Mozilla Moves Into 2002? Maybe.

alanjstr writes "MozillaQuest reports that Mozilla 1.0 has been pushed back into 2002 (from Oct 2001) in its latest schedule update. Since the end of 2000, the rate of new bugs being submitted has doubled (according to the pretty graph)." However, the Mozilla guys, whom our own HeUnique talked to have said that they are still on target, and that the 2002 story is not true. So - you be the judge on this one. Or not. Whatever.

Comments

Doubling bugs

[ryants]

A possible explanation for the increased bug rate:

The rate increase in bug reporting is possibly due to wider use; as each build got better and better, more and more people tried it and found more and more things (little things) wrong.

In which case, that just means that Mozilla is getting more and more refined. I think this correlates with most people's experiences with Mozilla from build to build.

Just a thought.

Re:Doubling bugs

[core10k]

Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier. Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Alien54]

The rate increase in bug reporting is possibly due to wider use; as each build got better and better, more and more people tried it and found more and more things (little things) wrong.

Well, it is also natural to not right up to cosmetic bugs when you are more concerned with truly broken features.

This probably means that the "Look and Polish" bugs are starting to get attention, as well as performance bugs (ie, it works, but it is slow)

- - -
Radio Free Nation
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"

Re:Doubling bugs

[PMM]

how does not multiplying entities without nessecity prove anything?

Re:Doubling bugs

[ryants]

Occam's Razor says that you're wrong

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccessitate

Of course, you're trying to imply that "Mozilla is getting buggier" is a simpler, therefore correct, explanation.

While certain possible, it doesn't jive with the fact that most people find the latest builds of Mozilla much more stable than previous builds. While this is anectdotal evidence may be somewhat weak, it is evidence nonetheless that your theory doesn't take into account.

Don't forget the "sine neccessitate" part when you invoke poor old Willam's name.

Re:Doubling bugs

[core10k]

Well, when confronted with a fact like 'bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled,' one shouldn't immediately go on apologetic flights of fancy which result in such ineptitudes as 'there's more users so there's twice as many bug submissions! DUH!.' when there's no evidence backing it up.

Re:Doubling bugs

[hexx]

Occam's Razor is not a law of physics, and as a philosophical principle, it does not even apply well to complex situations - as it can oversimplify.

In fact, I believe Einstein put it quite eloquently: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to toss this comment out:
He argued no SPECIFIC points, yet you said that he's is wrong simply because it's more stable...IMHO Moz is plenty stable...just damn SLOW and it has a clunky 'feel' to it .... notice no stability problems were mentioned in my post, yet I have NEVER used it since my first few initial experiences (and they were fairly recent)

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

The rate of incoming bugs has been pretty steady for some time. With 15,000+ active Bugzilla accounts it is not at all strange to see 300 bugs reported in a single day. Anyone who takes a minute to look closer will see a couple of important trends in these numbers. First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code. Second, the overall average severity of incoming bug reports has been going down for some time so that while the volume of incoming bugs hasn't changed a lot, the kinds of issues being reported are more polish issues that development or testing blocker issues.
I have been involved in organizing the Mozilla community quality assurance and testing effort for more than two years and I can say with confidence that the project is at a much higher quality level than it was 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 6 months ago (grab M9, M16 or 0.8 and compare for yourself). Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[Malcontent]

" Occam's Razor says that you're wrong"

Well then I'd like to meet this Occam's razor. Did he/she/it do statistical analysis to see if bug counts are increasing, did it actually read through any bugs, did it ask the mozilla team if lots of duplicate bugs were being submitted.

You seem to have an awful lot of faith in this Occam's razor maybe you can explain to us why this is some sort of a irrefutable authority and a flawless analyzer of complex code.

Re:Doubling bugs

[mnordstr]

I strongly disbelieve that the number of bugs is increasing per build. The fact remains, that as they get closer to 1.0 the development focus is on the core of the Mozilla engine, and the stability of the product. They don't "care" about the GUI right now, as they got more important issues. The fact also remains that these bugs that get fixed in the code don't affect everyone. Someone might download a new release and won't notice anything new (because the bugs didn't affect him/her and there were no new GUI enchancements/fixes).

When I changed from 0.9.2 to 0.9.3, I noticed a new GUI bug, the titlebar had somekind of buffer problem, and there always where strange characters after the Mozilla {Build ID: ....} text. But the stability had improved alot, and it hasn't crashed even once (honestly :).

So, the # of bugs is in fact decreasing all the time, believe it or not. The only thing that bothers me right now is that I have to stop my MP3 player when I start Mozilla because the Flash plugin wants to use the soundcard when it gets initialized. Solution: Start Mozilla when you login (before you start listening to music) and never close it :)

Re:Doubling bugs

[core10k]

Christ this is isn't getting through, is it? When confronted with a FACT that doesn't jive with your reality wish-list, YOU DONT START MAKING SHIT UP to explan it away.

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

The incoming bug rate is NOT DOUBLING. I don't know if that is some figure you got from MozillaQuest (reason enough to discount it) or if you actually went to the source (bugzilla.mozilla.org) but someone got their queries/reports confused. The bug charts show that the rate has been pretty much steady for a long time. The only interesting thing about this graph (that the person reporting the doubling nonsense obviously was confused about) is the rise in New and the drop in Assigned. Bugs start out as New and get marked Assigned when a developer decides the bug is his. In late 2000 we stopped sending out a 'nag' email that urged developers to accept their New bugs. When we stopped sending that mail the Accepting dropped off. The incoming bug rate has not changed significantly and neither has the fix rate.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[ryants]

Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.

Amen to that :)

Re:Doubling bugs

[ryants]

The incoming bug rate is NOT DOUBLING. I don't know if that is some figure you got from MozillaQuest (reason enough to discount it)

Well, MozillaQuest was refusing connection when I tried to read it (slashdotted, I guess), so I had to pull the figure from the article summary.

The most reliable source? Nope. :)

Thanks for setting it straight.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Every question/problem has at least one answer or solution that is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and is completely wrong.

The "critical" analysis on MozillaQuest seems fairly naive at best , and seems to be more a means of expressing frustration at the rate of progress of Mozilla, than a solid argument.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Just downloaded M3, and it's incredibly fast, having some rare theme and didn't crash yet!

-- proudly written from Mozilla-M3.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? "frustration at the rate of progress of Mozilla" is the argument.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or does mozillaquest seem a very much like a plant?

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU DONT START MAKING SHIT UP to explan it away.

You should have just said this in the first place. Slashbots are far too stupid to even understand the concept of Occam's Razor. (The phrase "casting pearls before swine" comes to mind.) Swearing and capital letters are the only way to get through to them.

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

Well, when confronted with a fact like 'bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled,' one shouldn't immediately go on apologetic flights of fancy which result in such ineptitudes as 'there's more users so there's twice as many bug submissions! DUH!.' when there's no evidence backing it up.

"bug submissions to Mozilla have doubled" is not a fact. It doesn't even make sense. Doubled what? Doubled since yesterday? Doubled since the beginning of the project? Doubled in volume?

Bug submissions certainly have not doubled in volume in recent history. We get between 100 and 300 bug reports a day and this has been steady for quite a while. About half of those are immediately marked as Invalid, Duplicate or Worksforme by the growing numbers of active testers and Bugzilla account holders. We have over 15,000 active Bugzilla accounts and that number is growing (accellerating, even). And that is a fact.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.

Only an open source programmer would have the nerve to say this. While software developers working for commercial companies around the world turn out more complicated products than Mozilla in less times with way less bugs, mr. asa acts as if he lives in his own little world where products can have as many bugs as possible without it being a problem.

A project like Mozilla which is running for such a long while now, and being planned to be released in october, should hardly contain any bugs at this stage! You've had plenty of time to get rid of the bugs and prepare this thing for release!

I just don't believe the arrogance of some of those open source people.. Ever since Netscape released the code you've been disappointing us. The Netscape codebase has been raped and abused into a extremely bloated, slow beast. Each and every one had his ideas of what should go in it and as a result we get a bloated bug-ridden piece of software while WE JUST WANT A FAST, HIGH-QUALITY, LEAN, BUGFREE BROWSER WITHOUT THE BELLS AND WHISTLES.

Thanks god there is Internet Explorer.

Re:Doubling bugs

[mobydobius]

Jeezus, Dude!

I've been reading your comments in this thread and have come to the conclusion that Ockham's Razor is this new theoretical toy you've just found out about, and now you want to knock all kinds of shit over with it. You wield it like it is a magic wand that can take any experimental data and come up with the appropriate hypothesis to fit it. Well, "Sorry for the cold glass of reality", but Ockham don't do that.

I've graciously provided a link above that can tell you what the Razor is all about, but for now lemme tell you why you just don't go using Ockham in this case:

Various people have been giving different possible hypotheses for the increased number of bugzilla entries. Each hypothesis predicts different statements about the individual bugzilla data and events surrounding the data.

For instance, one ./er suggests that the increased bug reports come from increased numbers of eyes looking at Mozilla, and that the bugs are actually old and hitherto undocumented. A closer look at the bug reports would be able to see if in fact the bugs pertain to old unchanging segments in the code.

Since Ockam's Razor can only be applied to situations where two competing hypotheses would predict the same data, and since your hypothesis (Mozilla is getting buggier) would imply that the new bug reports are pertaining to newer segments in the Mozilla code--in contrast to the competing hypothesis--you can't use the Razor to imply your hypothesis is better suited to the data. In general, one should never use the Razor to circumvent more careful examination of data and further experimentation. If further experimentation can be used to distinguish between two competing hypotheses, then Ockham does not apply.

Though, secretly I must admit it would be helluva cool if there did exist a magic wand that could give me the perfect hypothesis for any data set. It would greatly simplify my life.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Mr Z]

The rate of bug reports doubled around the time Netscape 6 was released, thus opening Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers to a much wider audience. I do not think this is a coincidence.

Also, the graph is misleading -- it doesn't show the number of outstanding bug reports, only the number of opened bug reports. Duplicate bugs will all be counted in the "new" category. I'd imagine that the actual "defect introduction rate" is much less than this graph would suggest.

Still, the fact that the curve isn't leveling much means either (a) the new user base is growing faster than the actual defect rate, so the bug database is getting swamped with increasing numbers of nuisance and repeat bugs, (b) or the actual defect introduction rate hasn't leveled out. The article argues (b), but I think the reality is closer to (a), especially when looking at the graph for "assigned", which I'd guess more accurately represents "bugs that are actually bugs and therefore require attention".

--Joe

Re:Doubling bugs

[Mr Z]

.IMHO Moz is plenty stable...just damn SLOW and it has a clunky 'feel' to it

That has more to do with using Gecko to render the user interface than it does with anything else. Go try Galeon and be impressed at how snappy Mozilla can feel. I use it for all my browsing at home currently. It's about as snappy as 4.7x was, but it handles modern websites much better. Galeon requires a Mozilla installation -- it just supplies a GTK based UI to replace the XUL-based one that comes with Mozilla.

--Joe

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

If somebody said the same thing about Windows, you'd laugh your ass off.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that bothers me right now is that I have to stop my MP3 player when I start Mozilla because the Flash plugin wants to use the soundcard when it gets initialized. Solution: Start Mozilla when you login (before you start listening to music) and never close it :)

Solution: Use IE, and you can open up your MP3 player whenever you damn well want.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Cato]

The key issue that needs highlighting is the *number of high severity bugs* - as long as this is going down, as it is, Mozilla is clearly converging on a releasable product. Personally, I'm quite happy with Mozilla's quality already - the few bugs that I've found myself have typically already been reported and on the way to being fixed, and in 0.9.3 it's now quite stable and almost as fast as IE5.

Re:Doubling bugs

[cyberdonny]

>> Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.
> Only an open source programmer would have the nerve to say this.

No, some commercial outfits say similar things. For instance Andersen Consulting, sorry, Accenture has this bizarre mentality of artificially inflating number of bugs in their pre-shipping bug tracking db, because the quality of their product will be judged by the ratio(bugs_found_after_release / bugs_found_and_fixed_before_release). The intended way of keeping this small is to make a quality product with almost no bugs left after release. However, another way of keeping this ratio low is by inflating the denominator, i.e. making sure many bugs are logged before release. Every trivial item will be logged, and preferably multiple times (for instance rather than saying "error messages have many spelling errors", each individual typo will be logged as a separate bug...). So, not all commercial entities consider a huge number of bugs to be a bad thing; in some circumstances it's actually quite the contrary!

Now, back to the issue at hand: in this particular case (Mozilla), you have to consider the difference between bugs and reported bugs. If a product is so buggy that nobody uses it, obviously no bugs will be reported. Mozilla is now entering a phase where many more people start to actually use it, and to use it more thoroughly, so surely, more bugs will be found and reported.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Ms.Taken]

Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier.

So I guess Occam's Razor would also say the the amount of gold ore in California exploded at the start of the gold rush and the number of stars increased dramatically with the invention of the telescope.

If you start with the statement, "The discovery of X has increased", there are a number of explanations that meet Occam's rule, including:

• More people are looking for X.
• Methods for finding X have improved.
• The total amount of X has increased.

Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted.

Ms.Taken's Lady Schick: Having an unpopular opinion doesn't make you right.

Re:Doubling bugs

[marmoset]

Is it just me, or does mozillaquest seem a very much like a plant?

Mike Angelo has been trolling for hits with these "Mozilla has 10 billion bugs and won't ship 1.0 until 2010" articles for months. Every time Slashdot links to one of these silly things, his ad impressions jump through the roof. It's just like the nonsense ZDNet posts when they want a quick traffic boost, only ZD's page layout isn't as nasty on the eyes as MozillaQuest's "MyFirstHomepage" visuals.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, i think you nailed this own right on the dot.
good job to the developers of mozilla for making some bad ass software.
really kick ass, i've entered my fair share of bug reports jus cause i want to see the software get beter =)
prefer mozilla over netscape anyday...

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

btw, who ever authored this page is an idiot or has never written a peice of software in there life, and or never used mozilla.

>
Sadly, the Mozilla Organization does not seem to grasp just how far behind schedule is the Mozilla Project and just how buggy is the Mozilla browser-suite. Or, perhaps it does not grasp the importance of quality workmanship and producing software products that are not full of bugs.

rolf, i think the author should also write a page about how microsoft's premier product visual studio 7 is already 1 year late.
steve balmer'promised' that it'd be released at the end of 2000.

"throw it UP"
aahhahahaha, balmer is maximum funny man

Re:Doubling bugs

[cavemanf16]

The only thing I find lacking from IE5.5 bug wise would be lack of UI settings for maintaining and editing Java, JavaScript, and other security/annoyance type issues that sites think need to bombard me with to give me a 'quality', sticky experience on their webpage. Besides that, I've finally set Windows to use Mozilla exclusively as the default web browser. (Konq is still my fav on Mandrake8 :) ). Sure some things are still a little slow, but Mozilla's open format to releasing software (and testing it) means that it has become a 10 times more useful to me than the *other* guys' software.

Re:Doubling bugs

[ethereal]

That doesn't sound like good news to me - as you approach 1.0, you want to focus less and less on the core and on stability, and more and more on the GUI stuff. This is because core changes are costly and will introduce more bugs in unrelated areas, whereas GUI touchups can be localized and handled separately.

Although if you're saying that they're no longer focused on adding in more stuff to the product, then that's a good thing at least.

Re:Doubling bugs

[fanatic]

more people tried it and found more and more things (little things) wrong.

It still disappears for no good reason on a regular basis. Not a "little" bug.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Punto]

When we stopped sending that mail the Accepting dropped off

So basically the bugs are the same, but nobody is fixing them? :)

Re:Doubling bugs

[GreyPoopon]

Every time Slashdot links to one of these silly things, his ad impressions jump through the roof.

So instead, let's all send e-mail to the companies advertising on MozillaQuest and tell them that we will *never* purchase any of their products until they quit advertising there. OK...maybe a little too aggressive.

Re:Doubling bugs

[alanjstr]

I was only making an observation from the graph that was on MozillaQuest. At no time did I bother to actually analyze the numbers. I just noticed what looked like a trend.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Captain_Vegetable]

Just think, when this if finally done we will have something that comes close to IE5 four years late.

Re:Doubling bugs

[MindStalker]

Your joking right? Of course you are, sorry for the inconvenience.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Homewrecker]

You OSS supporters are becoming more predictable than the tide. Surely anyone who negatively reviews an OSS product, regardless of crappy nature, must be disreputable.

This is turning into the same madness that is destroying our "real world" society -- if I'm black and John, who is white, doesn't like me, it's because he is racist. The fact that I kicked his dog and did his wife means nothing.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

The bug charts [mozilla.org] show that the rate has been pretty much steady for a long time.

CALL ME CRAZY, but I would think that as a product approaches release, this number should be going DOWN. You see, there's a certain point at which you say "OK everybody, we are going to bake this cake, so STOP ADDING NEW FEATURES and introducing new bugs, and lets fix the ones we got."

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

CALL ME CRAZY, but I would think that as a product approaches release, this number should be going DOWN.


That's assuming that all bugs in the product are already known. That's assuming that you treat all bugs as having the same severity. That's asssuming that the number of incoming reports is reflective of new bugs in the projuct. All of these assumptions are wrong.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[Homewrecker]

Hooray, some logic still lives around Slashdot. Imagine how things would look around here if IE jerked with the soundcard at startup.

Re:Doubling bugs

[asa]

Nope. Bugs are being fixed at about the same pace (maybe a little faster). It's just that they are not being Accepted in Bugzilla. So a lot of bugs go from New to Resolved Fixed without having been moved to the Assigned status.

--Asa

Re:Doubling bugs

[Kenyaman]

Occam's Razor really only applies when there is no clear indication otherwise, and even then it's just a rule of thumb, not a solid scientific law.

Re:Doubling bugs

[spudnic]

So you just aren't keeping track of which bugs get fixed then? So how do you know if they have been fixed or not?

Re:Doubling bugs

[scrytch]

First the percentage of Duplicate, Invalid, and Worksforme bugs continues to rise and is at about 50% so nearly half of all bugs reported turn out to be something other than new bugs in the code.

Where I come from, "works for me" cannot close an open issue, and must be followed with "cannot duplicate with same configuration". I get a whole lot of "works for me" anecdotes when I tell people about my miserable experiences with new kernels, reiserfs, and mozilla builds. Well, most firestone tires didn't blow out either. Still want a set on your SUV?

