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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."
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 re-activated a Compuserve account I hadn't used for years just to get my grubby meathooks on the beta of the Compuserve browser V7.0 with the Gecko engine. I've gotta tell ya, it kicks some serious butt over V6.00 with the Explorer engine. Actually, there seem to be few sites where I've had a problem. The only one I can think of off hand is the MSN Communities sites. Even then, the only restriction is that some of the cutesy features aren't available to me. But they don't even appear to be broken, they just don't appear. Assuming AOL is using Compuserve customers as beta testers for their AOL client, I don't think they'll have many issues. The change over, for the Compuserve client at any rate, is pretty much transparent. Glad I held on to that Compuserve account for all these years. I'd originally had it in the pre-net days for downloading patches and what, and I never got around to canceling it. So they just kept charging my credit card.
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.
"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?
But you have to appreciate your credit union's point of view. They need to do what they can to keep their costs down. In this context, it means designing their site around what the vast majority of what their users are browsing with. If they had to design, test and maintain the site for every single version of evey single browser under the sun, it would significantly increase their development costs (and keep in mind that such costs have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the credit union, it could still operate without a web-banking solution.) which would in turn raise the costs you would be paying to your credit union.
There was another posting in a forum here in which someone was complaining that a certain image-based spam trap was bad since it would not work with Lynx. If this logic is followed, it means every website out there would have to be designed to run under Lynx. Unfortunately, this is not realistic if you want to make money off od your website.
Granted, if everything was designed to run under Lynx, then it would most likely be standards-compliant with every other browser out there :)
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
The problem is that *every* browser, from IE1 and NS1 up, will simply ignore CSS features they don't understand, which was part of the design of CSS and allows pages to degrade gracefully. Every browser, that is, *except* for Netscape 4.
Every other browser will either honor or ignore your font color selections, either of which looks okay. Netscape 4 will honor your font color selections only on the table row where the text is longest, in some circumstances, which invariably looks awful. Setting certain vertical-alignment properties on images will either work or not work in other browsers; in Netscape 4 it will randomly reorder your images. And so on.
For every other browser ever made, you can safely use any feature of CSS and get something which will look *okay* - either your stylesheet will be honored or not. With Netscape 4, if you happen to use the wrong part of CSS, your page will be completely unreadable.
You might not agree with the previous poster's position, but it is a logical approach. If Netscape 4 is remotely widely used among your site's visitors, it's really the only approach.
Stuart.
- 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?> Is there much difference between the Mozilla 1.0 build and the Netscape 6.11?
IIRC, Netscape 6.11 is based on mozilla 0.9.2, which was released about 9 months ago. There have been some improvements since then, notably:
- substantial performance tuning
- tabbed browsing
- the javascript debugger
- DOM inspector (I think)
- a complete re-jig of the menus and context menus (though the latter is driving some people nuts)
there's also uabar, the UserAgent toolbar. Allows you to change your UA String while browsing and gives you a nice selection of common choices.
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
Mozilla was slow on my p166 (Linux), so I didn't use it very often. But then I had to start doing web development work, and bought the cheapest new motherboard/cpu I could. So sure, on a p166/64 megs of ram it was admitidly not very usable, on my el cheapo $400 CDN AMD CPU/Motherboard/128 megs of ram combo the feb 10 nightly has been running just great with no problems at all. I don't think you can get away with saying rendering is slow, because its not. But I would believe its slower to popup and start with only 64megs of ram.