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Mozilla 1.0 Delayed Again
Capt. Mubbers writes: "Both
Mozillaquest and RootPrompt have pointers to the new Mozilla 'Tree Management' diagram which is now showing a delay until Q4 2001. Hey, I don't mind, later should mean that they are taking the time to get it right! Cough, cough Netscape 6.0." Sometimes I wish large projects would just use a series of intriguing codewords (or name+code release date), so this point-oh anxiety never had to surface.
1. On Windows platforms IE rules and always will, no getting away from that. The OS integration means that people are not inclined to use additional resources starting up a browser when they esentially have IE loaded from start-up
2. Mozilla on Linux IMO sucks royally and I prefer Konqueror, and I know a few developers working on browsers based on KHTML, simply because they find Gecko to be too messy and too demanding on resources.
3. Mozilla on STB's does not seem likely either. Mozilla requires too much memory and cpu power to run resonably, and is far too prone to crashing. Proof of this is the distinct lack of news about all these wonderful new peoducts that would be using mozilla. Methinks maybe the delays are in part due to the designers having to consider getting a web browser written from scratch, after them being unable to get mozilla to work within the constraints of the hardware.
Mozilla may be getting better, but it still feels as robust as a ming vase.
Of course it hasn't. If we just settled with what there was, we would all be using horribly out-dated software that all came from the same company. :)
As opposed to a clone of a 30 year old operating system, running on x86 hardware?
>>You'll have your Office apps, messenging, graphics and general applications rolled up into one shell.
Why is this good?
IMO the biggest problem with mozilla today is that it's a big monolithic monster. It should be split up into several components based on a common foundation.
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yes, there are alternatives, but some of them (galeon for example) still depend on mozilla.
:)
As well, while mozilla may be "useless" in a way, it's still proof that open source can work. Well, that's what I'm hoping anyway. I don't think that it'll surpass the monopoly that MS has on the Windows side, but IMHO a commercial strength browser such as mozilla will help linux.
On the mac, if it's faster than the 18 bounces that IE took to start up on my friends iMac under OS/X, it'll do great things for all the macheads out there
Besides, it's not like the salespeople couldn't use attractive codenames to sell products. Think of the number of slashdotters who'd by your widgetapplication with a codename like "NataliePortman" ;)
A project with a codename of "NataliePortman"? Where do I get me one of those?!?!?!?
:)
Actually in galeon isn't not even a hidden option ;) I actually still allow popups, which are sometimes needed to go to flash sites and whatenot, but I have popups open in tabs by default.
:)
Tabbed browsing rocks
I completely agree. Our company uses build numbers, so customers get build 1300 or build 1422 and not "version 1.0". This is great for us developers, but the salespeople hate it! They want the ability to say [fanfar]new! version 2.0 is out![/fanfare]
:)
With commercial products this is a sad fact of life. I think we're moving to doing it the way that VM Ware does it, with a version+build ie: "1.1 (build 1321)" Guess we'll see how that works
If you're looking for good .debs a dude by the name of christophe has made patched 0.9 .debs which are available at ftp://ufies.org/pub/galeon/people/christophe
.8.1's.
./
They are made for the galeon project, but don't rely on any external (ximian, etc) debs. They are IIRC just recompiles of kitame's
Apt-gettable even via:
deb ftp://ufies.org/pub/galeon/people/christophe
'Course some of my jadedness has to do with the lack of good Mozilla support in Debian. Yeah, yeah, I know all the reasons and it's a volunteer project, etc., etc., etc. It's time to stop the excuses.
Debian rocks. I know this. Someday Mozilla will as well. But probably not before kmail shows up in Debian with IMAP support at which point I'm long gone.
--
IMO opinion what makes Mozilla slow is not only the themes but the way it caches pages. Compare to Opera and you'll see what I mean. Mozilla seems to re-render the page each time you flip back and then forward (yes, I've set the preferences to never compare the page). Opera seems to cache the entire rendered page, so it's lightning fast.
Anyone know for a fact?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Thank you for rehashing the same tired, stupid arguments that bad trolls always post everytime something about a big project comes up on Slashdot. Just as the arguments you make have been made a million times before, so have the refuatations so please, nobody try to educate this guy, just mod him down and move along. Nothing to see here.
"Some even leave their platform of choice (such as Solaris on the desktop)..."
I don't believe you, what you write makes no sense. Nobody would ever call Solaris their desktop platform of choice. =-)
-Paul Komarek
Because it is the goal, genius.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Popups can be nice -- for glossary terms, for instance. But only when the user asks for them. Otherwise they are almost universally annoying.
He was talking to you, are you his CEO?
~^~~^~^^~~^
Actually, 0.9 was not so very good. Quite a lot of regression bugs, including image blocking stopping to work, password management dialog broken, theme/UI problems, etc. The speed improvement was good, but the UI bugs were very unpleasant. Most of these are resting in RESOLVED/FIXED now in bugzilla, so I guess 0.9.1 is going to be yet better, unless, of course, more regressions will happen.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Umm... You must not be aware that Mozilla started from the Netscape code base. Netscape released their source back in '97, what was then probably a later 4.x release.
Mozilla appears to have spent the last 3 years cleaning up the mess, trying to get it to handle standards compliant HTML, etc.
My suspicion is that the Netscape code was a complete utter mess, and the Microsoft code is much more clean and object-oriented thus making it easier to maintaing and extend.
This may be more of a battle between hackers and mature software engineers than it is open and closed source.
...and my opinion:
Usability:
Mozilla 0.9: 9.5 (Slightly sluggish at times, but definitely bearable and otherwise the usage is frictionless)
Opera 5: 3 (MDI was invention of Satan, defaults *all* wrong and configuration is confusing - oh, and that banner renders me insane!)
IE 5: 6 (All new windows aren't the same size, and I saw no reference to mouse customization - because middle button should be "Open link in new window"! Also, mouse wheel scroll is slow.)
All this is just opinion (except for the MDI part, which is theological).
If you look closely at the first tree image, you see one of the "Crash Landings" -features being "threaded pr0n". Also in the second image, there's another feature called "libpr0n".
Instead of complaining about not being able to get v1.0 faster, better take a look on tremendous improvements that have been done starting with release 0.7. I'm now using Mozilla as my primary browser, have no compaints about stability (I'm talking about the browser, mind you) and as soon as Mail module gets faster, I'll finally remove Navigator from my HD.
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
Hey, how about an idea like having an application load .so libraries into RAM on system bootup
or something, and keep them in memory all ready to go for when a program using that library starts up?
like say load all the KDE libs or GNOME libs or both on startup so when you login to your KDE or GNOME session,
everything loads faster... or is that not the core speed issue here?
the real at&t mix
Nice job. I hope you report all the bugs into the bugs.kde.org database.
BTW, your critique is irrelevant. Konqueror the browser is not dependent on khtml, the render engine. So even IF your analysis were entirely true (which I doubt), using e.g. gecko is no problem. If in the future the KDE community notices that khtml doesn't cut it, well we will just use gecko. The code is already there, at the moment though, most users are happy with khtml.
BTW, of the tests you did, three have already been fixed in the last release KDE-2.2alpha1: Positioning the background image, backgrounds on line boxes and CSS1 borders work fine now.
Some of the tests are IMHO academic (who uses cap style anyways??) and KDE is mostly a volunteer effort. Therefore someone has to find something important enough to spend time on it. Word spacing and capitals CSS properties obviously are not deemed important enough so far. Don't forget that commercial Mozilla has several full time programmers while volunteer khtml is a small project.
For real world web sites, I use konqueror without problems at all. Almost everything works and the improvements are coming along fine with every new KDE release.
Please redo your tests with KDE-2.2alpha2 which is supposed to come out today.
--
Moritz
Even so, does that mean they all belong in Mozilla? The UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well". So, there should be separate applications for P2P, mail, news, and whatever. The argument is that if you bundle everything together, it's a bad idea, which I agree with. Since everyone for their daily tasks uses a notepad, a browser, a filemanager, a spreadsheet, and a word processor, does that mean that they should all be one application? I don't think so.
Engineering and the Ultimate
... but it still has some annoying bugs (like a tendency to crash when forking 20+ windows and a failure to display the button bar after you hide and show it) which keep me on the fence regarding whether to pay or not..
:/ We need the floor wax, we can hold off on the dessert topping...
and yes, I did submit the bugs.
Anyone else think the Moz release 1.0 runup is actually an asymptotic function?
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
Don't you mean Galeon?
If anyone is really interested, I'll post a list of sites that Opera and Konqueror foul up that Mozilla get right. There are a lot of such sites. Browsers like Konqueror and Opera, that pay lip service to standards but don't implement them, are holding back the development of new techniques and technologies on the web.
Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:
Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?
Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.
