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Mozilla Project Releases New Roadmap
Mozilla has released a new roadmap which includes branch, freeze, and release dates from 0.7 up into 1.x. I'm still hoping support for the Xrender gets in there soon, that and encryption are the 2 things lacking for me (and encryption has worked all right for some of recent versions). Anyway good luck to the actual hackers working on this thing.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Sites that mandate IE or NS are quite rare, but often come from large companies - for example, jamjar.com (UK car buying site from major insurance company) is unusable even with Netscape on Linux, let alone Opera. The website management there can't or won't take out the line of browser detection code that prevents Linux working, despite several complaints.
no it is December 3rd....it's build 2000120306 ...it was just a typo
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The timebomb no longer exists, and hasn't for a long time. The page which mentions it should have been updated.
:-)
However, I would hope you find a build better than your current one inside 30 days
Gerv
I've found that compiling mozilla yourself, omitting all the debugging stuff, the speed increases tremendously.
So did Netscape forget to remove their debug code when they released Netscape 6.0? Mozilla is slower than IE5. Netscape is slower than IE5. The memory footprint of NETSCP60.EXE on Windows 2000 is 3x the footprint of IE5. I don't think you can blame "debug code" for all of Netscape's problems.
cpeterso
The single most important feature lacking in Mozilla is speed. It's hard to believe anything would run slower than 4.x (especially on older machines), but it does. I would be much happier if they just released the source for Netscape 3 and let us hack on any necessary features (IMAP, modern javascript).
I think Mozilla is a great project, but does it really have to run so damn slow?
I think Netscape would have done themselves many favours if they had made their first release browser only (no Mail/News or Composer, maybe AIM).
The browser with it's new rendering engine is the sexy part of the product, the bit that people are interested in playing with. If they could have omitted Mail/News and composer for the first release they'd have a smaller, lighter package, with less to QA that people would be happy to use as a browser.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
A further point - not only will Mozilla work better in the future because the hardware baseline will be set higher, but also because optimisation is not currently a priority on the project - following most sensible programming guidelines the emphasis is on elegant code, and optimisation will come later. I fully expect the release version of Mozilla (or 1.0, at least) to be a lot easier on system resources in general - once the application is feature complete it's possible to sort out performance issues.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
AIUI, milestones represent branches from the trunk - development on the trunk continues as code approaches a milestone release, but it doesn't make sense to just finalise the code and release it as-is, warts and all.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Define 'as good a job as'. Mozilla does a better job than IE5 at conforming to most HTML and releated standards (HTML, you remember - that thing which browsers are supposed to render, yes?)
If your definition of compatibility is 'doing everything like IE5 does', then of course Mozilla doesn't do everything as well as IE5. Then again, with this model IE5 has a bit of an unfair advantage. Yes, there's a certain influence on Mozilla to ape IE5 in every respect, right down to supporting the same 'features' (Not bugs. Definitely not bugs...), but if that's the case then it's always destined to play catch-up. The real aim has to be to support the standards laid down by the W3C (which Mozilla already does better than IE5 in most respects, before a release-level version) and provide ease of use and a good set of features - which you may or may not agree that it does - to me in most (but by no means all) cases it already outpaces IE5 on this front as well.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
You miss the entire point of the Mozilla project with this statement. The websites shouldn't say "Mozilla 6 needed". They should say "HTML 4.0 required" - it's all about standards, not individual applications. Backwards compatibility is less of an issue because of this - if the aim is to make sure that standards work correctly, then breaking those standards in order to ensure backwards compatibility is a bad thing, not a laudable goal.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Nice try. I run Mozilla on a range of operating systems (not being a single-system zealot like yourself). The version I keep most up to date is installed on a Windows 2000 partition - my laptop boots with equal ease to Win2K, Win95 and Linux. On *all* platforms Netscape 6 is inferior to the Mozilla nightly builds at or around the launch date. The fact remains that the NS6 release came before the browser was ready for prime-time, and the feature freeze came even before that. Hence the reliability problems that a lot of people have had with NS6. Note that I have no problem at all with Mozilla, and that I use it in preference to Internet Explorer under Windows. That doesn't make a buggy, advertising-ridden release with a fatally flawed installer any more excusable.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
"I can't believe this guy (EverCode) is supposedly a mozilla coder" I missed that part. Where does he say heis a Mozilla developer? -Asa
Try a nightly build from here
0.6 is quite old. It is a snapshot of the MN6 branch at the time Netscape 6 was released. That branch was cut on 9/22 and development on the branch (lasting about 6 weeks) was slower than it was on the trunk. Nightly trunk builds at the Netscape 6/Mozilla 0.6 release point were significantly better than 0.6 and we've gotten a lot better since then.
