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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.
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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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