I think you are wrong about your IE comment. There is a large and growing group of web authors who see IE and other non-compliant browsers as obstacles. The members of this group are the people driving the next generation of web content and applications. When the others see what this group is doing with standards, they will start wondering "How can I make my site look like that and do those things?" The momentum is on the side of the standards. Soon enough we will see IE 6.0, with hopefully improved standard behavior. Millions of people will get it via Windows Update. AOL users will all get a next-generation browser as part of some future push upgrade. This will provide a sufficiently large group of users for standardize web authoring to be taken seriously.
Please understand that Konqueror wouldn't get me so steamed up if they would take a rest from trumpeting their standards (non-)compliance. On their own web site they boldly claim CSS1 compliance "except for 3 properties", a claim which is strictly false. In only fifteen minutes of testing, I was able to find numerous CSS1 bugs in Konqueror 2.1.1. Their claim to support "about 60%" of CSS2 is even more bizarre: released versions of Konqueror barely scratch the surface of CSS2 compliance, especially with regard to table layouts, backgrounds, horizontal and vertical formatting, and floats. Konqueror developers should give the rhetoric a rest and honestly assess the quality of their product.
(or name+code release date)
Oh, you mean like Windows 95/98/2000 and most any other Micros~1 product? I had always (or at least since 1995) thought that was rather annoying...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Well, it's an up-to-date clone of a 30 year old OS. And since the basic idea behind computers hasn't changed all that much in the last 30 years (excluding clustering and stuff like that), I think that is fine...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Does Linux really matter? On the x86 side we have Windows, Solaris, and *BSD, and on the Mac side there are a couple versions of MacOS that act fairly differently. Hasn't the ship passed already?
Of course it hasn't. If we just settled with what there was, we would all be using horribly out-dated software that all came from the same company. And anyway, Opera isn't open source, and Konq is fairly tightly tied in with KDE. What about Gnome users or people like me who tend to just use fvwm and no extra desktop stuff? Mozilla is great in my mind...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Proof is in the eyes of the beholder on something that largely lies with preferences, but I'll give it a go.
/.). I actually get work done, never experience crashes or lost data and that's while running largely beta software.
:) If you think I'm full of crap - well, only for the next few minutes.
Please be aware the MS hasn't created a thing - they buy out small projects (like how DOS and IE got started) and repackage them, tweak them and slap the MS label on it. Innovation to Bill is to see someone doing something neat and aquiring them, or as with Netscape, force them out of business.
I used C# as an example, not an endorsement. So, for me, the wind stays true. As for people saying one thing isn't needed because there are other ways, that's just plain human nature. Why IE when there first was Netscape. And both were based on Mosaic. I seriously doubt that MS "invented" SOAP. There's probably some sap somewhere who is fondling his big fat MS check and signing a ND agreement.
Stability - my wife can testify to the endless fustration, lost data and crashed computers at 4am that Windows was to me. That was at home on my three systems doing multimedia homework, and at school on any one of their NT workstations. Saving often doesn't account for lost inspiration when the moment has passed. Sure, you could blame the user, but remember Bill and his blue-screen of death presentation. Or the Win2K server crack-challenge that wouldn't stay up long enough to be cracked. But with Linux, my wife now sleeps soundly sans my ranting and foaming. So that remark was based on personal experience and opinion (as is most of the remarks made on
Which brings me to the "Bleeding Edge" point - you have a point with the recreation stuff, but to have a useable system, you need popular apps. To have a gui, you need, well, a windowing system. Wanna write a report in a wysiwyg prog? Well, there's where our "MS Office ripoffs" have come from. What's wrong with that? Our innovation is the fact that we created all this stuff mainly in our spare time and through open source cooperation - I'd have to say that's fairly innovative in itself. Bleeding edge isn't necessarily making a computer do a tapdance on the bar, but making it do something in a system that it previously didn't do in that system, which in our case is Linux. Mozilla is bleeding edge. Sure, IE can do a lot, but then, IE isn't on Linux. Additionally, Bleeding Edge can also mean developing alternatives to Microsoft under the gun of Microsoft and doing it successfully. Regardless of how you take it, if you like Microsoft and think they're "innovative", more power to you. That's your choice. Oh, and that indeed is a choice. The other is to use Linux. Something Microsoft would prefer you not do, but that you are able to do. The Bleeding Edge software that is being created on Linux isn't necessarily unique software - indeed some are dead knockoffs of other commercial packages (Gimp comes to mind) but it belongs to the community, not to a company. Linux a rehash of *nix? Perhaps. But what other *nix runs on virtually anything with a cpu? Hell, what other operating system, MS included runs on as many platforms. I'd call that innovative. OSS software got its features not through copying the code, but through serious volunteer development. And all this hard work is free for the rest of us. Tell me that's not Bleeding Edge. Even in your definition, OSS is a unique creature in the software world. It's true innovation is that it removes the shackles of closed, secretive development teams and brings about access to a resource of developers and information and help and examples that no closed source project can emulate.
But, once again, it's largely in the eye of the beholder. If you think Microsoft is truely innovative, then you're entitled to that totally wrong opinion.
Microsoft built itself up by stepping on the shoulders of others. It bought a cheap non-quite-*nix clone and sold it to IBM as their own. It cloned Mac and Xenix. It cloned WordPerfect. It cloned Netscape. It cloned OS/2 Warp. And it calls all this innovation and bleeding edge. You fault me then for calling the hard work of OSS developers bleeding edge too? Well, this probably won't turn you, but it's the best I could do 5 minutes before dinner...
Be well.
There's a difference between "ripping off ideas" and "ripping off code". Microsoft is more than welcome to jump in with it's own Linux distribution. It probably won't sell much, but they're still free to do it. They can even produce their own Jabber client. Or participate in any number of projects or base projects off existing ones. That's how it's done in the OSS world. The only hitch is if the original is GPL and they used code from the original, then their version has to be GPL too.
If, like some companies have tried to do mistakingly or on purpose, the code is closed up and is clearly based on GPL'd code, then you bet we'll be up in arms. If they like our ideas and decide to copy them, more power to them. That's what competition is about. If they like our code and steal it, then that's illegal and it doesn't matter if it's Microsoft or RedHat - there will be noise about it.
Mike
Does Linux matter anymore? We have Windows. Does Netscape matter anymore? We have IE. Does BSD matter anymore? We have Linux. Does C matter anymore? We have C++. Does C++ matter anymore? We have C#. Does Gnome matter anymore? We have KDE. Dude, listen to yourself. If you like Opera - knock yourself out. Mozilla lives because people are honestly interested in it. I'm interested in it. Not because it's better than so-n-so. There are features in Mozilla that extend it beyond just being a browser - in fact it seems to be heading towards the next generation of web-based application services via XUL. If you don't want all that jaz, grab Opera and be happy. But don't say the ship has passed - you don't say that about an Open Source project. Ships only pass commercial ventures. Hell, Windows has the basket of eggs when it comes to market-share. So does that mean the ship has passed for Linux? I couldn't care less if every commercial venture using Linux fails - as long as there is Open Source, I'm happy. For me, the ship is in and will remain so as long as I'm happy with the choice I've made. If you prefer Microsoft, or KDE or balloons in your ears - it's fine by me. That's the beauty about true freedom.
Please be aware that most of the software you use every day on your Linux box is pre-1.0. Even then, it's often better and more stable than any MS product. Most of the rest is some beta version of this or that - pretty much, to use Linux is to live with the bleeding edge. Just because Mozilla hasn't released a 1.0 product doesn't mean 0.9 sucks. Hell, check out the versioning of Windowmaker and Enlightenment. Or Bluefish. Better yet - the time it took for kernel 2.4 to be released. Does that mean that 2.2 sucks or that the ship has passed for Linux? Hell no - I still use 2.2 on my box. It suites me fine. One of these days I'll mosey around to getting it upgraded to 2.4 - but at my convenience. I'm in no hurry. I use Mozilla 0.9 as my primary browser, mail client and test platform for web applications development. It tickles my fancy. I'll continue using Mozilla because I like it. Its got bugs, but I can live with it. It may not be as fast as Opera, but my system kicks butt, so it's not such a big deal for me. But I'm the last person to critisize someone for using Opera or Konquerer. I use Opera on my win-boxes to test CSS layout. And IE 5 and 5.5. And even Netscape 4.77. (all but Mozilla strictly for testing purposes). If you think Mozilla has some problems, rather than complaining about the "ship passing", contribute to the project and make it better. Code, or debug, or whatnot. That's how Open Source works. There's no room for complaints without offers to help.
The cycle of software development (at least for OSS that I know of) seems to follow this pattern:
:). Sure, there's still a lot of debugging going on - that'll happen right up to and after the 1.0 release just like it happens with every other OSS project, Linux included, but the concentration now is making things more efficient and faster. While we probably won't see as quick a Mozilla as, say, Opera, it'll certainly be as quick as or faster than the Netscape 4 series, which for decent computers (or even slow ones) was fast enough. Work is also progressing on making startup faster. IE only seems to start up faster because the core of it starts up when MS Windows starts up. Mozilla and other apps don't have that luxury, but there are other tricks to get things cooking a little faster.