--Asa
2000121306 ^^---checkin # for that day.
um, actually that 06 is the hour that the pull for that build happened.
--Asa
I don't know.. I don't think this looks too good. It will be months before Mozilla 1.0, and that's if "we're lucky," according to the timeline (which looks a little unprofessional, but hey, whatever.) However, they haven't really gone over what their criteria is for 1.0 - that's supposed to come later.
I feel the Mozilla project will never yield a great browser. In their quest for market share and compatibility on many platforms, thus prohibiting the use of many useful C++ features, they've ended up with not only a bloated, slow browser on anything but new computers, but, as Galeon proves, the Gecko rendering engine lacks speed as well. Although KDE's Konquerer is looking good, I'm not sure how tied into KDE that is. Hopefully my pessimism will turn out to be unnecessary, but I don't think things look good for the alternative browsers.
Yes, that is a valid point but there is not much that could be done about it. We have to move forward on standards support, and even Microsoft is making similar efforts as Mozilla now, from what I have read.
Basically it took 2 years for people to get their DHTML techniques down so they worked well in both IE and Netscape. Doing this is no joke.
Soon you will see updated techniques on how to do most of what could be done before while still making Mozilla/Netscape 6 happy.
However, if you want to go all the way with your DHTML, use Mozilla/Netscape 6. All you have to do it look at the w3 specs, and most of it will work.
Someday everyone will be using a standards-compliant browser, but unfortunately it will be a couple of years at least. Too bad we have to wait.
Maybe we should all start putting those old "Netscape Now!" and "Upgrade to Netscape X.X" buttons on our web pages again to get people to upgrade. Way back when those were effective because it really was not that hard to download and upgrade. The same is now here today now that lots of people are getting fast connections so they can install Netscape 6 with ease.
EverCode
damn! yes. i believe that's correct. i guess i'm just a master of irony :)
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
if you are using Build 2000121306 you are not using the December 3rd build.
Let's break it down:
You're using the December 13th build, not the 3rd.
Todays build is nice as well, but there is still the canvas bug error that's been hanging around for about a week. Not nice, but if you know what you're doing, easy to work around.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
furthermore, there are lots of nifty features, such as the ability to define domain-based javascript policies, spoof your user-agent string (again, domain-based), and similar functionality for cookies. oh, and it supports netscape plugins if you have lesstif/motif. what more could one want?
i suggest that you say hello to http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html
zot!
tmk
According to the Xrender document on slashdot a couple days ago, there's no need for support above the toolkit level. In which case, the GTK+ changes just need to be completed and merged with the stable branch- something that the Mozilla developers are not directly responsible for.
-bugg
This kind of support is better to the open source community than support from a company like Corel which promises a lot but fails to deliver. Netscape Corp. contributes to the Internet community and helps advocate the need of open systems, public specs, etc.
--[rosso bright]--
And to actualy build it you have to have over a gig of diskspace readily available, and to use it you have to allocate it around an eight of gig of RAM.
To not be enoyed by slowness you'll need an i686 over 500 MHz.
But if you can satisfy these requirements then it's OK: I use it as my only browser, both at home (900 MHz) and at work (500 MHz), and with mozilla 0.6 I have had only one or two mozilla crashes lost month (using WinNT).
--[rosso bright]--
I don't want to just slam mozilla. It is a very ambitious project that has tons of resources pulled out from under it. What mozilla is undertaking is huge. I think in another year or so it will be a very, very strong competitor. It's becoming wayy more stable and fast. I find just pure mozilla with netscape loaded only uses about 20megs of ram. (Note: this is just doing Free memory before - Free memory after). It's just the ends that need to be ironed out now, proformance, and the little end stuff, but extremely important, like printing. I think once some of the plugin stuff gets streamlined you're going to see people proclaiming mozilla is really coming around. Loading the JVM at start-up is hardly memory/proformance effecient. Mozilla is the only real hope for advanced new web technologies on UNIX. However, I do think some things like Konqueror and Opera will be very good at rendering "the simple stuff" but it seems to me mozilla is more being designed as a cross-platform enterprise application platform in itsself. I just hope they do iron out all the little stuff.
