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Mozilla Poised for Revival?
MarkedMan writes "An interesting and fairly lengthy CNET article on Mozilla and the pending 1.0 release. Kind of shallow research, making some common mistakes (Like many others, he half implies that AOL picking Mozilla as the default browser automatically puts 35 million users in the Netscape camp.) Good to see this getting some fairly mainline press."
I have to admit that it will be good to be on this side of the fence during a brute force conversion of browsers (AOL to Netscape/Mozilla). I would love for some of these sites that use IE specific features of CSS or DHTML (or god forbid ActiveX) having 35 million screaming AOL users at their doors.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Even if AOL + Mozilla meant 35 million more Mozilla users and 35 million less IE users... It isn't that big a number when you look at the number of users using IE right now.
Would be nice if you could count on 35 million to just switch at the drop of a hat... but howmany are still using AOL3, 4,5,6 etc...
When Mozilla was first turned open source it was pretty bity and crashy and hopeless.
Now its probably one of the more stable browsers.
It does show that dumping a large amount of commercial source into the open community can produce results - but with this amount of code it does take time.
(Running mozilla 0.9.9)
I've seen a lot of comments that seem to totally discard any significance coming from AOL using Mozilla as the base of its browser.
:)
If nothing else, this seems particularly important to me because it will force more Web developers to stop using IE as a test browser.
With the poorest standards compliance of all browsers, this has created a flood of these "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer" pages, because they write THML, Javascript, etc. that is broken.
Now, if these broken Web sites are revealed as such by a larger audience, we could see some improvements in the overall quality, because something tells me the typical AOL user will happily complain about anything.
Source code is a lot like a parachute; it needs to be open in order to function properly.
probably not /.ed for those with good connections, but I had a hard time with it. Anyway:
But a comeback is exactly what the open-source project hopes to pull off in the next few weeks, when the Netscape Communications-backed effort releases the first official version of its Web browser. After four years in development, the pending event has renewed excitement in a project that once was hailed as a possible Microsoft killer--only to tumble into obscurity after lengthy delays.
The milestone itself is something of a fiction, representing a minor improvement over previous Mozilla browser versions--and one that will be quickly outstripped. The development team routinely turns out new "builds" every few weeks. Mozilla.org, the group steering the browser's development, debated the merits of setting a Mozilla 1.0 version at all. Ultimately, however, it decided the step is an important concession to attracting third-party developers that could create applications based on its technology.
"The most important thing to me is it's going to freeze the API (application programming interface)," said Ramalingam Saravanan, author of the Mozdev-hosted Protozilla project. "It's been changing so much, like every two weeks. You can't keep up."
As Mozilla.org readies the long-awaited 1.0 browser, speculation has swirled over the prospects of a renewed browser battle with Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer now dominates the Web.
The release comes as AOL Time Warner is testing Mozilla technology in versions of its America Online software, a move that could see Microsoft's Internet Explorer ousted as the default browser for some 35 million Web surfers. AOL Time Warner has also filed a civil suit on behalf of Netscape, which AOL acquired in 1999, that alleges Microsoft engaged in illegal practices.
The Mozilla project "is clearly AOL's latest effort to try to get some value out of the Netscape purchase," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.
Appealing to all camps
More significantly perhaps, the Mozilla faithful believe the technology's allure lies in its flexibility for running on various platforms including non-PC devices. Tech heavyweights, ranging from Sun Microsystems and Red Hat to Nokia (news - web sites), are already using Mozilla technology on a limited basis in their products.
But it will take more than tentative support to move Mozilla out of the shadows and into the limelight. Large software companies will have to be convinced that the technology can live up to their needs. That will be the biggest test of whether Mozilla's open-source roots can translate into new products coming from high-tech giants.
Mozilla architects are targeting the swelling wave of Web devices that require Internet-enabled software and accompanying applications to thrive. The next generation of cell phones, pagers, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and set-top boxes will require slimmed-down technology to access the Web, and Mozilla could model itself as the technology of choice.
Mozilla is a programming tool designed to let applications built with it run on almost any operating system. Mozilla developers initially concentrated on building a browser, but the underlying technology can be used to create many types of applications. Some developers have already branched into making Mozilla instant messaging (news - web sites) software, media players and other applications.
Work in the browser realm has focused on its rendering engine, called Gecko. The technology, which allows Web pages to be viewed on browsing software, can be embedded in a variety of products including non-PC devices such as set-top boxes and PDAs. Gecko has also become the cornerstone of the Mozilla browser and AOL's Netscape 6.
In addition to Gecko, Mozilla has drawn significant attention for its XUL, or XML-based User-interface Language. XUL (pronounced "zool") is language for describing user interfaces of various applications. Like Sun's Java language, it is meant to be a "write once, run anywhere" solution.
That has made it attractive to some developers seeking to create applications outside of the closed world of Microsoft.
"It's open source, so it's low cost," said David Ascher, director of programming tools for ActiveState, which is using Mozilla technology to create an interface that makes it easier to work with a range of programming languages. "That also means when there's a problem with the code we can go in and fix it ourselves. The other key benefit is portability. We don't have to change much of the code to run on different platforms, which is a powerful argument for us considering that many of our customers are not using Windows."
Tracing its roots
The Mozilla movement was established in 1998 by then-independent Netscape, which charged the open-source project with creating a compelling Web-browsing technology. At the time, Netscape was engaged in a bitter market share battle against Microsoft. It made the risky move of releasing the software code for its Communicator browser to the public, hoping to convince developers to help fight its adversary.
Almost four years later, the Mozilla revolution has turned out to be a grassroots campaign. It's been marred by squabbling, unrealistically high expectations, false starts, and most importantly, Microsoft's breakaway victory in the contest for browser dominance.
The Mozilla browser's delays were exacerbated after AOL acquired Netscape in 1999. Although AOL continued to support Mozilla as the foundation for future versions of Communicator, many developers questioned the Internet company's commitment to the browser effort.
AOL, meanwhile, has emphasized the project's independence.
"Mozilla.org remains an independent organization that exists to make Mozilla a successful open-source project, and it supports the entire Mozilla community," said Catherine Corre, an AOL spokeswoman.
In all, it took more than two-and-a-half years for Netscape to release its first browser product using Mozilla technology, Netscape 6. Developers unanimously criticized Netscape 6 as an unfinished, bug-prone beta release. Future versions of Netscape 6 have corrected most of the browser's initial problems.
Mitchell Baker, chief evangelist of the Mozilla.org project, admitted the group was confronted by a series of roadblocks that hampered its development time line. The biggest setback was a decision to completely scrap Netscape 4 source code as its foundation and rebuild it from scratch.
"People generally understand when you redo a whole house, you leave a wall or two standing," Baker said. "It wasn't clear right away that most of (the code) should've been rewritten. We started with the kitchen, and then realized we had to redo the bathroom, then realized the wiring was all wrong."
Thinking outside the box
With such a late entry, there's little chance the Mozilla browser can outpace Internet Explorer's dominance and ubiquity. Instead, Mozilla supporters view non-PC devices as the next frontier. Its flexible code can fit into many molds of varying devices, letting manufacturers of Web tablets, PDAs and set-top boxes tweak the Gecko browsing engine to their own tastes and specifications.