Features
Debugging
Optimization
Mozilla, as of v0.9 is now entering the serious Optimization faze. That's why it was a serious mistake for AOL to produce Netscape 6 based on Mozilla v0.6. Lotsa features, but lotsa bugs and virtually zero optimization. Bad Form, AOL. I'd be happy if AOL killed Netscape altogether - Mozilla certainly isn't dependent on Netscape - of course a few of the developers may have to find other jobs so I'll bite my tongue
Mozilla is also more than just a classic browser. It has to be to survive in the upcoming state of computing. Ideally, there will come a time when the only app you'll need is Mozilla. You'll have your Office apps, messenging, graphics and general applications rolled up into one shell. These apps will be able to either be located on your system, or remotely on servers. This may not set will with everyone, but then that's what freedom of choice is for.
If you're not satisfied with the speed of things but still like Mozilla, then jump in and help out. There can't be too much help. OSS projects are what you make of them - and as long as there are interested developers and users, the project will live on.
I'm feeling the same way. I recently downloaded a Mozilla nightly to the Win2k partition because I was sick and tired of IE crashing. Much to my surprise, it tends to render complicated pages faster than IE 5.5. I have used Mozilla on Linux for a long time since I do not run Konqueror or Opera for religious reasons, but I had sort of given up on Mozilla on Windows. Not anymore.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I run Win2k because if I don't I'll have to find another job. Opera and Konqueror are not required for my job.
I don't run Opera because I prefer to use free software when possible. I also prefer to use software that comes neatly packaged with RawHide. As to Konqueror, that is dependant on QT. I avoid QT for religious reasons.
I fail to see where I am moaning though. I have not said that either Opera or Konqueror are bad; if I had technical reasons for avoiding them I would have stated them. My reasoning is political/religious. I am also a little surprised that you think I am not using Linux. I use RedHat Linux because I like the product and because I feel that RedHat is operating in a way that allows me to escape them if they go bankrupt. (I avoid TrollTech by the same reasoning. If TrollTech disappeared, only applications with GPL-compatible licenses could use the QT toolkit.)
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I have read the agreement. It says that if TrollTech fails to keep making QT available under the Free Edition license, the Foundation is allowed to distribute it under the BSD-like license.
However, there is no obligation that I can see that forces TrollTech to keep a GPL-licensed version around. Since the Free Edition license is not GPL-compatible, the agreement is fairly useless.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Agreed, under OS X I think Mozilla is a much better choice.
I'm running Mac Mozilla nightlies on an OS X G4 400 MHz and I find that Mozilla (in Classic) is faster than IE 5.1 (Carbon). Scrolling in IE is jerky and live resizing and refreshing are painful. It doesn't look like the MacIE team has made any improvements since 5.0 came out long ago. The only place IE bests Mozilla is (very slightly) in startup time.
If Mozilla would get mouse wheel scrolling working under OS X I wouldn't need IE any more at all.
Looks like it's moderators on crack day today . . . :)
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What all of the different daily builds for Linux do.
What's the difference between the following:
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-sea.tar.gz
mozilla-gcc295-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Not to mention the various embed-* versions?
I alternate between the sea and not sea versions and notice no difference. I'm assuming they use gcc295 to compile the -gcc295 version, but what do they use to compile the other versions, and why is a gcc295 version needed? Also, what do and don't the embedded versions give you?
My thanks go out to the person that clarifies all of this.
The last answer I heard for this is "We're waiting on an okay from a major contributor, but work is still ongoing on this". Now, I have no idea which "major contributor" this could be: I don't think it's Netscape themselves because they were the ones that initiated this, so I guess the top candidates are Sun, IBM and maybe ActiveState... but those are just names pulled out of the hat that have done a lot of work on Mozilla. It could be anyone, but "we're waiting on a major contributor" is the official line.
Stuart.
(re debian support: Just unpack the 0.9 tar.gz in /usr/local as root, cd to the installed directory, run the following:
/usr/bin/mozilla from the debian package to run /usr/local/mozilla-whatever/mozilla instead of /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla. Works great.)
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ;
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=. ;
./regxpcom ;
./regchrome ;
touch chrome/user-{locales,skins}.rdf
then edit
As far as the "major portions rewrite", I partially agree. However, I'd still much rather see this work done before 1.0 than after - the image library had major structural problems, the old cache was completely crap (and was the primary cause of the appalling behavior of "view source" on form posts), and some of the newer rewrites (CSS rule matching, XPCDOM) are major performance and memory gains (in other words, answers to all the "it's slow/bloated" criticism). It speaks poorly of the *early* mozilla development that these major rewrites are necessary, but it's still good to see them happen - as a mozilla user myself I can see the benefits every time I download a new build and I certainly wouldn't trade my new cache or image library for the old ones.
Stuart.
Damn, 2 days ago I had moderator access and nothing I wanted to do with it - now here's a post that I want to mod up and I don't have any.
Folks, MozillaQuest has been clueless from day 1. I've found numerous factual errors in their articles, all of which were obvious to me even as an outsider who just follows the various n.p.m.* newsgroups and reads *real* mozilla news sites like mozillaZine. I haven't read a single article at their site that told me anything I didn't know, except for the ones (like this one) that are just plain untrue (see other posts: the roadmap was updated weeks ago and all they changed was the "you are here" X).
I suspect this site is actually run by someone with an anti-mozilla agenda. Checking the whois indicates that the same person (Mike Angelo) owns the domains and posts practically every article on the site. And the front-page has at least 5 "Mozilla 1.0 delayed until XXXX" articles - nothing about all the great new features that have gone in recently, the giant leaps in mail/news stability and performance, the pre-loader for better startup time, Dave Hyatt's new CSS rule matching code that gives a 10% performance improvement and saves hundreds of K in runtime memory, or anything. Just "Mozilla 1.0 delayed". Way to not tell the whole story.
Read mozillaZine if you want mozilla news, or better yet, subscribe to the newsgroups and follow interesting issues in bugzilla. If only the MozillaQuest editor would bother to do that.
Stuart.
Hey, PD. Sure looks like a case of plagiarism to me...
Whoever is the one to allow the disabling of popups, will be the most popular browser on the internet. This is fact.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
My understanding is that even Gnome has a browser, not as far along as Konquerer, but it's there. Don't use Gnome much, so I don't know the name, but it's there
Je ne parle pas francais.
I'm wondering if Mozilla matters anymore. On the Linux side we already have alternatives in Konquerer and Opera. On Windows and MAC, IE does a good job. And these alternatives don't try to be anything but browsers.
Hasn't the ship passed already?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Haven't you ever heard of the rule of 3 for microsoft? Every version of microsoft software before version 3 (and sometimes including it) is a useless piece of shit that noone uses.
But that never stops microsoft. They just keep putting money and time into it until they've got a workable enough product, and enough of their other products depend on it, then they win.
But of course, persistance is a losing strategy. If you're not #1 you should just give up. What a brilliant strategy.
Doesn't anyone study history any more?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The Linux kernel is another example. They wanted a 1 year deadline and it turned into about two.
Now there is really nothing wrong with this in my opinion as it is better to release software that is good and works right than to just release software.
I know that there are many software companies that believe in 6 month release of their software and rolling it out not fully tested. The clients test it and then report the bugs and then we fix them. It sort of works and prevents scope creep.
I think that mozilla has suffered from scope creap. Rather than taking Netscape 4 and improving lets say the rendering system and the networking they redid it from scratch. They could have started on one or two systems and then release a 5.0 browser. Then made bug fixes, then started on other systems. I thought the initial goal was to make a small light browser. At 12 Megs or so of a download it is relly not much smaller (if any) than netscape 4.x.
WIth AOL not shipping AOL 6.0 with mozilla / netscape, who is their target audience at this point? I run linux and use konq or netscape 4.x. Untill I get my 850Mhz or better with loads of RAM (512Mor more) I think I'll steer clear of mozilla.
Yes I know this will probably be flamed, but am I wrong?
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The moral equivalent of -turbo for X-based versions of Mozilla is the remote control of a running Mozilla offered by the -remote argument. (This is actually a feature inherited from Netscape, from a long time back.)
Typical usage is mozilla -noraise -remote 'openURL(about:blank,new-window)' (disclaimer: I use a standalone program to feed this to Mozilla, not Mozilla itself, so Mozilla's syntax for this may be slightly different). With some auxiliary programs and some shell scripting you can construct quite useful systems out of this; I can highlight a URL in an xterm (or anywhere), pick a menu entry from my root menu, and be browsing that URL in a new Mozilla window in moments.