I realize you don't have the resources to investigate every worksforme problem, but if you come up with a product that's only perfect in your test lab, you still don't have a quality product.

Re:Doubling bugs

[jesser]

We still keep track of what bugs get fixed. We just don't keep track of who is working on a fix in the same way.

It used to be that bugzilla would ask bug owners to either accept the bug (change it from "new" to "assigned") or give it to someone else after they had owned the bug for a week. That resulted in "assigned" pretty much meaning "one person has owned this bug for a while", which wasn't very useful.

Now a bug owner is supposed to move a bug from "new" to "assigned" when he is actually working on the bug (or believes that he should be the person to fix the bug). Some bug owners forget to do that, so some bugs go directly from "new" to "resolved fixed" without ever being "assigned". The best way to tell the owner is actually working on a bug is to look at comments in the bug and the target milestone.

Re:Doubling bugs

[jesser]

Mozilla hasn't gained a lot of new features lately. What it has had are module rewrites, which are often necessary in order to fix tough bugs and increase speed (as well as making future development easier).

Re:Doubling bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

troll troll troll troll

trollity trollll!
trollity trollll...

trollity trollll!
trollity trollll....

troll troll troll troll
troll troll troll troll

I could tell becuase you make a blanket generalization disregarding the facts and then turn around and say that is what they are doing to you!

You have learned well, but there is soo far to go yet.

Re:Doubling bugs

[ppanon]

Well, since MS IE is dropping support for Java and Netscape Plugins in IE 5.5 SP2 and IE6/Windows XP it seems to me that Mozilla's support for these features will soon far surpass IE's by default. Cookies are the other major privacy/security concern I have and Mozilla definitely blazed the trail on Cookie management.

Note: You will still be able to use the Java JVM from an older IE install if you upgrade to more recent versions of IE, but it would expect that the nice Java configuration features you just mentioned become much harder to access.

I think MS is making a mistake in yanking Netscape plugin/Java support from IE. With any luck, they are opening the door to the resurgence of Netscape/Mozilla.

Re:Doubling bugs

[cavemanf16]

I think MS is making a mistake in yanking Netscape plugin/Java support from IE. With any luck, they are opening the door to the resurgence of Netscape/Mozilla.

Well, the whole idea from Microsoft is to once again stomp out competition. They know that IE has dominance in the market these days because of Netscape's inability to keep up with M$. They also know that if they don't include Netscape plugins or Java immediately, some of their users will not notice the difference, and even worse, those same users will complain to the website owners about using Netscape and Java before they complain to M$ for not including it in the browser. So yes, it sucks, but it's an intelligent business move designed to further cement IE's (unfortunate) market dominance.

It's sort of like NSync, Brittany Spears, and all the other crap pop music: The masses buy it, even if musically it's all the same (and not very creative). Notice my sig... Probably one of the most creative, inventive, bands still making music, but no teenager these days has ever heard of them. And that's the way I like it, it keeps the music creative, unique, and wonderful.

Re:Doubling bugs

[Captain Oblivious]

Bug counts have never been an accurate measure of the quality of the product.

Thank you for saying this! I have been trying to explain this to my customers but they just won't listen and keep threatening to go to the competition. Idiots.

Harry "Harold" Flanders,
Owner and operator, Mount Pilot Terminex

I think it'll be ready before 2002.

[JeremyYoung]

It's nearly ready now. I haven't logged into bugtraq very often lately, but I haven't had a bug to report in over a month. 0.9.2 has been very stable and usable. It's a little slow on the load, and the e-mail proggie it comes with could be a lot easier to use, but those are truly the only complaints I'd have with it.

Re:I think it'll be ready before 2002.

[Anonymous Coward]

what planet are you on? I have found so many bugs since .9.2 I can't stand it. from pages not loading correctly... to mozilla using 70% of the cpu all the time... loss of newsgroups... thats just the tip of the ice burg... in many instances mozilla is improving however daily bugs exist.

Re:I think it'll be ready before 2002.

[JeremyYoung]

I've never had the problem of it using 70% of the CPU. I get the normal spikes I'd get with any other program, but no steady use over 5% from Mozilla, even with 7-8 windows open. The only web-page that hasn't worked correctly for me is the MSNBC front page, but all the news article pages on it work fine. I haven't had any problems with any other webpages with 0.9.2. Flash works fine, I can even get the embedded video working good, and Java of course works good. This is a fine browser as is as far as I can tell. I'd love to see more innovation in the interface, but since Microsoft isn't really innovating in that area (*cough*no competition*cough*cough*), why complain?

I don't use newsgroups, but I have been using the Mozilla e-mail program as my primary e-mail proggie at home, and it's been doing a decent job. The interface stinks, and it's rather inflexible in folder creation, but I haven't lost any e-mail, and it doesn't crash on me.

Re:I think it'll be ready before 2002.

[Anonymous Coward]

0.9.2. Let's see ... (using it now)

- Still no -geometry. I REALLY hate having to place windows every time i spawn a new window with a middle click. Netscape had an X resource that handled this. Why doesn't Mozilla do the same?

- Just how many windows does ^W close, anyway? If you're running 0.9.2, sometimes it does ALL of them, since the whole browser crashes!

Those are my major gripes from constant use. I'll still use Mozilla over "crash because you touched the mouse wheel" Netscape 4.7x any day, though...

Re:I think it'll be ready before 2002.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the guy said he was had Mozilla use 70% CPU all the time. So freaking what if you didn't? Does that make it any less of a bug? It's not as if it's a difficult thing to verify. Are you calling him a liar, or what?

Mozilla into 2002!

[erc]

Gee, maybe they outht to throw away all that old, buggy code they've been building on and start from scratch - this time, using accepted coding practices? The quality of code in a project can be measured by the number of bug reports...

Re:Mozilla into 2002!

[Kwikymart]

The quality of code in a project can be measured by the number of bug reports...

Well, thats complete bullshit unless the project you are comparing it to are exactly the same. You cant compare mozilla to any other web browser with bug reports like that unless they have all the same features. Even then, it is still not a good idea to use this as a benchmark.

The Better Quest Site

[newbiescum]

MozillaQuestQuest

Props to Mozillazine for the link. If you want real Mozilla news, check out the latter link. Much more informative, and the discussions are at least somewhat insightful.

Re:The Better Quest Site

[briansmith]

It is XHTML. You must have an XHTML-capable browser to see it. Apparently IE 5.5 is not XHTML-capable.

Re:The Better Quest Site

[Tackhead]

> It is XHTML. You must have an XHTML-capable browser to see it [the Mozillaquestquest.com article]. Apparently IE 5.5 is not XHTML-capable.

Neither is Netscape 4.7.

Only Mozilla folks could create a website that's unreadable by both IE and Netscape 4 ;-)

Why 1.0?

[Scrag]

What is the obsession with reaching version 1.0? It's not a finished product until then? Then tell me why I have been using it for everything that several finished products can do. It won't have bugs by the time it reaches 1.0? I cant understand that either. It's not everyone will stop working on it when it reaches 1.0, so that means version 1.0 is just another version in the middle of hundreds of others.

What is really important is that the browser keeps getting better, and it is. With each release they fix tons of bugs. That isn't going to change when it reaches 1.0. I don't care if it never reaches 1.0 as long as it keeps getting better. They could call the next release 1.0 and everyone would be excited, but it wouldn't really mean anything. Just like the actual 1.0 release won't.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.0 is considered by convention to be first public release.

In the public's eyes, 1.0 isn't even a good version to start with, cause "X.0" versions have more glitches that will come out after the public release. They'll wait for 1.1+

So yes, from what your average browser user knows, if it aint 1.0 or it has "beta" after it, it isn't done yet!!!

Re:Why 1.0?

[VenTatsu]

1.0 is important because it is the point where the programers can sit back and look at what they have done, in it's 'compleated' form. It's the point where they have to ask them selves wether it is good or not.
As a user I always want a new version, with fixes and new stuff to play with.
As a developer I often want to reach a point where I can call it done and feel good about it.

Re:Why 1.0?

[goldid]

It's pretty simple. Remember that the whole world isn't computer literate. We may be please to use version 0.9.3, or even version 0.4. The average user? The users whose massive support makes certain projects fundable and viable? They want version 1.0. 1.0 says, "Hey, this is stable, it won't kill, maim or cause your machine to implode." That's what the rest of the world is looking for. Keep them in mind. 1.0 is a major milestone. While 0.9.3 may be just fine, it takes 1.0 to make it not scary.

Re:Why 1.0?

[rgmoore]

AFAIK the key is that Mozilla is in a feature freeze for the 1.0 release. All work until then is supposed to be bug fixing, although there also appears to be some cosmetic work like changing the available themes. Once they reach 1.0, they can start adding new features again (though many posters here would claim that Mozilla is already so bloated that new features would be redundant.) As other people have pointed out, 1.0 is also a big psychological milestone.

IMO, Mozilla is already well ahead of the quality of most released commercial software, and the willingness of Netscape to base NS6 on the existing Mozilla tree is pretty good evidence that Netscape agrees. The Mozilla team could declare the next version to be 1.0 and I doubt that any more people would complain about the quality than with other packages. The decision to squish every last bug before declaring 1.0 is a really good sign of the quality of code that the team wants to put out.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO, Mozilla is already well ahead of the quality of most released commercial software, and the willingness of Netscape to base NS6 on the existing Mozilla tree is pretty good evidence that Netscape agrees.


Yeah, and after Netscape 4.0 we all know what sticklers those Netscape people are about releasing a quality product! ;)

(sorry, I couldn't resist)

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking about average users, they don't see much difference between 0.1.0 and 1.0.0. Chop off the "redundent" leading zeros and both the numbers look like 1.0.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

You use Mozilla? Personally, I won't use Mozilla until:

• the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons
  
• rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space (a la IE)
  
• that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed
  
• there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their /etc/hosts anymore? hello?)

My hope is that these silly design issues will be resolved in 1.0. Anyone with me? (Yeah, I would know if anyone's with me if I could understand the bug search. Holy cow.)

Re:Why 1.0?

[binford2k]

You, my anonymous friend, are a monkey.

Each of your silly objections can be alleviated right now, if you used even one single brain cell on thinking about it.

• the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons
• rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space (a la IE)

So write a theme that does this, or look through the available themes on themes.org. Strike one for the intellectually challenged.

• that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed

So turn it OFF, buddy. Did you forget to turn on your brain switch this morning? Strike two.

• there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their /etc/hosts anymore? hello?)

Why bother with that silliness? Man you are clueless. Right click on the doubleclick image, select "Block images from this server". Strike three, this moron is out.

Whoopty. All your problems are fixed. Quite trolling and bitching and go download mozilla. This time remember to use that grey matter between your ears.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Kanasta]

Why? Because even tho it's stable for YOU now, it's totally unusable for ME. Granted some of the hardware I use is pretty crappy (S3 Trio graphics card gives me headaches all the time), but that shouldn't explain why it crashes on me every time I open a few (3-4) windows. Granted I'm part of only a very small percentage of users, but if you're suggesting Mozilla developers should start patting themselves on the back then you're kidding yourself.

Given the amount of trouble I've had, I'm not going to touch it again until 1.0. And also until they trim down the file size. I thot the thing was supposed to be efficient and stuff, fit on one floppy or whatever.

Re:Why 1.0?

[hound3000]

Because 1.0 is a *happy*, *feel-good* version number. Because you not obsessed with 1.0 like the rest of us, you must neither be *happy*, or *feel-good* about yourself. This is most probably the cause of a deeper or underlying problem. Since you refuse to be *happy* like the rest of us complaining and generally b*tching, you obviously must need therapy.

You see, version numbers are of ultra-importance. Microsoft sold umpteen billions of Windows 95 because of a 91.9 difference in their last version, 3.1. Then, when 98 released, not everyone upgraded, because a version difference of 3 is pathetic compared to 91.9. So be *happy* and smile when Mozilla reaches 1.0 We guarantee you will *feel-good* about yourself when you do...

Was that over the top?

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a driver issue to me.

Re:Why 1.0?

[unapersson]

If it's crappy for you and not for lots of other people, then have you been filing lots of bug/crash reports, or just closing it and moving along. The bugs won't magically go away if you don't actively either 1) file bugs or 2) hammer away on talkback builds to cause as many crashes as you can. 2) is exactly what you should be doing if it regularly crashes for you, then the problem is far more likely to be resolved. That's what I've done in the past everytime I've had a build that crashed on me, and since doing that I've had nothing but extremely stable builds for a long time.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be in tech support with an attitude like that.

Re:Why 1.0?

[kubrick]

The average user? The users whose massive support makes certain projects fundable and viable? They want version 1.0. 1.0 says, "Hey, this is stable, it won't kill, maim or cause your machine to implode."

To a generation raised on Microsoft products, v1.0 is a scary number. Windows 1.0? Windows NT 1.0? Internet Explorer 1.0? Way too immature for use. I think Mozilla should jump straight to 'Mozilla [current_year + 1]'. So, if they released 'v1.0' tomorrow, they should call it Mozilla 2002.After all, we gotta keep up with the Gates's...

(This message posted with Mozilla 0.9.3 :)

Re:Why 1.0?

[Zico]

have you been filing lots of bug/crash reports, or just closing it and moving along.

File lots of bug reports? Hammer away at talkback builds? Ummm, I'll think about it when AOL/Netscape/Mozilla starts sending me a check to do their work for them. I don't know about you people, but my time actually costs money.

Things like this are why Mozilla's been a disaster. When someone just wants something to work, they get chastized (not by you in particular) for not filing bug reports and doing a bunch of other nonsense that isn't their job. If I have to hammer away on unstable builds, file bug reports, write my own themes, patch the code, etc. etc. just in hopes that it'll be working better not now, but in the future, then I might as well be throwing my money down the drain.

I know a lot of people here at Slashdot refuse to believe the whole "Linux is free only if your time has no value" thing, but it really shows itself when you consider all the time people expect you to put into Mozilla when you really just want something that works. The time saved by being able to use IE 5+ is enough in itself to be able to get a new copy of Win2K Server, provided that you've advanced beyond the flipping burgers/tech-support/allowance-from-parents stage of life. Again: Time is money, kids.

Re:Why 1.0?

[archibald tuttle]

I do not see what is so great about IE. I have a dual boot setup with linux/konqueror and windows/IE, and I do not see the slightest difference when browsing with konqueror. In fact I sometimes have to look at the window borders to see wether I'm in KDE or in windows.

I have to agree about mozilla though. Its very bloated, and even if they can make it work in the year 2002, they should be ashamed that less people can write a better browser (konqueror or opera) in less time.

regards,

tuttle

Re:Why 1.0?

[unapersson]

If you don't want to hammer on unstable builds then why on earth are you downloading development software? The builds are clearly marked as being for testing purposes. Running talkback builds involves no extra work on your part, just clicking a submission button when it crashes. The whole point of using beta software is to report bugs/crashes.

If you're not prepared to do that then why on earth are you using beta software? At least have the respect not to moan about it when things don't work, when your machine configuration is obviously the source of the problem, yet you have no interest in improving things as you'd rather winge. Filing a few bug reports and running talkback builds has meant I now have a very stable browser on my machine, in fact on NT4 at work, Mozilla crashes a hell of a lot less than IE does. What can I do about IE's crashes? Nothing.

In fact, I think the IE6 beta has even gone Mozilla's route and can send crash reports.

Re:Why 1.0?

[LarsG]

They want version 1.0. 1.0 says, "Hey, this is stable, it won't kill, maim or cause your machine to implode."

You must have been hiding under a rock while MS redefined the meaning of "1.0".

Re:Why 1.0?

[Azghoul]

You're an ass.

No one is suggesting that you spend hours a day working on Mozilla. What IS being suggested that, when you try to run it, and it breaks, don't just quit and run away. Tell the talkback thing to 'send' instead of just dumping it all.

Everyone ELSE should throw their own time and effort into Linux/Mozilla/whatever, but you should be paid because you're SOOOOOOOOO valuable.

Pretty pathetic. Do you sleep? Do you watch sports (or anything else) on TV? Do you read a newspaper? The Economist? Hmmmmm you're not making any damn money there, loser.

Re:Why 1.0?

[archen]

a generation raised on Microsofts products? I'll agree that most people start out on M$ products, but take a poll of how many people remember ANY of those products at Version 1 - I doubt you'll find many, and if you do find some, chances are they were scarred for life and use UNIX now.

Re:Why 1.0?

[archen]

you mean like IE fits on a floppy disk? yeah right

Re:Why 1.0?

[kubrick]

Hey, my path was Commodore 64 -> Amiga -> Linux. But I know how many people out there worship the Big Blue Screen of Death in Redmond...
Besides, if people don't remember v1s, all the better reason to inflate the version numbers. :)

Re:Why 1.0?

[kubrick]

BTW, has the comment submission code changed? Or is /. just dumping my preferences?

Used to be that newlines would automatically be converted to <br> for you...

Re:Why 1.0?

[stikves]

No microsoft understood that versions like 1, 2 do not seem pretty. And they bumped it to 2000!

Re:Why 1.0?

[ethereal]

TANSTAAFL.

There are really only two ways to satisfy your need for "something that works" - you can either work on it yourself, or pay for someone else to do it. I don't really care which you choose, but if you choose to be part of a project that is predicated on users submitting bug reports and maybe even bug fixes to improve that project, then you probably shouldn't turn around and bitch that those are the project parameters. You knew it was a work in progress, you knew how Open Source works, and you knew that there was an expectation that it would be your job to contribute to the project (via bug reports and/or fixes) in order to earn the right to complain about it.

I'm not saying don't mention bugs that you find in Open Source projects (because nobody can be entirely involved in every Open Source project who's product you make use of); I'm just saying you shouldn't really be surprised when people tell you to shut up and start coding :)

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

"you knew how Open Source works"
Well now, that is truly begging the question, isn't it?

Re:Why 1.0?

[FatalException]

There is an opiton in the prefrences.

I have seen posts that say it was reset with the upgrade.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Syberghost]

"1.0" says to most people who got into computing after 1995 "was released in 1901".

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So write a theme that does this, or look through the available themes on themes.org."

There's only like 3 themes available that work on the current milestone. Sometimes milestones come out and NONE of the themes.org themes are updated.

