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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 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
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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!