use it. It's not just the crash factor (they are, after all, still working on it), the bells and whistles, the terrible UI, or the lack of conformity to standards; The problem is also that IE now functions so cleanly and so smoothly that Netscape is hardly a contender anymore.
I hate to say it folks, but the battle is drawing to a finish, and Microsoft is emerging as the victor. Netscape made some serious blunders, and while they may scoop in a few dollars before they go, they will likely disappear within the next few years. The software company I work for has stopped bothering to support Netscape because it is so divergent, and also because within the next year or so it will lose market share until it finds itself in the company of Opera and Lynx.
Got Rhinos?
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Did you actually say that a Microsoft product is somehow better than an Open Source product? on Slashdot? Are you crazy?
--
I personally like IE better, I am not sure why. A lot of my friends ask me why i like it better and I never have a good answer.
It's because of the subliminal messages, of course!
This sig is umop apisdn.
Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for Mozilla, but at this point it really looks hopeless.
"In a number of cases, Mozilla engineers have fixed standards-compliance bugs and have had their patches to the source code reviewed twice by senior engineers. Even when the patches are extraordinarily simple ones"
Sounds like typical management to me. The idea is usualy to attach yourself to anything that may wind up being a good idea. Leaching credit for good work is SOP in every corporation I have seen. Do we realy think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs wrote every line of code themselves? yet who gets the credit? By exhaustively reviewing the fixes, it allows them to take some credit for the fixes themselves, or, if they actualy find a flaw, all that much better. it's a win win......
Dirty Pirate Hooker
naww..I think that IE has not beaten Netscape by any means. In fact, at our school, we only have netscape, and that is the same at some colleges i have visited. Netscape might not be as popular, but it hasn't lost the browser war.
I personally like IE better, I am not sure why. A lot of my friends ask me why i like it better and I never have a good answer. Now I might, but I still wouldn't underestimate Netscape, Mozilla etc....I don't see Microsoft having an opensource browser, do you?
The anti-salmon
IE has about 80% market share... I'd call that a big win [not saying that's good, just that it is]. Now Netscape has been peddling dog feces as consumer product for quite a while now, and Mozilla is still not ready for prime time, nor is it really visible in the Windows arena [hint to open source folks: the key to victory is not the OS. get people using open source tools on windows, showing them the value of open source, THEN move them to a different OS, touting how all their lovely open source tools will port so nicely]. I wish it were otherwise, but so long as I have to use Windows [and I have some reasons folks] I'll use IE. Once I'm through with Windows, well, I hope SOMEONE has their act together by then.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
It's a horrible article because it's got it's head up it's ass. If you're going to write an article about standards compliance, the natural thing to do would be to do a comparison. Obviously we can't link to Microsoft's internal bug repository, but makes a straw man argument that somehow, there are no bugs in IE which cause under certain rare circumstances, for IE to violate official web standards.
It's funny to see that some people are willing to pull a stunt like this, in an attempt to get the bugs they care about fixed. Anybody who has been following Mozilla development (like for instance me, this being posted from a version of Mozilla built from CVS earlier today) is aware that some known bugs will be left in NS6 and fixed in NS6.01 or whatever simply because right now they need to ship product. If there's a bug which causes seven pages on the Internet to display slightly incorrectly, they really don't give a shit, and that's GOOD.
No I'm not smoking crack, it really is a good thing. What good will a perfect, bug-free browser do if it's delivered at the same time as emacs 27 and Linux 2.6? If we get a damned good browser out there, it forces a larger portion of the web to make sure they work with IE, and Mozilla. If nothing is shipped, then IE becomes the standard, and there's no chance of preserving a standards based web.
I have nothing against IE, I think it's a great browser, and IE 5 for Mac is, in my opinion, the best browser I've used. The idea that we should abandon mozilla, stop reporting bugs, and hope that IE6 saves the world is even more ignorant than the slashdroids who think that Linux is the only decent operating system in the world.
Congratulations Michael, you and the trolls were having a short dick contest, and it looks like you won.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Yes, you read that correctly. Netscape won the browser war. Netscape's goal was to turn the web into a platform. They succeeded in that goal. We now live in a world where many applications are web-based instead of Windows-based. Microsoft didn't want that. Netscape did. Netscape won.
It was a Pyhrric victory, of course, since Netscape's market share got decimated by Microsoft. But they succeeded in turning the web into a platform.