That's a big reason 1.0 is critical -- the mozilla theming community was just getting started and continual API changes have discouraged many developers and left good themes unmaintained. There's tons of annoyances with the two default themes, including the quite valid issue about the non-standard location bar placement. None of this can reasonably be fixed by external developers until the API freezes or they devote themselves to continually chasing Moz's tail.

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he could take all his extra money and go buy a computer that isn't such a complete piece of shit.

Re:Why 1.0?

[sulli]

Then tell me why I have been using it for everything that several finished products can do.

Because your version crashes far less often than the one I tried recently (for MacOS 9)?

Re:Why 1.0?

[then, it was nigh]

that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed

So turn it OFF, buddy.

HOW?! I've been going crazy trying to figure that out. The "Internet Search" panel in Preferences just lets you change where you search.

Re:Why 1.0?

[binford2k]

Edit - > Preferences -> Navigator -> Smart Browsing -> Location Bar Autocomplete.

You can also look in the Advanced preferences for even more options.

Re:Why 1.0?

[jesser]

the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons

I happen to like Mozilla's toolbar configuration enough that I set IE to have the location bar to the right of the navigation buttons. But I use the huge resultion of 800x600, so YMMV. See bug 49543 to split the navigation buttons from the location bar, once Mozilla supports rearrangable toolbars and allows toolbars to be horizontally adjacent.

rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space (a la IE)

The clickable regions are rectangular. They just *look* like circles. Use the "classic" skin if you want buttons that look rectangular.

that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed

In preferences, go to Navigator > Smart Browsing > Location bar autocomplete > Advanced. (This pref was added after 0.9.3, so you'll have to grab a nightly build or wait for 0.9.4 to see it.)

there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their /etc/hosts anymore? hello?)

That's a real bug, and its name is 28586. You can vote for it if you want.

I would know if anyone's with me if I could understand the bug search

Try the search form on bugzilla's front page. The syntax is a lot like like Google's, except that each word you type is treated as a substring (so a search for "bookmark" will also find a bug with "bookmarks" in the summary).

Re:Why 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally if something works for most people but not for you its a problem with the setup of your computer.

Either windows (or whatever os your running) is messed up or you have a messed up install of mozilla.

If you upgraded for an older version of mozilla you might also have a messed up profile, creating a new profile has fixed many people's problems.

Re:Why 1.0?

[SamBeckett]

Pretty pathetic. Do you sleep? Do you watch sports (or anything else) on TV? Do you read a newspaper? The Economist? Hmmmmm you're not making any damn money there, loser.

That is a pretty lousy attitude to take-- one is entertainment value while the other is gobbling up entertainment time.. He is not particulary entertained fixing Mozilla and/or sending Bugs using some retarded Talkback thing.

And I am not entertained by constantly reading this Socialist Weblog.

Re:Why 1.0?

[then, it was nigh]

Edit - > Preferences -> Navigator -> Smart Browsing -> Location Bar Autocomplete.

No, that's already turned off; that's one of the first things I tried. I still get the "Search for" drop-down.

I'm not worried.

[Soko]

Mozilla 0.93 is great as it is - why about worry when 1.0 is coming out?

I have absolutely no problems with .93 what so ever on Redhat 7.1. Nevermind, guys - keep on moving forward, at the pace you need. I'm certainly impressed, as well as extremely grateful, so far.

Soko

Re:I'm not worried.

[PingXao]

I'm going to agree with this. I've been a Mozilla basher for almost 2 years now, happily using Konqueror and, before that, an older Netscape.

But even though I gave the Lizard below-average marks up until now - and deservedly so, I think - since I downloaded 0.93 I couldn't be happier. On my RH 7.1+ boxes it runs much faster than Konqueror. The ability to kill off unwanted banner advertisements and the fine-grained control over cookies is a godsend.

So, after 2 years I now recant everything bad I said about Mozilla. More importantly I can now recommend it to everyone I do business with! It's about time!

Re:I'm not worried.

[dadragon]

0.9.3 works nicely here. The only problem is on my 2K server box (It's not actually a server, it's just a box running 2k server) it's quite slow. I didn't submit a bug/problem report because 1) I figured someone else would have my problems too, and 2) The nightly builds are beautiful. Good work, Gentlemen, and presumably Ladies too!

Re:I'm not worried.

[magi]

I'm myself not that convinced about the stability of Mozilla. For me,

• 0.9.1 worked just fine,
• 0.9.2 usually crashed within a minute, and
• 0.9.3 always jammed when starting and didn't even show up.

(Sorry for not filing bug reports this time.) This was also in RH 7.1. Ok, it probably works for most people, but for a few it doesn't, and the reasons don't appear to be obvious.

Besides, it's still rather slow in Linux, compared to Konqueror, and especially to old Njetscape 4.7x. I mean the GUI; the rendering is rather quick.

Re:I'm not worried.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your profile got hosed in the upgrade from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2 try creating a new one

A Rose by any other name (?)

[Ars-Fartsica]

What is the problem? Mozilla is essentially stable and featureful from my perspective as an everyday user. Given that the product is useable today, isn't 1.0 more or less an arbitrary release point? Its not like 1.0 will close off all existing bugs and not open any new ones - every release is an incremental march towards stability with new features adding their own instabilities.

Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.

Re:A Rose by any other name (?)

[JWhitlock]

Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.

Or, better yet, let's take a page from the closed-source playbook and call it Mozilla 7.0, or Mozilla 2002, or MMII(zilla) or MMoziIIa (something with Roman Numerals) or just Transmeta. Or, go back the the unix roots, and call it "mz".

Re:A Rose by any other name (?)

[Anonymous Coward]

MozillaXP.NET

Re:A Rose by any other name (?)

[David Gerard]

"1.0" is when Mozilla has API stability. It doesn't at present. (e.g. some bugs require API changes to fix.)

MozillaQuest is one big troll

[FattMattP]

I think that anyone who's kept up with Mozilla Quest and its articles has realized that it's one huge troll. The guy who writes the articles hardly ever has anything good to say. He also has a way of misconstruing and twisting things that would make a Microsoft PR executive beam with pride. Someone created a great parody of it called Mozilla Quest Quest. Apparently it requires Mozilla, or something that can handle XML, to view it.

Bottom line: Take anything the Mozilla Quest site says with a HUGE grain of salt.

Re:MozillaQuest is one big troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently it requires Mozilla, or something that can handle XML, to view it.

IE 5.1 for Mac OS X handles it fine -- FYI. OmniWeb 4.0.3 does not. Fucking Cocoa apps suck.

Re:MozillaQuest is one big troll

[Gorgonzola]

That MozillaQuestQuest site is pure genius. I wished the slashdot crew would link to it every time they made the mistake to link to MozillaQuest and put the whole shebang in the funny section.

Re:MozillaQuest is one big troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Insert on the first line and it'll work in ie.

Who the fuck is Mike Angelo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I give in.... who is this guy? MozillaQuest sounds very important and it certainly had me going for a couple of minutes, but then look at the front page.... over 20 articles, and all written by Mr. Angelo.

Trying to be self important but having nobody to listen to you. The site looks quite sad, to be honest.

Re:Who the fuck is Mike Angelo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how he has nothing but FUD to say under the guise of mozilla and linux news, I'd be tempted to call him a MS marketroid.

not really concerned when 1.0 comes out...

[bbh]

I don't see the real importance of whether it is 1.0 or 0.9.xxx etc.. I have tried the different Mozilla milestones in the past and thought this is way too buggy to be usable, but around 0.9.2 it really stabilized to the point where it has become quite usable and worth the effort of using and filing talkbacks when there is a problem. The speed has increased dramatically and the crashes are pretty rare. I believe that is progress, so I don't really care about what number is placed on it, as long as they are moving forward, I don't see how you can complain. You make the following comment in the article:

To the Mozilla Organization's and Mozilla Project's credit they almost have a darn nice browser suite. But they will not have a nice browser suite until they get it right (to-wit, get rid of the bugs and release Mozilla 1.0).

To get it right, its gonna take time. I believe the reason there are so many more bug reports are because people like myself and many others have noticed the improvements made to Mozilla and have actually started using it again. With more users comes more bug reports, which will create more debug data which will help the Mozilla crew squash bugs a lot faster. Be patient, there is progress being made.

I've now actually switched to using IMAP with Mozilla 0.9.3 and it finally works really nice since the 0.9.x series. I noticed one bug that caused a crash in 0.9.2, filed several talkbacks, and the problem was gone in 0.9.3. Visible progress, just the way I like it.

bbh

Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[bluephone]

Mozilla Quest is the single biggest source of lies on the net today. This is the same man who claimed Netscape 6.1 wasn't based on Mozilla code. The more attention this guy gets, the more lies he spreads. Would a "LinuxQuest" that posts crap about how Linus is an MS employee who's being paied to drive Linux into the ground get as much attention around here?

Re:Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is why is anybody taking Slashdot seriously ? The guys running this place are whacked out and will accept any submission without any question whatsoever..

I'd be happy if slashdot were shut down today.

Hopefully VA will go bankrupt sooner than expected!

Re:Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[Malcontent]

Then why are you here in the first place?

Re:Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of like looking at a car wreck ... somehow you can't turn your head away.

Re:Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[bluephone]

I have no idea why you ask that in response to my comment. I was talking abotu how bad MozillaQuest is, not Slashdot.

Re:Please stop posting MozQuest crap.

[chegosaurus]

> Linus is an MS employee who's being paied to drive Linux into the ground

I knew it!

bugs are not bugs

[bagel]

Some of the bugs present on bugzilla are actually enchancement suggestions. So don't be fooled by the raw number on the list. How many of them are critical bugs? How many are just "this feature should be included" or "the menu item should belong to another place"?

Re:bugs are not bugs

[core10k]

Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier. Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted. (as Redundant, hopefully.)

Re:bugs are not bugs

[bagel]

I've actually filed a so called "bug report" on bugzilla two days ago for a enchancement suggestion. It's related to the mail program and you get to select 5 levels of importance, one of them being "enhancement".

1.0 milestone not so important

[salimma]

Remember people, this is not propietary software! Mozilla is getting more stable and faster as each day and milestone goes by. It's not like you cannot use it now - get any recent Linux distribution (except Debian until Woody is released) and a recent Mozilla is included.

Releasing a version 1.0 matters more in the commercial world, but since in that aspect Netscape 6.0 and 6.1 has been released, that aspect shouldn't be overrated as well.

After all, the ext2 file system is still at revision 0.17, Enlightenment 0.17 is still in CVS and Sawfish is still at 0.38 - and millions of people use them.

Regards,

Michel

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they shouldn't be using ext2. If you don't unmount properly (like if there's a power outage) then your filesystem gets messed up and you have to wait about a week for fsck to finish running. (if fsck itself hasn't been corrupted...) It sucks!

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 6 GB hard drive and it takes maybe 30 seconds to fsck the whole thing.

The only people who complain about the time taken by fsck are those who have 80 GB hard drives to hold all their pornography and pirated MP3's.

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[rgmoore]

After all, the ext2 file system is still at revision 0.17, Enlightenment 0.17 is still in CVS and Sawfish is still at 0.38 - and millions of people use them.

Actually, Sawfish has finally made it to 1.0. It's just that packagers don't seem to have gotten the 1.0 packages out yet. Not that this invalidates the point that many very useful programs are still officially pre-1.0.

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[dadragon]

I don't have any pirated MP3s. If I was in the USA, I'd have many, many GB of pirated MP3s, but here it's legal as long as I don't trade them.

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[mimbleton]

"Remember people, this is not propietary software! Mozilla is getting more stable and faster as each day and milestone goes by. "

One has nothing to with the other.
You know, proprietary software gets better as well, the difference being that users are spared inconvenience of installing new version every other week.

Re:1.0 milestone not so important

[salimma]

I must apologise if that is what my statement appears to imply; what I was trying to say, of course, is that while propietary software is not normally made available prior to reaching a stable 1.0 state (or betas thereof), Mozilla has had many milestones released.

Granted that only the latter releases are actually usable, but I note that commercial vendors tend to have more pressure on them to get a release out of the door. Witness two Netscape releases already based on the pre-1.0 Mozilla code.

Hope that clarify matters,

Michel

errr there is a reason

[metalhed77]

in theory the 1.0 version is the version you release to the general public with grand ability to say, HEY THIS SOFTWARE WORKS AS ADVERTISED (as if that were ever true). the 1.0 version supposedly marks the point at which all the key features work and work well enough and without too many bugs. There is a method to this whole crazy version scheme

MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[Chuck Chunder]

I thought MozillaQuestQuest was funny when it first came out. Then I read this "article" at MozillaQuest and it became clear that the parody just can't be as funny as the real thing. The title is just so ludicrous to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the Mozilla project it simply defies taking the piss out of it. And the right sidebar! I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Someone sign this guy up to write for Slashdot!

Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[Zontar The Mindless]

The MozillaQuest site itself is so badly executed and so sophomoronic in content as to place it beyond the bounds of credibility or even lampoonability. How anyone can come up with "October + ? = 2002" is simply beyond me -- unless they've an ulterior motive. That funny biz with the screenshots and graphs struck me as an amateurish (but still annoying) attempt at disinformation.

It's just so fscking sad that anyone would even link to it, much less give it guaranteed traffic by posting a story from it as "news" here.

/. editors, please don't choose articles when you've been smoking crack. You'll just continue to embarass yourselves and waste our time. Thank you.

In the meantime, I plan to continue to ignore MozillaQuest and hope that it'll just go away.

BTW, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.3 exclusively for my email and it kicks butt (and I don't have to worry about .vbs viruses on my Windows boxes).

Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[GreyPoopon]

And the right sidebar! I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Someone sign this guy up to write for Slashdot!

I absolutely agree, and I'm happy to see that somebody else has already expressed their sentiments on the issue. In all seriousness, when I first saw the link (on Mozillazine) to that article, I really believed it must have been a parody site. Subsequent research left me astounded to find out that it wasn't. I have honestly never seen such unprofessional and irreponsible journalism (if it can be called that) in all my life. And as you said, the sidebar really took the cake. It reminded me of some of the crap people in high school debate classes would dream up. In fact, better make that junior high. The high schoolers were much better at critical thinking.

This latest article just continues to prove how worthless it is to read articles on Mozillaquest -- unless you just want a good laugh. In fact, if you take a look at the current roadmap for Mozilla (that has been in place for a while), you'll see clearly that they aren't promising a 1.0 release anytime this year. They are *hoping* to have one, but the more conservative of the two numbering schemes obviously takes them into the next year. It's been that way for a while since the roadmap was revised.

My suggestion is that you use Mozillaquest to test out your new DDoS tools. We can just consider it to be the "door stop" of websites.

Re:MozillaQuest is beyond parody.

[Anonymous Coward]

True the site is poorly written, and it just looks plain ugly, but it does raise some good points. Why in the world wouldn't they fix simple cosmetic bugs before a release? Why is the memory managment still not up to par? And I'm surprised that you're able to use Mozilla Mail exclusively considering they haven't even put together a dictionary for a spell-check. Don't you find that annoying?

mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.org

[asa]

I just want to make sure it is very clear to slashdot readers that MozillaQuest is in no way connected with or affiliated with mozilla.org. Do not be confused by the name or the 'borrowed' mozilla graphics (mostly gone now I believe). MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site. It is a shame that slashdot, a place that many in the open source community turn for information, continues to point its readers at this kind of sensationalism.

--Asa
(my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or mozilla.org)

Good old debian :)

[bagel]

get any recent Linux distribution (except Debian until Woody is released)

Woody still has M18. Guess debian users will have to wait till sid is released.

Re:Good old debian :)

[crumley]

Woody still has M18. Guess debian users will have to wait till sid is released.

Uhm, no.

% dpkg -l | grep mozilla
ii mozilla 0.9.3+0-3 Mozilla Web Browser - dummy package
ii mozilla-browse 0.9.3+0-3 Mozilla Web Browser - core and browser
ii mozilla-mailne 0.9.3+0-3 Mozilla Web Browser - mail and news support
ii mozilla-psm 0.9.3+0-3 Mozilla Web Browser - Personal Security Mana
rc mozilla-xmlter 0.9.3-1 Mozilla Web Browse - XML enabled

More recent mozilla's have been in woody for at least a few weeks.

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[darkPHi3er]

"Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier...."

even assuming the reports of the rate of rise of bug reports is increasing, and further assuming the rate of rise is as steep as indicated, ol' Billy of Ock wouldn't necessarily agree with you, try some other possible explanations....

1. the code portions showing the increase are relatively new and have not had the equivalent amount of debug time that the more mature sections of the code have been given

2. the coders producing the buggier code are new to the project and are still learning how to implement and design their particular sections, even highly experienced coders/designers have a rise their error rate when changing to an unfamilar design, this is usu short-term and correctable w/o a ton of effort

3. the bugs located could be on the "other" side of the code, say the JVM or the security sandbox or OS threading model or ??????

...and let's not forget that even M$ has acknowledged that W2K has shipped with nearly 70,000 ***KNOWN*** bugs....

the Mozilla Quest article does not classify the bugs by type or location, how many "app killers" are there? how many "OS killers"? versus how many are UI related where a drop down box doesn't autoscroll or automatically alphabetize?????

the entire MozillaQuest article reeked of hostility towards the current Mozilla development structure...

...as someone who is NOT a daily Linux user, and who doesn't use any Mozilla on ANY platform i found the tone of the article very opinionated and hostile...it sounded more political than analytical and seemed to have an agenda greater than informing the Mozilla faithful....

maybe justified, maybe not, i don't know...but there's way insufficient info in that article to conclude "...Mozilla is getting buggier"...

problem : (

[labradore]

while I was writing an email to the author of that article the mozilla email composer program crashed :( *sigh* I guess there are still _some_ serious and probably elusive bugs to fix but on the whole I like Mozilla better than the "competition." Yes, I've tried them all.

Re:problem : (

[PurpleBob]

That's a feature. If you had managed to send an e-mail to Mike Angelo and gotten a reply, your inbox might have had a stupidity overload and caused all the other messages you would ever recieve to spontaneously turn into badly-formatted sources of misinformation with ugly and irrelevant blue buttons on the side.

Now aren't you glad Mozilla sacrificed its own process to protect you from this horrible fate?

One reason 1.0 is important...

