Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
The automatic leap from the fact that someone uses free software to the idea that they hold some cherished belief in The Cause and spend their every waking moment promoting Free Software to others is a pretty big one to make.
You wouldn't call someone a hypocritical compact car advocate if they drove a Geo but said the Suburban has more head room, would you?
There have been at least a couple versions of IE for unix platforms. They were incredibly slow, huge, buggy products that roughly noone used.
On platforms where I have a choice, I avoid MSIE, because it's both amazingly insecure (not just `insecure', but incredibly so. Glaring, stupid bugs coming out at an amazingly high sustained rate. If only MS would spend 10% of the time/money they've invested in claiming in court that MSIE is absolutely essential to their business actually treating it as such...) and also because it's *Annoying*. In those rare situations where I'm forced into using MSIE it generally takes me less than a minute to run across a maddening barrage of flashing, blinking, obscuring ads covering the screen, floating around the background, or whatnot.
If you want speed, try Opera or Omniweb. If you want a good browser with source access, mozilla and konqueror are both good bets. MSIE's advantage is, was, and always will be that it's already built in to your OS.
I used to think that Mozilla was too slow and bloated. I still used it every day on my Linux box, but it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences.
However the speed issue was put on the back burner once I started using a small fraction of the features. Tabbed browsing, disabled onload popups, javascript console/debugger, etc, etc...
I still kept thinking, jeez, its just a browser people, it can't be _that_ hard to make something that renders HTML. However once I downloaded Komodo ( here )
and used it for a couple days, I saw the light. Mozilla isn't just a browser, its a platform. Komodo still suffers from Mozilla's slowness, but the amount of useful features included with it easily makes up for any speed issues. Mozilla will start to speed up once it matures more, so thats something I can wait patiently for.
Kudos to the Mozilla team, keep up the good work!
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
you'd rather him be blinded by faith instead of being reasonable about which browser is best? Being so quick to label him a "Free Software advocate" just because he switched to primarily runs Linux is a large insult to anyone who has put time into making Linux a decent operating system. Some people think Linux is the best operating system even when they aren't blinded by rhetoric like you.
And IE is a good webbrowser; that is fairly clear. Some slashdot people like to use the best, instead of being coerced into this insanity that for some reason is expected of them
IE is fast because it's a tidy little COM object that's intertwined so closely with Windows
Has anybody ever backed up that statement with facts?
Where the the profiling of Mozilla which proves that, in the areas it is slow, performance increases could only be gained by using features that only microsoft knows?
Having a thorough understanding of where and why Mozilla is slow may give you
a) insight in how to improve the performance
and/or b) ammunition against microsoft were it proved that IE is indeed pulling tricks that other software writers can't pull.
The more I hear " IE is better because MS are cheating" without proof, the more respect I lose for Mozilla.
Secondly - moving on from the conspiracy theories - MS's browser is implemented as a 'tidy little object'; perhaps, just perhaps, small, efficiently written code runs quickly ???
I think you're confusing the issues here, the browser integration stunt that MS pulled to try to avoid anti-trust legislation and the fact that they wrote a better browser with IE 4.
Bleh!
Getting tables looking good in Mozilla and IE is not impossible. It is just more difficult than it needs to be. For example, the use of the background colour is different and (correct me if I am wrong) this is not in the W3 standard.
Anyway - Netscape 7 will ROCK!
Yeah, Microsoft did it. Or maybe without a clear direction or final decision makers a big project like this can't reach a goal. Th eone thing about commercial software is that at some point one person or group decides exactly which features will be in the next version and which ones won't. It looks like Mozilla got caught up in the "all features right now" problem and it has really shown. Don't try to be all things to all people, just make a good base browser and then build on it.
This looks to me to be a very good thing. Finally, we see a long lived mozilla 1.0 branch with real involvement by mozilla.org in producing a quality product.
Beyond that, with the 1.1, 1.2 releases we finally look to be getting something that is a real development scheme rather than the endless series of, what I would call, "technology previews" that earlier versions of mozilla have been. (With the alpha quality that usually goes along with such previews.)
If they stick to this, it seems to me 2002 really could be the year of the lizard.
So, you don't want choices, or competition?
I think it's great having a browser that looks and behaves the same on multiple platforms. It provides a familiar base everywhere one goes. It kind of harks back to the days when there was talk of the browser being the platform, not the OS, which would of course render MS Windows irrelevant.
I think that you've hit the nail on the head: Mozilla seems to perform much better under Windows! I find it kind of funny, in an ironical way.
Mozilla *is* technically (I try to be objective here) still the third best webbrowser for Windows out there, after Opera and IE. Am I complaining over that? No. Why? Opera is ad-based, closed source. IE I don't even need to comment.
I'm sorry, but Mozilla just hasn't grown up, look at the latest milestone. Hit add bookmark and it won't give the current page as default values. That's so basic broken as can be.
Mozilla needs to work more on it's core features, way more. The latest flashy standard people use 5% of the time isn't that important if users grow tired of it doing what they do 95% of the time, and that's how it is now.
Best of luck,
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm a bit of an expert at this, and I've been trying a lot of pages. Mozilla fails to support all but the most trivial of Java applets. The exact pieces of the API which are broken is unclear. In my tests, 90% of a random sampling of applets wedge, if not themselves, the entire browser, on page load.
I've been watching this situation for some time, wondering if it would improve.
When the Mozilla people started talking about 1.0, I dug up the email of the Java integration maintainer. Not easy; the OJI page on Mozilla.org is incredibly stale (April 2001!):
http://www.mozilla.org/oji/
I sent him an "are you the guy?" email - he responded, "yes, that's me." Then I sent him an email asking if I could help with efforts to get Applet support up to spec by 1.0. He never wrote back.
As of now, Java is a massive hole in Mozilla. Going to any page with an applet shows the infamous Netscape puzzle piece; clicking on it starts a process to download and install a Java runtime (whether you have one installed or not) which is exceptionally crude even by Netscape standards. You get a popup window with HTML form buttons to select your JVM - one for each "supported" platform (how hard is it to detect OS?) and an extra big empty window with [object Object] popping up above it...
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. This is probably preferable to one previous failure mode, which was an instant application crash every time a page contained Java.
Laugh all you want about applets - this affects a lot of web pages.
If Mozilla for some assinine reason wants to kill Applet support, they need to at least cauterize the wound. As it is now, this is a huge problem that IMNSHO undermines any credibility their 1.0 designation might have.
We're on the road to Tycho.
One of the most important reasons I use Mozilla is because of it's Non-Commercial nature. My biggest gripe with Internet Explorer is that it is a tool for Microsoft to show 'their view' of the Internet.
Enter a wrong URL in the Address bar? By default, Microsoft gets to see where you were tring to go and even presents their search engine which promotes their affliates and advertisers. With it's built in media player, IE is also a key part of Microsofts Digital Rights Management stratagy.
The ablity to customize my browsing experience is important to me. Compeition is also critical for a product to keep growing. If one company owns the browser market, users are the ones who will loose out in the end.
As a developer, features such as 'View this image', 'Open frame in new window', 'View frame source' and tools like the new Javscript Debugger and DOM Viewer make Mozilla my browser of choice when developing web sites.
Sure, Mozilla has a ways to go, but it's getting there, slowly but surely. And at the moment, it's good enough for me to use on a daily basis.