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."

Comments

All right

[SomeOtherGuy]

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.

Re:All right

[ShawnDoc]

Wishful thinking. These AOL users will still have Internet Explorer on their machines. A good majority of them will just change their AOL options to use IE instead of Netscape once they upgrade to a version that defaults to Netscape. They may not be completely computer literate, but they aren't morons...

I think you are overestimating AOL users. The majority of AOL users use AOL because they don't know how to work a computer. That's AOL's big selling point, that they don't have to think.

At any rate, neither DHTML nor CSS are IE specific features, so you have no idea what you're talking about to begin with..How did your post get moderated up?

How did your post get modded up? IE uses proprietary tags not found in the WC3 standards to implement "features" exclusive to IE. Many web sites use these tags that only work in IE.

This has been going on since the earliest days of web browsers, and in the past both IE and Netscape were just as guilty of inventing proprietary tags to give their browser more "features". That is what is so great about Mozilla, it is the most standards compliant web browser available. Now developers can code to the WC3 standards and know there is a browser capable of displaying the page correctly. Once (if) AOL converts their users to Mozilla it will hopefully force MS to make IE more standards compliant and in return allow developers to finally be able to easily design browser agnostic web sites.

Obviously you don't have much experience dealing with either end users or web page design issues.

Re:Netscape is dead

[IronTek]

Long live IE! Its just a better browser.

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. ...but whatever, I guess..

It'll be a victory for standards.

[anser]

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.

Some interesting weblogs by mozilla developers

[Tayto]

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.

Mozilla is flexible and everywhere

[stego]

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.

Re:Just proves Joel's point

[MindStalker]

Yea, but Mozilla is an backend architecture for internet applications. While netscape 4.x was just a browser and an email program. YES most of the networking components should have been reused, no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But as the complete underlying API is different, very little of the code could have been reused to create the product that mozilla is today. It may have gotten here faster, but it would just be another browser, the market has enough browsers, mozilla architecture is something innovative and once accepted could truly create innovation in the market place.

W3C Validator

[hendridm]

> 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...

Re:W3C Validator

[garett_spencley]

I know I'm a little late for this discussion but I thought I'd post this anyway.

The whole ideal behind standards is so that you (theoretically) shouldn't have to care about all the browsers.

From my point of view, if I design a web page and follow the standards to the "t" and verify it for compliance after every single minor change, then if a browser doesn't render my page properly the browser is at fault and I don't give a shit. It's not my problem.

Now from a more practical standpoint. If my web page is going to be making me money and 90%+ of my users are IE users then I better make sure it renders properly in IE. However, that's still no reason not to follow standards. Because if I make a concerted effort to follow the standards then I can be reasonably sure that any other browsers (that I haven't tested it with) stand a good chance of rendering it properly.

With the above stated there's absolutely no reason not to verify your pages for standards compliance with the exception of pure lazyness.

--
Garett