[brunes69]

For all those who keep saying "Who cares when 1.0 is coming out when 0.93 is out now", and you are somewhat right, don't forget that RedHat has said (and I believe other distros will follow suit) that when mozilla reaches 1.0, it will stop carrying the horrid Netscape 4.7x altogether, in the distro, and focus on Mozilla as the default browser. This support alone will help Mozilla greatly.

Re:One reason 1.0 is important...

[bkhl]

I remember they said they would replace Netscape when Mozilla is a viable alternative.

Re:One reason 1.0 is important...

[Doc Roy]

I think they actually said when mozilla becomes stable (possibly 1.0) then they will ship with mozilla. I don't think they will wait just because it isn't a 1.x release. Mandrake already ships their distro with mozilla. 8.0 came with mozilla 0.8

Bug Triage & 1.0 matters

[zenyu]

I've started using Mozilla whenever I can as of 0.9.2, but it's not something I want to encourage others to use yet. They are making a great deal of progress though, with 0.9.2 I always kept a copy of Netscape 4.7* running and now I only run it when something actually goes wrong with Mozilla (Or I need POP3 which now crashes my Windows copy of Mozilla.) Point here is that 1.0 has meaning to me, should it be fairly robust I will encourage my friends to use it and install it on a bunch of machines that I don't update with every release.

Now to the subject line, being a programmer I find the interpretation of these Bug Graphs silly. All the "New Bugs" don't mean anything, when someone looks at them or tries to fix them they'll probably realize there are 20 bug reports that all refer to a single bug. The fact that assigned bugs grew matters, but this certainly hasn't jumped as much as usage has so again the interpretation that things are getting worse is flawed.
And that mention of fixing the "Memory Problem" before v1.0 is silly, just make it not crash and work like it's supposed to. Fixing the memory problem or speeding up the parser are features which can wait for v2.0. Of course, they are not going to fix 1500 bugs by v1.0, when they cull all but the 5-6 stop-ship bugs then we'll know triage has been done and Mozilla is a few months away.

Re:Bug Triage & 1.0 matters

[asa]

Point here is that 1.0 has meaning to me, should it be fairly robust I will encourage my friends to use it and install it on a bunch of machines that I don't update with every release.

What if Mozilla 0.9.8 is "fairly robust"? Will you not encourage others to use it because it is not called 1.0? What if the plans for 0.9.9 and 1.0 do not include any improvements in the "robust"ness of the app? Is is useful to hold off recommending it until the magic number 1.0 happens? What if we had never moved from the Mx Milestone naming scheme? We'd be at about Milestone M26 now. Would you wait until it hit M30 or M50 or maybe M100 before encouraging others to use it?

Of course, they are not going to fix 1500 bugs by v1.0

Actually, we average about 1500 bugs fixed every Milestone (about every 5 to 6 weeks). So I sure hope we can fix at least that many in the Milestones we have between now and 1.0.

BTW, I appreciate the sentiment of your comments. Don't take my nits as anything but nits and my questions as genuine curiosity.

--Asa

Re:Bug Triage & 1.0 matters

[zenyu]

What if Mozilla 0.9.8 is "fairly robust"? Will you not encourage others to use it because it is not called 1.0? What if the plans for 0.9.9 and 1.0 do not include any improvements in the "robust"ness of the app?

There are certain things I expect from a v1.0.

• Features that don't work are removed.
  
• It doesn't crash very often (once per 1000 pages or after running 3-4 days is ok.)
  
• Important and easy to implement features such as ESC = "stop those f***'n animations" on all platforms. I remeber Netscape 6.0 got a nasty NYT review because this didn't work on some non-Linux platform.
  

So it's not that it is called v1.0 that's important. Mozilla just has to work like one. I'll take the development team's word for it, if it's called v0.9.9 they think it isn't ready for prime-time.

Of course, if they release a v1.0 that doesn't meet those modest standards, it will look worse NS6.0.. I personally think Mozilla can make it by December, the progress has been great this year.

Once there is a stable working application, adding features will be much easier. I even worked on something to filter the images but abandoned it because I wanted to distribute it early August and I just couldn't. If 0.9.3 had been out in May, which has a very stable browser component, I wouldn't have put the project on hold.. Now I'll wait a while before spending any more time on it. I can't really contribute until it's stable because I can only commit limited time along with my expertise.

Re:Bug Triage & 1.0 matters

[Anonymous Coward]

for me, i have been seeding my boss for a couple of months, educating him on what is different between netscape's browser (whatever it is officialy called now) and mozilla, and why i think we should go to the latter. still, it is going to involve my credibility when i install mozilla, and i belive the psychological effects of a 1.0 will be better--actualy my boss generaly has a "wait for the bug fix" policy so a 1.0.something would be something he would be much happier with.

we are still on netscape 4.7.5, but have had to install ie for the web sites that require it, and recently netscape 6.0. 6.0 was well recived, but badly preforming, soon after i tried 6.1 on one users computer, and though it should be an improvement in so many ways, it had a show stopper right off the bat (that i have never seen in mozilla).

i am enjoying mac 2001080214 right now, although more recent nightlies won't download for me. mozilla is stable, fast, and pretty and i have 15 users who would love it, but there are still a few nits to be picked, and while i pull nightlys onto my computer every day at work, i am not going to get to upgrade the rest of the users more frequently that every three months or so.

you are debunking the 1.0 myth to the wrong people. slashdot == choir

Re:Bug Triage & 1.0 matters

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. I've started to use Mozilla as my primary browser since 0.9.2, and it rocks!
There are still some major bugs, but judging from the changes between 0.9.2 and 0.9.3, I'm sure that the most severe ones will be fixed.

I had 150+ windows open in W2K SP2 from 0.9.3, over a course of nearly a week, and it remained fairly stable. Something did happen though, that closing one of the windows required about a 30-second wait, and (perhaps due to this) one of the windows hung, wouldn't redraw, wouldn't close.
Eventually read everything in the windows and closed them, and had to force-close that last hung window. Not quite sure what happened.

Contrast that to Netscape 4.7x, especially on Win98se - open too many windows, run out of resources, crash, crash, crash. Heck, even 0.9.2 on Win98se is stable, as long as I don't open so many windows that my system resources go down to 2 percent.I give Mozilla a big thumbs up!

Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[goingware]

I believe it was IBM that first figured out that bugs in a large project asymptotically approach a constant number.

You may fix the worst bugs, but as time goes on more and more bugs are found, and eventually bugs pretty much crop up as you fix them.

The thing is, although bugs are constantly appearing, the frequency of the average bug decreases. You start getting bugs that happen only once every thousand user-years. Try as you might, you can't squash them all.

There is some hope, in that you can use some fundamentally better method of software engineering and things get suddenly better. The bugs still approach a constant level, but it is a smaller level. Back when IBM studied this, it was still common to write operating systems in assembly code. Using a high-level language is so much easier to debug that you can achieve better bug rates.

But at the same time, we have much greater ambitions for our software. Mozilla 1.0 will have far more features than Microsoft Word 1.0 did.

Re:Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[Hobart]

> I believe it was IBM that first figured out that bugs in a large project asymptotically approach a constant number.

Mr Crawford --

Does it have to be a requirement that there will always be bugs?
I would like to believe that given strong specifications, proper coding practice, accounting for situations, and no unreasonable time constraints, it's possible to produce a bug-free piece of software that performs its task correctly on a given system... I've read Worse is Better

Re:Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[hta]

How I wish you were right.....
"The mythical man-month" quoted research showing that most big programming projects could be characterized by a single number.
This number was the average number of new bugs introduced, uncovered or otherwise made noticeable by fixing an old bug.
If this number is 1, you should start planning for replacing the system.
This is one reason why INTERFACES are important: the more isolated a fix is, the bigger your chance of keeping your number 1.
IBM S/360 was the OS where this was first made explicit, I think.

Re:Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[Anonymous Coward]

More features? Yeah after 3 years it should have more features than Don Quixote ...

Re:Bugs Approach a Constant Number

[SpeelingChekka]

You may fix the worst bugs, but as time goes on more and more bugs are found, and eventually bugs pretty much crop up as you fix them

I guess that depends on your software's structural design. Our older systems where I work used to have such horrible design, that it was nearly impossible to fix or add *anything* without something else breaking. Often, something seemingly totally unrelated to the change would break! It gets to the point where you're afraid to change anything for fear of the repurcussions. We had no version control either.

We've rewritten everything, and we've put a huge amount of effort (and experience) into a decent design, and not only is our software MUCH more robust, but our known "buglists" for version 1 have in the recent past dropped to 0. Yes, zero, we have no known bugs anymore. These are reusable libraries consisting of over 100000 lines of code. We completed "version 1" recently, and the rate at which we currenly find new bugs is maybe three or four a week, so keeping the figure at "0" is now quite easy. It takes a lot of hard work to get there, and a "feature freeze" is a requirement (very difficult when programmers always just want to add "this cool new feature" or "that useful new feature"). Some todo's move over to the "version 2" todo list, and the remaining stuff (bugs and minor design issues) just need to be tackled, one by one.

Could you provide a reference to the IBM study? It sounds fishy to me. It seems to me that bug-list graphs have a lot to do with how well-design the software is, and how disciplined developers are.

Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[caspy7]

Please, someone tell those that are responsible for posting these to never ever again post any information found on MozillaQuest. Please don't even bother visiting the site so that he gets hits. This guy sensationalises information and just plain makes stuff up. MozillaQuestQuest.com is a good place to point out his contradictions and such.
My question is how can we delegitimize this guy so the real media doesn't take his lies and run?

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard the phrase, "Bad publicity is better than no publicity at all"?

Bash MozillaQuest and Mike Angelo all you want, he's still a faithful Mozilla user. Why are you attacking a Mozilla user who takes the time out of his busy schedule to publish an independent newsletter on Mozilla? What do you expect him to do, spend 100 % of the time praising Mozilla like some old issue of Pravda did for the Soviet government?

My question is how can we delegitimize this guy so the real media doesn't take his lies and run?

You are living in a bloody fantasy world. The real media aren't going to "take his lies and run"; the real media have simply abandoned Mozilla and turned to IE. In the words of David Coursey,

Netscape should just give up. Internet Explorer, regardless of how Microsoft did it, has won the browser wars, and Netscape is no longer really contributing technology or even creating competition for IE. There may be a need for multiple Windows browsers in the world, but I haven't found one. The Netscape Mozilla "free software" effort has been every bit the bomb I predicted it would be. I am not sure how much Netscape--or parent AOL Time Warner--depends on the browser directing people to the Netcenter portal, and what the loss of the browser would mean to that business, or the role the browser plays in the Mac world ,or on other platforms. But on Windows, it's toast.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[Doc Roy]

What do you expect him to do, spend 100 % of the time praising Mozilla like some old issue of Pravda did for the Soviet government?

No. But I expect him to try and get his facts straight. Does he even bother trying to contact the people at mozilla.org for confirmation of his story before publicising it?

The comments about the browser war being over really shit me. I seem to recall people saying the same thing about IE when Netscape held over 90% of the market. "Oh IE will never be able to displace Netscape."

Just because it has the largest portion of the market Now means nothing, because Now isn't what matters. Tommorow is where the future is and that is where the changes will occur. Believing that just because you are number 1 now doesn't mean you will remain number 1. If that were so then netscape would still have 90% of the market.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you seriously think we wouldn't know it's you, Mike?
Your writing style is unique. Abysmal... but unique.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[belbo]

Well, at least I can get mozillaquest displayed in the browser of my choice (Opera). Not so with mozillaquestquest.
What is this, some kind of reverse discrimination? That's plain stupid. I'm interested in what's going on in M's development, but since I'm on a laptop here, Opera suits my needs (MDI) much more than Mozilla (0.9.3) which is very slow on my machine (600 MHz PIII, 256 MB, no less...) and takes up too much of my valuable screen estate.

Everybody here's screaming blue murder if a site's blocking non-MSIE users, and rightly so. Now this guy's doing the same and it's ok because it's cool?

tom

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[mimbleton]

MozillaQuestQuest.com is broken ( on IE, Netscape 4.7 and Opera)

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[mkelley]

Works fine if you're using Mozilla.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[mimbleton]

That is what I meant.
Definition of broken, if you will.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[dSV3Hl]

MozillaQuestQuest uses XHTML, which has been a standard for about 2 years. Why don't you try viewing it with a standards compliant browser?

I can think of one off the top of my head....

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[Anonymous Coward]

"What do you expect him to do, spend 100 % of the time praising Mozilla like some old issue of Pravda did for the Soviet government"

Yes, many of the folks over at mozillazine do expect exactly that. Also remember that Mozilla is a totally independant project from Netscape and AOL or they'll send you to the gulags.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[mimbleton]

Hehehe.
Nice try.

Unfortunately you know that whatever IE supports is the standard regardless of any "officially" declared standards.
Frankly, it is not even something that MS invented but our lovely friends from now defunct Netscape.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[RacerX69]

Hehehe... Nice try to you, too!

If you actually did research for your facts, you'd know what you're talking about.

XHTML1.0 is simply a re-engineering of the HTML4.01 standards into XML. The W3C standard was written by the W3C HMTL Working group on which Microsoft has ample representation. According to the acknowledgements section of the XHTML standard at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#acks, Microsoft has 2 reps out of the 24 members who worked on the standard. Seems to me that if they helped form the standard, they should also implement it.

Re:Please Slashdot never again post MozQuest info

[SpeelingChekka]

Yup, that MozQuest article is just plain FUD. Perhaps this guy is trying to get hired by Microsoft PR department, because this article is such beautiful FUD that I don't think MS could do a better job. The way he lies with statistics is beautiful.

I can't help but think that MozillaQuest MUST be a site run by Microsoft. For one thing, the site is butt ugly, to lead people to think 'geez these opensource guys are unprofessional'. Secondly, the naming of the site seems to be such as to try fool people into thinking its associated with Mozilla. Thirdly, its packed with FUD.

I mean, lets be logical about this - why would someone intent on dissing Mozilla create a site that on the surface looks like a Mozilla fan site?

This sort of crap happens every day - I wouldn't be surprised if its just another part of MS's "fake grassroots" spin campaign. Movie companies do this sort of thing every day (create fake "fan" sites to gather "grassroots" support). There are web-design companies that specialise in creating fake "personal" sites, complete with deliberate ugliness and unprofessionalism. I would be VERY surprised if MS did not have such fake sites.

IE for Mac

[Galvatron]

IIRC, Microsoft actually dissolved the IE for Mac team because they did such a good job that IE 5.x for Mac was better than IE 5.x for Windows. Hence, no 5.5 for Mac, and most likely, 6.x on Mac will be a shoddy porting effort rather than a slick native app.

Re:IE for Mac

[mimbleton]

And how the hell you know all that ?
Are you on IE Mac team ?

Re:IE for Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's not quite right. They did dissolve the Mac IE team, but it was to put them on a project at WebTV which itself got cancelled.

Since then, they've put a few resources back on Mac IE, but nothing they're working on is really that interesting, esp. considering how long it's been since Mac IE 5.0 came out. That's also why it's taking so damn long to get 5.1 out of "preview" mode, even though it's got basically nothing but minor features that got pulled from 5.0 at the last minute. Carbonization was done long ago. [I don't care if you believe me or not, but the info's legit...]

If you want progress in Mac browsers, Mozilla is the way to go. Mozilla kicks IE's ass on my OS X machine.

Re:IE for Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

where did you get the binary for it? There's no download on the releases page, and compiling the source requires me to install GTK, and god knows what else. Too much hassle when OmniWeb already does a damned good job.

Re:IE for Mac

[Galvatron]

No, I was not on the IE for Mac team. I do read the newspaper sometimes though.

we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[jchristopher]

There are so many really, really good alternatives to Mozilla now that it really doesn't matter whether it ever appears or not.

The other alternative browsers (Konqueror, Opera, etc.) are really making progress. Opera is VERY usable on both Win32 and Linux.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[ink]

The other alternative browsers (Konqueror, Opera, etc.) are really making progress.

While I agree with you that those browsers are improving, Mozilla is still heads and shoulders above any of them on a modern machine. I use Opera as my primary Linux browser, but I cannot use it to develop web software because of the many major display bugs it has. Mozilla, on the other hand, is a dream to develop with because of the great cache (I use CGI). The only reason I use Opera is for its tabs, which I am addicted to. I'd use Opera or Konq on a low-end machine, but Mozilla on a good on a newer box. Mozilla is both my wife's primary browser (and email) and is the primary browser on my laptop. People who haven't used Mozilla in a few months should really check out .9.3 -- it is better than any browser out there.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[jchristopher]

It (the browser, the newsreader) runs slower than dung on my Celeron 333 / RedHat 7.1 machine with 350 megs of RAM. Is that what you consider "better"?

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[jchristopher]

Just curious what kind of display bugs you are running into... I haven't been using it that long, but things have been smooth sailing for me so far.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[binford2k]

I would have to say you've got some issues.

I have a Debian server w/ a K6II-350 and 192MB RAM running anywhere from 1-4 instances of Mozilla for roaming clients over a 10mb network. (on a hub, too, not a switch)

It is quite snappy. I think you might need to take a look at your system.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you've just never seen a fast browser?

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[El Prebso]

Personally I just don't like Konqueror, and Opera is not an alternativ because of it is close source.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[aussersterne]

It is quite snappy. I think you might need to take a look at your system.

I run Mozilla (nightlies) on an Athlon 1GHz machine with 768MB CAS2 memory and a GeForce 3. It is noticeably slower than Konqueror and a snail compared to Opera.

I choose Konqueror because Opera has a few render bugs and because Konqueror is better KDE-integrated. I only open Mozilla for one or two sites that still cause Konq to punt -- but they're few enough and far enough between that I only have to launch Mozilla every 3-4 days.

Re:we'll be fine, even if it never appears

[ink]

Just try and develop some CGI with it; it pulls cache pages using some non-deterministic algorithm. The display glitches come with dynamically-generated pictures (may be a bug in the cache engine as well); sometimes it shows an older one while other times it will hose the picture with noise (switching desktops will force it to redraw). Not only that, but it will crash on occasion -- which Mozilla simply doesn't do anymore with simple HTML/css/js pages.

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site

You said Mozilla 1.0 would be ready in April 2001 and you're accusing others of spreading misinformation? Pot ... Kettle ...

we've turned to simply ignoring the site.

That's rather ironic, given that most web surfers have turned to simply ignoring Mozilla.

Hope great milestones until there!