Similar tricks can be played in Netscape. Netscape's documentation on this can be found here, along with the small standalone program to do the remote control. There are some differences between the documentation and current Netscapes (and Mozilla), but nothing too hard to figure out.
However, I would say that, at least in my own personal preferences as stated in my original post, would prefer the codename + build number.
That way, the builds continue growing (so build 1138 is always older than 2100), and nice names are given to appropriate places in the build count that mark a massive upgrade to the product equivalent to the major number change in the X.x system.
As I said, it's only a personal preference, but being that in all too many cases the tradional numbers tend not to mean what they should, why not use a nice sounding codename, plus a build numbher which accurately dates the release.
Besides, it's not like the salespeople couldn't use attractive codenames to sell products. Think of the number of slashdotters who'd by your widgetapplication with a codename like "NataliePortman" ;)
i second konqueror. mozilla may kick arse when they finish rewritting the network libraries so that it actually loads in a decent amount of time, but konqueror is already fast and has java and javascript support. the few things i dont like about konqueor are already mentioned on the mailling lists and in the todo baskets...
mozilla may be the crossplatform opensource browser available now but konqueror is more likely to be the IE killer
meridian at tha.net
If you think Mozilla is slow and unusable then head over to the build documentation on mozilla.org and read through how to pull the CVS tree and roll your own version. It's actually quite simple. Last weekend I pulled the tree and used the build configurator to turn off all the debugging code and turn off a lot of warning flags and little things like that. What I ended up with is a fairly fast running version that has SSL, java, flash, and runs through ESD as well. Ever few hours I close it down and restart it because top says it's eatting up memory, but it is definatly bettner than Netscape 4.7, Netscape 6, or any of the milestone builds.
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"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Surely, this is satire, isn't it?
;). Actually, starting up Konqueror from the KDE environment takes roughly as long as starting up IE5.5 from Windows98. This just means that a lot of the libraries is already preloaded - you pay for that with a longer start-up time until your system is useful at all. And have you ever waited for Outlook to load the MSHTML.dll? That also takes ages.
.so) in the widget subsystem used by every other application might actually be a good idea. Just hope that all programs are extremely stable, or the shared library will take everything down with one maladjusted application.
If not, let me throw in a couple of thoughts. Linux nowadays starts up much faster than Windows. If you use the graphical subsystem (X), it still is slightly faster in a typical environment (ie, my set-up
Point two: the software complexity. A group as loosely connected as the Linux kernel (sic!) hackers have to work on problems that are fairly well separated. Problems in one area shouldn't affect other areas, and GNU/Linux is doing a pretty good job at keeping different things different. There is nothing preventing people from using Linux without a nice point-and-click interface, if you don't need it. On the other hand, there is nothing preventing you from building a distro that preloads all necessary libraries and gives users the feeling of a fast browser start-up.
Complexity due to too large interdependencies between functionally unrelated areas might be (IANAWP (Windows Programmer)) one of the reasons why Windows has the instability it has. Ever thought of that?
Now, to finish this on a lighter note, having the xhtml.dll (or
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
This comment posted with a KDE free Konqueror 2.2. Hell, I don't have a "desktop environment" of any kind. Just a bare window manager and an xterm to launch apps with.
I don't know about the multiple platforms thing in the sense you're talking about.. Should work on other POSIX like OS's... MacOS X, Solaris, QNX, HP/UX, AIX... you get the idea.
I for one think that the latest nightlies fix most of the problems I had with the program. The skin looks good, the browser is faster, the toolbar is now down to the proper size, etc.
;)
Mistakes were made in the past that are now being rectified. Admittedly there have probably been too many rewrites, but what can you do I think all that is finished now. There is just clean up and test
Everything is looking good - wait 4 1/2 months and you will have kiss ass browser. .
If you don't want to wait just use the nightlies - that's what I am writing this with
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Mozilla has progressed very far over the past few weeks or so with many rewrites landing in the tree (image loading, cache re-write, new skin, new history etc.). The new skin, Modern 3, is much nicer than any proceeding it, reminding me of MSN Explorer in pleasing asthetics. The guys working on this have put in a hell of a lot of effort and time, I think we can all wait a little longer. I would hate to see them rush right at the end and prove all the naysayers right.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
There must be plenty of moderators with a sense of humour floating around today
Forgetting how much of a bad idea it may be, the Linux kernel is GPL'd and Mozilla isn't so you simply cannot combine them legally.
That said, Mozilla now has a -turbo startup parameter which will make the browser start up and show no windows, so Mozilla can be made to load at boot time for faster later use on Windows. I think this "turbo" mode is also planned for other OSes in time.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Konqueror.
It's as good or possibly better tha Mozilla and IE and was developed in a true OSS fashion with no commercial backing in less than two years (i think - anyone know when konq. dev started?).
-henrik
nonsense. i use Opera specifically because it's MDI. why on earth would i want a half-dozen web page windows cluttering my desktop? MDI coralls all those child windows into a nice safe, out of the way place.
defaults *all* wrong
change them
confusing? it looks exactly like netscape's tree+property pages setup.
- oh, and that banner renders me insane!)
pay for it. no more banner.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Sorry, but there is no way you can hold up the Mozilla development process as a standard of excellence.
.0 releases should be fuctionally complete and bug free. This is a laudable aim, but not always achievable, particularly in the context of an enthusiast led, non full-time development workforce. Sometimes, as with the Linux 2.4.0 release, you *need* to release something as .0 in order to get your workforce to rally round and start debugging :). There's an apt quote about 'herding cats' about this on the tip of my tongue...
:) ). Given that, until recently, almost all the coding on Mozilla was being done by paid Netscape engineers, you would expect a degree of planning and management to be evident. So, the second issue is the Mozilla development process itself. Mozilla seems to have turned in to a 'developers playground', initially overdesigned and poorly implemented, and subsequently rewritten ad infinitum.
There are two seperate issues here, which are getting confused by some people. The first is the one you mentioned: that
Of course, in a commercial environment forcing people to debug in such a drastic fashion isn't necessary (in some utopial ideal world
It's very possible that we could have had a decent, workable Mozilla 1.0 a year ago, had the developers focused on reasonable aims. Instead they wanted to write the browser-to-end-all-browsers at their very first try, and this interminable delay is the result.
The annoying thing is that this failure of a commercial company, developing in a commercial bloated over designed fashion, has been held up as an example of the failures of Open Source development.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
...which is why they abandoned the 4.7 codebase and started from scratch, so it doesn't actually share any code. Mozilla has actually been written from the ground up.
Which was their choice. They still started with a mature codebase; scrapping the old stuff mid-go is no excuse if you're a commercial software engineer - you still have to hit your targets.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Internet Explorer does not have integration with the kernel. IE is a user-level app, (part of explorer.exe, which is the windows desktop environment). IMHO, Internet Explorer's integration with windows is equivalent to the integration Konqueror has with KDE. Putting a web-browser into the kernel would be an a very stupid thing to do, since html/javascript engines are very unpredictable and unstable beasts.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
Concentrate on making a small fast browser! Not mail/news/irc/aim/shopping.
And when it lacks mail/news/irc (aim and shopping are Nutscrape/AOHell addons), people bitch and complain that it doesn't have all the functionality of IE (aside from the IRC, which isn't something the entire devteam is sweating over), so why should they use it, especially if it takes another year or so to get those functions in? If you want pure browsing, I point thee to Galeon, Skipstone, or K-Meleon.
Works fine from here.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
This is the proper link to my LinuxToday post. I blew it the first time.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
That's the word I was looking for. Merci.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Hi.
I happen to be Mark Bialkowski, the guy who made a very similar comment to LinuxToday. You don't read LT, do you?
Nice modifications to the comment. I specifically ignored w3m, because last time I used it, I thought it was ass. I suppose I should try it again, though.
Since I was specifically referring to Linux users who bemoan a lack of "good" (re: IE) browsers, I also ignored K-Meleon, though that's a good example of Gecko's cross-platform advantage.
I appreciate the sentiment, though I'm a bit perturbed by your lack of originality. Looking at it another way...were my words that good?:)
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
People seem to under estimate the cross platformness of Internet Explorer. Remeber that it's available on Windows and Mac with very good quality implementations. That already gives it a good 97-98% market. And then there's HP-UX and Solaris, putting the total near 99%.
Even though Mozilla is ported to many more platforms in absolute numbers, the coverage percentage isn't much better than that of IE.
MSIE 3.0 did support JavaScript (1.0), while Netscape 3.0 was at version 1.1. MSIE 3 also had limited support for CSS1.
Now.. 7 years for MS is grossly changing history. If you count MSIE 2.0 for MS, you should also be counting Netscape 1.0 for Mozilla. MSIE 4 was a major rewrite and just about everything from MSIE 3 was thrown out the window.
And look at Opera.. There's a small group of people in Norway, in a company nobody has ever heard about, who put together a browser that stomps all over Mozilla. And they did that in what? 2 years?
