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.
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 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
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.
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.
Why not simply make it a link?
Ian Hickson's Evil Test Suite Results
That way there's no worry about the random spaces put in by Slashcode.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
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.