[taboca]

I don't care if the *perfect* 1.0 is going to take more or less. It's important to note that mozilla.org community is deploying !*great*! releases each milestone. That's important!. 0.9.2 is one great example. Mike! - don't worry - if you need to create a Mozilla based product! go for it!!! and be happy! :-)

www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[ChrisCampbell47]

To put a finer point on what Asa said, the author of MQ is, by all evidence available, a fool.

See www.MozillaQuestQuest.com for a parody. I assume he works for Microsoft, the poor guy.

The Mozilla crowd has learned to ignore him; Slashdot should too.

Re:www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[ogren]

Bottom line:

The www.MozillaQuest.com guy is an idiot. He's poked his head up before, and if you take more than a casual look at his site it's pretty clear that he has no idea what he's talking about. Factual errors, spelling errors, bad design, bad writing style, it's all there.

The MozillaQuestQuest website linked by the previous poster is hysterical after you have explored the MozillaQuestQuest site for a bit.

The 0.9.3 Mozilla build is great. I've started to switch back from Konqueror. I'll miss the favicon's in the title bar and bookmarks, and the ability to enable cookies and JavaScript on a per-site basis. But Mozilla's JavaScript engine is better, its rendering engine is better, and its fonts seem better behaved.

So the whole debate about "1.0" does not interest me. I still want to see progress for Mozilla, but what number they slap on the release is largely irrelevant.

Re:www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[asa]

I'll miss the favicon's in the title bar and bookmarks, and the ability to enable cookies and JavaScript on a per-site basis.

You can enable cookies and JavaScript on a per site basis. You can go one step further too. You can disable specific bits of JS on a per domain basis. You can, for example block a group of sites from opening new windows or resizing your window. You could block a site from moving your windows or altering the status bar text. See Configurable Security Policies for more information.

--Asa

Re:www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he's an MS employee. Microsoft usually astroturfs products that are better than their own. Why beat a dead horse?

Re:www.MozillaQuestQuest.com

[sphere]

Gotta agree--from my limited experience with Mozilla 0.9.3, it's just as good as IE for most of my browsing needs.

Even as I type, I'm using my Power Mac G4 to browse through Slashdot with IE 5.0 and Mozilla 0.9.3. As far as rendering time & general performance, there's been no perceptible differences between the two. Only that the default font is 12 point on Moz and I should really change it to 10 points (my preference). But big deal, right? :)

As I actually use Mozilla 0.9.3 to file this message, I've got to believe the Mozilla folks over the naysayers.

C'mon in folks, the water's fine!

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Matthew Luckie]

MozillaQuest is a series of articles written by Mike Angelo who has no connection to mozilla.org or any 'inside information' about the goings on of the Mozilla project. mozilla.org has in the past made attempts to correct the misinformation that is published at this site but the requests went pretty much unanswered and so we've turned to simply ignoring the site.

Michael Angelo has a serious credibility issue, being a teenage mutant ninga turtle and all

cowabunga dude

keep up the good work

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Matthew Luckie]

Michael Angelo has a serious credibility issue, being a teenage mutant ninga turtle and all

i spelt ninja wrong, it is me with the credibility issue

So....

[EvlPenguin]

...who else here thinks the only reason there is a Mozilla project is that Netscape said to themselves: "well, this code is just too fucked up, lets give it away"?

Re:So....

[Salsaman]

Actually you are right.

The NS 4.x codebase was fucked almost beyond repair (partly I believe because NS was trying to keep up with all the proprietary changes that MS were making to HTML).

So Netscape gave it away. Then after a year or so, they realised that instead of trying to fix it, it would be easier to start again from scratch. Hence NS 6.

Re:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, blame it on Microsoft. Yawn. &ltsarcasm&gtNetscape never added any proprietary HTML tags, no.&lt/sarcasm&gt Jeezus H fuckin' Christ. Is that something you're parroting in the usual /. style, or did you just make it up? Netscape invented proprietary tags. They were in the very first version in 1994, preceded only by Mosaic. Center? Blink? Hello?

Re:So....

[Salsaman]

That's why I said 'partly'. Can't you read ?

Re:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been better if you had said nothing at all, MS-bashing fag.

Re:So....

[3247]

"The NS 4.x codebase was fucked almost beyond repair (partly I believe because NS was trying to keep up with all the proprietary changes that MS were making to HTML)."

Actually, Netscape introduced more and the more horrid "proprietary extensions" to what they called HTML, even before there was an Internet Explorer.
Having a pure tag soup interpreter instead of a parser that understands at least a bit of true HTML, the codebase was "fucked beyond repair" right from the first version.

Not to say that this wasn't true for other browsers, especially MSIE, which was written to be bug-to-bug compatible...

Re:So....

[mimbleton]

You just had to stick that bit of MS bashing there ...

Re:So....

[NutscrapeSucks]

(partly I believe because NS was trying to keep up with all the proprietary changes that MS were making to HTML)

Others have already flamed you, but I'll pile on.

In 1995-6, Netscape had a 90% marketshare and essentially told the W3C to fuck themselves, and went ahead and implemented a completely proprietary Document Object Model (document.layers) and style sheet system (JavaScript Style Sheets). Meanwhile they were running around to their 'enterprise' customers and preaching the wonders of open standards and encouraging to replace their existing client-server apps with Netscape-based web applications.

Well, the W3C quite naturally ran to Microsoft, who managed to implement some of the W3C DOM and CSS specification in IE (at least until they started winning the marketshare battle, in which case they radically slowed down this standards support).

Meanwhile, Netscape's customers, many of whom had bought their quite expensive server products, figured out that Netscape had set a proprietary lock-in trap and were pissed. Netscape promised to make it all better and support the W3C standards.

At this point, however, their 'tag salad' renderer couldn't be hacked any further, and they felt the need to start over from scratch. While they were at it, they scrapped pretty much the entire Netscape 4.x codebase, thus starting the 3 year dev cycle that brings us to today.

As for 'HTML', everyone is pretty much aware of the proprietary extentions (Netscape has BLINK, IE has MARQUEE), and they aren't that big of a deal. 90% of the stuff that IE supports and NS4 doesn't is actually standards-based. Their approach to missing close tags is different too, but again, not that big of a deal for good markup.

It's the next generation stuff (DOM, CSS) that Netscape attempted to embrace-and-extend shittily and for that they are doomed to their miserable marketshare. I know you want to bash Microsoft, but until the release of Netscape 6.1 they've been playing the webstandard game far better than Netscape.

Re:So....

[scrytch]

I believe because NS was trying to keep up with all the proprietary changes that MS were making to HTML

<layer>yeah, netscape would <blink>never</blink> do anything like that</layer>

MozillaQuest is run by an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy running MozillaQuest is an idiot. He had an article there claiming "netscape is denying that Navigator code is based on Mozilla". What a moron. (I'm not even going to link to it here)

It's probably hosted by M$ astroturfers.

14,000 bugs - how 'bout that

[sunset]

I've not seen quite that many yet. :-)

Moz .93 has managed to become my primary browser. It seems to be more usable and reliable than Netscape or Konqueror. And Opera is just not my style.

-- Rod
http://www.sunsetsystems.com/

Re:14,000 bugs - how 'bout that

[Anonymous Coward]

To get anything near that amount of bugs in a query, he must have asked for all components available in the bugzilla. However: several components there don't have anything to do with the Mozilla browser/mailnews apps as such. For instance the component "webtools" (which are about webtools like bugzilla itself). That component alone has has over 2000 bugs filed over the years. Around 700 are fixed, around 650 are NEW, ASSIGNED or REOPENED.

A query for open RFE "bugs" regarding the actual browser and mailnews components (requested enhancements of various use) account for around around 2000 "bugs" alone. Spanning from blissfull wishes like "make Mozilla the best porn browser" to "render WinWord documents".

Glad you're here to point reality out Asa. :)

[Down8]

I can't believe this lameness got posted on Slashdot. I think I had been using Moz for about a week before I saw MQ and realized what a sham it was.

Ah well, life goes on I suppose.

-bZj

Fixing your objections

[yerricde]

the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons, and rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space

If you care enough about it, write a chrome with this configuration.

that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed

IE 5.x has a similar feature, the difference being that you can change which search engine Mozilla uses; poke around a bit in the prefs.

there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their /etc/hosts anymore? hello?)

Run WinApache and get 404s (broken images or "Not Found" in an iframe) instead of "conn refused" popups.

Re:Fixing your objections

[binford2k]

Run WinApache [apache.org] and get 404s (broken images or "Not Found" in an iframe) instead of "conn refused" popups.

Why even bother with that?

Right click on the offending ad and select "Block images from this server"

Whoopty, no more doubleclick.

Re:Fixing your objections

[Trelane]

Mmmm. Yes. And, besides that, the user has the ability to:

• Select which SSL version to use
  
• Select which ciphers in which strengths to use
  
• Selectively block cookies based upon site address
  
• 
  BLOCK CERTAIN SITES [or just by default; much more configurable, though, read the link] FROM BEING ABLE TO LAUNCH POPUPS [or various other bits of JavaScript]
  
• Encrypt saved passwords and have a master password for access to them
  
• 
  Save form data
  
• Work with certificates and their validation
  
• stay memory resident like IE and just launch new windows [this is why IE "loads" so quickly]
  
• the ability to not be memory-resident [unlike IE]
  

and onward. There's more to it than that. Download it and check it out.

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... I really don't think you should compare Windows 2000 to Mozilla. Aside from the open/closed source difference, Windows is an OS not a web browser. There are just a FEW more lines of code in w2k than in Mozilla ;)

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Doc Roy]

I've been following Mozilla since M16 and I don't recall them ever saying that 1.0 would definatly be released in April 2001.

I believe the roadmap has always said: 0.9.1 (possibly 1.0?)

And the pretty little graphic has always had the 1.0 branch as a grey line over the top of a solid black line, always with the text "When it is ready"

So you cannot accuse mozilla.org or misleading people. I think someone has been suckered in by the mozillaquest hype.

One more thing. If mozilla was a commercial product it would been released as 1.0 a few milestones ago. I read somewhere that the reason it hasn't is because mozilla.org has Very high standards. No crash bugs and 100% standards compliance.

Not good

[humming]

Now it will be a prestige for the Mozilla gang to release the browser in Oct '01, since they cannot allow MozillaQuest to be 'correct'.

Do you think this will make 1.0 buggier (since they had to rush it out) or more stable (since they worked harder on the Oct goal?)

//Humming

Re:Not good

[ZxCv]

Rushing out a release solely to meet a release date (*especially* to prove some ass wrong) would be ridiculous. I always thought that was one of the cornerstones of open source-- there's no PR/marketing force driving the software releases, so the releases are released when they're ready and not until then.

Walk a mile in another's shoes...

[penguin_nipple]

IMHO, 0.9.3 is an excellent browser. It's installed on all my machines ,including on both partitions of my Development box at work (w2k and slack 8.0). Yes, development my appear to be slow, but I'd simply like to point out to a few things

1. Mozilla is a massive project, whose (main) goal is a natively running browser on multiple platforms, this is no small task and they have done well thus far. I don't think anyone can point to a browser that runs on as many different platforms as well as Moz does.
2. Mozilla was one of the first major Open Source initiatives undertaken, and in fact must have been a logisitical nightmare to get rolling - especially taking into account the fact that they wiped the proverbial board clean with Mozilla - however, consider all the other issues that go into an open code distribution system.
3. We have no other development process to use as a benchmark to the development of Mozilla. Up until this point in time, all one has ever gotten is binary distributions. Very little insight and even less information from previous organizations.
4. Agreed, the much hyped 'browser-wars' are over, thank god, IMHO, those wars ended up coming down to distribution issues that Microsoft capitalized (unfairly) upon. As we all know, 99% of the world will use the browser that smacks them in the face at home. As for the corporate scene, many organizations continue to use Netscape and (from people I know who deal with these issues) will move to a stable, compliant browser when available. Which is in fact becoming more of a critical issue - called them 'web enabled' or 'network aware' applications. I would point to .NET as an example of how this scheme seems to be gaining prominence.
5. Mozilla is quite a bit more than just a browser or mark up renderer. Granted most of you wouldn't ever need the capabilities provided in XUL, but many application developers might. Cry cry cry about bloat all you want - if you are using a windoze box to read this, then you are familiar with bloat. You may bitch and moan about XUL and how horrible it is, however, it is essentially providing the multi-platform capabilities of Mozilla. And for me anyhow, it is important to have a rich, dynamic, and actively developed multiplatform browser. Try not to overlook that contribution - Mozilla is an extremely flexible piece of code.

6. I am not going to put down or put on a pedestal any of the other available browsers. I use them all, on numerous platforms, both open and closed. Konqueror is great for quick and dirty net searches. Opera is great on low-end boxen. Explorer is well...explorer...*sigh*. Mozilla is quick, stable and does everything I want to do online. This is just my opinion.

   From the pace of development, Mozilla is doing fairly well. If you're a programmer, you should realize the scope of what they are doing over at Mozilla. As for Slashdot, why exactly would you guys post an article so blatantly and obviously mis-informed?? Generally I look to /. to give up interesting news, somewhat outside the normal of FUD and goofie marketing/media coverage we see everywhere on the net.

   Could someone from /. explain the motivation for posting the story in the first place? Not that an article which is critical of Mozilla or any open source should not be posted. In fact, critical articles are fine. So long as they are informed and well written which this one obviously is not.

   Just a note to Asa - your posts are very obviously showing a note of tension. Don't worry about it, you guys are doing a helluva job and from one (semi) sane coder to another I'd just like you guys at Mozilla to know that your broswer is sweet. They'll always bitch abut something *shrug*

Re:Walk a mile in another's shoes...

[Anonymous Coward]

> 1. Mozilla is a massive project, whose (main) goal is a natively running browser on multiple platforms, this is no small task and they have done well thus far. I don't think anyone can point to a browser that runs on as many different platforms as well as Moz does.

Lynx. You asked for it.

More seriously, you are absolutely right. I switched to mozilla a few month ago, and I love it. Not because it is fast (it is not). Not because it is slim (it is not). Not because it is bug free (it is not). Not because it nice (it is not). Not because it is well integrated (it is not).

But because:

1/ It is free software (ie: I can consider it as beeing mine, I can invest time understanding how it works, because it will still be avaliable in 10 years)

2/ It is multi-platform. I use the same browser on Mac OS 9, Win2K, Mac OS X (even if fizzilla have, well, issues...), and freebsd. If I decide to try BeOS or the HURD, I know that I will still be at home for a large number of tasks.

3/ It incorporate XUL, which means that apps built on mozilla will be avalaible on every platform too. I started using the mozilla mailer and news reader. Not the best one out there, but they work on every platform I need.

4/ When something don't work, you can fill a bug, and track progress.

I impatiently wait for 1.0, just because at this time new features will be accepted in the moz tree. I'd really need PGP and roaming profiles.

Cheers,

--fred

Some perspective

[billh]

While Mozilla has been under development:

Business plans have been written, VC found, businesses opened, millions made and millions lost.

We have sent probes to Mars, only to be shot down by the Martians.

Hundreds of species have gone extinct. Most of which were yet to be discovered.

People have met, married, and divorced.

I went from a shell account to SDSL. Of course, I still use the shell account.

There was peace in the Middle East. Sort of. I think.

The Olympics. More than once.

A president got blown by an intern, and we've stopped talking about it on a daily basis.

Another intern has disappeared, and we might have stopped talking of her by the time we reach 1.0.

So is it just me, or does this project seem like it is taking an insane amount of time to complete??

Re:Some perspective

[Doc Roy]

I think it is just you. It really isn't that insane.

The only reason why people are saying "Geez this thing is taking forever" is because it has been in the public eye since the beginning of it's development. Remember most software is developed behind closed doors and no one really hears about it until it is released as 1.0 (or very close to 1.0). After that all you see is small updates to that program which doesn't take as long.

So to summarize, the initial 1.0 release takes a long time to get right. After that it doesn't take as long to do each release so development seems quicker.

The other thing to think about is IE 6 is going to be released soon. How long has it been since IE 5 was released? And they didn't write it from scratch. Do you think they were sitting on their arse the entire time?

Re:Some perspective

[itarget]

Don't hold your breath, because it will never be "complete".

There will always be something to fix or something to add, and that's the best part about it.

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is no peace in middle east, yet, at least by the standard everybody except American hold. So When we have mozilla 1.0, we have finally see a peace in middle east. Thanks God! oops Thanks G.W.Bush.

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

But, correct me if I'm wrong, this doesn't apply to commercial software, right? I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this! Next thing you know, I'll be uttering half a dozen hippocracies before breakfast!

Re:Some perspective

[bad-badtz-maru]

Apparently you didn't read the development page well enough, 1.0 will be released on the same day the first female president is inaugurated in the US.

maru
www.mp3.com/pixal

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really supposed to ever be complete. If you want a browser based on that work which is already usable, forget Mozilla and try Galleon. It's out now, and it works. And it's twice -- er I mean, half -- the browser that Mozilla will ever be.

Re:Some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot that whole Bosnia episode.

Reliability of Talkback?

[eekDude]

I'd like to submit bug reports, but whenever Mozilla crashes on me (Windows build), Talkback brings up an error message saying that it can't connect to the reporting server. I've always had this problem, not sure why. Is there a reason for this? (for the record, I'm not connecting through a firewall).

So when do we see a 1.0?

[Metrol]

As a FreeBSD and NT user who designs web pages, layout and font sizes really matter to me. Although I mainly use Konqueror under FreeBSD, it has far more to do with the simpler interface than it's rendering engine. To date, I haven't see any other browser display layout, fonts, and deal with Javascript better than Mozilla.

With that being said, it's still quite apparent that Mozilla is an 800lbs. gorilla when it comes to memory and CPU usage. It has gotten a LOT better in the last few builds. If these kinds of optimization issues were worked out by the next release, I would happily convert myself and others that rely on my judgement on over to Mozilla.

Thing is, even as I type this on ye olde Netscape 4.78 after browsing around to several web pages, NT is reporting about 17M of memory allocated. Just to start Mozilla is 22M, and I haven't gone anywhere yet. To further illustrate the point, I went and opened up the newsgroup readers in each, subscribed to a group, and then pulled in all the headers of that group. NS 4.7 comes in at around 18M after this operation. Mozilla at 40.5M. Not going to bother listing numbers off of FreeBSD as I'm still running 0.9.3 on there.