"Now instead of just having an application locked inside a browser window, now we can use it to create a full-fledged application," said David Boswell, project manager for CollabNet and co-founder of Mozdev.org, a group that is helping to steer about 66 Mozilla-based application development projects.
Mozdev's offerings include Chimera, a Mozilla-based Web browser that Boswell says is winning some converts among Mac OS X (news - web sites) users. Others projects that leave Web browsers far behind include the Jabberzilla instant messaging client and a music player called Lizzard.
Despite the promise of extensive application, the Mozilla technology faces considerable challenges. For one, mobile device companies such as Handspring and Palm already have browsers suited to their devices. Handspring has its own wireless browser called Blazer that is being used in many of its products and has been licensed by Sprint.
Meanwhile, Linux (news - web sites) Labs recently released a beta version of a Web browser for wireless Palm devices called Vagabond.
In a sense, the market for handheld browsers is already picking up steam without Mozilla. Despite an initial rush among developers to download the code, the project hasn't attracted a wave of corporations and legions of developers on nearly the scale of open-source operating system Linux.
"Why somebody would want to try out a Mozilla browser on the Handspring is beyond me because there's a really good browser out there," said Ken Smiley, an analyst at market research firm Giga Information Group. "That's what they were saying with the Gecko engine. I just don't think it's really proven yet that it has a superior solution."
Furthermore, Smiley questioned whether flexibility matters to non-PC device makers. Web tablet makers rarely produce mobile communicators, and cell phone manufacturers typically don't make set-top boxes. Cell phone giant Nokia is a notable exception; it uses Mozilla's browser in its Mediaterminal set-top box, which is only available in Sweden.
On shifting ground
Interest in Mozilla appears to be changing. Despite AOL's ambiguous relationship with Mozilla and Gecko, recent events may signal a commitment to the technology by the online giant. In March, the company began testing Gecko as the default browser technology for its AOL 7.0 software after years of using Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
If Gecko indeed becomes the default technology in the anticipated release of AOL 8 this fall, the tide in the browser wars will shift.
"All of a sudden the browser battle is much more interesting simply because of the sheer numbers of AOL subscribers," said Carl Howe, an analyst at market research company Forrester Research. "It is simply a very different bundling strategy in the same way that IE is bundled with Windows."
A booting of Internet Explorer would be felt around the world. It would mean AOL is stepping onto Microsoft's home turf to challenge its hold on Web browsers and possibly other applications closely knit into Windows. Although AOL says publicly that it does not intend such an advance, it is nevertheless funneling money and support to the front line.
AOL's Corre would not elaborate on Mozilla's role in the company's future. In fact, the company's being mum about it with everyone.
"That's the million dollar question, and wish I could answer it," Mozilla.org's Baker said.
Evan Hansen contributed to this report.
Maybe it will turn out like the dinosours in Jurassic Park, and destroy Internet Explorer?
Mozilla will be a great product eventually, but unfortunately I agree with Joel Spolsky that good software takes ten years to write, and you should NEVER rewrite code from scratch.
I know that as a software developer, I've certainly learned from Netscape's mistake.
Long live IE! Its just a better browser.
...but whatever, I guess..
While this was actually true to some degree in the early days of the Mozilla project and the later days of the IE project (IE 6 is almost respectable...for a Microsoft project), I believe Mozilla has surpassed Internet explorer in several areas that are important to at least myself. For one, as a sometimes web developer, Mozilla sticks closer to the standards. I've found myself on more than one occasion having to go back and figure out how to crap-up my HTML code to make it look right in IE. That's a waste of time, but because of people like you, and companies like Microsoft, I have to do it. Further, when I used to use IE back in the dark age of my OS use (i.e. Windows...also note that that i.e. has no relation to IE. In fact, even i.e. is embarrased by IE), I used to open up new windows like crazy! With tabbed browsing in Mozilla, I can keep a single instance of Mozilla open and keep all the sites I'm at organized! I'm never using a browser without tabs again!
For these and other reasons, I truly like Mozilla better than IE...even better than Navigator as well, as it seems less bloted than Communicator 6.0.
What matters about AOL adopting Mozilla is not that IE would somehow lose its majority share, but that a non-IE browser would subtend an important enough fraction of visitors that site designers could ill afford to ignore it. The IE-only travesties of today might give way to something approaching a standards compliant Web.
Has Mozilla decreased in popularity somehow? My impression is that as it gets more usable, more and more people are using it.
Kind of shallow research, making a some common mistakes (Like many others, he half implies that AOL picking Mozilla as the default browser automatically puts 35 million users in the Netscape camp.)
this is one of the things that irritates me about slashdot..
on the surface, it seems like this would throw a mass of people into the NS/mozilla camp. the slashdot "journalist" asserts that it actually won't, but doesn't back up his assertion.
also, "making a some common mistakes"?
Check out mpt and hyatt's viewpoints on current and future trends in mozilla development. Some very interesting views there, I think Dave Hyatt's call for hundreds of different browsers to suit different people should be a call to action! Look at how well galeon has done - as long as they all use the gecko engine, we'll all be richer for having different browsers for different occasions.
Very good point. I know the NOC I used to work at that supported AOL still used older AOL clients (as far back as ver.3) for dialup testing, because the customers were still using them. Some people will not change just for the sake of changing, especially if it's computer stuff they've gotten used to.
:)
There's also the fact that this would mean AOL customers downloading a new browser and configuring it. As I understand it, Mozilla isn't exactly something you'd want to grab and go from a dialup connection... don't forget copying those bookmarks! I *still* blow away my bookmarks on occasion... good thing I always keep a backup
Aww, FSCK!
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
The next generation of cell phones, pagers, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and set-top boxes will require slimmed-down technology to access the Web, and Mozilla could model itself as the technology of choice.
So the next generation of cell phones will have 256MB RAM?
Ok so AOL now uses mozilla rendering engine, while that's all great and dandy. Consider this, an open source project that is being used in a extrememly commercialized product, not only that but AOL is considered by many if not most the scum of the internet. While I'm aware that most everyone that reads slashdot hates Microsoft I fail to see how this effects hardly anyone here beyond the fact that websites they create will now have less IE visitors. AOL uses Mozilla because it owns netscape, not because IE sucks, in reality its a very decent web browser despite the fact that microsoft made it. Mod me flamebait.
The consensus seems to be that the old Netscape code base was really bad. Well, it might have been bad, but, you know what? It worked pretty darn well on an awful lot of real world computer systems.
Yes indeed, Netscape 4.x is really bad. Which must explain why I'm stil using it! (When I forget to run Moz, which is nicer.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Goto slashdot. See Mozilla icon. Think Mozilal.0 RC1 is released. Be disappointed.
/. many articles on Mozilla will there be before 1.0?!
C'mon! How
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
"Kind of shallow research, making a some common mistakes..."
Yeah a it is a easy to a make a some a common mostakes.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
So mozilla may gain some ground and users.
Do we see a return to yester year when web designers actually ignored proprietary html extensions and designed compatible (for lack of a better word) sites?
On that note, when you browse with your non IE browser and you stumble upon a site that renders totally useless (visual mess, links broken, or anything else that works only in IE), do you just go away or do you pop an email to the webmaster telling theme there losing visitors/customers?
I just installed Netscape 6.2.2 on XP Pro and it WILL NOT remember anything in the default or user profiles. Each time you start up the machine and log on, it makes you go thru the whole user config process again and again and again.
6.2.1 did not do that.
