Update to the Mozilla Roadmap

LinuxNews.pl wrote in to note that the mozilla roadmap was recently updated to include major milestones in the not so distance future, including a target for a 1.0 release in Q2. I write these words in Mozilla. Now that there are 128bit encryption modules, all I want is more stability and more speed. Good luck guys!

Comments

Re:Comments

[DLG]

Just a few notes. IE crashes on me in Win98. It always has. It displays things differently in Mac and Windows. It doesn't run in Linux or any other OS at all. If Microsoft was working to provide a standards based WWW browser on every platform it could, well I would say great. But to suggest that the IE saga has been somehow faster and more efficient than Mozilla, while offering the same quality of product, well you are wrong.

IE was barely useable until version 4. The next version (6) will remove builtin java support.
Furthermore the number of upgrades I have seen for IE during my time using Win98 is pretty regular. The fact that they are beta testing in a closed environment versus an open environment is not a benefit.

One question I have for you is "Do you use Mozilla?" and "Have you ever had a bug report to them?" I have done both, and my experience has been that in most situations the organization of the Mozilla developers is quite sophisticated in closing out significant bugs. Whether Microsoft is similiarly efficient is impossible to know, since you can't watch and track bug reports made about IE.

I do know that in all bugs I have made I have recieved direct responses from a developer, either confirming the bug, showing it is a duplicate of an earlier one, or asking for more info.

The OPEN SOURCE development model is NOT merely a lengthy beta test anymore then Windows is. The fact is that mozilla has, as a nightly build functioned extremely well for me. There are times when I have to back out of an upgrade but I DO attempt to do nightly build installations. This is so that I can help out, giving bug reports, and further.

Mozilla is targetted over a wide range of platforms. It is an ambituous project with goals that aren't entire equivalent to Microsoft's IE.

That what was once a rough and slow performing webbrowser has become a fast rendering relatively well behaved app is a great thing. The fact that the Mozilla folks don't say "We are done" when they have it mostly done isn't a negative. Microsoft has consistently beta tested on their paying costumer... Look towards DOS 4.0 as one of the early examples of 'wait until the .1'...

Obligatory Galeon Reference

[Outland Traveller]

I've been using mozilla as my primary browser for the past 4 months. The browsing speed is acceptable on my PII-400 linux box, but not exactly snappy. After reading the recent articles on KDE, I thought it might be time to check out the alternatives to straight mozilla.

Konquerer is quite nice, but I generally prefer to stick with the gmome/gtk apps. I was pleasantly surprised that Galeon has come a LONG way since I last looked at it. In some areas it has even surpassed mozilla's functionality:

- user interface to control pop ups & animations.
- nicer, more integrated bookmark management
- better support for external handlers, like ftp and page source viewers.
- crash recovery picks up browsing where you left off.
- something called tabbed mode that I haven't played around with yet.
- the starting points of integration with nautilus.

All this, and it looks better, runs faster, and uses less memory than straight Mozilla. A win all around.

Thank you free software.

-OT

Re:Strip it down, fer chrissakes

[SquadBoy]

So compile it without. Fairly easy to do. Takes 3 and half weeks but not hard at all to do so.

Mozilla's speed

[FTL]

Most people seem to agree that Mozilla's biggest technical problem is its speed (or lack thereof). Given that Mozilla's 1.0 release keeps slipping year by year, I wonder if the speed issue will be substantially resolved simply by the fact that once released most people will be running faster computers.

I can just see the programmers saying "Yes, we can make this product twice as fast, it will just take us 18 months of work", then sitting back and playing Quake while Moore's law grinds on.
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Mozilla is nifty! It even likes my 4.x plugins

[StandardDeviant]

I tried Mozilla 0.8 a few days ago (the last milestone I tried was 0.6 IIRC), and was pleasantly suprised by how much it has improved. Didn't crash once in several hours of use, even when I fed it Java. It even liked my 4.x series plugins[1] (namely Flash, I haven't tested realplayer or acrobat yet), which is a very cool point 'cuz that means there are whole masses of plugins that people use/rely on that won't have to be recoded all in a hurry for the new version.

So all in all: yay Mozilla! Thanks, coder dudes! :-)

[1] easy to do: cp /path/to/4.x/plugins/* /path/to/mozilla/plugins/ worked for me (one other filesystem level oddity was that to get java to work I had to symlink the libjavaplugin_oji.so from ~4 levels deep under (/path/to/mozilla)/plugins/ back to plugins; seems odd that the installer wouldn't do this).

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