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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.
its good to see how far mozilla has come. ive been using it for a long time in linux, and now i am ready to make this switch on all my win computers as well. my only complaint about that browser is that it doesnt support the ability to change the colour of the scroll bars found on certain webpages.
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As a diehard IE user who made the switch from netscape to IE 3.x, I am quite shocked at how well Mozilla performs in the .99 version.
.99 my view was changed completely. I don't use an integrated bookmark manager or email, but for browsing I find myself opening up Mozilla more and more during the day.
I've kept tabs on the performance and functionality as various betas came out and was always extremely disheartened that it just wasn't there. I was beginning to think that one of the most visible efforts by a community to really create a useful application was going to fail.
With
Congratulations to everyone involved in the development and testing. This is quite a success and one that I hope garners a ton of attention!
It seems interesting and maybe coincidental that AOL Timewarner starts testing Netscape, and Mozilla seems to quiken its pace to 1.0. Maybe I am just reading to much into this, and its probably all just coincidental, though, it is something for the conspiracy theorists to work out.
Jason Lotito
Is it me or does the ability to view the source of whatever your looking at seem to be something that even a 1.0 browser should do correctly?
Use a CSS to set up a piece of text as small caps and render it in Mozilla, Opera, and IE and guess which browser fill screw it up? Well, IE of course. IE is OK, but Mozilla does a lot more with web standards. I routinely try to code pages to web standards and have Mozilla and Opera display them properly, only to have IE suddenly say to me "And now for something completely different!" If every browser besides IE becomes 100% standards compliant, then I would hope web designers would start putting little bugs on their page that says "Best viewed with something other that IE."
It is both good and bad that AOL has decided to use Mozilla in the next AOL release. Unfortunately they are applying pressure to the Mozilla team to wrap it up and get the product out the door.
Case in point, bug 99344. The Mozilla team has known about this one for at least six months, yet the bug still lives. Now it is unlikely the fix will be made before 1.0. The project managers are being pressured to "back burner" bugs like this one to ship the product.
Why rush? AOL pushing them is a bad thing since bugs like this one are now getting out the door and tarnishing what *has* to be a near perfect product. Rushing out the door will NOT recover any market share, it is far too late for that unless AOL/others plan to show us why everyone *must* use Mozilla/Netscape 6.x. instead of IE. For your normal "Joe Sixpack" websurfer it is going to be difficult if not impossible to convince him to change since IE works for 99.9% of what he likes to do, regardless of security holes.
On the whole I am very happy with Mozilla, I use it as my primary browser on all platforms. Still, I can't totally hide my disappointment that some knowns issues are going on neglected, leaving web developers, yet again, to deal with the bugs. *sigh* nothing changes. Things have gotten MUCH better, yet...
A: i prefer larger text size on my browser because of a huge monitor and high resolution i run at. On IE, i can set the text size from smaller to larger and IE remembers that preference forever. Mozilla forgets my text size (i prefer 120%) as soon as i close the program. Any way to make that 120% permanent ?
B: I have a HUGE hosts file that i block crap like doubleclick.net, known spyware sites, porn sites, etc.....anything i dont like :) On some sites i visit a LOT, such as slashdot and cnn.com, i block the ad servers. Mozilla gives me an error of "connection refused when attempting to contact foobar.spyware.site.com". I know the connection was refused (grin), how do i keep mozilla from bitching about my blocked sites in my hosts file?
if i could solve those two issues, i'd almost never use IE again (dont get me wrong, i like IE6 a lot, but i dont like the idea of being trapped on one platform because of a browser, I want to be able to use win 32, linux, mac os X, etc, and have the same browser no matter what).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
A coworker of mine was complaining the other day about how Netscape 4.7x was being disabled for most webpages. He knew that Netscape 6 "Sucked @ss" and absolutely refused to have anything to do with IE. His problem was that Netscape 4.7 had trouble displaying nested tables. They took forever to load and locked up all the browser functions until the page had finished. I have not used Mozilla, but knew that it was supposed to be very good, so I recommended it. He downloaded and installed it last night.
This morning he came in raving about how good it was. He loved how easy it installed, how it detected all his preferences from netscape and allowed him to access his netscape mail, and how many useful options there were, not to mention that it displayed the nested tables even faster than IE.
Looks like I'll be spending time downloading tonight.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
Opera, a browser which has built in ads, is the herald of people using it to stop seeing other ads?
Hrm
The single coolest thing I've seen done with mozilla:
http://oeone.com/
This is a little iMAC-ish PC that uses -- get this -- Mozilla code as it's GUI WM!
These are very cute, check them out.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
If there are so many then why would you block them?
I understand that for your "average" user, it's desirable to have JRE and Flash come bundled with Mozilla. Personally, I'm glad they don't. I haven't installed either and have no plan to in the near future. If anything I'd make these optional componets in the installer which are selected by default, but can be removed with a click of the mouse.
And Mozilla *does* work out of the box. Let's not call seperate programs part of Mozilla.
Monday is a horrible way to spend 1/7 of your life.
When Netscape first released the source code *four* years ago...
/. user accounts/logins. One could post as a AC (as I used to do), or could post using any nick of your choosing. Linux stories on the web were rare (and newsworthy for a /. story). IIRC, beowulf cluster jokes were funny back then, and First Posts! were still the norm. Hot grits was something I would eat, not something that I would consider pouring down my pants. Thank You.
There were no
ok lets benchmark the load of slashdot. Moz, Konq, Opera. I'm going to load the main page, everyone here can do it too and make sure its accurate. .9x nightly vs
Mozilla
Konq 2.2.1 vs
Opera 6 beta 1.