I use Mac OS X. There are atleast 3 Mozilla based browser floating around for OS X. And, for yucks, I _just_ installed a version of Mozilla that uses Xfree to display - I wanted to see how it might look different and I wanted the experience(wow, the text sure looks crappy)(but the code renders the same). The point is that Mozilla is available here and everywhere - certainly one the 'most available' applications that I have experienced. It seems like every permutation of every platform has a Mozilla available.
Like many other authors, Jim Hu has failed to grasp the larger picture. While Mozilla could be a potential competitor to IE, it's more of an alternative to IE. Most of the people that I know who use Mozilla do so because they are under a platform that doesn't have an IE browser installed by default. (I don't mean to suggest that my colleaques would use an IE browser if it were installed on the box).
I run linux 99% of my uptime. And I use galeon on top of Mozilla. Why? Not because I hate the concept of IE (I hate IE for other reasons) but because it's an alternative. Sure I have a Sun that I could run IE on, but the velocity of the Mozilla and Galeon development is the alternative solution that I'm looking for.
OpenSource developers aren't "let's go give MS a run for their money!" people. They're "let's go make a browser that sucks less." Not everything is a competition - some projects exist just to provide alternatives.
What is Python a competitor to? I dunno... It's just an alternative... Just like Mozilla...
-c
Do it for da shorties
--- http://www.statmarket.com/cgi-bin/sm.cgi?sm&featur e&week_stat
Please post further quotes and stats below... I was looking for raw numbers but couldn't find any...
Davak
The Last time i used netscape was like 6 years ago. I fully believed IE was better and booted faster.
2 months ago i heard Moz was making good prograss and seing how IE 6 is Junk(keeps freezing when Looking up DNS) I gave Moz a shot. I am converted.
I dont have to worry about pop up ads and VIruses. I say if We just Get Ppl to acutally try it the word of mouth with spread.
Just think of what will happed whejn AOL includes it with AOL 8?(is that what the next number wil be?) Kudos to the devs they put out a great product
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
It has been my experience that a great percentage of AOL users simply do not know that they can use any browser other than 'AOL'. They do not think of it as a browser, but an application called 'AOL'. ('How can you run AOL in Internet Explorer?' 'Can it run in Word, too?')
What's wrong with this picture?
First off, the basic problem with Mozilla is that they can't generate a stable release. I'm using it now, and there are many painful bugs, like broken text editing and undeletable long-line spam messages. And I just waited 22 seconds with Mozilla frozen for Mozilla to open an empty window. (Someone is going to say "those problems are fixed in the latest beta". But they're not fixed in the latest Netscape release.)
Mozilla is currently at version 0.9.9.x and counting. Someday, they'll declare a victory and go home, claming to be 1.0. Will it have every reported bug fixed? No. They vote on which bugs get fixed and keep the rest.
Personally, I wonder if there's a secret deal to make Mozilla lousy, financed by Microsoft.
My brother has a web site than can only be used with IE. So when I asked him what happened with surfers surfing with their fridge he just stared at me. He thought the idea ludicrous but nowadays you don't need a desktop computer to browse.
I don't like those home pages that say: Best seen with this or that browser, go here to download it. Do they really think that people will download 10-15 MB just to see their lousy homepage?
even i.e. is embarrased by IE
:)
Come on, someone's gotta give this a "Funny."
he half implies that AOL picking Mozilla as the default browser automatically puts 35 million users in the Netscape camp When ever has a MAJOR company been successful in pushing a product on users?
One big appeal of Mozilla is that, with this browser, non-Wintel users aren't second-class citizens.
IE 6.0 for Windows came out last August. Yet Mac users still aren't even at the 5.5 version -- the most current version for Macs is still 5.1.
The unstated message Microsoft sends to Mac users is, "You want the coolest, latest browser, then switch to Windows. If you want your browser to be two years obsolete, stick with your little toy Mac."
With the release of Mozilla 1.0, this browser will be giving IE some heavy competition -- particularly on non-Wintel platforms. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft suddenly starts offering Mac users a much more current and attractive version of IE. And if they do, the question will be: why weren't they doing this all along?
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
We're all missing the server equation here - MS is pretty damn big in the server side of things.
:)
Yeah yeah yeah - quote netcraft at me with Apache = 60% and so on. I believe it too, but it doesn't matter. *MANY* commerce site - the things your parents and friends visit - run on IIS (for better or for worse). You can argue percentages all you want, but there's enough of them out there. Heck Macs are about 5% of the computer market, but some people still care about them.
If you even concede that IIS has a 15% share of servers conducting commerce, that's a big number.
My point? If mozilla ever starts to be a credible browser threat, IIS7 (or 8 or whatever) will suddenly either not work with mozilla at all, OR give lower priority treatment to mozilla requests. Or, better yet, just occasionally drop requests, making it even harder to diagnose.
"Works fine when I use IE7.5, but danged if Mozilla 1.01.02RC3 (cause that's about where they'll be) crashes sometimes!"
There's already issues with SSL between IE and Apache servers and non IE browsers and IIS. MS controls too much on both sides - IN BUSINESS/COMMERCE, WHERE IT COUNTS - to ever let anything else ever get too big again.
Responses?
creation science book
The "risk" associated with mozilla becoming mainstream is that we would be more subject to spyware attacks and such because the user base has grown so that it is significant. And frankly, as much as we talk about mainstream acceptance, many of us will not like the other side effects of mainstream acceptance that I have mentioned.
If Mozilla does become mainstream, I think that there is a possibility for a K-Meleon revival and a port of the browser to linux. K-Meleon is a gecko based browser with many features similar to mozilla but it is "light" and does not have the news/mail/composer stuff in it.
So am I right about many slashdot users in the idea that they prefer to stay in the obscure corner? Reply to this!
The IE only days are now over. Anyone that realizes what is going on is scrambling to get compliant pages up. My main client was willing to ignore Netscape originally, then when we determined that Netscape 4.x was 6-8% of the audience for his site, he wanted the next version to support Netscape 4.x.
The site sorta works in Mozilla, but not terrifically. We're busting ass to redo the site with full HTML 4.01 compliance, CSS 1.0 compliance, and verifying everything in Netscape 4.7. Once you know Netscape's quirks, you can avoid using CSS features that confuse it.
We'll stay away from XHTML until Netscape 4.x is dead, and a properly working Netscape 6.5 will go a long way towards that. It's mostly corporate users, and they'll migrate when something better is available. In about 2 years, I'd expect Netscape 4.x to be dead, and we can all move on to XHTML.
Of course, there is always the option of doing two renderers, one for Netscape 4.x in HTML 4.01 and CSS 1, and one for IE 5+, NS 6+ in XHTML + CSS 2.0...
Alex
What I don't understand in this article is how they can compare current hand-held browsers to Mozilla or Gecko.
The "embedded" version of Mozilla contains all browsing components that normal Mozilla has. That includes full CSS1 support, javascript 1.5, DOM.
To the level of very high compatibility with thouse standards (same as normal Mozilla of course). Plus XUL support.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/
And it all takes 4.3Mb (archived) for windows version.
I really don't see any competitors here in terms of portability,compatibility and size (the other option that comes to mind is Opera).
I liked the google toolbar which is pretty convenient. How do u install in it mozilla.