There *IS* a good web browser available on these platforms - Internet Explorer. Why would anyone want to change, except for political reasons? Do you have any idea how little people care about the politics about IT? I bet 2 out of 3 people have never even heard that Microsoft would be "evil" and even if they did, they wouldn't care enough to download some other browser that was more politically correct.
And don't forget iCab which is now Carbonized. I wish somebody (ie, iCab) would create a Galleon-esque Mac browser---just give me a browser based on Gecko. I don't need an integrated mail and news program; IM client; auction tracker (IE5 Mac); etc.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I vote that the codename for Mozilla 1.0 be "When It's Ready" :-)
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Imagine an internet where you need a Microsoft OS in order to check your bank balance online.
-Bruce
That would be Mozilla then.
r na l.open","noAccess");
e nt s/configPolicy.html
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowinte
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/compon
"a series of intriguing codewords (or name+code release date), so this point-oh anxiety never had to surface."
oh. you mean like 'windows 95' or 'office 2000'?
sorry, for a second there I thought this was slashdot...hey wait a minute...
----------------------------
When Mozilla comes out, it really is going to have to be heads above everything else. Since it is not officially tied to a company trying to make a profit, it is going to have to include the "gutsy" features like per-domain cookie management, *ad blocking*, spam blocking, etc. Things that will heighten the user experience, possibly to the chagrin of those trying to commercialize the web.
But Mozilla is really more than a browser...it's a UI engine, and that should probably be exploited. If you look at the Windows XP interface (and the prototype "Odyssey" interface before it), it is (or at least appears to be) web-centric rendered markup language. Perhaps Mozilla could play a role in providing a similar UI for potential first time home users?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I just don't get why people think that Mozilla is taking so long. Everyone says 'Look at IE5.5, it's really good now'. But Microsoft have been developing IE for what, 4 / 5 years? Which basically means if by Q4 Mozilla is as good (and I honestly believe it will be better - and certainly technically more impressive, which will translate to future improvability) then mozilla.org has done what Microsoft did in a year less.
/surely/ what free software is about?
Mozilla appears chronologically after MSIE. So what? I know all the arguments about the browser war being lost, but I'm not so convinced, especially will the emergence of all the new platforms. Fact is, come 1.0, anyone will have the tools available to zap their new improved browser / internet suite / revolutionary cutting edge killer app into being in a very short time. Perhaps people won't adopt Mozilla, but the opportunity to do so and not reinvent the wheel is
But I wonder how much performance you could really hope to gain from this approach though..
Mozilla, being a heavily graphical app, probably won't benefit much from kernel integration, since fetching the pages from the web via the network stack, storing them in memory/disk, and reading the data back out - typically kernel operations, probably take no time at all compared to the thrashing, blocking and redundant redraws that contribute to mozilla's perceived slowness.
XML support in the kernel - hmm.. i'm not sure if you'd see much performance boost here either - building node trees and traversing them might benefit from kernel integration, but if youre worried about parsing performance, then why use XML?
If youre going to put an XML parser in the kernel, then why not embed Perl in there as well? And once you have Perl in the kernel, it makes sense to add Python too. Pretty soon, the idea of having a 'kernel' disappears.
Word processing in the kernel?? Now i *know* the crack where you live is really good.
Remember there are good reasons for separating kernel and user-space activities. This stuff just plain doesn't belong in the kernel at all.
Keep the core kernel as lean as possible, and focus on doing the few things you need to do extremely well i.e. hardware interfaces, memory management and synchronisation functions.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Thank you! Finally, someone with their head about them. I wish I points to mod your post up.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
unfortunatly the codecs are closed source, so it's gonna be pretty tough to get those sites to work. x86 users can use libavifile, but that still leaves ppc, alpha, sparc, whatever users out of luck.
"The largest impact Mozilla could have in the areas of browsers could very well be cell/Yopi like devices that require easy to build sharp looking interfaces for embedded systems like PDA's with wireless internet access."
Actually, the symbian reference platform has gone with Opera. Doesn't mean all vendors will use it, but it *is* the reference app for HTML derived content.
Imagine if you were still in high school. Imagine your teacher giving you a major assignment, but said you could hand it in 'when it was ready'. Would you ever finish it? Maybe just in time for graduation...
Now fast forward to your work (if you're working). Think of the projects you have and the project plans. If they're well planned out you'd have clear deliverables and time schedules and if the times are realistic you would hardly ever miss a deadline.
Now think of another project where the plan wasn't so clear and detailed. The customer/boss came back to you every week with great new ideas for the project or changes to what you already finished. How badly did you miss the deadline, or how much OT did you have to put in for that?
Now tell me, given Mozilla has no deadline at all, and the developers are mostly volunteers! (no OT), and given every week someone has some great new ideas for the project, do you think we'd ever reach a 1.0 where everybody was satisfied?
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The nightly build for win32 doesn't work for me. Every item there is nonstandard. ie they're all pictures made to look like buttons or scrollbars just as in NS6. None of my touchpad shortcuts work. So eat me because I'd rather have something that works than something that's themeable. I have wrist problems and I use my touchpad in preference to my mouse (both are connected). I can't do any scrolling I usually do on the touchpad.
OK, all that aside, the thing just keeps spawning blank windows every now and then instead of opening whatever window I wanted. Maybe the Linux version works great, whatever, but the rest of the world using windows are just stuffed.
I'm going to uninstall the damned thing now. It won't even load properly and is spawning tiny blank windows every 3 seconds.
---
An example is the Sun JDK. They use codewords internally. In the bugtracking system you see messages like: "fixed in merlin". Wtf does that mean? Is that the next release, or a release that is already in the past?
If I have 1.4 now, and it says "fixed in 1.5" than I know it'll be fixed soon or even be in a release that I can already download. If it says "fixed in 1.3" than I know that I already have the fix. With codenames, there is no proper ordering.
The longer it takes for a real and finished alternative, the longer this steady rise of IE market share will continue. This will make more and more websites "take the jump", and design their website for "IE only". For a long long time website designers have gone through great lengths to support both IE and NS, but with IE approaching a market share of 90% some (more and more) don't think it is worthwhile or necessary anymore to support anything else as IE.
Should Mozilla be too late, then when Mozilla is a finished and great product there will be no more website that it can view. All sites will simply require IE, especially with .NET coming up.
If the Mozilla people want to do something relevant and produce a product that is not only great, but also useful, they must give utmost priority to quickly releasing it, finishing the core product and forget about less important stuff such as the IRC client, newsreader, gopher etc.
There have been ideas put up many times to split off a "good old days" Internet and start anew. Instead it might go differently where we don't split ourselves off, but are split off by an external (evil) force. The effect would be the same.
I thought the proper procedure for releasing a program is to release whatever you have on the original release date you set. I mean, if Apple says so, it must be true.....
For the ignorant with too many mod points, that was humor. Just so you know.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
What's that on the road map image at the bottom of More crash landings?
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
I've always liked yyyymmdd version numbers. Then, not only are all version numbers equally boring, but you can always tell how many days (months (years)) it's been since the last Mozilla release :)
Jason
Many of the comments here summarize all that I hate about the software development field. First, never, ever, ever, *ever* beat anyone over the head for being honest about delays. Always let developers be upfront. Second, the "point-oh" thing used to mean that "this software meets the functionality specified in the RCS for this version." The "build number" let's-give-them-a-compile-drop mentality that Microsoft has pushed on us has put software engineering standards a few generations, and I find it funny that Slashdot is officially sanctioning it.
Aargh!!!!
Does it matter?
:)
Yes SIZE does matter, and when you take a look at how big mozilla is then ofcouse it matters.
On a serios note, yes it really does matter. Mozilla is aiming at being the most standards compliant browser out there. There's a reason for mozilla being large: It needs to implement a lot of standards.
One part of me wishes the best for the mozilla project bacause it will show us the web as originally envisioned: Same look of pages across any OS. Another part of me is filled with sceptism about the price (in terms of performance and/or memory usage) being paid for the standard compliance being too large.
In any case it'll be interesting to see what comes of it when the project is over. In any case it is worth the effort. Either we'll go: "it could be done but what a slow browser, lets go make something else", or we'll really appriciate what the mozilla team did.
Thomas S. Iversen
To relieve point-oh anxiety, I wish developers would simply release small, then add features later. Instead, we have these gargantuan product definitions that take years on end to reach the point where anyone with work to do would consider taking a peek. And we know what happens then - all the moldering bugs come out. So it's really point oh-one or oh-two we /really/ want.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
If all else fails, there's always w3m, lynx and links - pure content, no frills
There are already several good browsers for Linux. And Mozilla will be around long after nobody can remeber just quite what Internet Explorer actually used to be.
Tony
Good work, and good luck!