Slashdot mainpage Mozilla 1.06 seconds.
Reload
Slashdot mainpage Mozilla 1.25 seconds.
OSDN main page Mozilla 1.498 seconds.
Reload
OSDN main page Mozilla 3.4 seconds.
Slashdot main page Konqueror 3 seconds
Reload
Slashdot main page Konqueror 1 second
OSDN main page Konqueror 4 seconds
Reload
OSDN main page Konqueror 3 seconds
Slashdot main page Opera 2 seconds
Reload
Slashdot main page Opera 2 seconds
OSDN main page Opera 6 seconds
Reload
OSDN main page Opera 4 seconds.
This debate needs to be ended once and for all, I challenge ANYONE to host an official benchmarking test suite where thousands us at slashdot can go and benchmark Opera vs Mozilla vs Konq vs IE and once and for all prove Mozilla is fastest.
I know it wins at OSDN and Slashdot.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'll agree that Mozilla renders fast -- my main complaint is that it "feels" jerky, unresponsive, or in layman's terms -- slow.
For example, if you are (say) loading a large slashdot page in the background, the UI and the scrolling of your foreground window becomes very unresponsive. This gets kind of annoying if you click the wrong link and find that your Stop button doesn't want to register and the page loads anyway. (2x PIII-600, 512MB, Win2K)
This is all probably threading issues rather than actual performance -- it's just that perceptually looks like a performance problem.
Also, IMO, the incremental renderer adds to this perception. On IE you might wait just as long, but when the page appears it looks right. Mozilla shows you various half-done bizarro-versions of the page along the way, which can look klunky on some sites.
(The graphs are interesting because they show the OS X version to be much slower than the Windows version. Yet because the competition is worse on Mac, Mozilla feels much better there for some reason, on much slower hardware than my Winbox.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Plug-ins -- something that I've been curious about.
Mozilla is supposed to be this 'base' browser that can be branded by anyone.
But is seems like there is no centralized plug-in directory. Which would mean that 3rd parties like Real have to write installers which handle each particular branded version of Mozilla which would lead to inevitable installation problems.
However, the idea is that "non-geeks" (who aren't doing testing of some sort) should use the Netscape releases, which do include Real/Flash/Java.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
To crank things up several notches, enable 'HTTP Pipelining' in the Preferences (Debug -> Networking) and restart Mozilla. It's pretty cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
OEone sell their desktop environment (which is based on redhat btw) for about $40 if i recall correctly. Try it out - it's damn nice, esp if you've got a family member who doesn't need the power+expense of Windows/Office and who can't/won't get to grips with Linux. You know, the type who just write the odd email, browse the web, chat to friends, type up a letter etc.
Would it not be possible to compile Mozilla using ccc (Compaq C Compiler for Linux/Alpha and Tru64), SUNWspro (Sun`s compiler for sparc) or icc (intel C compiler) under linux/solaris/tru64/irix etc.. or does mozilla depend on gcc specific extensions.
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(The graphs are interesting because they show the OS X version to be much slower than the Windows version. Yet because the competition is worse on Mac, Mozilla feels much better there for some reason, on much slower hardware than my Winbox.)
Looking at a page load graph doesn't tell you the average machine used. I.E. If their Win2k box is a Pentium 2GHZ and the OSX box is a G4 800MHZ, etc... One could have faster disks, more memory, be running less applications, any number of things.
A better question might be "Why is there a big spike up for all of the platforms over the last few days??" Another might be "What does the IE graph look like??"
Win boxen are moving to the terminally slow anyhow. Load up a registry watcher and right click and see how many registry accesses are needed to bring up a right click menu. Gee, all of that disk thrashing wasn't virtual memory??
If you really want a "fast" OS, try using a RTOS. QNX makes a great one, and everthing happens in a blink.
Before comparing apples and oranges, use your head. Are these default OS'es, or tweaked ones?? If they are default, MAC probably has VM turned off, and Windows has it on. If they're tweaked, who tweaked 'em, and how knowledgeable is he about all of these platforms.
Finally, don't forget that OSX is still new. The OS itself needs alot of tinkering. And OSX is quite slow to respond in comparison with alot of other OS'es before you even begin discussing Browser performance.
~Hammy
Hmm.. just a few weeks ago my girlfriend was compaining because she couldnt view and edit her webpage at neopets properly in IE anymore.
so i first downloaded opera 6 for her which is a nice browser but she still had some problems with websites so i got her to try her neopets page from my box running moz
she is now a very happy mozilla user.
when she went to a site which required flash/jre it asked her if she wanted to install the plugin and then it just worked.
Well done all you mozilla developers.
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
Moz still needs to fix up SSL speeds. IE probably cheats and misses doing stuff Moz wastes time playing with (i.e. using web standards).
Dan Boneh gave a talk about speeding up SSL transactions a couple months ago at Berkeley, and he mentioned that IE (and only IE) will terminate its connection if it is given an RSA public key whose base is greater than 2^32. Microsoft may be using an optimization other browser developers chose not to employ.
For those just tuning in, an RSA public key consists of a large composite integer N, and a number e coprime to \phi(N), called the base. You encrypt by raising your message to the power e, and decrypt by finding d, the inverse of e mod \phi(N), and raising your ciphertext to the power d. A very effective way to speed up transactions is to find small d (potentially making e very large), so the server doesn't work so hard exponentiating. This places more work on the client side, but IE refuses to play ball.