I'd really like to see Mozilla become a viable browser, but I just downloaded the latest version and it's slow, unstable and full of bugs; for example, just try opening the bookmarks window when you have over 600 bookmarks at the top level, then try cut-and-pasting all those bookmarks into a folder at once so that it won't take a minute or more to bring up the menu, doesn't work. Then delete them... and it redraws the window after every deleting each bookmark. As a result, it took over ten minutes just to delete them! On the good side, at least it doesn't lock up for ten seconds or so on the Hotmail inbox.
So I won't be switching from Netscape 4.7 and IE6 for a while yet.
Well most likly what will happen is mozilla will be on the new aol CDs and as AOL knows the exact version they are installing on everybodies computer, as well as the exact versions of IE that came with previous AOLs it should be no trouble for them to program the transition seemlessly, nobody should really notice.
I recently upgraded a Win box (yes, the shame) from Netscape 4.75 to 6.11 and it's a dog.
Slow as molasses. Tuned it a bit, but it's still dog slow.
I hate IE - but I need something that uses my DSL and doesn't take 60 seconds to render an email or bring up a page.
Is there much difference between the Mozilla 1.0 build and the Netscape 6.11? Should I have chosen native Win code during the install instead of "generic" code?
Are there any useful sites to help with this - and what are their URLs? And does anyone know how much of a difference (stats, URLs, basic ratio) there is between the Netscape build and the Mozilla build?
Yes, I tried Google - and it helped a bit in tuning some things. But I've got a Qwest DSL line, and it's dog slow now.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I emailed their customer service and they said "Netscape does tend to be a little quirky. We suggest using Internet Explorer or the most updated version of Netscape."
It just so happens that I had IE5 and Netscape 6 on my machine so I tried doing the transfer with both app's and got the same error. I emailed customer service again, and here is the response (word for word):
"Have you tried Internet Explorer 6, as that is the most recent and should solve your problem. That is actually what 95% of our Customer's use who access our website. Thank you."
Can you imagine that? Think they were blowing me off?
I can only imagine the kinds of reponses from customer service folks who have never heard of Mozilla:) btw-Downloaded Mozilla for my home computer the other day, running on OSX and have been very pleased so far!
I use Mozilla or Galeon everywhere now. Some web sites detect which browser you are using, and if they don't see "IE" or "Netscape" they won't let you in.
So I have changed my user agent string, and both Mozilla and Galeon now claim to be Netscape 4.0. Given how buggy and crash-prone 4.0 was, everyone is using 4.7x if they are really using Netscape, so "Netscape 4.0" ought to be a red flag in a server log.
Here is my user agent string for Mozilla:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)
So there is at least a chance that if webmasters look at the server logs, they can see that I'm actually using Mozilla. If they just use scripts to tally what browsers have visited their sites, and the scripts ignore the "compatible" remark, my visits will show up as Netscape 4.0... oh well, no trick is perfect.
Here is what you put into prefs.js to set the user agent string this way:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)")
Mozilla can handle every web site I care about, if it can get in. This trick lets it in.
Maybe Mozilla should have a feature that lets you set the user agent string on a per-site basis! That way we could be leaving "Mozilla" in the logs on most sites, and only lying to the sites that won't let Mozilla in.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Somehow all this "Mozilla 1.0 will be shipped Real Soon Now (tm)" articles remind me of some guy running around with an "The End Is Near!"-sign, but I fail to find an analogy for all the "All your AOL browsers are belong to us!" comments.
95% of the people using AOl wouldn't understand that they are currently using IE. Most people I have delt with fixing their computers call it something like "AOL Internet Browser"
I garuntee you that people will call customer support because their websites "look a little different" after the switch.
AOL likes to market to people ignorant about computers. Just look at their commercials, they have one person saying on it "I like to hear the 'you've got mail' blah blah blah". Those "testimonials" are definately directed for people who dont understand computers.
IE for Mac and IE for Windows don't begin to have identical feature sets, even where HTML tags and CSS support are concerned. The same actually goes for MS Office on the Mac, which also doesn't use the same names as Office for Windows.
The reason for this is because Microsoft's Mac products are produced by an entirely different division of the company, which focuses on Mac-specific interfaces and features as well as maximum compatibility with Windows-made files. It's also partly because most of the whiz-bang features for IE-Win (and Office-Win) are specific to the Windows OS, nearly impossible to reproduce on the Mac even if Mac users wanted them. Microsoft's Mac and Windows products may have the same name, but invariably that's where the similarity ends.
Mozilla and Netscape Navigator have used a common code base for all platforms, so identical version numbers were meaningful there. Microsoft does not. Comparing IE-Mac and IE-Win by version numbers is an exercise in futility.
And as an unrelated aside: is IE6 for Windows really all that different from IE5? I sure don't see any major differences in my day-to-day browsing.
mozilla is a perfect example of how stupid, contrite little sayings like "never do this or that" should never guide you... in some circumstances (like mozilla), a rewrite is the best option.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
My point? If mozilla ever starts to be a credible browser threat, IIS7 (or 8 or whatever) will suddenly either not work with mozilla at all, OR give lower priority treatment to mozilla requests. Or, better yet, just occasionally drop requests, making it even harder to diagnose.
Now I've heard some paranoid things before, but Microsoft is not quite so stupid as to cripple the performance of their software for a competing browser, just to make "15% of the web" slower to surf for Mozilla users. They will INSTANTLY lose credibility with MANY IIS MAINTAINERS. Companies tend to get pissed off when software excludes some of their customers. (Ignoring those companies in bed with Microsoft, of course.)
Works fine when I use IE7.5, but danged if Mozilla 1.01.02RC3 (cause that's about where they'll be) crashes sometimes!
You're trying to make fun of the version numbering for Mozilla, but I've got IE 6 installed right now, which lists it's version number as: 6.0.2600.0000.xpclnt_qfe.010827-1803.
Yes, that is what it says in the "About MSIE" window for "version."
"And like that
Mozilla has excellent DOM2 support, but crappy XSL support. Whereas IE is the opposite.
Whatever the developers prefer, is what the end-users are going to have to use.
Mozilla itself is pretty awful, IMHO, due to it not looking or working like any other Mac OS X (or OS 9 for that matter) application. The weird differences aren't beneficial either. However, Chimera, based on Mozilla but sporting a Mac OS X Quartz UI and page rendering is looking to be a really great thing. I'm very excited about what happens with Chimera but don't forsee installing another version of Mozilla itself.
--- What?
Yeah a it is a easy to a make a some a common mostakes.
Indeed it is.
In the past, Netscape browsers had Mozilla/x.x at the beginning of their user agent string. Then MSIE mimicked that in their early browsers so that sites built for Netscape would see MSIE 3.x as compatible (or whenever they started doing this). Now MSIE 6 continues this, with a user agent like:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)
The new Mozilla browser, which AOL calls Netscape 6, is showing a user agent string like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.9+)
So when the 1.0 version is released, are they really going to follow that same trend? Or will they use the user agent I propose here:
Mozilla/1.0 (No, really, this is Mozilla 1.0, not Netscape or shitty old MSIE pretending to be Mozilla.)
And just imagine when we get to Mozilla 4.0:
Mozilla/4.0 (No, not Netscape 4.x or MSIE 6.x, this is truly Mozilla 4.0... PLEASE, YOU MUST BELIEVE ME!)