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Ok, this is just nuts, not insightful. I'm no kernel wizard either (far from it!) but I do know that integrating these things in to kernel space is just a bad idea. Preloading the mozilla libraries is something that can and possibly should be done at startup, although you don't want to integrate them in to the kernel by any means.
The reason you don't want them in kernel space is, should one crash, you'll take down the entire system. Not having protected memory for things like browsers and word processors is a very bad thing for any system. IE doesn't load anything into kernel space, and while IIS does apparently, you sacrifice stability and necessary reboots for the speed gain.
Konqueror does load up all its libs at KDE's startup making it a much faster start than Moz, although C++ has linking issues (see Waldo Bastian's paper on the subject).
And as for the assertion that taking MS's lead could lead Linux to desktop domination, then maybe you should read some of the other discussions on a KDE or Gnome story to get a better idea of what Linux does need to get on the desktop (this was a good one) and I can tell you it's not tying the browser to the kernel! Not having your system crash on you is a much better selling point than the slight speed gain from integration.
In conclusion: load libs at startup: good. Put apps in kernel space: bad.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What makes you think Windows is the best and most modern OS? My copy of windows sucks ass in terms of stability and configurability compared to my copy of Linux. It's less fun too :-)
I've got way better app support via apt-get (consistent updates, security fixes for all apps on my system), I don't have to reboot my system every time I make a network change, I don't have to reboot my system every time I load a new driver/module, and I've got the ability to boot multiple versions of my system with different features depending on what I need.
Oh yes, and I don't have such wonderful modern operating system type features such as Outlook and IE security holes.
Wow... my OS must be antiquated to allow such things and still not crash as much as my modern copy of windows. Personally, while Linux has a lot to learn from other systems, I think Windows has a long way to go to catch up to a ten year old clone of a thirty year old operating system.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
AOL signs a major deal with Microsoft to support IE for 5 years. Soon after the 1.0 release of Mozilla is delayed. LAUNCH ALL CONSPIRACY THEORISTS. Of course let us ignore the comment above by the creator of the Mozilla roadmap, I want to read some crazy conspiracy theories. World domination is at stake here!
When a lot of people misinterpret what you've written, rather than think "man, what a bunch dimwits," I'd look at what you could have done better yourself. I think the widespread misinterpretation, which you seem to attribute to uninformed or careless viewers, is really traceable primarily to a poor method of visually depicting the information you're trying to convey. When you label Mozilla 1.0 in the May graph as "When it is ready", yet attach a line between that and the first part of Q4 2001, it's easy to misinterpret, and in fact hard to interpret it correctly. I realize technical communication probably isn't your fortee, but if you think about it, can't you see the cause of the problem here? Show that image to 100 professional software engineers, ask them when they think version 1.0 will be done, and I bet a majority will say the early part of Q4 2001. Since what you're really trying to indicate is the earliest possible date along a wide range of dates when it might be done, perhaps you could depict target ranges (earliest foreseeable to latest foreseeable) for some of the milestones. Or if you don't want to go into that sort of detail, omit 1.0 from the graph, but include a footnote toward the bottom describing the situation textually, since it's not easily conveyed within that diagram format. Something like "Version 1.0 may be ready as early as Q4 2001, but will likely take several months longer, and won't be released until meeting our release criteria." One more thing: saying the 1.0 release date hasn't slipped at all is true in a sense. But it's also true that the optimistic ("if we're lucky/when it's ready") release date has been slipping - it was 5 months away in December, and 6 months later, it's still 5 months away. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it is a real change to one aspect of the timeline, and it's obviously an important aspect to many people. Brushing it off as a mere misinterpretation seems to sidestep that point.
I think that Konqueror 2.2 is a stunning competitor to Internet Explore and Mozilla/Navigator. And KMail/Konqueror is a wonderful competitor to Outlook Express. I'm not putting all my hopes on Mozilla, that's for sure.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!!
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
This might be a secluded idea of my own, and I have no idea if it would fly, but in programming my own stuff, I always use greek letters to describe its progress. We half-use it already, with alpha and beta versions, but all I do is say alpha10 or beta20, describing its stage and its build in that stage.
Only difference is I extend it further, giving the title "gamma" to a completed work (a gamma2 or gamma5 would be like v1.2 or v1.5), and a "delta" would be a completed work with a significant amount of bugs fixed.
Course, this is just a "home-brew" version system of mine. Who knows how well it would fly in the business world.
1) Whats the rush for AOL to release the new browser now that AOL is going with IE? None.
2) The release schedule in actuality has not changed. Go to mozillaquest and compare the two graphics for yourself - they only moved the 'X' further along and pushed the 1.0 grey branch down - the point releases have not been moved, hence, the production schedule remains the same.
3) I use mozilla day-in-and-day-out - i'm using it right now. It beats the sh*t out of IE. Why? Because if we have no other choice, and we all had to use IE, as soon as M$ sees no more competition, they will stop producing the crappy thing for other platforms. Oh, sorry Steve Jobs, we decided that Mac's are too difficult to support, bye. Then what would us Linux, BeOS, Sun, Amiga, HP, and others do? Stop using the web. Riiiiiiiiight. Time to swtich to Windows! What else has M$ showed over the years other than the ability to twist peoples arms and make them use Windows?
4) For the love of God, people - quit frickin' cutting our own throats. Mozilla is our ONLY major OpenSource platform for web applications. (Which, hopefully, some of you more intelligent slashdotters realise is the future of the web.) If you dont like it, download it and try it again - like now, today. If you still dont like it - SHUT UP! We could kick each other in the teeth day after day about how Redhat is more secure than LinuxPPC, or how Mandrake is better for newbies, ow what have you, but what does that accomplish? NOTHING. The best thing you could ever hopw of your competition is that they attack each other - united we stand folks, divided we fall.
Mozilla - you're soaking in it.
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
I've recently switched to Opera, and although it may not be free (yes, I did pay for it), it certainly has given me more pleasure than Netscape or Mozilla has so far.
:) )
Mozilla is far too expensive in wasted time... (which in my opinion is worth more than the money I paid for Opera...)
One crash a week is too much, and validates the money I pay for a stable browser.
IE 5.5 is stable and free as well, but it then locks me to Win32, which sucks.
In my opinion: (score out of 10)
Stability:
IE 5.5 9
Opera 5.1 8
Netscape 6 6
Mozilla (pre-release) 6 (We'll see about Moz 1.0)
Cost:
Mozilla 10
Netscape6 9 (takes away some choice)
IE 5.5 8 (takes away some choice)
Opera 7 (pay for something that's free?)
Portability:
Mozilla 10
Netscape6 10
Opera 8 ( It works on Epoc too!
IE 5.5 3
My R 0.2e-1
So please stop talking nonsence and look better on what is actually done on both sides.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I figured this is the best place for this, despite my timing (hopefully you're watching for such a reply):
the roadmap page has two problems that I can see. first, there is no FAQ, so take away the link at the top. second, you changed the ideal release date of 0.9.1 to june 6, 2000? if you mean 2001, it isn't on the table as that... so you either mean 6/1/01 (and table is wrong) or 6/6/01.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
The image loading/rendering library for Mozilla is internally known as libpr0n. An appropriate name IMHO.
I'll bear this in mind when I make the next roadmap image (soon, probably, since we're about to release 0.9.1). Thanks for the idea! :-)
I drew the roadmap.
Mozilla 1.0's ship date has been the same for around 3 years now: "When It's Ready".
When I drew the first roadmap which mentioned a 1.0 release [2], I placed it "in the future", faded out and labelled "if we're lucky". The accompanying text explained that Mozilla 1.0 would be released "when it is ready". When I next changed the roadmap significantly [4], it was to add in another milestone (0.8.1) which had been requested by groups who use the Mozilla codebase in their projects (like Nautlius and AOL). So far, nothing too serious.
The next big change [5] was to simply move the roadmap along a bit so that there was more room. Mozilla 1.0 was still a faded out, but I also took the opportunity to move it along a bit too, thus keeping it at the end of the roadmap. The release date for 1.0 was not changed, it was still "when it's ready".
However, when that roadmap diagram was published, I discovered that I had previously a undiscovered power among the Slashdot community! People were outraged that the faded lines had been moved! The text hadn't changed, the release date hadn't changed, but the image was adjusted a bit and this is clearly what matters!
Wary of this amazing power, when I made my next update to the roadmap image [6] I was very careful about making the release date of the Mozilla 1.0 product extremely clear: the branch is labelled "Mozilla 1.0 (when it is ready)". I figured that would prevent another outburst from my fans.
