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!
Don't assume that just because it's 1.0 means that it's perfect.
Many people will try Mozilla for the first time in 1.0. People more than ever need to go out there and download [linux, mac, win32], test, and give bug reports.
If you want to help open source but can't hack the code, this is your chance to help! :-)
Learn to love tabbed browsing if you have complaints about startup time. Once it's running, hit CTRL+T under Windows to open a new tab; it's much faster than opening a new window because of the reduced window manager overhead. Hell, if you're ambitious you can configure Mozilla to open a new tab whenever you middle-click on a link; that's a KILLER feature.
Add the Mozilla mouse gestures package and you will be setup to browse.
-inq
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?
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.
Gee, did it ever occur to you that it is becuase that's not in the CSS Standard? Scrollbar colors are an IE "extension" to CSS, and web authors who use it are rather ignorant of their readers. Users have their scrollbar colors the way they want them; and there is no reason for authors to consider messing with their UI. It can only decrease the usability of a web site. For information about how to prevent web deezyners' screwing with your scrollbar's default settings, go to this page and scroll down a bit.
No, Mozilla has a mouse gestures package, it's a toolbar you add and it drops a configure dialog in your Preferences dialog.
/me whistles.
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/
-inq
Nobody will want to use it now because web surfing has lost it's luster...
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.
And the biggest plugin annoyance of all time....installing a JRE. For the non-geek user this is just a pain. They don't want to have to download and install this as well as the browser. It makes things too complicated. I wonder if an open source JRE like Blackdown.org's JRE with the Mozilla could be included with Mozilla.
Also, Shockwave Flash has to be installed afterwards as well. IE on the other hand includes this in their browser. IE basically works out of the box, Mozilla doesn't. And the auto-plugin-installer crap doesn't work perfectly yet.
That contact ended almsot 2 years ago I believe. The contract was basically that AOL got the AOL icons installed automatically with windows, and AOL agreed to use IE. With XP MS refused to resign the contact unless AOL agreed to not just use IE, but also WMP (instead of real), and many other microsoft technologies where AOL was using other products. AOL told MS to shove off, and thus the contact was not extended.
It's very nice. I just found out about custom keywords today, and they rock.
You can set up a book mark that takes a parameter and has a shortcut keyword. So now when I type "g keyword" into the urlbar it searches Google for my keyword. Browsing will never be the same :-).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
We've still got a ways to go here. Check-ins to the tree are being tightly managed by the Mozilla "drivers" and we're working on getting it into shape for branching. When we get a handle on a few more bugs we'll create a Mozilla 1.0 branch and do a fairly quick Release Candidate 1. This will be a preview of what's to come with the final Mozilla 1.0 and an oportunity to gather feedback and TalkBack crash data that we will respond to over the following weeks as we approach the Mozilla 1.0 release.
--Asa
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}}