I looked for the Mozilla 0.6 source to try this myself, but they apparently don't have a tarball for it. I'd wager they have 0.6 in CVS, so I'll have to try that some day.
This whole thing reminds me of when GNOME came out. All we heard was bitching and whining all around about how it sucked and was buggy, and now that it's a stable project no one seems to have any real problems with it.
I think the same thing will happen with Mozilla. You've got the core supporters (try a nightly! Or v 0.6!) and the bashers (slow, bloated, sucky) but in the end, when it's released, you'll see a lot of people using it happily with no complaints. We bitch because we're seeing a work in progress and comparing it to a fifth generation product but when we get the final product I think we'll be quite content with it. It'll render fast enough and start fast enough and we really won't care in the end because we'll have a good, modern browser. The bitching is just temporary.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
While I think you mean in terms of overall useablity, not rendering (obviously) in the "step back" statement for NS6, I use NS 4.x under Linux for exactly two reasons:
It's that simple. I can't WAIT until either NS gets its feature bloat under control, or MS decides to build IE5+ for Linux. Until then, I use NS 4.x and curse and curse and curse, simply because there are no viable alternatives. It's awful.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
It's now to the point where it's a browser I can use for everything I used a browser for before, and I pretty much use a browser for everything so that's saying a lot ;). There's still some strides to make in performance, but it's good enough.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Unfortunately, Netscape needs to generate noise now, and has been doing almost nothing for itself or its parent companies until the release of Netscape 6. They really had no choice to release Netscape 6. If they hadn't done it soon, Netscape would have become a company with absolutely no return on investment, a company that just spent wildly on an open-source program that was neither profitable or marketable.
I guess they were finally able to pull off the "marketable" web browser, although they loaded it up with such a huge amount of crap that many users may be wary of installing it (not to mention the installation problems, slowness in comparision to IE, etc.). I think waiting would have been ideal, but I don't think it would have been releastic for Netscape. I honestly think they waited until they felt they could afford to put their name on the browser without losing face.
NSParadox
Unless mankind redesigns itself
If your posts are censored how is it I come to read and respond to them?
Your post was * critiqued. *
Because Roger Ebert gives a movie a thumbs down does not in any way make it "censored." I still possess the power and free will to see the movie just as if he had never reviewed it at all. Those who are swayed by such reviews have only themselves to blame for their own thoughts and actions.
Now, as for the meat of your post, what made it flamebait was not the opinion or any of the content, but rather the crude beligerant tone of the post. Learn to argue a point properly and you'll get far fewer moderations such as the one in question.
You won't * eliminate* silly moderation though. That will only happen by eliminating all people inclined to such. Now THAT would be censorship.
The proper way to deal with bad moderation is to shrug it off and write a piece that gets modded up to +5.
The best revenge is ALWAYS living well.
I'm using a nightly build of Moz myself, but in seeing your reply I just had to add one tid bit. You'll need to give the "asswipe" 3-4 years to complete writing it, with no realistic end in site. It's just plain depressing.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The second problem really isn't a Linux problem, it's poor vendor documentation and Windows-only device drivers. Most manufactorers work hard to create fast, speedy, Windows drivers. Most Linux drivers are reverse-engineered. This costs Linux some speed.
Until someone creates a GUI system under UNIX that doesn't require a network layer, UNIX GUIs will always be slower than Windows GUIs. This network layer is simple overhead, and will always slow down a Linux GUI - even on a loopback device. As computers get faster, it might be less noticable, but the network layer always will slow it down.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I really want mozilla to succeed but I'm worried. I am disappointed in the DHTML support mostly - its a step backwards. Sure supporting standards is good but backward compatibility would be very nice.
Mozilla should be trying to be so good that you start seeing "Mozilla 6 needed" on web sites rather than the current "you must have Internet Explorer to view this site".
no sig.
For my money Mozilla 0.6 is a much more stable and usable snapshot than M18 was. The milestone release really had me wondering about how well it was ever going to work. 0.6 is pretty stable and works pretty well. It's got some annoying rough spots (links not changing colour is the most glaring) and it occasionally has a crash, but it's my everyday browser now. That's something that previous milestones couldn't claim because the bugs were too glaring and constant.