"And like that
Well, until we weed out the lame, lazy web developers like those at Capital One. It doesn't mean a thing. If you try to use Netscape 6.X or Mozilla (any version) you get a graphic that says this browser isn't supported and that Netscape 6.x and Mozilla do not even support 128bit SSL connections. I find this absolutely frelled up because when you go to Netscape.com you get pelted with Capital One ads.
Lets face it. Until the MCSD and Frontpageish web developers get fired and we go back to testing websites for absolute W3C compliance. It's bloody fruitless to talk about or get excited about.
I also can't use browser w/o tab now.
But moreover, mozilla can disable all pop-up/pop-down ads (disable opening of unrequested windows). This small feature makes me love it.
Another thought: will sites (e.g. Yahoo!) block or *dislike* mozilla just because their pop-up ads won't work?!
I'm confused, is it good that the shallow research or the mistakes is getting the mainline press exposure? Or is it both?
that, and the fact that they are just using Gecko, not the entire bloated Mozy.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Over the course of my employment--about three years now--I've rewritten over four applications from scratch... and it's the best thing that could have ever happened to the code.
The problem with application development is that new features tend to get tacked on over the years. Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?" and all of a sudden, you're given a chice: either hack on a modification to make the code do something it wasn't originally intended to do, or rewrite it from scratch. The first choice is quicker the first few times through, but programs grow more and more buggy and cumbersome as more and more extra features are hacked into the code. Pretty soon, you're left with a horrid, unmaintainable mess that has tons of random, hard-to-find bugs--much like Netscape 4.x.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them. Mozilla may have taken longer to write because it was written from scratch, but you can be damn sure it's a better browser than it would have been had it been based on the Netscape 4 code. The Mozilla project wouldn't have thrown away all that code unless they had a good reason to do so, and anyone outside the project who arbitrarily says they should have kept it is talking out of their ass.
In windows, mozilla is slooooooow. It takes forever to load (don't tell me to enable quick launch, I don't need any more system tray icons, thanks) and slow to render. If I have it minimized for a while, it takes it forever to redraw the page once I decide to pop it back up. It's insane. On my linux box, NS and mozilla are about the same, so I use mozilla and submit the bugs, but I couldn't take the dragging feeling in windows, so I've reset my default browser to IE.
On top of the speed issues there are JS compatibility issues. Our school has a web-accessible email server (netscape's messenger express), which works fine with NS and IE, but has some problems with Mozilla's thinking on javascript. Some of the web pages I've designed that have javascript also break under mozilla. They run fine in IE NS and Opera, and, except for a nested table rendering problem in NS that I had to find a workaround for, I didn't have to do much tweaking after I wrote the code the way my js references told me it was supposed to be done. In other words, I feel no compelling reason to customize them for Mozilla, considering 99% of the users of the sites use IE or NS.
The only reason to use mozilla is if you're an anti MS or OSS idealogue (there are things to be said for both of those points of view, although not for being closed-minded idealogues). I'd just rather use the best/easiest tool for the job, and in most cases I've had to reluctantly admit that MS does a pretty good job at things. (clench teeth, prepare for -mods)
I work on a Web Application, and we want to tell our users its ok to use mozilla, however we still have too many problems with Multilanguage support. In particular use of Global IME for language input just does not work right in Mozilla. See defect (98434). Our web app has over a 1000 input fields. So this is a show stopper for us. Hence we can't back mozilla till this is fixed. I imagine this is a show stopper for lots of other sites, especially overseas. Until this is fixed I don't think Mozilla is ready for the big time like everyone is claiming.
A certain percentage of my users are on Netscape 4.x, and I need to make the site viewable to them. Therefore, I will make certain that the siet works for them.
For everyone else, HTML 4.01 and CSS 1.0 should work fine. If they don't understand a tag, they ignore it. Netscape 4.x has some cascading and inheritance issues, so we need to work around them. After you've done it a bit, you get the hang of it.
Of course I'll test the site on IE, you think that I'm an idiot?
I won't, however, bother with Konqueror, Opera, OmniWeb, or other "fringe" browsers. They can take my compliant web sites and deal with them or not.
I am coding to the standards because its the best approach. Search engine spiders will understand the code, fringe browsers will understand the code, and anyone that writes a user agent that understands the standard will understand the code.
I need to meet business needs, and that requires the site being usable under IE and Netscape, so I'll do so.
If I'm coding to HTML 4.01 Transitional (with the DocType) AND CSS 1.0 to the standard, why the hell do you care that I'm ignoring certain CSS options? I'm giving you a standard document, I really don't understand your hostility to my approach?
Alex
Why are you offended
- You can tell Mozilla to not open ANY popup windows.
- You can tell Mozilla to block banner ads by right clicking on them
- You can tell Mozilla not to loop animated gifs at all. Or you can tell Mozilla to loop animated gifs only ONCE (my current setting)
- You can tell Mozilla to accept cookies based on varying levels of privacy
Can you do any of this in IE? I also prefer Mozilla on windows because it renders pages faster than IE on my old laptop, has tabbed browsing, and supports mouse gestures. IE? Hello?... because they write THML...
I'd like to nominate this as the official name of the Microsoft-Only version of HTML.
I'm submitting an RFC to the W3C right now.
She got laid off by AOL. Apparently she still "runs" the Mozilla project though as the "Chief Lizard Wrangler".
I personally don't like her (having met her in person), and think that she deserved to get laid off because she didn't seem to have a good attitude and was not very outgoing. She was even pushing for a "source-only" release of Mozilla 1.0 so they "don't have to support it".
I personally hope that Mozilla 1.0 will bring in fresh new developers to the project. That would definitely be a boost, otherwise I am afraid that developers are getting burnt out.
...or was that not a very flattering article. The post makes it sound like this was a victory for Mozila - being recognized by CNET. But my reading was that they basically said:
1. It is not really a "real" 1.0 release
2. It has always been buggy and not useable
3. It is not as mature as IE
4. AOL might switch to it, but only because of sour grapes
5. Its history shows it is unreliable
6. No one in their right mind would trust their future in Mozilla.
Maybe I read too much into it, but that was the sense I got. As someone who has been using Mozilla on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux since 0.8 or so, none of this has been my experience. It is more solid than IE, faster, and very reliable. It now has at least as many features as IE and crashes almost never on any of the platforms I have used it on.
There is one site that I know of that attempts to pop up it's ads, and once they fail pops open a dialog box that tells you they use those ads to pay for the site and you should disable your adblocking software. You can't get to the site unless you allow the popups.
This deserves +%, insightful.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Further, "good software takes ten years to write" is a silly generalization from a silly man. Software simply takes, as long as it takes... like Duke Nukem Forever, which may take 20 years ;-)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Help us test the our new ftp servers by
s t- 1.0.0// latest-1 . .0/
downloading the latest nightly branch build
from either of:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/late
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly
Help us test the 1.0 branch by trying out that build and making sure no horrible regressions have crept in.
slashdotters, do your thing!
I finally downloaded Mozilla after all the hype. Holy shit is it fast. It is noticeably quicker than IE. I used to give a passing nod to people that said that IE is the best browser, back when it had Netscrape to deal with. No more. They should get working on a PDA version. That space is ripe given MS's crappy CE browser, and don't get me started on AvantGo...
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Don't you have to have to be something important, fall, and then come back for there to be a revival?
