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Mozilla Tree Closes for 1.0
fire-eyes writes "After many years, the Mozilla cvs tree just closed for 1.0. " It's been a long time coming. And I'm glad
that on Unix we still have a browser war since Konqueror and Mozilla are both
excellent browsers. Congratulations to every developer who committed a line
of code, but mostly to you guys in the middle who had to wrangle the whole
project.
browser war between Mozilla and Konqueror?
yes, both are excellent browsers, but I was pretty sure that Opera has at least as large of a share as Konqueror on *n*x desktops.
Sure, the free version has ads, but it's still free, and it seems to render sloppily coded IE-compatible/W3C-incompatible pages with more flair than either of the other two. Opera recently released the TP3 of their version 6, and it is excellent.
just a note.
lysergically yours
It is the most standard compliant browser with some of the best features out there (popup killing, tabs etc). It's been a long road to 1.0 but it's been worth it. But remember 1.0 is not the end of the project, just the freezing of the API's there will continue to be improvements and enhancements made.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Until it approaches Opera for speed, it will still be not a preferred browser. Opera's mouse gestures are also an excellent feature which help improve browsing speed. I think that improving Mozilla's speed should be the developers main focus going forward.
"And I'm glad that on Unix we still have a browser war" Trolling in the news post?
.9.7 was already better than IE in almost every category. .9.9 just blows everything else out of the water. The browser war is alive and well on Windows.
The browser war on Windows is joined as well!
IE may come installed with all copies of Windows but that doesn't mean that Mozilla can't compete. In fact, Mozilla
Moz 1 will be a great breakthrough for open-source software. And there were a lot of people who thought we'd never see it. Now it looks inevitable. Moz already runs fast and load times are generally 2 secs, I can't wait to see what it does fully optimized.
So, hats off to the Mozilla crew. And bravo. Hoorah for OSS and openness, modularity and custizability in user software!
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
But for anyone interested in the actual link posted in the story, here is the google cache version...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
i don't see a conspiracy.
they (TW/AOL) want a solid browser (an alternative to IE).
they own a browser.
they pump money into their browser to get it finished.
seems like normal business to me.
We've got an internal web system thats supposed to be IE only. They only enforce the IE only stuff on the production site, not the development site. One of the developers was having an issue with cascading style sheets and kanji rendering properly. He came into my office and mozilla 0.9.9 rendered it perfectly while IE went to hell in a hand basket and was "generating an error log"
Needless to say, The developer went back and installed mozilla (though they still target IE) and I've been lobbying the manager of the project to widen the browser scope.
Three Cheers for the hard work put into the making of Mozilla. Its good to see what comes out of a development model thats based on quality, not time to ship.
Horray for a browser that at least makes an attempt at following standards (instead of trying to create ones!)
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
So people who view your site with it won't see it right, who cares, at least they can try to see it. You may end up blocking some other browsers that do work, while trying to block it.
And for the record, I have not had any problems with visibility in mozilla. My only problem with it is arrays of text boxes (like 10x10, could have something to do with their onchange) grind performance to a halt.
It's pretty easy to understand. Mozilla is getting close to 1.0, so AOL started testing it.
If only they would have done the same thing with the Netscape 6.0 release. That thing drove away a ton of people that won't ever ever come back.
But I guess they've made clear their prorities between the AOL client and the desktop browser.
You know, I've been seeing that coloured scroll bar thing more and more lately. The New Yorker even has it. I must be missing something, but what is the purpose? How does this enhance my experience?
;)
The same way Netscape's introduction of the <blink> tag did?
slashdot!=valid HTML
Seriously, it's web developers like you who have totally and utterly ruined the web.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not actually defending Mozilla here, since I don't know if it's a bug or is properly following the standard. But, your attitude is really poor, and it's attitudes like yours that have made the web as lousy as it is today.
So, thanks, we all appreciate it.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Whenever there's a slashdot mozilla article, there's also the seemingly required collection of "It's too slow" comments.
However, if you haven't tried a nightly build recently, you aren't seeing the full picture. this graph shows the recent large performance gains that have recently gone into mozilla.
Personally, I find mozilla outrageously fast on Windows; faster than anything else I've tried. However, on Solaris and OSX, the performance isn't where I'd like it to be. (But as the graph above shows, it's getting better, and I've noticed it on OSX.). If you're a user of the Windows platform, and have heard the "slow performance" chatter that goes on, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
(In spite of the "I'd like it faster on Solaris" comment, that doesn't mean I don't like it. I still use mozilla exclusively on Solaris too; the tabbed browsing, integrated searching, and killing of popups would make it worthwhile at half the speed.)
There are also a large collection of performance bugs that probably won't make Moz 1.0, but do have a good chance of making 1.0.1. So there's even more good news just a little down the road.
I am very glad that Mozilla doesn't support colored scroll bars. The webpage can do anything it wants, as long as it's in my current broswer window (that includes screwing with my status bar, coloring my scroll bars, popup windows, and stupid mouse effects).
are probably going to be forced to block all Mozilla browsers.
This kind of attitude is intolerable. It's stupid. It's arrogant. It's wrong. It's no wonder web "developers" are the laughingstock of the software engineering world.
Imagine a gas station that blocked all Fords.
There are millions of web sites that render under Mozilla just as well, or better, then under the monopolist's client. They can do it, why can't you?
If your site won't render on 99.99% of your target audience's browsers, then you need to fix your site. You don't have to make a page under Mozilla look exactly like a page under IExploder. It would be nice, but it will never happen. Hell, you can't even make the page look identical under every IExploder browser, because the users will all have different monitors, desktop sizes, fonts, plugins, etc.
