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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.
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?
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
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