It looks fine under Netscape 6, and it looks horrible under IE 2.0. QED, Netscape must rule and IE suck, right? Because comparing a current release brower to an obsolete one is what we do on Slashdot, right?
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
I don't know why it has to be done like this. I'm pretty sure GTK apps can specify their own theme and have GTK draw (once!) using that rather than drawing on top of what GTK has already drawn. Perhaps someone can offer an explanation.
You might want to checkout some browsers that use Mozilla's rendering engine and straight GTK for the interface instead of Mozilla's XPFE. Galeon and SkipStone are two examples, but unfortunately I find they crash a lot more than Mozilla.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I've found that compiling mozilla yourself, omitting all the debugging stuff, the speed increases tremendously. As for stability, there are _huge_ differences depending on exactly what nightly build (or cvs timestamp) you use; it can go from unusable to "why don't they just release this version?" in a day (and back).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I've been using the December 3rd Build since it was the lastest. It's been really stable(this it's crashed twice) SSL works(I've orderd mose then 3 things using it so far), Netscape's Java plugin and even the flash player plugin works without problems.
:-/
It's also pretty speedy. At least as fast as Netscape 4, and it renders pages alot faster.I also use the mail and news client. It's a little slow when you have a alot of e-mail(200+ messages in a folder), but I think it's a really nice e-mail program.
To really use mozilla, you just have to find a good nightly, and stick with it. The 2000121306 build is what I've been using as it's worked great. The only thing I hope doesn't happen is that it timebombs in 30 days, because I'll have to hunt for another nightly that works as well as this one.
WOW. I like what the browser does, but it would be real nice if it was not so big.
konqueror crashes to much or it does not render allpages corectly.
Netscape 4.. well lets not go there.
It will be so nice to see a good browser for UNIX. On that will run fast on a low spped pentium (133 or so) with a little memory footprint (32Meg even though I have more). One that renders HTML 4.0, CSS 1 & 2, DOM, ECMA Script. You know it would be nice to visit sites like CNeT TV and be able to use a newer browser to view the video, neither moizilla, netscape nor konqueror work! I still HAVE to use Netscape 4.x.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The goals are really pretty clear:
Ever since Netscape 6.0 was released, the focus has been performance improvements and bug fixes. The rest of the roadmap describes how to nominate bugs for the following releases. The goals of the releases will be to fix the bugs that have been most nominated for fixing in those releases. You can't get more democratic than that.
Unlike the misleading statements of Evercode up above, the targets also involve decreasing the footprint of Mozilla. The Mozilla developers aren't just waiting for systems to get faster to hide the bloat. Now that Mozilla is basically feature complete, they are actively working on decreasing the resource footprint and increasing performance. Mozilla (and Netscape) releases will just get faster from here onwards, and not because it's expected that you will upgrade to a 1.7GHz processor in 2001.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The problem is that the Netscape 6 release is the worst possible publicity that Mozilla could receive - it's buggy, and as the original poster suggests it shows a complete disregard for quality issues. While Mozilla is a perfectly competent browser (for those who are willing to accept it as a *pre-release* piece of software) and has replaced IE on my machine entirely, a lot of people are only seeing the NS release, which is giving them a bad impression, and thus reflecting negatively on Mozilla, and on open-source applications in general.
Yes, NS have done a good thing in supporting the open-source approach to Mozilla. But they have done *nobody* (including themselves) any favours by conceding to the pressure and releasing a product for the scrutiny of the general public before it's ready.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
As of M18, there are no more Mx milestones. Instead, we have what you see now: Mozilla x.y.z.
There is only one bug that keeps me from recommending mozilla to friends. That is, bug 7201 The fact that Mozilla cannot print is absolutely terrible. If you try to print a weather forecast at intellicast.com you get 9 pages! Even each gets printed out on a separate page. It's quite crazy. Please vote for it.
Ian
To give up after all...
Well, maybe not to give up upon creating a good browser, but does anyone feel, like me, that this is going a bit too far?
Linux on the desktop may not be there yet, but at least until some time ago we had a usable browser. However, with the many changes in web technology (yeah, standards, well let me tell you: standards are what most people use, not what's dictated) I too must now admit for some time that compared to IE on windows (and it must be stresses: yes, on windows only, but that's another matter) netscape 4 is bloated and featureless...
So what did I recommend a friend lately for use on his LInux desktop? Indeed...Mozilla...Boy, what a disappointment it was...