By the way, I don't fault AOL/Netscape in putting money-making devices in the browser. They have to make money somehow, and they don't have OS or office suite cash cows to support the browser as a loss leader, so they have to recognize some revenue somehow. At least they've continued to support the open source Mozilla project, allowing you to re-build it differently if you so choose. AOL has been more than gracious in keeping the dream of a non-MSproprietary Web alive; they do not deserve our scorn.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'm know I'll get mod'd down for saying this, but...
Whoever posted this must have been having and extremely bad day. Let's review the post (posters notes, not quotations from the article):
Hrm... perhaps someone ("michael") was:
Personally I think that slashdot is having serious quality problems. Crap is getting posted all too often, and good stuff is getting refused. Articles like this don't even deserve the bytes they are printed on (err, what a sec here...
I remember a slashdot that was run by a single person, and that person ran a quality site. Back then the quality of the site was directly tied to his reputation... now however, things are seeming different.
-Chris
Set Konqy to masquerade as IE from the Control Center (UserAgent). www.zdnet.com is not shown correctly because buggy scripts in the page identify us as Netscape. Also complain to their webmaster.
IE isn't availible on all platforms so how do you expect me to change to it?
-Compenguin
A Slashdot story advocating the use of a Microsoft product??? Maybe one of those dooms-day asteroids is going to hit us after all. Surely this must be one of the seven signs???
Full HTML4.0 compliance
Full ECMAscript 262 support (Javascript)
Java applets
Full CSS1 and partial CSS2 compliance
Full SSL support (with openSSL)
This is definitely the browser to use if you're on a unix system. It's great for those that want an open source browser that is lightweight (no email/news clients, as there are other KDE apps for that).
-Justin
"Clearly, IE is a better browser" /.- think before you post. I still like you guys, and you'll last a lot longer if you don't alienate your readership by allowing trolls to pose as employees.
Eh. Clearly, you haven't been using Mozilla regularly. It isn't yet as good as (say) IE 5.5 for Mac, but it is vastly better than Netscape 4.x and getting better all the time.
"and will stay that way."
How exactly do you justify that? Oh, wait, I forgot- this is slashdot, not actual journalism.
Seriously, if this article were a comment, it would get modded into the ground as flamebait, because Michael is making claims that are not only tenously grounded in reality, but which he completely fails to back up at all. Furthermore, it completely ignores most of us who are not willing to run products that aren't free, Windows first and foremost among them.
Please, please
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I've been reading Slashdot for a long, long time and I resent your claim that supporting IE is "ridiculous".
Historically, Microsoft made some pretty crappy software. Things are changing, however, and they don't deserve the flaming that they get on this site. Yes, they're closed-source. Hell, RedHat makes closed-source software. **MOST** companies make closed-source software. But in terms of stability and quality, Win2k and IE 5.01 are awesome products.
Before you get your panties in a knot, let me tell you that I ran Linux from early 1994 until 1998, when I switched to FreeBSD. My job title is "Senior UNIX Administrator" and I've spent more than my share of time at a bash prompt. I've played with nearly every OS out there, both open and closed-source. I stand by my opinion that IE and Win2k are excellent products.
And for your statement that "IE will never compete with Mozilla", well, you're just plain wrong. IE's user base is growing daily. IE came farther along in a matter of a year than Mozilla has done in its lifetime. Like it or not, most of the world uses (and will continue to use) Microsoft Windows.
On top of all that's been said; about OS embedding to gain performance and entangle IE in the OS; about the IE lack of standards compliance; the customizability of Mozilla and the like; I'd like to add THIS.
It's exactly the sort of blind regurgitation of opinions, as skillfully demonstrated by the troll message I'm responding to, that has gotten us where we are now.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Not all of us run Windows, so we can't beta-test IE 6 unless MS suddenly decides to start supporting platforms outside of Windows and Macintosh. In any event, Mozilla nightlies are just as good by now; that the Mozilla crew has developed a cross-platform, standards-compliant, feature-filled, modern web browser in about 2.5 years from the ground up is just amazing. That Netscape/AOL is pissing in it doesn't surprise me, but then, I use Mozilla nightlies, not NS6.
Mozilla != Netscape, but Netscape is being built on Mozilla.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Of course the correct response to this is: Its Free Software - don't whine - patch! If Netscape management is more worried about shipping than fixing some bugs then fork for god's sake! I would rather them ship a 90% compliant browser than ship nothing and leave us with NS4 on UNIX.