Personally, it's just frustrating as heck to watch. There we have this Gecko engine was does a truly beautiful job of properly rendering a web page regardless of the platform. Exactly what a browser should do! Wrapped around this is a monster of a UI that even to this day still feels like I'm trying to interact with some bad Java applet. Oh sure it is pretty, but the reaction time even on a 1.2Ghz machine is noticeable.

Looking back, I'm finding myself in total agreement with critics I disagreed with before over one point. XUL. The Mozilla folks repeatedly told us all how much longer it would take to develop this project if they stuck with native OS widgets. I just have to wonder how much time has been wasted while the resources of the Mozilla project could have had Win32, Mac, Qt, GTK versions out the door by now? Certainly projects like Galeon have shown this could have been done.

Mozilla made a wrong turn early on (IMHO) with XUL. Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace. Problem is, those projects are out on the fringe, while IE is dead center of the web universe defining the standards across the board. Mozilla is FAR more than just a browser at this point. It's the last chance gasp at taking control of web standards and the Internet itself from Microsoft.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved your rant. I'm a bit latest greatest mozilla (and gasp IE) supporter.

Native OS Windowing routines, combined with an incremental extension of the 4.xx netscape codebase no matter how fucked that might be would have been great for Moz1/NN6, but now it's been a uphill battle, repeating past programming mistakes to get it 'just right'

Think about back in the days of JWZ where they released a revolutionary 3.0 ver with how many core people?!?

All long, long term coders agree on the statement that NN6 is hobbled by not sticking evolutionary style to the 4.x codebase, and letting the two mutate independantly.

BTW, how many times has the Netscape 4.x browser been downloaded as a %of 6.0 downloads since the 6.x came out? If you really knew the numbers, you'd say for shame.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[The Sith Lord]

I agree that on the offset, Mozilla appears to be more of a memory hog than Netscape, but in my experiences (in a Linux environment), show that though Mozilla will take on average, 50MB, it will only take that 50MB.

On numerous occasions I've seen Netscape 4.7 go nuts, and eat up to 300MB (I have 256MB RAM, plus swap). I'd prefer Moz eating 50MB that have to restart Netscape every 5 minutes to get my memory back.

Still, they have come a long way, the most recent snapshot is extremely snappy, fast and stable (though there is a problem with the bookmarks which is just eating me up!).

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Salsaman]

But the mozilla team have consistently stated that if mozilla were not based on XUL, there would have been no Linux version.

Besides, it makes sense from a programming perspective - you *should* abstract out the interface from the computational part of the program. It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.

And as for the responsiveness issue, personally I find no difference between native windows apps and mozilla and native linux apps and mozilla.

Plus I am sure that there will still be a few optimisations before a 1.0 release. If you knew anything about software development (which you appear not to) you would realise that the standard process is:

1) get something that works, so that people can start development in other areas

2) once it's working, start to optimise it, preferably without changing the interfaces.

I remember back when M16 came out people were saying mozilla was a POS, it was time to bury the project, it would never be usable, etc,etc. As somebody who'd been following the project since the start, I could see that some big optimisations were being a worked on, and mozilla was about to improve radically.

I told people that and was laughed at. But lo and behold, a few months later we got the 0.9.x milestones and as I predicted mozilla became very usable, to the point where people are now using it in preference to other browsers.

I believe now that many of the big optimisations are done and dusted, we will start to see a lot of the smaller optimisations worked on. The interface will improve, memory usage will go down.

In short, don't write mozilla off because it doesn't use native toolsets. Give it a chance, and we will see what happens before 1.0 comes out.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Metrol]

It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.

But it's not using native widgets on any platform. A massive amount of time has been spent recreating open dialogs, scroll bars, drop down menus, and all manner of UI objects. My objection to this is that they could have had a dozen native front ends together in the time it's taken to recreate all the various tid bits that Microsoft, Apple, Gtk, and Qt (to name a few) have already done. Galeon was put together with a team of 9 folks in a very short time. K-Meleon for Windows has a team of 4 guys.

In all fairness, I do happen to like the "idea" of what XUL represents. The ability to take what started as a way to do skins and turn it into a platform of it's own has a lot of appeal. The only thing that I'm questioning here is the timing. CSS and XML should have been #1 priorities, with XUL slated for Mozilla 2.0.

The delay here as Mozilla goes about reinventing everything that looks round will prove to be more crippling than a simple technical problem. First off, it's ruined Netscape's name in the browser market for everyone I've talked to who was silly enough to install 6.0. Secondly, it's put everyone else in the field in a catch up position to anything that IE does. It's going to take a LOT more than optimization to recover what was lost.

Here's to hoping that it can recover.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Tack]

But it's not using native widgets on any platform. A massive amount of time has been spent recreating open dialogs, scroll bars, drop down menus, and all manner of UI objects. My objection to this is that they could have had a dozen native front ends together in the time it's taken to recreate all the various tid bits that Microsoft, Apple, Gtk, and Qt (to name a few) have already done.

Sun travelled down this road with Java's AWT. AWT abstracted the native GUI on each platform so that Java apps using AWT would run using the native platform's look and feel. this was a great idea at first glance because it meant better integration.

The problem with AWT was that each platform's GUI had its own little nuances and idiosynchrasies that made uniform rendering across the board impossible. It was a mind numbing experience to make a dialog box that rendered the same on all of Java's platform, and sometimes the rendering would be out to lunch.

So instead Java got the Swing UI. Swing does precisely the same thing as XPFE in this context. It's a single API implemented using low level graphics functions on each platform and ensures that rendering widgets stays uniform on all platforms. Swing L&F (look and feel) is pluggable so that you can have a native look with the Java app, but it's still Swing. XUL too is skinnable, and once Mozilla 1.0 is released and the skin stuff stabilizes, expect to see a slew of quality themes that integrate well with the platform of your choice.

Jason.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Patoski]

It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.

This wheel has already been invented quite nicely by wxWindows. wxWindows is a common API for GUI programming that wraps itself around the native OS' widget set for Win32, GTK, Mac and Motif. In my experience wxWindows is far less resource hungry than what I've seen from XUL and with wxWindows you get the crossplatform goodness as well as your native OS' look and feel. wxWindows began in '92 and really started growing up about '95 so I'm not sure why the NS devs made the comment they did about not having a *nix Moz port were it not for XUL. wxWindows was around at that time. Perhaps wx doesn't do something that they needed or they just weren't aware of it's existence. Perhaps someone can elighten me.

And as for the responsiveness issue, personally I find no difference between native windows apps and mozilla and native linux apps and mozilla.

That must be some system you have there. Myself and everyone I know says the same thing: XUL is heavier than it ought to be.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

it may be true that using native widgets would have been easier, but Mozilla is looking at the future. I'm sure that if they had gone native, that down the road they would be sending people everywhere fixing problems on one OS with a specific problem with 'dialog x'. As it stands Mozilla will be much more maintainable in the future. It will certainly be much harder for a company (such as MS) to throw weird things into the OS to try to block Mozilla.

Mozilla may be re-inventing the wheel, but we don't use the same wheel for everything right now anyway. Tires for a 747 jet don't fit on a VW bug now do they?

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a FreeBSD and NT user who designs web pages, layout and font sizes really matter to me.

Then you are doing something horribly wrong. Please learn about a new development in personal computers, called "HyperText Markup Language." It is a way of doing logical markup, where the user or user agent makes decisions about layout and fonts, which the web page author has no way of influencing or even anticipating.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[mimbleton]

This is precisely what GTK and QT do.
These are emulating toolkits which means they do use abstracted low level GUI native functions to create their own set widgets from scratch.
Just like swing.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[roca]

Galeon etc are fine web browser shells but they don't provide nearly as much UI as Mozilla does --- especially if you include Mozilla Mailnews, Composer, etc. Making UI for all that stuff is a lot of work. So it's hard to say for sure that it would have been less work to do independent native UIs.

Galeon etc also use Mozilla's widgets in their content areas for HTML widgets ... getting native widgets to work there is hard because they have to be stylable with CSS, work with the Javascript/DOM event model, etc. Even IE doesn't use native widgets there. So a lot of the work behind XUL had to be done anyway.
It's great that the native UIs are being done. But even with hindsight it's hard to say whether the decision to go with XUL was clearly right or wrong.

Of course, going forward, having XUL around is pretty cool.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[warpeightbot]

Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace.

They are.

I'm typing this on Galeon 0.11.5, and while Galeon is being a memory pig at 39mb, it is pretty fast, and it has a lot of cool features that respond in a reasonable manner (tabbed browsing, icons, session recovery). Yeah, it's got a few bugs, but it's VERY useable, version number be damned.

I have currently on-system Galeon, Mozilla (0.9.3, still very useable but a CPU hog as well), Opera (damn that thing is LIGHT! still some CSS bugs; the Linux version lags Win32 in that respect), Konqueror (plain, but functional, and also light... but no tabs like Opera), Amaya (for standards checking, in case a site acts funny), Netscape (the only one I leave Flash-enabled), lynx, and links. All of them have uses... but Galeon is the one I use the most, just because it's that good, that cool.

Asa and the gang have come a LONG way since M18, and Marco and Ricardo and company have built on that success... I could give a rip about version numbers, what I care about is functionality. If they want to go the Debian route and get *all* the bugs out before releasing 1.0, that's fine with me, as long as they keep putting out milestones. Frankly, except for the way plugins work (or don't), I'm really happy with what they've got now...

Which leads me to the zinger: if we can do all this with BETA software (Mozilla 0.9.3, Galeon 0.11.5, Gnumeric 0.67, AbiWord 0.7.14, openssl 0.9.5a, LILO 0.21, yadda yadda yadda... out of the 631 packages on my Mandrake 7.2 system, 139 of them, including many vital ones like pam 0.72, have version numbers >1.0)... what will the world look like when all that stuff is finally 1.0?

Me, I'm looking forward to it...

--
Need a Unix guru?

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

"problems on one OS with a specific problem with 'dialog x'."

Fuck man, they are already way down the road! The assumption of the XUL interface was that every platform pretty much acts like Windows. Turns out that's not even true on Linux where the UIs are 'influenced' heavily by Windows. The result was that thousands of platform-specific UI bugs have been filed for everything from keybindings to whether 'OK' is to the right or the left of 'Cancel'. The code is probably riddled with platform checks, esp for the Mac. Like or not, these things matter to people.

XUL does have some advantages -- The product was quickly ported to OS/2, OpenVMS, and BeOS. I'm sure if you are one of the 99.9% of users that doesn't have access to those platforms, you are really excited about that. *Maybe* it could get them easily into the settop market in the future, but with the current memory footprint, no fucking way.

The only really concivable reson for the XUL stuff is that it might be used as a future platform-independant version of the AOL client. It certainly wasn't needed for a basic Windows/Mac/Unix browser.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, I'm not holding my breath.

Re:So when do we see a 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

do you honestly think that the entire world would have soaked its panties over the dot-com rush if every site got to pick between "proportional" and "monospace" fonts for presentation? BS. If it weren't for all the non-standard tags and plug-ins that made early web pages look good, HTTP would have gone the way of gopher.

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the roadmap has always said: 0.9.1 (possibly 1.0?)

Good lord, sometimes it seems a lot like Oceania around here.

Although most of the evidence has been suitably erased from Mozilla.org, I have been able to find a document which clearly shows the plan: Originally releases 1.0 and 1.0.1 were scheduled for Q2 2001. That would have put 1.0 in April 2001 or perhaps May at the latest.

dateline

[RestiffBard]

2020
somewhere on the web

today the mozilla group released 1.0 No one noticed. development of 1.0.1 will begin tomorrow. the expected completion date is 2075.

Re:dateline

[stikves]

Hey! Did you read the comments above?

People all agree that mozilla is pretty complete now! The only thing that's needed is the developers "satisfaction".

Re: Astroturf

[Jebediah21]

Yes, Internet Explorer. Now there is something truly bug-free...

MS PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION

In an effort to protect the right to innovate, Microsoft is warning its customers not to use the web browser known as "Mozilla." Microsoft believes this piece of software is written by rogue hackers who plan to usurp the Internet. One of these rogue hackers, going by the handle "asa", admits that 150 new bugs are found in the "Mozilla" web browser every day.

Microsoft is proud to provide users with a fast, high-quality, lean, bugfree browser: Internet Explorer. In the entire existence of our quality product, not a single bug has ever been reported.

OT: Microsoft and IE

[Omnifarious]

The other thing to think about is IE 6 is going to be released soon. How long has it been since IE 5 was released? And they didn't write it from scratch. Do you think they were sitting on their arse the entire time?

This is interesting, because after thinking about it, I start wondering why Microsoft keeps a seperate version number for IE if it's such an integral part of the OS. I mean, why does IE 6 exist as a version number apart from 'XP'?

Seems to me that even Microsoft doesn't buy it's own BS about IE being an integral part of the OS.

Re:OT: Microsoft and IE

[Zico]

I really hope you didn't spend too much time thinking about it, because it's not interesting; your post is actually stunningly vacuous.

Anyway, if you really bothered to think about it, you'd realize that there's no reason why major OS components need to be tied to a certain OS version. I hope you don't think that you're stuck with one version of glibc depending upon the version of the Linux distribution you're using. Or that it's "BS," as you put it, that older OSes that aren't yet using IPv6 won't change their name once they do support it. Same with different versions of MDAC, MSXML, etc, being able to be used by different OSes. Please give it a little more thought next time, okay buddy?

Re:OT: Microsoft and IE

[Anonymous Coward]

This is interesting, because after thinking about it, I start wondering why Microsoft keeps a seperate version number for IE if it's such an integral part of the OS. I mean, why does IE 6 exist as a version number apart from 'XP'?

Because they can update the browsing engine and browser shell. And yes, IE is an integral part of the OS.

Re:OT: Microsoft and IE

[mimbleton]

Dude, IE is basically ActiveX control used and expected to be installed by tons of independent Windows apps ( eudora for example)
It is part of OS.

Re:OT: Microsoft and IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, "dude", IE is not part of the OS. Go do a University level course on operating system design, dumbass. Its an ActiveX control, so its just a component (like a library) which is dependent on the OS itself. Dependency: App -> IE control -> OS. By your arguments, the run-time C library must ALSO be part of the OS, because it is "expected to be installed by tons of independent Windows apps" (I guarantee you, many more (by factor of probably thousands) applications require the standard C libraries than the IE control. But the C libs are NOT part of the OS. The "OS" is that layer just above the hardware, it abstracts the hardware. Other libraries provide further abstractions.

Your PC-Gamer-level understanding of how computers work is painful, keep your technical opinions to yourself, "dude".

Of course the "what is an OS" can be fairly subjectively reasoned, but your argument that "its an ActiveX control" and "it is used by a number of apps" doesn't say anything about whether IE is "part of the OS" or not, "dude". What are you anyway some schoolkid?

Re:OT: Microsoft and IE

[mimbleton]

Nobody gives a fuck about official OS definitions.
Notepad is NOT part of the OS neither is calculator but if customer expectations is that these little apps should be bundled with OS then it is part of the OS ( as far as they are concerned)
Forcing MS to unbundle IE will result will tons of apps breaking , almost to the point as if Common Controls DLL was removed.

Again, nobody gives a fuck about your academic definition of OS.
OS is what market decides it is.

STOP READING mozillaquest

[clarkie.mg]

It has been said before but the stories still get coverage. mozilla quest is WORTH NOTHING. What do you have in your mind slashdot ? STOP those ridicumous post, please !

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL. It's funny watching Open Sourcerers flail about trying to justify stuff that they would pillory Microsoft for in a flash. Why don't you admit it? Compared to Mozilla, IE is outstanding. Mozilla represents a failure of the Open Source concept. That is what people here cannot admit to themselves, let alone others.

Re: Astroturf

[roguerez]

You can try to make fun of him, but the fact is, Internet Explorer is by far the best browser at the moment. Mozilla/Opera/Konq/etc. all have specialities but lack in other area's. IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.

Hate to say it but the Mozilla project has had their chance. In 2,5 year they didn't produce anything that is better than codebase they started with.

They fell in the typical 'committee' trap, where a committee decides what goes into a product. These are usually personal projects of the committee members which haven't a lot to do with the project at hand. But they put them in the project anyway. User wishes are not found interesting.

Well, we now have the result. After 2,5 of dabbling, Mozilla - overall - still hasn't risen above the Netscape 4.x level. Everything that has been improved has been compensated, unfortunately, by the bloatedness, instability, memory hunger, static look and feel, etc.

This isn't really a product for actual use by people. It's the result of committe-steered software development and in that context it's really a disgrace for the open source community. It only serves as an icon for those in the committee who saw their useless ideas get into the project.

Sorry, but 2,5 years for this? I valued my time better and moved on.

Mozilla (song)

[Ukab the Great]

(with apologies to the Blue Oyster Cult)

With the best of intentions and Netscape's old code
They produce a browser that tends to explode

Rendering pages in pure XML
XUL's really great, but performance is hell

Standards compliant every way they can be
But slow as a bear when compared to IE

Oh, no. We wish these bugs would go
Go go Mozilla, yeah
Oh, no. The rendering's so slow
Go go Mozilla, yeah

History explains as a matter of course
How mega codebases deter open source
Mozilla!

Not '1.0', but 'good'

[Frodo]

The problem is not 1.0, but being usable. RH is understandably vary of the browser "underdevelopment" - it, unlike Mozilla, can not say their paying customers: "OK, it would work when we are ready do make it work". It should deliver the product now. And Mozilla, while being useful browser, still has a number of problems, among which performance and memory footprint is not the least. When RH says: "when it will be 1.0" they most probably mean: "since you are good respectable guys and would not call it 1.0 until is is really good, we want to pick it up there when it's really ready for us". From this POV 1.0 is important for Mozilla team more than for RH and RH is just trusing Mozilla team to do a good 1.0.

Like it or not

[manon]

I like Mozilla. From time to time I donwload a nightly build. They came a long way! So keep up the spirit guys!
I think that Mozilla 1.0 is more than a number. It's like a motivation. First number no langer 0.

Visit mozillaquestquest.com for more great humour!

[Karora]

A hilarious parody of MozillaQuest can be found at http://mozillaquestquest.com/ although really, does it need a parody?