I mean, plugins either don't load or are a b*tch to install, some web sites do not display correctly, startup time is slow (after all this time...debugging code or not...), ssl requires a separate download, the mail client is pure shit, still no LDAP support, you get the picture.
Then Netscape killed the little reputation mozilla managed to make for itself by releasing NS6 release while it's somewhere more along the lines of pre-beta...
Doesn't anyone else feel that mozilla's development compared to what it achieved shows a rather low success ratio?
Is there really anyone out there, despite the zealotry, that would recommend deploying mozilla or NS6 to a few hundred workstations to his boss? How about within a few months? Not me...
I keep thinking that if all these unnecessary 'features' had been left out...We're getting into a dangerous situation here...This is yet one more open-source project that looks like it will fail miserably and with a high profile. And what the hell will we use as our browser in the future? Sure, it displays pure html code mostly fine, but what about those other 80 percent of the web that use plugins or extra features?
I wish people would stop engaging in this kind of uniformed guesswork. X11 is plenty fast for rendering HTML; people have used it for much more demanding applications. If Mozilla has a slow GUI, then it's because it isn't written right. If Mozilla runs fast on Windows and slow on Linux, then perhaps its toolkit makes assumptions about the underlying Window system that apply to Windows and don't apply to X11. That doesn't make X11 slow, it makes Mozilla poorly written.
That isn't really relevant to building a fast browser--both GUIs are plenty responsive and fast for that. But it is also not true in general. The X11 protocol can have a lot of advantages over the procedure-call-based approach in Win32, and it is far from clear which one ought to perform better in general. The matter gets even more complex in the presence of graphics co-processors, multiprocessors, or a networked display, where X11 can often take advantage of parallelism and asynchronous processing much better. In any case, in practice, in my experience, X11 is often as fast or faster than Win32.
On Linux is another story. It is just plain *slow*, buggy and crashes a lot. I would love to hear comments -- is this a result of using GTK? GTK doesn't exactly have a reputation for being blindingly fast. Or is it something else? Is it just that Netscape engineers have put more effort into tuning the Windows version?
Anyone who can comment I would be interested. I've been tempted to break out my profiler and see if I could speed things up a bit on Linux, but haven't been sure where the problem really was.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
What I find interesting is how Mozilla (the guys working on the browser) doesn't consider the code to be release worthy until in about six months. Netscape on the other hand considers it ok enough to ship. With an attitude like that with complete disregard of the lack of quality right now, no wonder IE is stomping all over them and no wonder 4.0 sucked as bad as it did.
I was one of those who was all-out for XPFE and Raptor (also known as NG layout, also known as Gecko) becoming the base for the new browser back when that was an issue. Now I'm starting to think that maybe the optimized table-rendering + some other tweaks (like not re-loading from the cache when a window is resized) would have been a better strategy for a 5.0 release. A slightly improved rendering engine from 4.x and what was then known as Aurora (now re-appearing as the sidebar) would have been enough to push Netscape to the point where many people could have used it as the #1 browser until 6.0 came with the new technology.
The way it is now, IE 5.5 is *so* far ahead of 4.x that there's no way anyone except those with a serious anti MS handicap and those without a choice would use the Netscape browser for surfing. Netscape 6.0 is a step *back* from 4.x. Opera and a couple of other products are showing promise but the "best viewed with xxxxx" attitude the web has (which is not quite as bad anymore, compared to two years ago) kind of rules them out because so many sites are broken for them due to JavaScript and similar breakage.
Here's hoping that Mozilla 1.0 will not be released until it's ready, stable, performs well and looks good!
The only way to find out is to download it and give it a try yourself. Of course it works, but it may or may not appeal to you.
In my opinion, it works better then Netscape 4.x, so if you have used that, you should expect more. There is one exceptions, Mozilla will run poorly on machines with not very much memory. Realistically, you should have 128 meg.
People don't realize that Mozilla is built for the future. In a year or so, the 'bloat' won't be an issue anymore because more people will have better hardware. In a couple of years, Mozilla will probably launch as fast as Netscape 1 did.
To top it off, I expect the Mozilla codebase to last for several years, if not more. No joke because we are reaching the peak of HTML, XML, DOM feature saturation for web browsers. There is only so much more we can add, therefore Mozilla will never really get outdated.
Yes, it really works, and will be working well for a long time.
EverCode