Mozilla Development Roadmap Updated

yota writes: "The guys at mozilla.org just published an updated development roadmap with some interesting thoughts about what will happen after Mozilla 1.0 will be released. Enjoy!" This is worth reading even if you skim toward the bottom and jump to the Intertwingle link. The Mozilla project isn't slapped together -- this kind of forethought and explanation is proof.

Comments

Mozilla as a primary browser

[Accipiter]

I switched to Linux as my primary OS a few months ago, and I haven't looked back. I find I don't miss Windows a bit, and I'm happy with my Slackware/AfterStep setup.

I use Mozilla as my primary browser (Nightly builds), and I find that it has gotten much better than it used to be. Bug reports hit Bugzilla, and are usually updated and/or assigned the same day. Their system is really great.

Sure, the browser has a few annoying things. Text boxes STILL don't behave properly, opening a new window in any shape or form (Ctrl+N, or a javascript function) takes *forever*, and other little things. Overall though, Mozilla is a pretty decent browser. Gecko is a great rendering engine, and tabbed browsing is just totally fucking fantastic.

Once the speed issues are addressed and the behaivior kinks are worked out, that's when 1.0 should hit.

Unfortunately, I find that I do miss the incredible speed of IE 5x. Say what you will about IE security, but it's still the best browser out there. Fortunately, I can happily make that trade-off as a Linux desktop user.

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[mosch]

opening a new window in any shape or form (Ctrl+N, or a javascript function) takes *forever*

Try using ctrl-t, to open a new tab. It's a lot faster than ctrl-n, and tabbed browsing is one of the nicest extras in the new mozilla builds anyway.

As far as 'best browser' goes, a Free Software advocate has to be incredibly hypocritical to recommend the use of IE. Mozilla works wonderfully for me, and I don't have to play the standard slashdot hypocrite, "believing" in one position, yet supporting another.

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[epukinsk]

opening a new window in any shape or form takes *forever*

I'm using Galeon (1.0.3) and it takes ~3.5 seconds from when I hit CTRL+N to when the new window is up and my home page is fully loaded.

It takes ~3.0 seconds to open a new tab. Galeon is great... the robustness of Gecko, with a nice lightweight, responsive front-end.

-Erik

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[rgmoore]

If you like the way that Mozilla works but find that it's too slow, you might want to try one of the browsers that's based on the Gecko rendering engine but does away with the rest of Mozilla's overhead. I use Galeon as my primary browser (which is admittedly easier since I use GNOME as my desktop) and it is great. It pops up windows very quickly, for instance, and its tabbed browsing is actually more mature than Mozilla's. I find that it gives me the parts of Mozilla that I like the most without the weight slowing it down.

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[Kiwi]

Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web.

This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:

• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Konqueror
• SkipStone

Note that all of these, with the exception of Konqueror, use the same "Gecko" rendering engine.

There are also some proprietary browsers:

• Netscape. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
• Opera

This only lists the browsers which will give a reasonable browsing experience with the majority of web sites out there. There are some other open-source browsers, too, such as Amaya (still being updated, it may even be usable for normal web browsing), Grail, among others. And, of course, for the remote ssh or non-X connection, there is Lynx, W3M, and Links.

- Sam

Re:Mozilla as a primary browser

[jesser]

Alright, now how do you switch tabs using the keyboard?

Ctrl+pgup, Ctrl+pgdn.

I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...

Ctrl+tab has traditionally been used for "switch between frames and the url bar" by web browsers and "switch tabs" by tabbed dialogs. See bug 114974 and the linked bugs for some heated controversy on the subject of what Ctrl+tab should do in the tabbed browser.

I'm a member of the "that's what windows are for" camp. That is, I think the tabbed-browser feature is an unnecessary duplication of what window managers do, a waste of screen space, and a waste of keyboard shortcuts. Thus, I sided with keeping Ctrl+tab for switching frames. I could see a compromise in which Ctrl+tab does both, since then it would have its old behavior in the case where you only have one tab open.

What I don't want to see is for this to be turned into an argument for full keyboard configurability. I like being able to sit down at my friend's computer without having to worry about them having completely different keybindings than I do, and I don't want that to change.

