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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.
Mozilla is Netscape. Netscape 6 is based on Mozilla code. If you are talking about Netscape 4, well there's no comparison. Netscape 4 sucks, while Mozilla (latest versions) are great. I just hope they fix the annoying cache and BiDi issues before the release.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
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.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
The Oprah browser sucks. Montel and Rikki are far better, although Rikki has quite a large memory footprint...
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
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
IE may be a bit easier to run, but there is not this HUGE gap you posit. The real question for me (and, I hope, most /.ers) is whether convenience is what I care about. Is bloatware better than well written code? Do you care?
Are you willing to lend support to a system you know is currupt for the sake of a little convenience? In general I understand that the US population says yes, but to hear this sad opinion voiced here is nothing short of dissapointing.
When will people learn? doing nothing isn't just a tacit voice for the status quo, but an active opposition of change, and as Morpheus says in the matrix "many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
I'm a concientious
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
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
Thats only because the browser is part of the OS itself.
Next you will be saying how fast Konq is on KDE.
Loading speed doesnt really matter as people get more ram and faster harddrives, what will matter most will be security, stability, and rendering speed. All which Mozilla have.
Mozilla truely is a next generation browser, most peoples computers arent fast enough to handle it, however if you have over 300mhz and over 128 megs of ram your computer will be just fine.
Since my browser is always open i dont care how fast the program is, but if i did theres galeon
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Its just the fastest browser for Windows.
Try running IE via Wine and comparing it to Mozilla, Then you'll have an equally fair comparison because neither Mozilla or IE would be native apps.
IE loses all of the sudden.
See Mozilla is slow because XUL is slow, however theres programs like Galeon for Linux and Kmeleon for Windows which use the native Windows Libraries and Classes just likee IE, making Mozilla just as fast as IE.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Its in second place
Netscape is Mozilla. Mozilla is netscape.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
-
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.
ITs a proven fact.
Remember before IE was connected with Windows in 98 how slow and buggy it was? No one used IE3.0. IE 3.0 was absolute crap.
IE4.0 however was where things started changing, they tied it into Windows98, in 5.0 they tied it into WindowsME, Windows2k etc, now IE 6.0 or 7.0 is tied into the new OS's.
Run IE on Windows95 and see for yourself. Its as slow as Mozilla
IE only got fast after it became a part of the OS.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Opera's primary problem is it's lack of a complete DOM for the scripting engine. Any page that wants to do anything interesting through the DOM is best off in Mozilla or IE6.
If you're going to take a look at Opera take a stroll through the preferences. The defaults were a bit strange for me, once I adjusted things I felt much more at home with it.
Bleh!
No... not slapped together. Carefully and fearfully glued together, balanced on a sharp precipice over a steep cliff, yes. :)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
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!
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.
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
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.
admittedly the new Oprah is a lot less bloated than the original.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
There is an addon for Mozilla that does this. IIRC it's called Optimoz.
Here we go:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/index.html
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.
Then mozilla on linux will be as fast as IE on windows.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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
> Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up
http://bugs.opera.com/
Just check this pointer.
Almost 20% of readers of this site are using mozilla.
These statistics are extract from a panel of 15000 visits a day.
If you have other statistics, just post a response...
It is faster, in the same way you get down faster if your parachute doesn't employ...
roaming user
Not there.
ldap addressing
It's in there and working quite nicely. Just in a slightly different place to accomodate multiple profiles.
composer usability (like publishing)
The "publishing" feature in Communicator stunk. I suppose it was okay if all you ever worked on was a single site.
Moz's composer looks to be leaps and bounds above what was in 4.7x feature wise. There are some major stability issues with it from what I've seen though.
similar pages button
It's in there, as one of the side panel options. Works nicer than the drop down button from 4.7x, and it pulls from the same source.
refresh bookmarks
Haven't a clue what that is. I do know that Moz's bookmark manager is a good bit more functional than what NS 4.7x had. Unfortunately, it is WAY slower.
Ya might try clicking around Moz a bit. Seems that you're missing some of those key things that really in there.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Regardless of whether or not people use Mozilla like it... I have one big complaint.
:(
Every time I reference people to webstandards.org because their Netscape 4.x browser doesn't render properly, and suggest they upgrade to Netscape 6.x...
Every single one of them comes back and says Netscape 6.x is too slow and buggy.
It seems to me that the target audience of Mozilla is the current users of Netscape, and they can't even convince them to upgrade.
Then again it might have something to do with AOL still pushing Netscape 4.x over 6.x.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
What do you expect?