MozillaQuest is usually so creative in his reporting that he might as well not bother. His claims bear no resemblance to any reality I participate in, and there is little point in rebutting him. If we all ignore him then perhaps he will go away? We can hope so.

Sawfish 1.0

[salimma]

Thanks for the information - did not catch on to this since it was not even mentioned on its home page!

Checking their ChangeLog file now...

Michel

Maybe you could put up a counter announce ?

[clarkie.mg]

Hello, it is sad that such a supid news post makes such a noise but maybe you could post up real information on mozilla.org about the relase date of mozilla 1.0 .

Re:Maybe you could put up a counter announce ?

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html for the current roadmap. I'm guessing that 0.9.6 is the most likely 1.0 right now, but that's pure uninformed speculation.

What's his problem?

[qabi]

Who is this guy, Mike Angelo, and what's he got agains mozilla?

Why use so harsh language, and why deliberately (I hope!) misinterpres so many obvious things?

If he has so much spare time he needs to burn off, why not go help the mozilla people fix some of the bugs.

I just don't get it.

-dennis

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

You can try to make fun of him, but the fact is, Internet Explorer is by far the best browser at the moment.

It's time to upgrade your Mozilla M15.

Re: Astroturf

[roguerez]

Been there, done that. I've been installing new milestones every once in a while because "it's really good now" advices, but each and every time my conclusion is that it is still NOT good. It remains a bloated, slow, pig.

You people WANTING it to be good doesn't make it so. I much rather use Netscape 4.x than Mozilla. But then, I much rather use IE than Netscape, so why even bother?

I have no intention of selling myself short by using a bloated product that just didn't fulfull its promises (and my needs) at all. I abhor using it, and I can decide for myself what I think is software that sucks. Is it mandatory on Slashdot to speak raving about open software, even when it's about a failed product? Not every one falls into the "it's so good now, really" trap, dude.

How can you take such an ugly website serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

they should rename it to "Beveled-Buttons-Galore" LOL

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[Anonymous Coward]

...and let's not forget that even M$ has acknowledged that W2K has shipped with nearly 70,000 ***KNOWN*** bugs....

W2K has about 34 million lines of code. How many does Mozilla have again? Does this mean that W2K has less bugs, line for line, than Mozilla?

Be careful. He is a web developer

[Doc Roy]

Don't believe me? Have a look here:
http://www.intac.com/~aboutcmp/SiteDsgn.html

It looks like he is still developing sites for 1997.

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[Doc Roy]

Thanks for that link. But this is quoted from that page:

The following table shows the new milestone schedule with very rough dates. We may well slip every one of these milestones somewhat, but we're aiming at quarterly milestones. We do not propose to be exclusively date-driven, or else the Mozilla community may balk at any pretense that Mozilla 1.0 deserves the "1.0" version string.

its quite good now

[delong]

Well I haven't used Mozilla in many a milestone. Not since before Netscape 6 was released, at least.

So I decided to download it and try er out for this article, see how theyre coming along.

You know what, sparky? I am impressed. Aside from the rare jpeg mangle, its worked great. And bloated? At only 8 megs? Come on, its not Opera but lets be reasonable. Im impressed enough with the progress and usability that Im gonna be using Mozilla 0.93 full time.

Derek

Why web browser must be big and slow?

[Jacek Poplawski]

I really don't understand why application called "web browser" must be so slow and so big. Everyone talks "get Netscape 4.x, it's fast" while it's huge and damned slow.
What's so special in rendering html that binary Mozilla is 10MB gziped? And why there is "mail/news", "irc", and "composer" included? Why no pinball or Quake clone (well.. it's GPL) ?
How it's possible that projects like dillo exists?
And yes - I use Mozilla all the time, but I am unhappy - after so many years still my computer power is wasted. I can only wait for next release of dillo and other good-written browsers...

Re:Why web browser must be big and slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you still think of a web browser as simply a "document viewer", you're living in 1994. The web has evolved so much that a web browsers now are actually "general-purpose, programmable, interactive, multimedia viewer". Take a look at the latest W3C publications like XHTML, CSS 3, DOM 2, you'll see that implementing them is actually VERY complicated. And unlike compilers which only has to generate output when the input program is correct, web browsers have to generate sensible output even when the input HTML is messed up. That adds even more complexity to the application.

You can write a browser under a few hundred KBs, but it is certainly not going to achieve the same level of HTML, CSS, Javacript, etc., compliance that Mozilla/Gecko has achieved.

Re: Astroturf

[WWWWolf]

IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.

...annoying middle mouse button behavior, annoying habit of NOT remembering what size the new windows should be, and if I touch the mouse wheel - well, I may as well go to the Moon and back and it may have scrolled the first line... =)

And yes, it has a Footprint with a capital F. (Not that Mozilla would do any better on that field...) However, Mozilla wins here - it's probably somewhat smaller to download. =)

After 2,5 of dabbling, Mozilla - overall - still hasn't risen above the Netscape 4.x level.

Significantly better PNG support? Wow, CSS implementation that actually works? Less rendering bugs? Million times better bookmark manager? Search capabilities with configurable search engines? Save dialogs that work while Motif's save dialogs still don't work? And it doesn't crash every 5 minutes (I haven't yet got 0.9.3 to crash)? Themability to combat the general ugliness of Motif? Progressive rendering of pages (No freezes when some New Media Guru used tables dishonorably)?

I think it has come a long way since NS4...

A question for those "using" 0.9.x

[hatless]

I've been using Mozilla and Netscape 6.x about half the time for a few years now, and the past few months have brought dramatic speed improvements. XUL is finally fast enough to be usable on machines slower than a 1.2 GHz x86, and mail folders open quickly enough to work with.

Mozilla 1.0 isn't a terribly meaningful concept, especially given that 0.9.3 served as the core of a genuinely commercial-quality Netscape 6.1--at least in most respects. But I do have a question for those who Mozilla or Netscape 6.x as their primary browsing and mail tool:

What's everyone doing about proper MIME support? Don't you people (and the developers!) ever send non-text e-mail attachments? Mozilla and Netscape 6 ship with virtually empty mimeTypes.rdf files and no auto-build from exisiting legacy MIME settings whether at the system level or from old Netscape 4.x configs, which means out of the box no external helper apps work--and worse, outbound email attachments other than HTML, text/plain, GIFs and JPEGs are mangled, transported as inline text. These empty MIME settings are years old.

Even more upsetting, the dialogs to edit and create mimeTypes entries from inside Mozilla/NS6 are broken: the checkbox that activates outbound MIME type declaration for a given mimetype is inactive, leaving hand-editing the poorly-documented RDF file as the only recourse. Not only that, but the Un*x Mozilla/NS6 doesn't seem to use the current environment in launching helper apps. Is it so hard or insecure or distressingly platform-specific to have the PATH environment variable--or use of "which" or "locate"--when launching helpers? Why must users manually locate the fully qualified path to their MP3 player, PDF viewer and so forth instead of simply entering, say, "acroread" or "xmms" in the dialog (or the RDF)?

Are the Netscape/Mozilla developers and those of you who claim to use Mozilla full-time passing around a hacked-up mimeTypes.rdf that isn't being shared with the public, and isn't even in an experimental branch of CVS? Or do you just never send email attachments?

And more to the point: doesn't the Netscape 6.x dev team ever send email attachments? How about the QA team? Are they all using Pine instead? And if they are, how does that jibe with the idea of eating dogfood?

Does Netscape even have a QA team?

I've thought of fleshing out mimeTypes.rdf myself, but I can't even figure out who owns it. Mail/News? Prefs? The core browser team? With the way the project owners point fingers, can I expect anyone to lay claim to it at all?

Maybe this is the problem.

Don't listen to anyone who says AOL's buyout has derailed the Mozilla project. They're clearly not taking an active role at all.

1.0 means different things in different projects, but one would expect nearly a year into the .9.x series--and two months from the putative release of a 1.0--that proper test code would be in place for core functionality like this and that things would be in a bug fix stage, not that inbound and outbound MIME handling would still be awaiting its first real-world testing two months before 1.x and more than a year after the release of Netscape 6.0.

Re:A question for those "using" 0.9.x

[roca]

> Don't listen to anyone who says AOL's buyout has derailed the Mozilla
> project. They're clearly not taking an active role at all.

You mean, except for the 50+ full time AOL employees who are doing coding and QA for Mozilla.

Re:A question for those "using" 0.9.x

[Anonymous Coward]

shhh ... We don't want to upset the 'advocates' over in the mozillazine community that subscribe to the intellectual dishonesty that the Mozilla project is some entitity only tangentally related to AOL/Netscape.

As for v1.0, that's the date that most Netscape-errr-Mozilla developers get laid off. Sorry it had to be that way, but AOL now realizes that the bought a $4 billion dollar lemon. But I'm sure that the Mozilla project will charge forward, with wonderous advocates like 'aza' leading the way.

Re:A question for those "using" 0.9.x

[jesser]

I've thought of fleshing out mimeTypes.rdf myself, but I can't even figure out who owns it. Mail/News? Prefs? The core browser team? With the way the project owners point fingers, can I expect anyone to lay claim to it at all?

File a bug on mail/news composition. If that's not the correct component, it will end up in the right place.

0.9.3 already better than IE 5.x

[cbr372]

but it really shows itself when you consider all the time people expect you to put into Mozilla when you really just want something that works

Your true nature as a Microsoft troll is showing itself yet again.

Mozilla is currently the most standards-compliant browser. In its 0.9.3 reincarnation, I have found it to be fast, reliable and easy to use. I tried the GNU/Linux and Win32 versions.

My Win32 test included a end-to-end test against the hyped IE 5.X browsers.

The test was performed on a standard 700Mhz Duron with 128MB of RAM running Windows 98SE.
My conclusive results are as follows:

Loading

Mozilla 0.9.3 loaded 17% faster than IE 5.01 and 21% faster than IE 5.5 using the -turbo option (C:\mozilla\mozilla - turbo)

IE 5.01 and 5.5 loaded 31% faster than Mozilla 0.9.3 when Mozilla was loaded without the -turbo option. This is not a good measure of true performance though - IE loads itself into memory. A better test would be to use Mozilla -turbo vs IE (see above).

Sites

90% of sites viewed with Mozilla loaded 100% correctly the first time they were loaded. 5% of the sites test with Mozilla loaded 80% or better when loaded for the first time with Mozilla. 96.2% of sites loaded 100% correctly when refreshed multiple times under Mozilla.

96% of sites viewed with IE 5.5 loaded correctly the first time. 98% of the sites loaded correctly after multiple refreshes.

89% of sites viewed with IE 5.01 loaded correctly the first time. 7% of sites tested did not load properly due to a 128-bit encryption SSL bug in IE 5.01

Reliability

IE 5.01 crashed the system a total of 2 times. 50% of the time, IE 5.01 took down the system with it, claiming something to the effect of: "Illegal operation: Iexplore.exe", followed promptly by: "There was an internal error in Explorer.exe". The Task manager and Start Bar dissappeared and the system froze.

IE 5.5 crashed a total of 1 time, claiming: "Illegal operation: Iexplore.exe". The system stayed up and IE 5.5 was able to restart.

Mozilla did not crash during this test.

Conclusions

IE seems slightly more compatible with most sites, but Mozilla seems faster and more stable at most tasks. Undoubtedly future versions of IE and Mozilla will improve and re-testing will be neccessary.

Re:0.9.3 already better than IE 5.x

[PimpBot]

78.2% of all statistics are made up.

*cough*

If you're going to give number, please at least point to some page filled with the methods used for determining those numbers. I don't care who wins, just prove your point will a solid testing plan, not crap like this. The scientist half of me nearly shit a brick when I saw your post ;-)

FYI, I've found Mozilla and IE roughly comperable. I must admit, though, I can't remember the last time I saw IE crash. Of course, this stems from two things I do:

• I use hardware which has good Windows support, i.e. has official drivers from MS (video cards being the biggest culprit here)
  
• I use WebWasher to filter web pages.
  

I've found that Windows NT/2k is rock solid with good drivers (98/ME is a travesty). I've only seen NT blue screen twice in the 5 years I've used it, and I've never seen 2k go down. Of course, as with any software, YMMV.

Re:0.9.3 already better than IE 5.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, kid. Win 98 is a DOS-games platform. Try IE on a real OS (W2K). Sorry, but this alone, makes your cute little test invalid.

Re:0.9.3 already better than IE 5.x

[Homewrecker]

Hey kids, some Linux zealot says IE is unstable and that Mozilla (snicker) loads faster! That's it -- get rid of Windows.

But Homewrecker, the remaining 99.9993% of the known universe disagrees.

The zealot has spoken... it is not our job to question. He is impartial.

Re: Astroturf

[roguerez]

I don't know what you are talking about. The scroll function ROCKS. I run W2K/XP with IE on a Sony picturebook and the mousepointer acts as a wheel when the middle button is clicked. It rocks on this 900 gram laptop!

Sorry but a unix with Kde/Gnome and Mozilla come nowhere compared to the usuability I get on my laptop with the software I have right now. For server uses, mail, etc I use my FreeBSD machine through an X-server. For browsing, multimedia, etc, an NT kernel based Windows (XP or W2K) with IE just ROCKS on my machine. Mozilla looks, feels and acts like a clunky joke. It's not something I want to waste my $2500 laptop on.

Guess I'm not idealistic enough, sorry. And that it finally has save dialogs that works is not reason enough to switch, it only says something about the abysmal state of user interface development in the free software movement, when this is considered an accomplishment. Also, not crashing? Been enjoying that for some while now, with IE. The couple of features that make it stand out from Netscape are, as I said, compensated by it incredible bloated- and clunkyness. You may have different priorities, but I like a smooth integrated, polished, working interface to work with, and I don't find it back in Mozilla.

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

You people WANTING it to be good doesn't make it so. I much rather use Netscape 4.x than Mozilla. But then, I much rather use IE than Netscape, so why even bother?

Have you bothered? Lately, I mean.

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[Chris Hind]

And of course most of those 70,000 "bugs" were spelling mistakes and wildly-obscure-device driver problems, rather than Mozilla-like bugs such as "crashes repeatedly", "doesn't render web pages" and "none of the features seem to have been finished".

Re: Astroturf

[roguerez]

Yeah, I bothered about two months ago for the last time (a 9.x release). It didn't change my opinion. But I bet the latest release would!!

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you mean. If there's one thing I always do... Every time the boy cries "Wolf!" and there isn't one, I make sure I listen to him more carefully the next time! LOL ROTL LMAO

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[naasking]

Mozilla-like bugs such as "crashes repeatedly", "doesn't render web pages" and "none of the features seem to have been finished".

uh huh. And just how many of those do you think there really are?

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried to run IE on a platform other than Windows? I have, on Solaris and HP-UX, and it is far the slowest, most crash-prone browser available for such platforms.

Mozilla runs everywhere, and it is getting better and better with each new release.

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because I don't run any other platform, along with around 92% of desktop users. IE also runs on the Mac, which takes care of most of the other 8%. And you want my browser to run some sort of ridiculously high level compatibility layer so I can feel good about that tiny percentage of people using other platforms? All the while making my browsing slower?
Sure, Mozilla is getting better with each release. Obviously my IE is displaying the bug graphs upside down, because to me it looks like the lines are going up, not down.

idiot

[Frequanaut]

"Sadly, the Mozilla Organization does not seem to grasp just how far behind schedule is the Mozilla Project and just how buggy is the Mozilla browser-suite. Or, perhaps it does not grasp the importance of quality workmanship and producing software products that are not full of bugs."

Good thing he's here to point this out.

What a self righteous momo.

Re: Astroturf

[jandrese]

Actually the small footprint of IE is a lie. IE is actually fairly large but a lot of it's code is integrated into the OS (ever wonder why Explorer takes soo long to start up?). As far a rendering speed is concerned, current Mozillas and IE seem to be neck and neck in my experiance, although my machine is fast enough that the big bottleneck is my slow connection to the internet.

The last half of your post is just pure troll and I'm not going to bother responding to it past this point.

Won't affect me

[Jim Hall]

I have been using Mozilla since 0.7, and it has been my primary browser since 0.8. The mail client finally became stable enough for me to move all my mail over in 0.9. Mozilla 0.9.2 and Mozilla 0.9.3 have both been very solid for me. Since 0.9.2, Mozilla has been easily as good as IE.

So, the "news" that Mozilla won't go for 1.0 until next year won't affect me. Mozilla is already my primary browser. I find remarkably few bugs that affect me (the only annoying bug affects overlapping table cells, simultaneous colspan/rowspan, since we use simultaneous colspan/rowspan on our web site.)

Re: IE on a Mac

[loom]

Did you ever try IE on a Mac ? I was running IE on Mac OS X and gave it up because it kept crashing all the time. Sure IE is a decent browser, but ONLY on Windows.

Actually my paranoid side thinks they did this on purpose :)

Mozilla and Memory Problems

[Mals]

Isn't it true that Mozilla does have some problems with memory management with the kernel? I was at a LUG meeting and someone was talking about problems with the 2.4.x kernels and applications that are heavily dependent on memory swapping such as Mozilla. Can someone please elaborate on this?

Real software developers...

[NineNine]

have versions. That's so that people don't have to download and install a new version of the software every single night. That's totally unacceptable. But what is, is waiting until a good number of bugs have been squashed, then formally releasing the software as version 1.0.

Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[darylp]

"It is MS-HTML. You must have an MS-HTML-capable browser to see it. Apparently NS 6 is not MS-HTML-capable"

Deliberately locking off browsers is wrong, no matter WHO made them. An IE user facing one of these anti-MS sites isn't going to think "I'll change my browser to a more politically correct version". They're gonna think "This guy who runs this site is an asshole."

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Bedouin X]

Sorry but XHTML is a W3C standard based on XML. The MS buzzword of the century. I find it interesting that IE can't properly render an XHTML file since they like to tout their XML support.

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'm actually genuinely interested in why mozillaquestquest.com doesn't work in IE and not interested in the stupid Moz sucks versus IE sucks flamewar.

Does anyone know what content-type header mozillaquestquest is sending?

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not download the file onto your disk and try it locally with IE? This will get rid of the content-type problem. If IE still doesn't work with that, maybe you can register a new user account called "IdioticExploderSucks" :-)

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know what content-type header mozillaquestquest is sending?

