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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.
Don't you mean Galeon?
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.
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();
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.
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
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!!!!
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
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 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.
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.
However, since I started using komodo, which was built on top of Mozilla I realized Mozilla has a really great potential for writing cross platform applications. Check it out. Also, if you primarily write server-side web apps, as I do, you can use browser components as the shell of your app, say to handle files and printing, while the bulk of your application runs on your web server.
I'd also have to give Mozilla the award for being the single best source of sample code out there in the open source world. Because everything is in there, there is a very good chance that you can learn about what you are trying to do by looking at the code. Hopefully, universities will pick up on this and use Mozilla to help teach CS. That would lead to more Mozilla users(and coders).
Additionally, having a complete, open-source browser suite forces MS to keep on their toes and release a high-quality, standards compliant browser, while at the same time preventing them from having a total monopoly on the browser market.
Yes, I'd have to say that Mozilla matters.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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.