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[HanzoSan]

What are you talking about? Its already better than Netscape, Its also better than IE at loading pages, its more secure than IE, its more stable than IE, the only thing IE has left is the program loads faster and thats mainly due to it being tied into windows itself.

Mozilla in 4 years, has surpassed IE, a program which has been in development for 8 years.

17 percent is not bad.

[HanzoSan]

Its in second place

Netscape is Mozilla. Mozilla is netscape.

Re:17 percent is not bad.

[macpeep]

Out of that 17%, about 90% is Netscape 4.x. Check the stats from any "neutral" site such as news sites or generic business sites for example. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have almost completely failed to gain market share back. If anything, they have LOST market share even after NS 6.x came out. And IE 6.x had a much higher market share than NS 6.x and Mozilla combined even before Windows XP came out and IE 6.x was still in beta!

IE is fast partly because of conformance tradeoffs

[yerricde]

The more I hear " IE is better because MS are cheating" without proof

What IE gains in performance, it loses slightly in conformance. IE bends the rules of HTML by not always properly initializing every iframe page's DOM. Speed-conformance tradeoffs that the user can't set are nothing new in the world of proprietary software; see also the Quack 3 incident.

Moz mail

[InsaneCreator]

One thing i really hate about mozila mail on windows: not being able to choose more than one file for attachment at the same time. If you want to attach multiple files to an e-mail you have to click on "attach" for every one of them. And this was the same in Netscape 4.x

Re:Moz mail

[ReinoutS]

So what's the bug number for this? Then we could vote for it. Did you post this in MozillaZine's Bug Forum?

Re:Moz mail

[bunratty]

Here are the bug numbers:
Bug 43015 for attaching multiple files with the File dialog
Bug 69528 for attaching multiple files with drag-and-drop

Galeon?

[ainsoph]

Am I the only one who loves this browser?

I was a hardcore IE addict. Been using linux for years, but was so sucked into browsing with IE I was sickening myself. I attempted to use Mozilla over the span of the project and for sure it got better and better over time, but I do agree with folks who say: "why not just a browser?"

This is one of the strengths of IE if you ask me. IE is just a browser the other tools are moved into the mess, and IE (IMHO) has a feeling of transparancy in this way.

I never got that from Netscape, and Mozilla felt that was more and more, but it just has too many 'features' I can get elsewhere.

So anyway, I ended up getting really paranoid about IE and was searching. I realized that if I had complaints about moz then I should use it and use bugzilla. I was doing this under windows as well as linux. I found myself (like a junkie) slipping over to IE again and again.

But then I found Galeon, it has saved me from this terrible addiction. I have not missed IE in the least bit. In fact, I am completly in love with it as a browser. Mozilla is cool too, but Galeon is the one that people who complain that Mozilla should have just been a browser, galeon is this.

Galeon is what it is all about.

Re:Make IE-Compatible mode?

[jonabbey]

So that ALL of the parsing/paining logic (as well as javascript) would behave EXACTLY as IE

With what IE specification?

Mozilla is shooting for the W3C specs, which have the virtue that they do exist. Mozilla actually does have a 'broken HTML compatibility mode', which it will use if a given HTML page doesn't specify a modern HTML DTD.

Moz for Windows

[positive]

I really tried to give Mozilla a chance on my WinXP system, but it's simply a hog. Using the Quick Launch feature (the only way it was usable.. I don't want to wait 10-15 seconds for my browser to launch when I open a link) it would consistently eat up 30MB of RAM and having the browser running just made my computer feel slow. This is in addition to the numerous UI bugs, I don't know if they are specific to the Windows version, but even things like rearranging favorites on the fly with drag and drop wouldn't work, and sometimes text boxes like the address bar would refuse to take entry and I'd have to kill and restart the browser.

I was bearing with it for a while, I had really gotten to like tabbed browsing, but then I searched around a bit and found a couple of solutions that would give me tabs in IE, pretty much the best of both worlds. I'm using NetCaptor at the moment.. only downside is that it's shareware, and $30 for tabs kind of sucks. I'll probably go back to Moz in a few versions and give it another try if they can work out some of the bloat/bug problems that it's having at the moment.

Now for those underlines...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla has been consistently improving, and now looks even better on XP.