Not that moz isn't good, but it does not seem like a valid reason to cheerleader it
I write this as a standards-loving web developer who has been fooling with Visual Studio .NET for 2 months...
.NET sites built in VS.NET WYSIWYG mode. There is a compatability mode but it drops back to Netscape 4 which also won't work correctly.
It is going to be UGLY when the 35 Million Gecko users (I know, shush) smack up against hundreds of ASP
We all know that Slashdot trolls are perhaps the most entertaining part of the site. One must view comments at -1 in order to see the wonder that is the /. troll community. However, page-wideners should not be considered a part of the troll community, and instead should be considered Troll Enemy #1. Why? Because if the whole page is broken by a massive page widening, the page becomes unviewable and the reader is forced, regrettably, to browse at 0, missing the cream of the crop of trollings.
All trolls unite against page-wideners!
I spent a summer living with my uncle, who had AOL. If you used another browser without using the AOL browser for 15 minutes, it declared you idle and disconnected you from the 'net.
That was REALLY annoying. Hopefully it's not still true.
One thing that MacOSX suffers from is lack of a speedy browser. I recently downloaded Navigator - a gecko based OSX browser. It's very immature but looks great, doesn't crash, and feels twice as fast as anything else out there. All it needs is a few more features and it'll be the browser to beat on OSX. While the developers of Navigator deserve some recognition, most of it goes the the developers of the excellent gecko engine. Thanks everyone - you know who you are...
Willy
Obviously its silly to rewrite good code for the sake of rewriting or understanding it, but you're flogging Joel's party line a bit too much.
> Good Web Developers hit up w3.org's validators for testing compliance.
I don't know, that thing is awefully picky. It doesn't even validate with the Mozilla web site (although it is possible). Are the Mozilla developers bad at web development? Perhaps. More acurately, I think a good web site doesn't necessarily have to follow all the W3C standards (although it is nice, I suppose).
I've seen countless web sites that display very well in Mozilla that get torn apart by the validator. I know, by ensuring W3C compiance you can be sure it will work in almost all browsers, but I don't necessarily care. I only worry about Mozilla and Internet Explorer. (Sorry Opera users, but it's bad enough dealing with two browsers on 3 different operating systems.)
I guess that's not why I'm not a web development professional...
After you have installed mouse gestures from Optimoz simply edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/gestimp.js to modify gestures as you like.
However, there's a bug that causes install to fail partially in some of the latest nightly builds. After install you have to edit .../chrome/mozgest/content/ pref/mozgestPrefOverlay.xul and replace all occurrences of "outliner" with "tree" to make preferences work (pref should be the in the advanced preferences branch, after editing you need to restart Mozilla). Do this only if you cannot see "Mouse Gestures" pref in the Advanced preferences brach.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
You don't say what hardware you're running Moz, so it's hard to assess your performance problem.
I hated running 0.9.6 on my notebook machine (AMD K6-2/333, 160MB RAM), but loved it on my desktop (P3/850, 512MB RAM). I stayed with Netscape v4.7x on my notebook because Moz was so miserably slow.
After increasing the notebook CPU's L2 cache from 0KB (yes, zero) to 256KB I installed Moz v0.9.9. Now I love it on this box too! I don't know if it was the previous lack of CPU cache or the several additional months of tweaks that went into Moz 0.9.9, but it's working great for me.
It is still slow to start, but if you use the Quick Launch feature you never see it after the initial bootup of the machine.
That my experience in both Windows and Linux (notebook and desktop machines are both dual-boot).
Maintenance of existing code is horrible. I'd imagine that without the strict commercial deadlines most open source volunteer programmers are going to go for the perfect re-write rather than the time spent learning & maintaining an existing code base.
Which is why its unlikely that IE will ever be re-written.
Jason
Over the course of my employment--about three years now--I've rewritten over four applications from scratch... and it's the best thing that could have ever happened to the code. ... you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them.
How common is it for the ORIGINAL developers to be the people doing the code rewrite? Rewrites are usually done because the new developers cannot understand how the original code works. Were the four applications you rewrote your code or someone else's code? If you cannot extend your own code without rewriting it from scratch, then you need to learn about information hiding.
Yes, Netscape 4 had many bugs. However, Mozilla also has many bugs. Why do you think it has taken THREE years to release a stable version? Here's a quote from Lou Montulli, one of the founding engineers of Netscape and the creator of Lynx responding to Joel Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" article. Lou says,
"I agree completely, it's one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape. In 1998, after wasting a year wanking, a group of new but experienced programmers, and one of our misguided founders, decided it was a good idea to rewrite everything. I had alot of vested interest since I had done most of the original design work on Navigator, but I was unable to supply enough visions of doom to divert the effort. The original design had degenerated substantially due to the integration of Java and the rapid pace of zig zag development that went on over the course of 4 years. There was good reason for a large change, but rewriting everything was a bit overboard to say the least. I laughed heartily as I got questions from one of my former employees about FTP code the he was rewriting. It had taken 3 years of tuning to get code that could read the 60 different types of FTP servers, those 5000 lines of code may have looked ugly, but at least they worked."
cpeterso
I've been programming for over 20 years, the real test is what the end users think. mozilla effectively abandoned its end users. Sure bits could have been re-written , but starting from scratch gave the ball to MS IE to play with
Joe Idiot Manager says, "Ahh, it looks good, but can you make it do my laundry?"
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
If you're writing a piece of software the second time around, you know what mistakes you made the first time, and can avoid them.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Programmers who join a thriving business should show some humility and realize they stand on the shoulders of giants, not idiots.
one word: BLOATware.
damned ugly thing it is to, and skinning it doesn't help. all the skins for it were made by aesthetically impaired and/or apparently blind individuals.
now, Chimera has some promise... uses the gecko engine, and will be a BROWSER only, no crap tacked on it like mozilla has (mail, etc)... Chimera, it's *AHEM* for OS X only.
You can tell Mozilla to block banner ads by right clicking on them
After those big ugly ads appeared on Slash, I finally decided to block slashdots ads as well. And now I happily read Slashdot 100% image free. I bet they did that on purpose. But I really don't need all that eye candy anyway. After reloading Slash 5 times a day for the last few years I was getting a little tired of them. I read for the content, after all.
The problem isn't with Joe Idiot Manager but with Joe Idiot Customer who ultimately pays Joe Idiot Programmer's salary. Joe Idiot Customer wishes to buy the feature now instead of when Joe Idiot Programmer feels the code base is right.
These things take time. When new features are hurriedly glommed onto an existing, already shoddy code base, you get a shoddy product. If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
And if the original code base was so inflexible that it couldn't support much enhancement, then you can blame Joe Idiot Programmer and his Idiot Manager who, alas, developed it without the benefit of knowing what mistakes they made the first time were.
Times change. In the tech industry, when you design a product, you have no idea what people are going to want put on it five years down the road. If you can accurately predict that sort of thing, you need to be in R&D, and not programming.
Some things can be anticipated, others can't. When Netscape was originally written, they didn't expect to have to add in support for tables. Since it was added in version 2, Netscape's table support has always been slow, weak, and buggy. The renderer should have been gutted and rewritten then, but it wasn't. Since then, the problems have grown worse because bad code has been piled on top of bad code.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible. Well, they didn't. "Should have" doesn't get you very far when you're producing a prodct, and Mozilla is no exception.
said Ken Smiley, an analyst at market research firm Giga Information Group. "That's what they were saying with the Gecko engine. I just don't think it's really proven yet that it has a superior solution."
