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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)
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.
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.
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.