My one compliant is [begin rant] that underlining of bold text still doesn't work correctly. There are so many obvious test cases for this, including Slashdot and Mozilla's BugZilla itself.

This bug has seemingly been ignored for the past two and a half years, with no plans of fixing it anytime soon (or before 1.0). Please, please, vote for bug 1777---or better yet, fix it if you know how!

Shouldn't an open source web browser be able to display Slashdot correctly? [end rant]

Re:Performance, stability, and correctness

[tweakt]

Dude, get a newer build. AFAIC, none of the problems you listed are issues anymore.

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[bunratty]

I still don't think Mozilla is better at IE at loading pages. Mozilla strictly adheres to the W3C standards, which is good, except the real world standard these days turns out to be IE. W3C's standard still lacks some pretty basic things like having an image as a background in a table cell, which IE handles fine. Until all of those little nuances are added, I won't agree that Mozilla renders better.

Mozilla handles an image as a background in a table cell, too. Let us know what nuances really do need to be added to Mozilla to make it work better with IE-standard pages on the web.

Re:Performance, stability, and correctness

[bunratty]

Here's the bug list for text editor bugs.

Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken!

[pixelfreak]

Mozilla uses the Java Plug-in from Sun. This is an API that allows Mozilla to use the lastest version of Java with out having to wait for Netscape to provide support. Need to create an applet that uses Java 1.4 functionaly? Just install the lastest plugin, copy a few files from your JRE to mozilla's plugin directory and restart!

Currently Mozilla needs work in the area of finding the Java Plugin and setting up the connection between the two. Until then, copy the file 'NPOJI610.DLL' from your JRE's bin directory to the plugin folder for Mozilla and restart Mozilla.

This is documented in the relase notes

Re:Just curious

[damiam]

IIRC, Mozilla was the original codename for Netscape, and was included by Netscape 1.0 in its HTTP headers. Many sites detected Netscape by grepping for "Mozilla" and provided a special Netscape-enhanced version of a page if the user was using Netscape (eg., a page using frames, tables, Javascript, and other Netscape-specific extensions that weren't displayed by other browsers).

When Microsoft released IE, complete with support for most of the Netscape extensions, they used "Mozilla" in IE's headers in order to trick sites into thinking it was Netscape. That way, IE users could also see enhanced pages.

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

>>roaming user
>Not there.

On Windows Mozilla complies with the MS filesystem spec, so you can use the NOS's roaming profile feature. Unix of course works like it always has.

Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken!

[Chops]

For some time, and continuing in 0.9.8, if you are brave enough to get that far, once you complete the install your browser will crash, and you will still have no Java support when you restart it.

You have to enable Java support by dropping:

user_pref("plugin.do_JRE_Plugin_Scan", true);

into user.js in the appropriate directory (c:\windows\application data\mozilla\profiles\default\${something_stupid}\ ) on Win2k, ~/.mozilla/default/${something_stupid} on Linux. Why is this not the default? Beats me. This helps, too:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true)
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true)

... which disables popups.

Roaming user solution in sight.

[mattdm]

Ben Bucksch of Beonex fame has offered to work on the roaming profile support on a tips-for-code basis. See bug 17048 for the background, and bug 124026 for the funding issues.

Looks very promising -- if you want this feature, consider throwing in a few dollars. If this kind of development model turns out to work well, it could be a revolution for large Open Source / Free Software projects.

Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement?

[epsalon]

It's not that Mozilla's JS sucks, it's sites are using stupid browser detection mechanisms to distinguish between NS4 and M$IE, and Mozilla sometimes falls between the seats, and gets denied.

Whenever you find such a site, check bugzilla for it, and if it's not listed, report it for Tech Evangelsim.

Re:Obviously, but... HAVE YOU TRIED IT?

[chefren]

You should try this for yourself. Once you do what you suggest, go check out some applets. Yes, the news ticker at java.sun.com works. But try almonst _anything_ more complicated.

I'ts time to start writing bug reports to Sun then. I have Linux with Blackdown's port of JDK 1.3.1 installed (it has the plugin too) and over 90% of all applets work nicely. Many old "Java 1.1" applets use deprecated java 1.0 API:s that might break without warning in newer JDKs. Applet writers should really start using Java2... (JRE => 1.2)