When IE comes with the OS why download a browser?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
Interesting my ass.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I opened a tab to respond to your post and it took less than a second to do so. The machine is based on a K6-2 500Mhz processor and is running XFree86 4.1.0. The Galeon is 1.0.2 and depends on Mozilla 0.9.7 for it's Gecko. I've had tabs take longer when the other end is a slow pipe but I can't blame that on the UI.
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.
I'm running the latest nightly build on a 400MHz K6-3 bought some 3 years ago when 450-500MHz chips were the fastest thing on the market. It runs fine, doesn't crash (usually) and isn't what I'd consider slow (biggest problem is network delays, not software speed). Are you sure you aren't looking at Netscape instead?
... etc. are simply brilliant.
... :-P
...
I truly believe Linus is watching and considering this as part of his (not so secret) retirement plan. Eventually, post 2.6, Linux kernel development will be run like this
"all code hosted on mozilla org requires active ownership"
I am well aware of this - the fact that I can manually install an OJI-equipped plugin is why I'm able to test anything at all.
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. You can use any of the applet directories... Even as of a few informal tests today, the 90% rule appears still in effect with 0.9.8. Almost no applets of any substance work, and Mozilla/JVM will quickly wedge in a busy loop (in my experiences after < 3 attempts).
Obviously, the fact that the installation glue is so abyssmal is a massive problem of its own, albeit a superficial one. But the API you refer to (the OJI) apparently is itself in a state of serious disrepair.
We're on the road to Tycho.
The installer is not the problem. And the JVM itself (i.e. appletviewer) does not exhibit the massive failures that I observe in Mozilla. The problem (aside from the broken installer) is that OJI itself is broken in some interesting way.
:)
Manually installing the DLL doesn't fix the issue. It just lets you realize how deep a hole you're in.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Despite this, the project just doesn't seem to converge on a rock-solid release. The "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" concept has failed here.
Why is this? I think it brings up a basic truth: if the underlying design has problems, the open source process is too incremental to fix them.
("Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Interesting=3, Overrated=2, Total=8." Biggest spread I've had in a while.)
And drop the windows.net server beta. Allthough the beta is solid, it IS lacking features and code.
WinXP with it's firewall can do NAT for you. As can the RH box ofcourse, but WinXP's is easier to set up (clicking 2 boxes and a button iirc)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
but removed in the final. Dunno why, perhaps too much of the beta testers complained about that feature. When this happens to a feature at MS normally you won't see it again. :)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
You can whine all you want, but unless you filled in a bugreport at the MS site, it's nothing more than hot air. Supply a bugreport, give an example where it doesnt work and you'll see it fixed in an updated version. Also: the W3C 'standards' are inconsistent and odd sometimes. CSS is a nice idea, but in the long run, it has to become a definition language how to visualize data (content). HTML shouldn't have become the language to lay out webpages in, since it's not pixel oriented and still has visualization tags.
;).
The IE6 GUI is basic, yes, but it's a browser, not an IDE you live in all day. The links bar is ok, but limited if you want 20 buttons or so
The security issues are related to the fact that the design of the browser wasn't from a sandbox point of view: the sandbox is build later, but some parts have been forgotten, and are fixed as patches, the last one on feb 11th.
What makes me laugh when I see mozilla is that I simply can't understand why I should run a program that uses a nonnative gui renderer. The codebase is so huge I can't image what's in there. It's a HTML parser/renderer for crying out loud! I haven't compared them, but I'm pretty sure the Quake2 sourcecode is smaller. Nuff said.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
This isn't really true. The license is disjunctive - so you can use it under any one of the MPL, GPL and LGPL. Therefore, a company can use the source under MPL terms and make a partly-closed product (as Netscape does with NS6.)
Gerv
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.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Switch on 'turbo' mode in Mozilla's preferences, and then Moz will load its libraries when you boot up windows.
It should then start up just as fast as IE.
Perosnally, I don't see what the big deal is. If AOL wants to roll out a closed source product with a one-click shopping icon let them. I can stick with Mozilla 1.0 when it comes out.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Opera, Opera, Opera!
I use it on all platforms. It's a great browser; the only one worth paying for, in my opinion.
Your comment betrays your ignorance. Using deprecated API's (like sun sound) will get you a CNFE on 1.2... but if you think it's OK for that to make the _browser_ crash, you have no idea what you're talking about.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I use IE all the time and I never use window cloning, I use the pop-up menu that has an item (3rd one down, "open in a new window") and I wish every day that they had middle mouse click!