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.
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.
It doesn't work on those platforms. It crashes and hungs, and in brief periods of time between crashes it doesn't behave properly. Ports are broken beyond repair, and all their development was abandoned.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Positioning anything 'pixel' wise requires a lot of coding trickery, Table and cell backgrounds render incorrectly - the list goes on.
You want pixels? How about displaying on my PalmIII? Why Yahoo works absolutely perfectly with my PalmIIIc and Browse-it (aka Proxiweb), and a bunch of sites written "pixel-positioned" looks like a pile of dog shit? Why every gorilla with a keyboard wants to make his stupid page display like it's a freaking laminated brochure? Aren't you and your company the real source of the problem?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I ain't budging. I don't _want_ all-singing, all-dancing websties to actively reprogram my computer for me. "Submit to the brain scan of brainitor.com!" yech.
Yes, I did mean to type websties... started out as a typo, then I fixed it, then looked at it and fixed it right back again. Guess why ;)
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.
---
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.
Internet Exploder is simply the best you can get.
I would agree that IE is the best if you want to view the most sites on the net. The problem I have with IE is that it is USELESS for developers to use in testing. IE autocorrects many serious HTML errors that SHOULD and DO break other browsers when they try to render pages. The result is that we have many web sites that are missing and tags or have other serious errors in thier HTML. These sites are NOT compliant with standards, either HTML or XHTML, and will NOT render in any browser other than IE.
The fact of the matter is IE IS HARMFUL to the adherence of standards on the web, and more so than Netscape because of it's lack of adherence to standards.
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...
this articel was about standards support and Mozilla/Netscape6/Galeon (a mozilla technology based browser) are all great places to look for strong standards support
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
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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.
If you think that, I feel you may be rather uninformed on the issues. JavaScript isn't important for fancy special effects. It's important for functionality in the documents. How are you going to make live changes to a page without JavaScript? Use VBScript instead? The idea is that we move away from this idea of reloading the entire damn page anytime the content has to change, and instead just make incremental trips back to the server. This saves on server load, bandwidth, client load, etc.
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.
CSS popped up? CSS defines styles for static documents.
Besides, what if you want to change your selections on accessories for the Palm. Would you rather recalculate your total price live, or take another trip back to the server and reload the entire page. JavaScript (or rather, ECMAScript) enables the former.
In order to build the next generation of web applications, we need some standards to work with. Expecting every site to use static HTML 3.2 pages for the rest of time is insane. Web sites should be rich, functional applications. They don't have to be flashy, load pages in all cases, but neither should they be wooden carts with square wheels.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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?
Microsoft gets bashed regularly by standards groups such as WaSP. But it's very possible that Microsoft is not supporting standards for political reasons. Mozilla's purpose, on the other hand, is to fully support standards. Worse yet, some of these issues have been addressed by engineers, but Netscape won't allow the patches to be included with 1.0. That's the kicker.
- Scott
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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.
You may choose not to use it, but IE is very much available for Mac OS X.
Although I must admit, I still use iCab on my SE/30, since Netscape and IE have failed to update their browsers for 68K machines.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
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.
We can, but do we?
There's more to high quality than a feature list.
Security, for starters.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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
Pardon me, but it's late, and I'm sick to death of this industry attitude that when someone wins a marketplace battle against Microsoft it's just until the next rev, but when Microsoft wins marketplace battles, it's forever.
See, there was this thing called an ANTI-TRUST LAWSUIT, and Microsoft was verified to be a MONOPOLIST that ILLEGALLY LEVERAGED THAT MONOPOLY and this case will eventually land in the SUPREME COURT where these very smart judges will confirm what every single worker in the tech industry outside of Redmond already knows: GAME OVER.
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.
Thank you, have a nice day.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
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.
Don't be a moron. Proxiweb can't make any use of that positioning because THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE ON PALM SCREEN. Just to be more or less readable text must be re-formatted, and actually developers of that browser went a long way to make it usable with all kinds of tables, images, etc. that in most of cases wouldn't be readable at all if the screen was just a scrollable window into "perfectly correctly" rendered page -- I will get RSI just from trying to scroll through that monstrosity.
So, developers of the browser are right, and pixel-positioning/overCSS'ing/flash/javascript based design is wrong -- not because of standards but because browser developers made a genuine and mostly successful effort to make their product usable. In the original spirit of the HTML ideas they tried to accomodate whatever will be possible to accomodate into the form that is most useful for the user. And both "standardizators" and stupid "web designers" did their parts in a job that bastardized the web, and made it impossible to accomplish browser's task on their pages, no matter how hard its developers would try to do that. Unless a browser runs on high-resolution screen that I can't put into my pocket, and uses countless megabytes of memory to do the rendering and interpreting.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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?
--
You're so right, and NOBODY can EVER challenge this Microsoft product, AGAIN!!! Once Microsoft winds a product arena, it stays WON, FOREVER!!!
Competitors need NEVER apply!
Pardon me, but it's late, and I'm sick to death of this industry attitude that when someone wins a marketplace battle against Microsoft it's just until the next rev, but when Microsoft wins marketplace battles, it's forever.
This is one plain and simple reason they need to go down the tubes.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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