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

Really kewl. Yeah, right.

[Animats]

It has new APIs! It has its own XML-based formatting language! Runs on PDAs and cell phones(?!) Zillions of features! We've given up on the PC market!

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.

Re:AOL Using Mozilla/Netscape

[NineNine]

A "standard" is generally defined as the most widely used method that a majority conforms to. At this point, the W3C standard is irrelevant and arbitrary. Who says that W3C is a standard? Just because some group and stands up and says "we make the standards" doesn't mean that's a standard.

Re:AOL Using Mozilla/Netscape

[maxpublic]

The majority doesn't mean jack shit. Market power means something when it comes to designing web sites, but 'market power' and 'majority' aren't interchangeable terms.

Like I said, this isn't a democracy. And whether or not *you* like *that* is entirely irrelevant.

Max