Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars II: CompuServe Strikes Back
securitas writes "Today CompuServe (an AOL subsidiary) launched CompuServe 7.0 with Netscape as the underlying browser. CompuServe started testing Komodo, a Gecko-based client, last year, and is now experimenting with Gecko-based AOL clients. CompuServe's 3 million-member user base is seen as a testbed before turning AOL's 34 million members into Netscape users later this year." Update: 04/16 20:54 GMT by T : Also an interesting story at CNN on the upcoming Mozilla 1.0. RC1 is very nice, as have been most recent builds.
The IE DHTML references on MSDN very clearly mark which objects, events, methods and properties are standard and which ones are not.
Their CSS Property Index clearly lists non-standard entries.
Erm, troll alert?
Who do you think pays the salaries of about 95% of the developers that made Mozilla? Answer: AOL
Without AOL's sponsorship of the project, Moz would still be at Milestone 0.5
> Both companies will continue their practices as
> they always have in order to appear to have the
> 'better product'.
You seem to have forgotten that the Gecko engine is open source. There are plenty of non-Netscape people working on Gecko and we will not deviate from Mozilla.org's stated policy of standards support, nor would we stand by and allow Netscape employees to violate that policy (which, by the way, they have shown absolutely NO sign of wanting to do).
AOL paid 4 billion dollars for Netscape and then GAVE millions of dollars of development time to Mozilla...
-pyrrho
(I'm the orignal AC)
> I fully agree that Mozilla is probably the BEST open-source project to date
Depends of the criterion you use. I'd tend to think that the best projects to date are things like linux, freebsd, emacs, xfree86, apache, samba [etc] which are fully mature products.
> but it is by no means the MOST IMPORTANT
I strongly disagree. We have no hope of crunching IE out of existance, but mozilla _must_ become the 2nd browser out there, with a significant market-share.
Having mozilla installed in a lot of place is not so we can 'win the browser war', but to prevent the net of becoming proprietary.
> People generally don't switch browsers. That is a fact - cold, hard, and undeniably true.
People can switch browsers. I did it. At work, we settled on netscape 6.2 / Mozilla. Compuserve users are going to switch browsers. AOL users may switch browsers.
Switching browsers is still possible (as long as we have the mozilla project delivering solid standard-compliant implementation while web-sites are not completly IE-only).
If cnn, amazon, ebay, yahoo, nytimes, google [insert favorite high-volume site here] are only accessible from IE (because we dropped the ball on the browser thing), you can kiss good-bye to any hope of the possibility of a MS-free desktop.
> So a "browser war" doesn't help anything, because it doesn't get MS off the desktop.
I hate to have to tell it to you, but MS will not be removed from the desktop, at least not this century. The question is not 'can we remove MS from the desktop ?', but 'can we avoid beeing forced to use windows ?' You thinkg that people don't switch browsers, but the truth is:
* People don't switch office suites
* People don't switch operating systems
* Corporations don't switch from exchange
> is becoming a distraction to what open source SHOULD be doing.
The next more vital application is an MS-exchange clone. This is (IMHO) more important than having an office suite. It is also much more difficult, but maybe a big player (ibm?) may move into that.
The stats from users visiting slashdot might be interesting for us, but are hardly going to be representative of the general population.
The best ones I can find for general UK usage are by a consultancy called Proteus. They look reasonable, though I'd have more faith if they showed Mozilla at somewhere past 0.8!
Interestingly these show a much higher percentage of Macs than I'd have expected - maybe MacOS X is really increasing their market penetration. (Thinks wishfully)
A minor correction for story on the home page. Mozilla RC1 is NOT out yet. The branch has been cut and there are builds inching toward the release within the next few days. However the latest "milestone" is still 0.9.9.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Mozilla 0.9.9
Open history window:
Tasks->Tools->History
Within window:
View->Group By->None
Sorted by Last Visited
Z->A Sort Order
None of those would apply, because none of those are in Gecko. The CompuServe client is still a client unto its own right; it sounds like it will just open browser windows with Gecko instead of IE.
For the last couple of months, Google has posted web browser usage stats, as well as OS usage. That's about as unbiased as you can get. Google Zeitgest.