Clearly not! Both RootPrompt and Slashdot have me as their top article! My power remains untamed! Woohoo! :-D
The roadmap images:
So when will Mozilla 1.0 be ready? We have a definition document.
how about an idea like having an application load .so libraries into RAM on system bootup or something
How about writing a short C program that calls each library's get_version() and then goes to sleep(), keeping the library code in sharable memory? It'd be similar to how the 'sticky bit' worked in old UNIX systems.
like say load all the KDE libs or GNOME libs or both on startup so when you login to your KDE or GNOME session, everything loads faster
You can already do that: graphical login. If you boot your Linux box into runlevel 5, or you do something similar on BSD, it will automatically start X and your desktop environment's display manager, causing the widgets and other libs to be loaded by the time you get the login prompt.
or is that not the core speed issue here?
The core speed issue is that we're used to graphical file managers and web browsers that share a rendering engine (Explorer and Konqueror; now I see where Konq's name comes from). A sleep()ing C program (as described above) would provide a similar speed win.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't worry, the Mac is my backup computer :) It's just convenient to leave a browser/mail open on it while my Win32 or Linux machines are used for real work.
Certainly there are a few bugs, but this really is a becoming an extremely solid browser.
maybe it's time to find a name to the upcoming v1.0.
Horizon (n.) :
An imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it.
IE grabs more marketshare. Concentrate on making a small fast browser! Not mail/news/irc/aim/shopping.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
And I don't see a product thats capable of being shipped. It took MS less time to overtake Netscape in numbers of users. Until Mozilla runs better than IE 5.5 there is no way I plan to switch.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Sure, complain that 1.0 is late, but the fact is that you can download nightly builds and regular milestones (and even CVS), so there's virtually no delay from the developer to the bleeding-edge or even somewhat adventurous user. A 1.0 delay is really just a delay in name game.
Some of Mozilla is currently dual-licensed, but saddly much of it is not. Is the dream of a GPL'd Mozilla dead??
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
that its running on a Mac where ever MS IE crashes every couple of hours I think that speaks volumes for its stability.
;)
I think the fact that you're using a Mac speaks volumes for your stability.
NO CARRIER
And thank god, 4.7 was showing its age.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
Mozilla is not just a browser. (I don't mean at the app level, such as the mail client, etc.)
.NET just around the corner.
.NExT 4 years for all of us should they succeed.
.NET philosophy my friends.
It is much more than that. What is interesting I find about the process of Mozilla in and of itself is the fact that considering what had to be done 3 years ago, and looking at the quality of the code in the Tinderbox Seamonkey CVS tree, I am impressed with the design quality of the code compared to commercial efforts in this area.
(A rewrite wouldn't have been required if commercial efforts didn't produce such a poorly designed product.)
Obviously, a lot more thought went into the engineering and design of the browser first, before development began. I suspect, like a Tsunami that travels thousands of miles as a 1 inch high wave, hardly noticeable, Mozilla will really start to tower over other browsers in the next 6-9 months as it approaches shores of a 1.0 release. I am not talking about feature sets either.
The largest impact Mozilla could have in the areas of browsers could very well be cell/Yopi like devices that require easy to build sharp looking interfaces for embedded systems like PDA's with wireless internet access.
That is perhaps just one area, but with these thoughts in mind, a browser of this capability, available on all platforms, could very well break Linux and other operating systems onto the desktop in the next 3-4 years, making native apps a non requirement for doing business on the desktop.
For example, Linux is more than a match with Kernel 2.4.x for poor Microsoft 2000, in the server room. Not yet on the desktop though, but only because of the apps situation.
But in any case, if the mozilla team decided to stay focused on the 3 things below:
1) Speed.
2) Bugs.
3) Feature Set Freeze for the API/Browser apps.
If these things can be done over a 6-9 month period of time, I am sure the release 1.0 will be a very shiny product.
AND IT WILL BE POSSIBLE TO RUN EVERYWHERE.
(BeOS, Linux, Windows, Sun, PDA's, Cell Phones, etc.)
More than a match for poor little IE.
That is the first thing that needs to be done to get rid of IE's growing influence, which if left unchecked, could make every dialup/cable session a very painful experience for one's checkbook with
Microsoft has some very very nasty things planned during the
I really would hate to see a "Microsoft Internet" and a everyone else internet.
(The subtle currents part running through this drama...could be a rant, or the truth. You decide.)
We already are starting to see this sort of philosophy with patents. Scientific research is slowing to a crawl in BIOTECH, because information cannot be used, or obtained, while millions around the world are delayed the cures they need for diseases and die as a result. Pay as you go absurd patents don't do science any good, unless you want to take another THOUSAND YEARS to develop a cure for the common cold!
Obviously, a single organization with perhaps a few thousand employees is not going to do the research faster for ANYTHING vs. the millions of people world wide in BioTECH could do if and only if, they cold get access to the information they need to do research.
Sound familair? Welcome to
Now, instead of taking a few hundred years to make advances in science, we can take a few THOUSAND years to do the same thing because 10 times the amount of people and infrastructure can't look at information unless they pay as they go!
We don't need one company controlling the entire internet with a default install out of the box that asks you to pay everytime you click on the mouse!
Philosophically, a lot hinges on Open Source development and the nets future to establish precedence that sharing information is far more economically attractive. Hopefully, will in the end, not only win out, but demonstrate that these sorts of philosophies (.NET, absurd biotech patents, etc.) lead to a great deal of misery for those that lack power and wealth in the world.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I read the article and figured out what is wrong... its built on XP!
(incoming memo for Mr. C.Whore)
Oh...I see. Wrong XP. Sorry.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
libpr0n was the working name for the new static image renderer. It was later renamed to imlib2 or something like that. More info at libpr0n.com
-Compenguin
you will notice there are sea builds in all the nightly folders that have non sea
-Compenguin
The idea is good in theory, except for the fact that mozilla requires X. Lets just consider this for a minute with an open mind for a second though and see if this idea can be salvaged into something useful though.
- Geko, the rendering engine could in theory be ported to the kernel.
- The other UI elements could be also ported to the kernel.
- Mozilla could probally run on GTK for the linux frame buffer. There might be som X specific code for the unix builda but that could be changed or #ifdef'ed.
- The mozilla source tree could be altered use these kernel modules.
- For those who believe this belongs in userland geko and the other components can be designed to build as shared libraries in unix and DLLs in windows.
Anyway assunming we do all this we could probally get a performance gain. The unwashed masses who just read email and browse the web would be happy with mozilla running on gtk for the linux framebuffer. It would be fast and with increased winmodem support and increased broadband usage we can perhaps win over the aolers. Then again if you really want to evangalize to the script kiddies get yourself sone blank business card size cdr's and download linuxcare's 50 mb rescue CD iso. burn them and keep them in your wallet. It hax mozilla/X/dhcp so boot up and show them hey lookie here. I think it has ssh on it so you han show them all the apps on you box if you keave it on. If not it defiantly has telnet so create a throwaway account on your box for telneting into and set the display variable manually.--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
there is no hyphen in K-meleon domain name
and in plain text for the paranoid: http://www.kmeleon.org/http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
and it was updated to the current state three weeks ago (i.e. this is not news). It's done when it's done. In the meantime, the milestone releases (0.9, 0.9.1 soon) are very very good. Nightly builds are bit more risky but addin/fix/improve features and performance.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I had an amusing thought that perhaps Mozilla is patterning it's release schedule after the one between Kernel 2.2 and 2.4 =)
.90 for a while now, and while there are bugs, it always seems to improve with each release. Mozilla has been in development for what, 2+ years now? Arguments about code bloat aside, I'd rather they do a good job on the bloated code than rush it out to satisfy a release schedule. Mozilla is one of the only browsers out there that does CSS to standard (Opera I think does as well, but I don't believe it's free).
In all seriousness though, I've been using
Not that I'm ecstatic about the delays, but I want a browser that's a joy to use at the end.
Humorless sig goes here.
More Crash Landings:[...]
- threaded pr0n
And on the second diagram:Crash Landings:[...]
- libpr0n
I won't make any (+1 Funny) eligible remark, i only want someone to explain this to me!Seriously, what does that mean!?
Mozilla is great because you can run it on windows/linux/macos etc... As someone using multiple Operating Systems (like many of my fellow geeks out there) being able to start up the same browser in each is a real bonus.
Good so far? Well no - I find myself using Opera now, it runs on OSes from Linux to Epoc, is lightnening fast and has a LOT of useful options (yes I even use the gestures sometimes). I had great feelings about Mozilla, but you cant render web pages with great feelings you need a browser that is ready to use now, is fast and usable.
I try a nightly mozilla build every week or two (to test web pages i've designed) and I'm sorry but its not finished yet and by the time it is it will allready be lagging behind its competition. The only downside - it costs money, but it costs about the same as a computer game and I spend a lot of time on the web.
--
no sig.
Yesterday, an apt-get just upgraded my Communicator to version 4.77.
:
Here's its list of changes
"This release contains updated multimedia plug-ins, including
Beatnik, Flash Player, RealPlayer 8, and AOL Instant Messenger
4.0, as well as enhancements for stability."
So I guess this is a suitable alternative to Mozilla or Konqueror (what else ?).