Let me hit you upside the head with a clue stick: the user is in charge. If you block them from your site they will go elsewhere, and they will take their money with them. That might only be 5% of your user base, but your user base is 10 million, that's half a million users you're insulting. You could be losing millions of dollars. This type of action may be commonplace in the software industry, but for every other industry in the world such behavior would be shocking.
The browser I use is Konqueror. Imagine if Konqueror was designed for only Linux. I couldn't use it because I'm not using Linux. But it still works. How can it work? Because it isn't designed for a particular platform, but for a particular set of *standards* instead. As long as I use a platform that minimally supports the POSIX and X11R6 standards, I can build and use Konqueror. But you can't adhere to standards too slavishly. If Konqueror required conformance to every POSIX standard, then not even Linux could run it.
In a nutshell, if a browser like Mozilla, which is more standards compliant than Internet Exploder, can't render your webpages, then the fault lies with your web pages.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Ctrl + N does the same thing.
Ctrl + Button1 opens the clicked link in a new window.
Button2 opens the clicked link in a new window, too.
None of these are "killer features."
Our users are interested in the web site working, and working correctly.
If it is a true vertical market, where you have physical control over the client machines, then you can impose whatever damn browser you want on them. But as long as the user has a choice in their own browser, then it makes sense at this level of sensitivity to implement *fewer* CSS2 features rather than more.
Where I work we build an embedded device with an integrated webserver for remote access. The data served by this webserver is even more sensitive than credit reports (medical diagnostic images). The developer of the access page really wanted to use just Internet Explorer as the browser, since it handled the features he wanted to use. But Navigator didn't. But our clients are all physicians and predominantly Mac users, so Navigator was extremely common. So the access page had to be made to work with Navigator.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Hold on a second.
This is "extremely sensitive data" and you're ensuring its security by... asking the browser not to display it???
(I could be misunderstanding your situation, but your original post was about making things invisible and now you're talking about sensitive data. Sorry if I put 2 and 2 together and got 5)
If I *didn't* misunderstand you, though, you've got WAY more serious issues than "Mozilla's broken". Like "view source". And "wget" (with a spoofed useragent if necessary). And "disable javascript and css". And "display: block !important" in a user stylesheet. All of these are *standard* ways that a user could completely bypass your "security", and most of them apply to IE just as much as to Mozilla.
Number 1 rule of security is NEVER TRUST THE CLIENT. Even if you think you know what the client is. You can never guarantee that the http request claiming an IE useragent isn't really a spoofing mozilla browser or a deliberately malicious wget command.
I seriously hope I'm wrong about what you are requesting here.
Sorry to be a complainer, but those testing methods are not good at all. There are so many other factors which can affect those times, that they end up telling you little about the browser. A better test would be in loading a huge local file from your hard drive to remove the internet speed from the equasion.
Mozilla is *not* exactly like IE, Opera or Konqueror. Yes, you can browse the web with all these products.
But Mozilla is more than a browser. Mozilla is a developpment framework. It's also a graphic toolkit, and a powerful language, whoose other components are based upon.
It means that Mozilla is far more flexible than other browsers. You can write games or word processors with Mozilla without any external library. And the result will be clean, based on fully documented standards, and portable across all platforms Mozilla can run on.
So when Mozilla 1.0 will be released, it will only be the _beginning_ of the story. The framework will be there and solid, and applications will show its true power.
{{.sig}}
Look every browser has something that it does
better than the others.
Moz is great.
But in a lot of ways it is playing catch up to Opera.
Still,
Go Moz
Here's a golden rule: NEVER EVER RECOMMEND MOZILLA TO ANY NON-GEEK!
I've been doing almost nothing but recommending Mozilla to non-geeks. Well, admittedly these people usually are less clueless than your average IE user, but at least I wouldn't call most of them geeks.
But the words "without all that AOL crap" work wonders, and then there's always "several thousand bugfixes ahead", not to mention that Mozilla has all the real killer features like tabbed browsing and the like which are still missing from netscape 6 (as far as I'm aware).
Depending on which functionality will be added to Mozilla in the time between 1.0 and the release of Netscape 6.5 I'll probably continue doing just this.
Netscape is something I only recommend to the totally clueless. For everyone else I continuously have the hope they'll look beyond and even become somewhat interested in the geek features of Mozilla. These people will never contribute any code (not that I do either, but time is the limiting factor for me), but who knows... they just might turn in a bug report somewhere along the way, or at least contribute some talkback data.
Keyboard shortcuts for everything. If you're into that, Opera beats anything else out there. Moz took its cue to implement mouse gestures from Opera. iCab is the only browser I've seen that has more preference options than Opera. Opera puts the user experience first, IMO.
Much like the Win-Mac dynamic, the little guy innovates. Opera is where you see the cool stuff first.
Sure, the UI is different than other browsers. Who cares? Who says the generally Mosaic-ish UI that IE and Moz have been using for years is the best/only one?
Constitutionally Correct
I'm not advocating this policy for every site, but for my particular case (where we are handling extremely sensitive data, namely credit reports), it does make sense. It's a vertical market application. Our users are interested in the web site working, and working correctly.
Now you say that security is not an issue...which is it? You are undermining your own arguments considerably. And as for being a vertical market application, you may have considerably more freedom in setting compatibility req's such as specifying IE5/6, but as your original post didn't mention this...
The crux of the FSF's argument is that a Linux distribution is merely The GNU System that uses the linux kernel. But the RMS quote demonstrates that The GNU System is not composed of just GNU software.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
No, it's not part of the standard. The reason they even exist is that FrontPage and other HTML editors don't set the document type declaration. Even setting the 4.01 loose DTD will ignore scrollbar colours in IE, as well as the onScroll and onResize Javascript events, etc. At least IE will obey the document type to the letter when it's set; trouble with most pages is that it is not set, so the broader HTML spec as extended by Microsoft is assumed.
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