I can't believe you got modded up as insightful. The article gives props to Mozilla which is the Open Source project not Netscape. The problem is that Netscape is ignoring all the fruits of the Open Source nature of Mozilla by refusing patches and the like to standards compliance problems.
I agree that for a site that pushes Open Source micheal should have pushed Mozilla instead of IE but it seems you are under the mistaken assumption that Mozilla and Netscape 6 are the same project which is untrue.
Mozilla is NOT Netscape
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance
the article is about how Netscape's people aren't implementing Mozilla's patches.
That's the story in a nutshell. Don't hold your breath to apt-get MSIE 6.0... Mozilla is working on these problems, and they're not worried about release dates
Again from the article: There's a link about signing the petition, and some very egregious examples of Netscape (despite railings by Mozilla) not implementing pre-existing fixes.
There's still hope... for those of us who wait for Mozilla.
__
alt.geek
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
What is this guy complaining about? Netscape has decided to put a feature freeze on Netscape v6.0, and is being very selective about what makes it into the codebase. Finally, Netscape wants to realease a browser, instead of releasing press releases.
Unfortunately, this is going to mean that some documented "misbehaviours" will not be fixed for Netscape 6. They'll be fixed in Mozilla, and fixed in later releases of Netscape, but they won't be fixed in this one. Oh well - sometimes, that happens. If it this matters to you, use Mozilla instead of Netscape. Or, use Internet Explorer.
But Netscape has to realease something. That fetid pile of refuse they've been limping along on for the last few years is simply horrible -- it doesn't even pretend to support any of standards proposed by w3 in the last four years. The CSS1 support is a cruel, hideous joke. The CSS positional content crap makes my hair turn grey. The DOM is entirely non-standard, and provides almost no scriptable elements -- essentially, Netscape v4 allows you to swap images, hide and show layers, and manipulate form elements. Thats it. Its hardly more than Netscape 2 provided. Some incredible effects have been created using these paltry tools, but I shudder to think how much hair someone lost trying to create them. Internet Explorer is much, much easier to develop for -- it supports the w3 proposed standards much, much better than Netscape v4 ever did. In some cases, it supports them as well as Netscape v6 plans to.
Unfortunately, there is only one widely used standards compliant browser -- Internet Explorer. More and more websites will abandon Netscape in the coming years. I am certain of this. If a credible standards compliant competitor to IE emerges, then I believe most developers will develop to those specifications. Unfortanately, if no competitor implementing CSS or the DOM emerges, then developers will continue developing to IE's implementation of those specifications, along with all the other non-stadard extensions IE introduces.
Frankly, the abandonment of Netscape is happening today, and the problem is going to accelerate. Unless some browser gets a toe hold in now, soon the web will be full of IE specific pages -- pages which follow no published standard, but instead are written to whatever implementation those guys at Redmond decides to give us. We need a second standards compliant browser available for most platforms, so that people have a reason to use the standards. A standard is only useful in the face of competition.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
You see, by releasing it as a 6.0 (not beta, but just as a version), people will download it, and not download anything for a while (people don't like downloading new stuff -- it tends to be slower and clunkier). As a result, developers will have to start (learning) how to develop for 6.0 -- programming for its quirks ON TOP of what they already have to do right now (we have to separate IE/NS, then by major version number, and if we're doing really funky stuff, by minor version number).
That's a WHOLE LOT OF CRAP. The article makes some good points.
I guess it comes down to: is it better for NS to release a buggy browser that people are pissed off about? Or is it better that they not release another (yet again) for a while and risk losing even MORE market share.
--
Nobody won the browser wars, damnit! We all lost! The browser wars set us back 10 years, to the time before the web. The Web was invented so that anybody could view anything on anything, the browser wars destroyed that. Instead, we got two sucky browsers that look the same, feel the same, renders pages almost identical. One is perhaps more bloated than the other, but they both suck badly. Instead, we should have had a great diversity in browsers, each with different features, leaving the layout of the page and the control of the page largely in the hands of the users. Very little of the web's potential is realized, all it does is put food on the table for a few overpaid graphics designers, while web pages are still linear or hierarchal. Arrrrggggh!
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I tell ya.. Slashdot says something Pro-Microsoft, the Internet will crash tomorrow at election day, and the US Government gives it's employees a raise.. Oh, did I mention that pigs have flown?
Now all we need is for the Transmeta IPO
Information is the catalyst for revolution