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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
That would just encorage "web developers" (I use the term very loosly) to only test their pages in IE. There are more than two browsers, you know. We don't need to give people the impression that it's "OK" to just spit something out of frontpage that isn't anywhere near valid HTML.
It's downright dangerous. I'll give an example. I took VB programming course in college (I was forced), and the professor posted the grades on the web. The grades were listed next to the last four digits of our student ID, at least in IE, mostly anonymous. Apparently though, he just did some sort of "embed database" command in Frontpage, because in Opera, I could see a major error. Everyone's home address, phone number, SSN, etc was included with thier grades! On the web!
Frontpage put the whole database into the web page, and because you could only see the field they actually wanted to show in IE, he went ahead and put it up! One quick glance at the HTML would have been enough for him to see the mistake.
So everyone always asks "What has MS ever done to you?" Well, I think I have a good story to tell them, and also a good reason people should not target browsers for "IE compatibility". We have standards for a reason, follow them.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It is faster, in the same way you get down faster if your parachute doesn't employ...
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
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}
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true)
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true)
... which disables popups.