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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.
The core of UNIX is based on small reusable components, but I don't think that's generally true for the userland tools, anymore. Just look at Perl, Emacs (no jokes please :-), X, KDE and GNOME, and (of course) Mozilla.
Unix was originally implemented on machines with very little memory, so it made sense to obey the "Unix philosophy" strictly. Nowadays, there's room for a little more flexibility.
For example, I occasionally see posts on Slashdot from "Unix purists", complaining that the GNU tools are way too bloated compared to their Unix counterparts. I find this amusing. In my experience, fractional improvements in performance and memory use are far outweighed by having more useful features. Like any other philosophy, the Unix philosophy taken to the extreme is bad for one's health.
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In that update, I wrote "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness" and not any particular new feature. Just before 2001 began, I wrote that useful and relevant (defined by the community) extensions are always welcome, provided that they don't have a high opportunity cost in terms of contributors who otherwise could and would have helped hack on 1.0. But by the fall of 2001, as noted in the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto, the opportunity costs of features and extensions had grown to the point where such "non-1.0" work jeopardized a 1.0 milestone that fit into any achievable schedule.
That sounds about right. Feature creep has damaged the project.Simple text box editing doesn't work right. Window opening takes too long. Menu popup is slow, and sometimes even breaks. Wierd behavior appears after the browser has opened large numbers of windows. All this stuff is basic, yet it's been botched.
Sometimes I wonder if Mozilla has secretly been sabotaged by Microsoft. Maybe they're paying people to bloat the code, add unwanted features, and make Mozilla unstable. Or maybe there's a secret deal between AOL and Microsoft to make it suck. That's how it looks from the user side.
I think that one of the greatest features of Mozilla is that you can take the W3 CSS2 spec and use it pretty much as a manual.
I work at a web-design company, and the web-designers are starting to realise this. Mozilla is the ONLY browser that gets this close to standards compliance, IE6 is still al LONG way behind. NS 4.7 just plain sucks at modern HTML/CSS; Opera doesn't cut it either. Konqueror is pretty impressive, giving IE a run for it's money.
Couple that with the fact that Mozilla is cross-platform, can be embedded and is truly Open Source makes it a really great product.
I think the best way to get support from Mozilla would be to add IE Compatible mode. Either through preferences or a new custom flag-tag (). So that ALL of the parsing/paining logic (as well as javascript) would behave EXACTLY as IE. I am sick and tired hunting javascript bugs (trees initialized only AFTER the document is loaded with a whole bunch of "nice" side effects if you try to use IE code). Sizing in tables is just off, word wrapping is weird (to say at least) and so on and so forth. :)
Leave this new "Mozilla" mode for experimentating web developers, for the rest of us -- give us IE-Compatible browser
Or you will see "Made for IE" buttons all over again
Hyperom.com
There is an addon for Mozilla that does this. IIRC it's called Optimoz.
Here we go:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/index.html
I upgraded my dual P2-450 to dual P3-850 last week. That seems to have fixed the Mozzila performance problems I was having under Linux (mainly long delays rendering pages).
In my mind, this is the problem. I want to run linux on my shitty computers, not on my box of doom. In my world, a dual p3-850 is more power than I would know what to do with, although if i remember correctly, the 850 is 100 mhz bus speed, the 800 was either,833, and 866 were 133 speed - I have an 800/133. 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. Some of the nightly build footprints on mandrake have been huge - to the tune of using 100 megs of memory, or something. That's just bad programming for an OS that many people see as being the os for "the other other computer".
Linux community: don't forget that many people looking to switch to linux will want to put it on their 400 mhz boxes that they have recently replaced with the P4-2.2 Ghz box. Don't write code for the latter, write it for the former.
~z
sig?
Today I installed Mozilla on my father's W2K PC. He is a typical M$ user: no knowledge al all etc. He compared Moz0.9.8 with MSIE5.5 and told me that MS had lost him as a customer now.
I can't access Netscape.com or Mozilla.org since I installed a beta copy of .NET Enterprise server. I'm using it for NAT for a WinXP box, a Redhat 7.2 box, and an OS X box. None of the machines can access either site.
.NET box, I can access both sites.
If I shut down the
tcboo
Just check this pointer.
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