Duh:

% telnet www.mozillaquestquest.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

Trying 216.240.148.34...
Connected to www.mozillaquestquest.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 16:52:00 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 Ben-SSL/1.40 (Unix) PHP/4.0.4pl1
Last-Modified: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 22:08:28 GMT
ETag: "5f004-477-39455f5c"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1143
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Anonymous Coward]

MozillaQuestQuest uses XML files styled using CSS. Netscape 4 and (most versions of?) IE can't understand it. It doesn't use XHTML, which is just HTML with the strictness of XML. Any browser than can render HTML will cope fine with XHTML.

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[manic micko]

This is the real header getting sent:

$ telnet www.mozillaquestquest.com 80
Trying 216.240.148.34...
Connected to www.mozillaquestquest.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mozillaquestquest.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 18:18:56 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 Ben-SSL/1.40 (Unix) PHP/4.0.4pl1
Link: <styles>; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/xml

Apparently, anything encoded as XML is displayed by IE in that unreadable MSXML collapsible heirarchy. And Microsoft claims full XML compliance... well I guess that's one way for a User Agent to display it, just dump the source code! ;-)

-- Micko

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be it, thanks.

Re:Doesn't this sound a bit like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't think it is. I've looked at the MozillaQuestQuest source and it appears just to be XHTML. However, its MIME type seems to be set to text/xml. I'm not exactly sure whether XHTML should be text/html or text/xml or something else.

Who modded this up to funny?

[jjn1056]

Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch. Yes, the Netscape 4.x source code is there, in CVS somewhere, but when they realized the codebase was too inflexible to fix, they decided to forget it and build it right. I remember they had a vote or something, about a year into the project. So they put the 4.x code into maintainance mode, adding bug fixes etc to try and keep their corporate clients, while working on a new, more stable and flexible system in parallel. That's one of the main reasons this project is taking so long.

I don't think anyone at netscape thought the code was too f*cked up. Remember, when the decision was made to make this an open source project, Netscape was still ahead in the browser war. Nobody was taking free software very seriously. At the time, everyone was saying they needed to make the browser free (as in beer) in order to compete with IE. Their decision to make it free as in speech has really helped the movement, despite the marketshare. If you judged linux or freebsd by marketshare, you'd be making a mistake. I think Apache and sendmail are the only free software to have dominate marketshares in their product group. Anyone know of others?

I guess some of Slashdot's users are too young to remember...

Re:Who modded this up to funny?

[jesser]

Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch.

It still uses the 4.x javascript engine, spidermonkey. Note that spidermonkey just handles the javascript language, not the document object model (anything having to do with the "document" object).

Pretty much everything else is new, though.

What's in a Name? What's in a Version Number?

[bwt]

As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla should have stayed with the milestone numbering system.

I HATE all the conversations about "When will it be 1.0?". The version number is an arbitrary string that has no affect on the code it is stamped on! All it does it make people complain.

Labelling something 1.0 does not remove any bugs. It does not mean that all severe bugs have been found. It does not mean that the next patch won't cause latent memory leaks or security problems or hard to reproduce crashes. In fact, it basically means nothing other than somebody decided to label it that way. If we called the damn thing 1.0 right now, the code would be exactly the same as if we called it 0.1. Arguing over version numbers is the stupidest activity programmers do. It's basically the one moronic marketing practice that hasn't been abandoned by the open source community.

What exactly was wrong with taking a nightly build every 4 to 6 weeks, testing it a little more thoroughly, and giving it the next whole number? They should have kept going after M18: 0.6 = M19, 0.7 = M20, 0.8 = M21, 0.8.1 = M22, 0.9 = M23, 0.9.1 = M24, 0.9.2 = M25, 0.9.2.1 = M26, 0.9.3 = M27.

Re:Doubling bugs & RedHat

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at RedHat bugzilla http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ you will see that the number of reports strongly increases right before every new RedHat release. People just do extensive testing then.

What is dillo?

[magnetx11]

That link you supplied is 404

Re:What is dillo?

[Jacek Poplawski]

I am sorry, should be "dillo" not "dilllo"
correct link is:
http://dillo.sourceforge.net

netscape willingness

[nilstar]

Do you remember netscape 6.0? Well, they were willing to base it on *buggy* code, and it got horrid reviews. Wait until a few others (who don't have hordes of developers on it) to start using it.... other than the only other project I know of.... Komodo by Activestate.

Mozilla is not a browser

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way I see it, anyhow. I used to mock the Mozilla project for taking so long to build a web browser, while groups like the Konqueror team could write a browser from the ground up in far less time.

But, now I have seen the light.

Mozilla isn't a browser; it is a customizable generic application interface.

That's why it's taking so long.

There have been several phases of custom application development: COBOL/IBM Mainframe, UNIX minicomputer, Windows or OS/2 application, Java application, and finally, web app.

Web apps are great, and highly portable, but...they have a lame interface.

Mozilla is the magic tool that allows you to write something that is essentially a web app, but still have a highly customized front end. And with web services, it will be able to act more and more like those custom Windows apps that take so much longer to write.

Am I wrong about this? I may be, but I think Mozilla is the thing that ties this stuff all together.

Remeber Windows 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, how nice the slashdot rationalizes about the number of bugs!

Windows 2000's big number of bug tracking entries ment low code quality. Mozzila's bugs mean high quality. Double standard.

So, not all commercial entities consider a huge number of bugs to be a bad thing; in some circumstances it's actually quite the contrary!

Re:Remeber Windows 2000

[MindStalker]

Nobody said that the high number of bugs, in any way translated to high quality of code.
But there is two factors to look at.
1. The amount of serious bugs is low, this translates to a high quality product.
2. There are many people using it, many of these people are developer types, who notice even the smallest bugs, most of which are simply small things that may have been overlooked, of which in a major product, there are millions of small things. As the code gets better, more people use it, as more people use it, more bugs get reported for small insignificant things. Eventually someday all these small insignificant bugs will be fixed, then people will still be reporting bugs, because they want some feature, or wish for the browser to act a certain way and it acts a different way. So they add this feature, or the option to make it work either way by an option in the preferences menu. These new features, will have bugs, or not work in the exact way that people want them too, and these will be reported as bugs.
In no way does any of this implicate that mozilla or any other feature rich product is bad, simply that it is evolving.

Re:Remeber Windows 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

If the same reasoning was applied to Win2K, it would

a) never get posted on slashdot

b) never moderated up.

Re:Remeber Windows 2000

[MindStalker]

Well first off all W2K is not a community project, so people only report bugs on serious issues that hinder there ability to work, they do not report bugs requesting features, or mentioning a misspelling, as asking that something works differently. That is done by user surveys and inhouse bug testing, of which many reports like that are made, but not publically posted because they are not officially "bugs". But Mozilla really doesn't care what you call as bugs and its all lumped into one. Call it a feature, or call it a bug itself, thats just the way this specific community works.

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[alanjstr]

Ah. I don't recall seeing a big disclaimer saying that the site was in no way official. Actually, I followed the link to the article from NewsForge. Sorry for the confusion.

Re:mozillaquest in no way affiliated with mozilla.

[alanjstr]

Well, now that we've spread some FUD, how about a nice official write-up of how Mozilla is progressing. Perhaps Slashdotters can submit questions, like "Why is 1.0 considered 1.0 if it will have known bugs?"

0.9.3 is good too.

[Thag]

The only problems I have with it are related to printing out web pages.

It's certainly much better than the old Navigator. Can't wait for 1.0!

Jon Acheson

Re: Astroturf

[icqqm]

"Hate to say it but the Mozilla project has had their chance. In 2,5 year they didn't produce anything that is better than codebase they started with.

They fell in the typical 'committee' trap, where a committee decides what goes into a product. These are usually personal projects of the committee members which haven't a lot to do with the project at hand. But they put them in the project anyway. User wishes are not found interesting.

Well, we now have the result. After 2,5 of dabbling, Mozilla - overall - still hasn't risen above the Netscape 4.x level. Everything that has been improved has been compensated, unfortunately, by the bloatedness, instability, memory hunger, static look and feel, etc."

You should write for MozillaQuest. Personal anecdotes, speculation, unchecked hypotheses, uninformed judgements and gross generalizations. You're perfect for them!

layoffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this is because both Sun and Netscape have laid off *LOTS* of people involved in the project. After all, the bulk of the development WAS being carried by these guys, from what I know.

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what you are talking about. The scroll function ROCKS. I run W2K/XP with IE on a Sony picturebook and the mousepointer acts as a wheel when the middle button is clicked. It rocks on this 900 gram laptop!

Because, clearly, what the world needs is another way to scroll! Scroll bars, arrow keys and mouse wheels all just don't cut it.

Why would you want to be able to open a link in a new window with a single (non-key-assisted) mouse click?

Does anyone at Microsoft ever think about ease of performing common operations before coming up with stupid new UI features instead?

told ya so

[Anonymous Coward]

I said that it'd come out in 2002, and nobody believed me. Well I TOLD YOU SO.

...

so there.

Re: Astroturf

[MindStalker]

Be honest, when was the last time you seriously tried mozilla. Actually for someone like you I'd recommend Netscape 6.1 Try it for a week, I'll bet you'll never go back, and will be begging for the next release.

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to be able to open a link in a new window with a single (non-key-assisted) mouse click?

Right-click a link, move the pointer down SLIGHTLY to 'open target in new window'

that was easy, wasn't it? Single click, no key assistance (whatever that means).

what point are you trying to prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Mozilla for OS X at all. I'll laugh if you think Mozilla under classic is a suitable alternative to IE on OS X.

Sure, there's a netscape 6.1 preview for OS X, but there's no way I'll trade IE for that. If you've run it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Re:what point are you trying to prove?

[Bedouin X]

Ever hear of Fizzilla?
http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/

the norm

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't this sort of thing the norm for opensource projects?

Re: Astroturf

[baptiste]

Actually the small footprint of IE is a lie. IE is actually fairly large but a lot of it's code is integrated into the OS

Amen to that! I kept having problems with IE 5.5 and 6 in Win 98 - a page would load but the window was locked up - the progress bar got all the way across and stayed there. Bringing up the file explorer - same problem.

Eventually (after 15 or 30 seconds) the windows would unfreeze and all was fine till I loaded the next page - starts all over.

Problem? A permanently mounted disk on a server that had been shutdown. I delete the drive map and the problem goes away. I'm sorry but a mapped drive to a shutdown server should NOT cause a browser to lockup on page loads. Integration is BAD!

Back Button?

[Anonymous Coward]

While we are on the subject...

I use mozilla a lot and like it, with my only complaint being that I don't know how to get it to recongize the 4th button on my Logitech MouseMan Wheel as the Internet 'back' button. IE does this automatically.

Anybody know how to do this?

Offtopic I know, but hey.

Re:Back Button?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were a Mac user you wouldn't have this problem.

As everyone knows: One Button on a Mouse is All You Need.. Period.

Mac is my favorite computer, by the way.

Re:Back Button?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking twit by the way.

Konqueror seems better than Mozilla anyway

[doubleyou]

I was using Mozilla for the past few Months, and I was more or less satisfied. Then I upgraded to the latest point release (0.9.2 -> 0.9.3) and a few things broke. For example, all the plug-ins stopped working.

I switched to Konqueror last week, and realized how much better it is. It renders much more quickly, and has a better response time to mouse events - I had chalked-up Mozilla's sluggishness to X.

These are just my initial subjective reactions...

Re: Astroturf

[Tackhead]

> Significantly better PNG support? Wow, CSS implementation that actually works? Less rendering bugs? Million times better bookmark manager? Search capabilities with configurable search engines? Save dialogs that work while Motif's save dialogs still don't work? And it doesn't crash every 5 minutes (I haven't yet got 0.9.3 to crash)? Themability to combat the general ugliness of Motif? Progressive rendering of pages (No freezes when some New Media Guru used tables dishonorably)?

All very good reasons why Mozilla on non-Windows platforms beats Netscape on non-Windows platforms.

But the original user started by saying:

> > IE has it all: speed, rendering, functionality, footprint, etc.

You're right when you say Moz has come a long way since NS4.

But NS4 isn't the competition anymore, is it?

With respect to the Mozilla team - nobody asked for an XUL-wowzers-skinnable application platform to replace the desktop. All we wanted was a web browser. And when it took over 2.5 years for you to develop it, most of us got tired of waiting and went with IE on our Windoze boxen.

Illiterati get modded up, apparently.

[dave-fu]

Occam's Razor states that (basically), "when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."
Literally (translated), his razor states that plurality should not be posited without necessity." Interprete as you may.

Re:Illiterati get modded up, apparently.

[Malcontent]

I know what it is you moron. Here were my points which you obviously missed altogether so I'll dumb them down for ya.

1) It's not a immutable law of nature. It's just a cute saying without any basis in mathematics, statistics, or science.

2) There are no "two competing theories which make exactly the same prediction" in fact there are no predictions being made at all. The airhead who posted the original post tried to use occams razor as some sort of a proof that the the number of bugs were going up.

3)Life is complex and relying cute sayings and looking for the simplest answer is a surefire way to arrive at the wrong answer.

TO blindly state that the number of bugs are increasing because "occam's razor says so" is just stupid. Why not go do some statistical analysis. Go see how many of the bugs are dups or feature requests or occur only on exotic platforms. Why not interview some mozilla developers or project managers. Why not look at the severity of the bugs.

None not out intrepid slashdot poster. He has no time for actual thinking. Occams razor says mozilla is full of bugs and who are we to argue with the razor.

galeon

[big.ears]

You may know this already, but Galeon has tabs too. Plus, its based on Mozilla's gecko. It has a very plain interface, but I find myself using it more and more. I switch between it and Mozilla frequently, and I only wish I could use the same history for both, so my followed links will stay the same color.

Re: Astroturf

[spudnic]

Why would we never go back? I don't get it. Ok, maybe on Linux I wouldn't go back to 4.x after using mozilla, but what about Windows?

What compelling reason would I possibly have for using Mozilla over IE, political issues aside?

W3C and standards

[V.P.]

W3C is a private (and self appointed) consortium, not a standards organization (cf. ISO, ANSI). As such it can only publish recommendations, not standards.

Re:W3C and standards

[Bedouin X]

Point taken... now tell us what body is officially responsible for defining the standard practices of coding content for the web? Microsoft is part of the W3C as well so it's not like thet have no say in these recommendations.

Re:Doubling bugs...razor needs sharpening????

[spudnic]

One of each is too many.

It's unusable.

Re: Astroturf

[MindStalker]

Seriously have you tried it, its like asking why wouldn't someone go back from IE5.5 to IE4.0. Its hard to answer, but simply obvious if you use it.

Mozilla is cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Mozilla.

Re: Astroturf

[MindStalker]

Oh come on, if you'd actually listened to the people who use mozilla, instead of just looking at the headlines, you would understand. For over a year, mozilla people have been crying. Try mozilla, its great you'll love it, because it was a really cool product that had alot of "potential". But, if you actually asked them, do you really think I should completly stop using 4.x and switch to mozilla. They said, no way, its still in development, its just really cool to see the progress it has made, and the cool features it had. Well things are finally finishing up, and it really is turning out to be better than 4.x, alot better. After waiting for almost 2 years now to switch to mozilla, I've finally made the switch to Netscape 6.1, almost a month ago, and havn't look back sense. I really would finally recommend it to the masses.

What was that cool indie site that JohnKatz liked?

[ahde]

Anyway, this sire reminds me of all the corporate Something Awful clones, but with a whole lot of marketing-speak semi-analysis and denigration of Mozilla.

Who do we know that would be motivated to produce an over the top amateur-looking anti-Mozilla (AOL/Time Warner Netscape division) packed with rumors and lots and lots of half-analyzed middle management data?

That said, mozilla sucks.

And I think 1.0 would probably slip past the new year, if as one reader pointed out, the 1.0 schedule is the layoff schedule for AOL/Time Warner Netscape division.

That said, I mozilla exclusively for my personal browser (except for lynx)

Re: Astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

He would never acknowledge it. It's from Microsoft, remember.

You know, MICROSOFT, the company that makes a browser that blows Mozilla out of the water.

But he would never admit that.

Re: Astroturf

[tlhf]

Um, I used Mozilla 9.3.

After 10 minutes it was using 60mb of memory. My PC has 64 mb of memory. Ever heard a hard disk cry?

I, for one, will be sticking with IE5.5.

Daaah, IE is XHTML compliant

[tlhf]

I've seen it said that IE isn't XHTML complaint. Well that's bullshit.

I've done loadsa 'xhtml' sites. XHTML is just a HTML living upto XML rules. Most browsers support it without even knowing it.

As for why mozillaquestquest doesn't work, I'm assuming that the reason is that it sends that data down the line marked as text/xml, and not as xhtml. See for yourself here. If it was sent down as text/html, or possibly text/xhtml (is that valid?) then IE would render it correctly. AFAIK, the namespace shouldn't be used to define a document, but a DTD.

In conclusion, IE renders it as xml, where as Mozilla eroneously renders it as xhtml.

Re:Daaah, IE is XHTML compliant

[tlhf]

Can I just say that I meant Doctype, and not DTD.

Re:Daaah, IE is XHTML compliant

[mimbleton]

Yeah, that is exactly what is happening there.
Mozilla is wrong here.

Re: Astroturf

[prog-guru]

With respect to the Mozilla team - nobody asked for an XUL-wowzers-skinnable application platform to replace the desktop. All we wanted was a web browser. And when it took over 2.5 years for you to develop it, most of us got tired of waiting and went with IE on our Windoze boxen.

I do wish they waited on themes and junk until the browser was solid, waiting 30 seconds to a minute for it to start is a drag. It is great though, who cares what month 1.0 comes out, it still gets better with each release. I've been using it primarily since 0.9.x.

Mike Angelo is a twit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mike Angelo has no idea about Mozilla. I doubt he even uses it.

Re: Astroturf

[Jebediah21]

What are you smoking? I'd really like to get my hands on some of it!

O, of course I am misguided. I am using Mozilla, which as we all know "isn't really a product for actual use by people."

Let's also not forget that IE has such a small footprint from being loaded with the OS...

You had no such points.

[dave-fu]

Now that I've provided you with a link, you may have figured it out, but in the meantime you've provided nothing but conjecture and infuriated hand-waving to disprove the razor.
Do you have any concrete evidence that there's a definite reason behind the ramping up of bugs or is this just a zealot's opinion masquerading as a quantified observation?
"None not out intrepid slashdot poster."
???