I've worked extensively in equities, real estate and import/export industries but I ain't never meet no one like geeks and geek watchers. On one hand the universal hue and cry of geeks is that joe user has no idea of security or what constitutes a good app. The buying public moves lemming like in one direction to another with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Then you get a remark like the one quoted above. People a 'killer app' just don't gotta be no superior solution. It just has to be basically functional, ubiqituous and what your friends use. Seen the sit com 'Friends', silly show, but in a big way it's the way we are. Users just wanna belong and if Mozilla can put out a viable product and the public picks up on it in large enough numbers then it will rule. "Badges, we don't need no stink'n badges". Simple n'est pas?
The bug in this article is rife in articles on IT products, i.e., it insisits on predicating the success of the technology in the mass market with the engineering of the app as it might underly the core technology of, in this case, the net. Anyone following this lead, like the cowboy hero, jumps on his horse and rides off into the sunset in all directions at once.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
How common is it for the ORIGINAL developers to be the people doing the code rewrite? Rewrites are usually done because the new developers cannot understand how the original code works. Were the four applications you rewrote your code or someone else's code? If you cannot extend your own code without rewriting it from scratch, then you need to learn about information hiding.
Okay, I admit, two of those projects were my own, and when I wrote them the first time, I did need to learn a bit more about information hiding. Mind you, I was an intern at the time. Since then, I've been hired on as a full-time employee.
The other two projects were written very badly, by people who had obviously never attempted to write projects of this type before. To give you an example, one used Netscape 4 and Apache to form the user interface of a local non-web application. The program itself used a postgres database to send signals between various daemons and cgi scripts. The re-coded version is a single executable that uses GTK+ as the gui. It's simpler, and a lot less crash-prone. Sometimes, bad design decisions don't give you the option of editing code that you already have. It's a fact of life.
I'm not saying that rewrites are great. Sometimes, they're just necessary.
It seems pretty fast to me on Windows 98. In a lot of ways, its faster than IE5. I have no problems with slow unminimizing. That's probably because of all that extra bloat of Win2k. It also seems a lot faster than the Linux version I have, though that's a few months old.
I wonder if AOL will use the Mozilla Application Framework to recreate the entire AOL interface? The interface that I see in the webvertisements pretty much sucks.
Isn't this what OEOne did? I know that their interface looks pretty good.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
8% means thousands of dollars a week (it's a small site). We can't just ignore that.
Blander = better for these sites, convey information, push product.
Besides, you can always return different stuff to Netscape 4.x than IE, we already do that. When we break standards to enhance on IE, we only return that to IE users. It's minor stuff, some of their Javascript.
People aren't suffering, I'm just being careful with the code. The "shiny objects" of the site are always graphics and Flash.
Alex
Lendrick and cpeterso are having a provoking discussion here. I appreciate it. As a manager of a small team of Web developers, I would put in my own two cents. My experience is that both of you are correct. Code does experience feature creep, planned or otherwise. So plugging in new features can require some ugly work unless the code is perfectly modular (and that's rare -- even if you deliberately make things modular, there is a good chance you won't anticipate every kind of need). Given years of development time, maintenance can become very expensive as new developers waste large amounts of salary trying to learn the code. And cpeterso is on the right track -- having green developers do the rewrites will doom the rewrite to repeat the same mistakes. Yet often the original developer is gone, or is wedded to his/her design and won't rewrite, or is bored of the code and has lost interest.
For me, I have this problem -- a codebase that is developer-hostile. I have one employee working on our intranet, and one working on our public site. I intend to swap the employees and have them rebuild each other's work. The advantages:
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I was a hardcore IE supporter and user, never really had any plans on switching until I read here that Mozilla allows tabbed browsing and ability to prevent unrequested popups. I tried it, used it and I don't want to use IE anymore. IE would take up 20meg per instance on some web pages (big memory hog), Mozilla takes about 30meg for all the instances running. I have already started recommending it to people. RIP IE :)
What's this Geeko injun thing ah keep hearin' 'bout?
This may or may not be best done from scratch; I dunno, I've not seen the code, so that's up to you.
That way, you get two developers thoughts on each aspect, not just "I did it this way because I think it's cool", and since they know the requirements of both sites, they will make sure that the library makes their lives easier. Then you can swap them over every week between intranet and internet sites, and they'll not notice the difference, since the APIs (the library of code they've developed) is the same.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
It sounds like Opera is your browser of choice.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Hey Sparkz. I haven't seen your sig in a long time. But anyway, there actually isn't anything similar on the front-end -- CSS, JavaScript, HTML, all different stuff. Even the PHP on the backend -- about 100,000 lines of code -- is different. The intranet has a budgeting app, an org chart app -- the public site can reuse very little of this. But all those PHP functions and modules need to be more rigorous. Functions for reading & sending email should be separate files that get included, just as the files to initiate a database connection are included. Multiply that by a few hundred more functions and modules that can potentially be cleaned up and put into reusable form, and now we're talking about seriously organized code. That's what I'd like to get to.
There is a game of Risk that comes with C source, and I really liked the organization of the code. It was not only modular, but included files were neatly stored into sensible folders and sub-folders. So when you look at the code, you really didn't need to know all 20,000 lines. I made a few changes by simply picking the folders I was interested in (ai, server), opening the applicable file (and thanks to the include statements, each file was only a couple hundred lines long), and tweaking. That is radically better than our 100 files all shoved into the top level of the Web directory, each about 500-10,000 lines long, with tons of redundant functions and code tweaks that made it into some of the copied functions but not others. And still, the 100 files are the result of planning, and it's much better than anything I had at the last company I worked for. But I see others doing better and I want to emulate them.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Am I the only one?
You be the judge.
http://home.attbi.com/~beef.jerky/xmosaic.bin
If Joe Idiot Customer wants a program that doesn't blue screen all the time, then he needs to wait long enough for quality code to be produced.
Mozilla is not a commercial venture so it can afford to tell customers to wait as long as it wants. If Joe Customer gets tired of waiting and switches to IE, that's what customers do.
You claim that Netscape should have made their code more flexible.
Not at all. I have no idea if they could have or not. My point was that even if they could have, no one should come along years later and call anyone connected with Netscape or any other mature codebase an idiot.
I read too many comments on current sites that don't support netscape/mozilla, and on the stats pages that say so many people are using MSIE.
/apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)"
I've installed *nix on many desktops where I work, and have the users using galeon, but I had to set the browser string to something MSIE-like or else sites crucial to our business reject them. And after that little change, all of a sudden the site FULLY supported galeon (w/ moz 9.9), gee, what a shocker.
Sad, but there's no good way to tell how many people are using what anymore.
FWIW, a few of those sites: quest quoting tool, and webdialogs.com account admin
Someone posted this link as a really good browser detection javascript: mozilla.org It said my galeon on linux was WinNT running MSIE 6.
If you're running galeon, you can set your string and test this thing out by doing this:
gconftool -s
There is something called the second system syndrome that suggest that the first version is patched to death, then the whole thing is rewritten with grand-ideas to make things better and miserabily fails (because it tries to solve world-hunger), and the third pass is generally the good one.
My experience tend to match this, btw.
yeah, i might be joking, what do you think?
