Red Hat: Who Needs Netscape?

LazyBoy points to this story on Yahoo which says that Red Hat won't be bundling Netscape with its distribution once Mozilla 1.0 is out. And since the (very nice) .9 is out, with .9.1 on the horizon, that shouldn't be all that long from now. Rather cool that the long-heralded failure of Mozilla is proving to be exaggerated, even with a lot of other good browser projects in the ring.

Comments

I've been running nightlies regularly

[Tony Shepps]

I know a lot of Slashdotters use /. moz updates as personal reminders to go get the latest build, just for browsing purposes.

I've been following the nightly builds pretty closely, and I would suggest waiting for 0.91 for most browsers. There have been a few bugs that crept in over the last two weeks or so. The most well-understood one is a problem with right-click context menus, at least on Win32. It sounds like they have the problem in hand, but it makes life painful.

I think there are some problems that have been introduced into the rendering engine, because I have gotten a few really unexpected and unusual crashes. In some cases the browser window just completely disappeared without a trace or any error.

And I have had a few *really* annoying crashes while composing messages in textareas. (Like I'm doing now.) That is extra painful because you lose what you were writing!

So your best bet is to wait on this one if you have a stable build that you're running, and pick up a nightly build or 0.91 build in a few weeks.

Other than that, recent changes in how pages are built make everything seem a lot smoother and faster. I forget what they called the one fix... it had a funny description, but the upshot was that you can now click on things on an "outgoing" page if your new page hasn't loaded yet. For us impatient browsers who give up on crappy-loading sites, that one was a real breakthrough!

Re:It's about time

[throx]

Somebody told me I shouldn't log in as root all the time, so I just changed my .bashrc to have a 'su -' at the end instead, and then set root's password to nothing.

Is that bad?

Thanks for talking out of your ass

[dimator]

then worry about the 200 applications they want to build into it. But instead they let the engineers run the show which will ultimatly be their downfall.

I interned at Netscape last summer. I worked on the Mail/News client. Let me assure you that there are most definitely phases to the project, and its not just a bunch of engineers sticking in whatever they want. Whatever new idea I had, it was shot down, because we were focusing on bugs at the time. All feature work was put on the back burner. Instead, I, and everyone else, worked on critical bugs.

And let me also assure you that the other projects in Mozilla (IRC, etc) were not created when an engineer said "Screw my bugs, I'm going to work on this." They were created when someone had some free time, or an outside contributor delivered some code.

Did NS6 ship bug free? No, but don't blame that on random engineering if you don't know what you're talking about.

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Re:So they wont be hypocrites..

[teg]

Read the licenses of djbdns and qmail, and you'll see why we can't ship them: If a hole is discovered, we're not allowed to distribute a fixed version in binary form.

As for Netscape, there really wasn't an alternative when we added it - there now is. qmail and djbdns, OTOH, would have a hard time making it in anyway as there are other alternatives with better licenses. Qmail isn't a "must have", when we already have sendmail, postfix and exim

Re:Browser alternatives

[RedWizzard]

IE (via WINE) - Microsoft's browser Konqueror - KDE's browser Nautilus - Gnome's browser Opera - Standalone browser

4 out of 4 of these are better than Mozilla right now.

Bullshit. IE via WINE is horrible, and Nautilus embeds Mozilla in the most basic form (e.g. not right click context menu), so can hardly be considered better. Konqueror is very good although it's behind Mozilla in some respects (notably Javascript support), but way ahead in others (especially resource usage). Opera I haven't tried but it does have the problem of not being free in any sense of the word.

Are you SURE you've tried 0.9?

[abe ferlman]

I've been using 0.9 since it was announced a few days ago, and I have to tell you it's MUCH faster than the previous versions, and doesn't make me miss IE at all. I'm slowly making the conversion from using windows for all my desktop tasks to using only free software, and not having a browser that could run effectively on my redhat 6.2 box with only 64 megs of ram has, until now, been a real pain. But 0.9 runs very nicely with my setup, and I'm not sure what you think would make it better. I think they've figured the big picture rather nicely, and their plans are beginning to come together. You may not be a troll, but you're wrong. Bryguy when neverwinter nights comes out, my conversion will be complete :)