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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'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.
even if after a year is spent trying to fix the commercial source, they abandon the crappy commercial code and start over from scratch? I love Mozilla, think it is a great browser (now), but I'm not sure if it should really be a poster child for OSS.
(running Konqueror 3.0.0-2)
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I post links to stuff here
How many AOL users know they are using IE?. I remeber on a radio show pcradioshow The host asked what browser he was using, and he replied with AOL.
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.
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.
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?
"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?
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?')
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
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.
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
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.