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
mozilla is bloatware.
ie is an awesome browser.
for platforms we can't use ie, we have konqueror and others.
browsers should render broken HTML code according to a broken HTML rendering standard .9 and I have to say, the browser just plain works better. This is really showing to become a commercial quality browser. Keep up the work all!
i for one say hats off to the mozilla folks for their outstanding efforts in creating such an awesome browser. I recently upgraded to the
Yeah, course it matters. I use it everyday, both a work in W*n2K and at home on Linux. It is much more stable than Netscape 4.whatever. It is also used as part of Nautilus (look out, I've said it now).
IE5 sucks big time, Konquerer I have never used as I don't want both GTK and KDE hogging my disk space, and Opera I have used and hate with a vengance!
So, yes it does matter. Mozilla needs to be done right and well, just done. If it means that I have to wait until Q4 then, thats OK. I've waiting for Word to work correctly for years!
Ciao.
"Watch the skies, keep watching the skies"
I think that a lot of people bother not realize the magnitude of the task that the Mozilla developers were faced with. They had to build a browser from scratch, which implements all the features of any modern browser, cross platform and all.
Think about versions 1.0 of MSIE and Netscape. MS and Netscape had the luxury of a very mellow development curve. I mean, MSIE 3.0 doesn't even suport Javascript! Mozilla has to cover all the features that MS has been working on for 7 years, in a 1.0 release!
So give these people a break. Your complaints are not helping speeding up the development at all.
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$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
...considering that the developers have been learning how to write a browser at the same time as they have been constructing it: Netscape's code was scrapped. And how many mozilla components have been rewritten twice? Or three times?
If you see this http://mozilla.org/roadmap/mozilla-1.0.html document you'll see that there are only about 400 bugs to be fixed for 1.0, which is good news.
The mozilla developers are working on a very significant project, and I am glad that they're taking their time to make it a high-quality product.Got friends?
Just curious, but considering how delayed the thing is already, why should we believe their optimistic best-case projections? Sorry if this sounds like trolling, but I'm genuinely curious.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
After trying Mozilla every new release. Now with 0.9 I trust them magain. Now is more faster, and less buggier, I think is going a be a realy good browser. I'm now using it as my default browser. And I only use Netscape in very special cases. I don't main waiting for 1.0 since I'm already using it :).
"Umm... You must not be aware that" IE started from Mosaic code base (which is really Netscape code base). It even said so while you were installing IE. Besides, my understanding is that although the initial idea was to work from the Netscape code, Mozilla quickly realized that creating all new Gecko engine would be far more beneficial in long run. Who knows when IE will sack up and do the same. Right now their browser is about the same in overall compliance as it was 3 or 4 years ago - it's improved a lot in CSS (though nowhere near as good as Mozilla), yet continues to introduce infuriating, anti-standards, Microsoft-world-only-compliant "features"/obstructions to web applications advancement in every update.
I resently reinstalled windows, and decided to use Mozilla .9, and so far it hasn't crashed.
I love it, it is nice, streamlined, and uses Netscape 6 plugins.
This is where mozilla will really shine through. Is IE P2P capable? Mozilla certainly is. Go to http://www.mozdev.org to have a look at all the applications currently under development for Mozilla
Internet Explorer isn't integrated into the kernel of Windows, but the shell. It is also a set of ActiveX components which are used by MANY applications, for HTML parsing, etc. If you don't use any apps which use IE components, then you CAN get rid of it totally. The shell will revert to Windows 95 style, however.
The truth about Michael
Being stuck on a slow (33.6) dialup connection at home, I tend to compile lists of interesting URLs in emacs, then go online, grab a dozen or so in one go, then drop the line and read them at my leisure offline. This often takes more than one session, so when I come home the following evening and want to check Slashdot|UserFriendly|space.com whatever, I can't restart the browser without losing a few pages I've already DL'd. The net result is that I often end up with browser sessions lasting many days, sometimes more than a week, during which I've opened and closed tens of windows. A stable build (i.e., a milestone release or a just-before-milestone nightly) copes with that without any problems. (Occasionally I come across a page concealing a lurking browser-buster, but these are getting rarer and rarer these days.)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
Is this slashdot or trash-mozilla.org ?
At least I didn't have to read about how great konquerer supposedly is.
This is what I have realised for a long time. Various things that Microsoft does could be learned from by the Linux kernal developers. Perhaps Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds should investigate whether or not it would be technically feasable to integrate Mozilla with the GNU/Linux kernal.
It makes sense to have the browser be part of the OS, since it is what most people use their PC's for all the time, might as well hide the overhead of starting it up by integrating it with the kernal.
Linux could easily start to make inroads on the desktop if it took the lead from Microsoft's very highly skilled geeks. (You can't patent putting the broswer in the OS, after all
XML support could go in there too, and possibly word processing also. They could fork a separate distro for the propellorheads that did not want all the 'extras' in their kernal. (it could all be #ifdef'd in the kernel source.
I am not a tech savvy hacker so I don't know if there are any technical reasons why this cannot be done (put Mozilla in the GNU/Linux kernal) but surely the potential upside of this approach cannot be ignored.
If Unix-based Operating Systems are to make it in the 21st century (they're 30 years old for fuck's sake!), they need to take some cues from some modern operating systems. Currently, the best out there is Windows. You shouldn't reject an idea just because Gates got to it first.
So instead of just flaming people for their innovative ideas, why not actually consider the arguments?
--
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I started working on the project around Sept. of last year (albiet I did a little work before then), and I am amazed at the explosion Mozilla has had recently. It has gone from an application that couldn't come close to competing with MSIE early last year, to something that is IMHO way better. Since now IE, Opera, and Mozilla follow the standard very well - it looks like a good day for Web Application Development. Even though IE follows the standard well, it doesn't come close to where Mozilla is. All you Konqueror zealots remember one thing - where is Konqueror for Windows? Mozilla is XP, and porting it to a new OS takes only a little while. I can't wait until the day that MailNews is way better than Outlook. Let's look at Microsoft... They released IE6.0 beta, and it looks as if they have made no effort to follow standards better. They have dug a hole by having to support their web developer clients who use MS proprietary code. Eventually, people will get sick of the fact they break the standard in many ways. Its a good day for Mozilla lovers. Just be patient, since Mozilla 1.0 will be eventually released and will hopefully blow you away.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
I know what you mean.
That last link I gave the Q.BATi project is trying to do that for Mac OS X.
Does anyone know if you can take the source code for gecko and put it into a shareware browser? That is what would need to happen to get an icab gecko.
There is actually a carbonized version of Mozilla. It is called Fizzilla
Another web browser for Mac OS X is Omniweb
There is an effort to make Mozzilla more Cocoa native here
Mozilla is a VERY GOOD browser, and they are really getting their acts together. They've done extremely well considering they can't integrate with the OS.
Konqueror, as I saw mentioned up there, is nothing compared to this.
Opera... nice, but I'd like to see the benchmarks first.
Mozilla is coming along. We can wait.
As someone involved in the Mozilla project, I feel that I must give some attention to the reson for the delay. http://komodo.mozilla.org/planning/branches.cgi is the mozilla.org branch 'anti-crash-landing' monitor. In the last few release cycles, the following major changes have occured: new security manager (ssl, tls...) LDAP autocomplete New Modern theme Enhanced frameset and iFrame printing XUL perf improvements (front end speed!) removal of old cache (disk space) api changes for more modular code accessibility code landed editor improvements css perf so that css styles are loaded into ram only when needed. Mailnews perf (much better now) style memory requirements reduced *new image rendering library! Improved string APIs new cache bidirectional text support for other languages improved autocomplete new pref APIs for embedding Each one of these things takes time to be put into ship shape. By holding off 1.0 a little longer, the bugs in the new things can be fixed! We wouldn't want to have another nscp 6.0, would we?
- i use opera, it's fast stable and doesn't eat all my memory.
when i use linux (at home)--- What would software be without Micro$oft reliable and free i suppose, like linux
If Mozilla were being made by Microsoft, we would have to pay for the betas, and it wouldn't be any good until version 3.1
I'm the stranger...posting to
I still think that the Mozilla team would do wonders for their PR and their user community if they released platform specific browsers for UNIX, Windows, and MacOS based on just Gecko and a minimal UI around that. For Gtk+, that could be Galeon, and for Windows, there is already something like that in their tree. People would be awed by the speed and flexibility of Gecko, and most remaining serious bugs in Gecko would get fixed quickly.
Gecko is also what matters most to conmpanies who want to embed a browser; they are not going to use all of Mozilla anyway.
Mozilla is now the only web browser which can compete with IE now that Netscape is dying... IE is very a good Win32 browser: I used it to download Mozilla for my Win32 and Linux boxes. Mozilla 0.9 is very stable and is running much quicker than Netscape 6.01 because of its lack of JRE.