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
AOL's confines on M$ platforms are the one's that Bill Gates creates for all M$ users. That's because the current AOL client software uses IE as it's browser.
I know this because my mom uses AOL as her only ISP, so I use it when I'm at her house, and because I encourage her to get pictures from my ftp site. She only uses the browser that AOL has for her surfing, and it behaves excactly as IE does. It lists her as IE_user for anonymous logins and exibits the same abominal ftp behavior, such as opening multiple sessions and not closing them until the sever overflows the number of concurent user allowed, and locking the entire GUI while the ftp site does not respond. Nice, eh? Oh yeah, you can open up IE with all it's shiney junk and it knows all your AOL browsing history and vice versa. Once code, two faces.
IE's poor performance is only the begining of the limits IE puts on it's users. File format problems and the forced downloads of adverts are more serious agrivations, that amount M$ to leverage it's power into the web. That's why it's so important to M$
It becomes apparent to all where the souce of incompatibility is when the user has nothing but M$ crap and it does not talk to itself and crashes anyway. That's the way things are at work, and everybody there knows.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
What a concept, Microsoft embraces and extends the English language! M$ embracement is always half done, and the missing functionality is crammed into strange extentions. Imagine that the M$English does not include any past tense construtions but instead has an "enhancement" to the future perfect tense that does the job. NT_English has the same problems, but a real korny sound to it that's popular with want to be's for years after free alternatives made the NT replacement unneeded. Engliz2000 has all the same problems but is based on New Technology Technology that is undone by mergence with the older M$English that has been enhanced to autocomplete thoughts and has had most of the logic filters removed so that adverts can be pushed into your head easier. EnglizXP is completely incomprehsible to speakers of Standard English and changes continuously. EnglizXP is then made the standard language of all MBA thesis and dissertation work, flooding the world with management that speaks only in buzword phrases.
Oh wait, it did happen! It was called Word.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
You see, Mozilla developers know how to, and not to, build a browser. Somehow, through some strange chain of circumstances plus big balls, they didn't humor the marketoids and stick to small improvements. They designed a browser for the next 10 years.
We have not yet begun to see how this work will pay off. You see, if you were in charge of "improving" IE6, what would there be for you to do? You might think "this module needs a serious rewrite" but your team would say "don't fuckin touch it--that code has been there since the Mosaic days, nobody really understands anymore what it does, but if you fuck with it, the whole ship is going down." "Well, what about this other module that needs a rewrite?" "Sure, good luck. Some temp patched that stuff together in '94. He had a deadline, and I guess he loved GOTOs..."
My point is that basically, improving IE is now a lost cause. Just about all the tweaking that's doable to that venerable mess has already been done. Sure they might paste on more modules, and they'll spice up the UI with each release. Other than that, they'll sit on their hands.
Mozilla was built from the ground up to be modular, reusable, publically documented, coded correctly. They took a long time getting the fundamentals right, and they refused to cut corners. That took a while, but as a result, Mozilla can be tuned into an ass kicking browsing machine.
To use an analogy: I'm sure that when the jet engine was conceived, the fastest planes used propellers. You might say that it's stupid to throw out piston+prop engines if you've already invested so much time on tuning and testing them. And I'm sure the best propeller planes were faster and more reliable than the first jet planes. Still, you wouldn't be stupid if you put all your eggs into the "jet" basket, because you know the potential of the technology, and you know that in the long run, they'll leave props in the dust.
It seems to me that IE is like a propeller plane that works very well, and Mozilla is a jet plane with many of the quirks that new technology brings with it. Right now, they're about equally well suited for their missions. But there's nowhere else for the prop plane to go.
Well, that was my long-winded take of what's up. In summary: sometimes it's right to throw everything away and comit to a better concept, as painful as that might be in the short term. It won't be long that people turn up their noses at IE.
Although I love the tabbing, cookie control, and pop-up control there are still three reasons I use IE. First, my login manager doesn't work with Mozilla. I have a lot of sites I need to log in to, so this is important to me. Second, I honestly can't live without my google toolbar. Third, it still doesn't display a lot of sites correctly, especially if they use java. Maybe this is related to standards compliance, but IE displays all the sites I visit correctly....
Brain-dead moderator alert. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to do something about this in meta-moderation, but just in case, let me state why this is a horrid, knee-jerk moderation.
:-)
This post should NOT have been modded "Off-Topic", as the two functions the AC refers to are in fact features of Mozilla, and this discussion is also about Mozilla. (Duh.)
These aren't the only cool things about Moz, BTW -- tabbed browsing also is quite nice. Not mention support for HTML, CSS, and DOM standards that no other browser can touch. Not to mention MathML and optional SVG. I'm using Moz 0.9.9 for all my browsing, email, and IRC now, and it works pretty damn well.
And it's nice to see some positive mainstream attention, too.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Using the classic theme, or better yet, pinstripe, mozilla fits in quite nicely.
Right. And the users will be asked if they want to grant that right. Which of course, most of them being complete idiots will do.
But that's not the point.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So consider it from that angle. That old "ugly" code - that happens to work - will drag you down as the years go on. Being ugly, and uncommented, will cause problems. If it can't be rewritten and if another programmer can't understand 'why' then you're screwed anyway.
Rewrites usually follow guidelines and comments in old code anyway.
You sayd it, start from scratch, not rewrite from scratch. You can always reuse a lot of code and redo the wrong parts / enhance the lacking parts. There's no need to "relearn" everything if you have thought things cleverly from the start. Some people just like hardcoding everything again and again for a lack of initial vision. And they are the ones likely to end the things sooner: but don't ask for ANYTHING not specified in the "whatever" requirements.
unfinished: (adj.)
It just struck me that Mozilla and Emacs seem to have some common traits. They have both ventured beyond being single purpose applications and have become platforms of some fashion. What is it with this approach, what's the driving force that makes a project take a look at it's core technology and it's ideas and declare that "This is so cool it should be used elsewhere, everywhere, by everyone."?
Hubris?
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
IE Favourites are actually pretty simple (each folder in the menu is a folder on disk, each favourite is a plain-text .url file structured like a very simple INI file), and Netscape 6 automatically imports IE's Favourites as a submenu of Bookmarks. Someone at Microsoft is probably kicking themselves (or being kicked) for not putting them in an obscure binary Registry key, compressed with a proprietary format and possibly encrypted :-)
AOL, meanwhile, has emphasized the project's independence.
"Mozilla.org remains an independent organization that exists to make Mozilla a successful open-source project, and it supports the entire Mozilla community," said Catherine Corre, an AOL spokeswoman.
I'd like to know what this means. Is AOL not planning to do any development on Mozilla? Is AOL not paying for Mozilla? What's in this deal for Mozilla?
Mozilla will get saddled with the obnoxious task of supporting a 35m customer base of end users. They will get no cash, no AOL developers, and AOL will bail as soon as they see how inadequate an open-source tool is for widespread corporate rollout.
I can't imagine why AOL would flirt with Mozilla, except that it's free, so they might as well investigate Mozilla's exploitability. Mozilla developers are probably gushing at the thought of massive exposure through AOL. Meanwhile, they are getting jacked.
I happened to see on one of their pages that the site was maintained by some company, so I went there and found a tech. support number to call.
This company doesn't support end users, though only customers (which in this case is the Credit Union). So I gave them all the contact info that I had at the Credit union. Hopefully they will fix the problem