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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.
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