Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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}}