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Mozilla RC3 Released
pjdepasq was one of many reader to submit the news that "Those fine folks at Mozilla.org rolled out RC3 on Thursday I noted. They say it's the last planned release before 1.0, which I'm guessing is right around the corner. As a fan of the project (I'm using it on 3 platforms!), kudos to all of you!" Here are the release notes.
...The Mozilla crew sneezed today. Come on folks - it's just another build with "RC3" tacked onto the name. Yes, it's good that it's nearing "completion" or whatever that means in software terms.
With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 7 will be based on that. I really hope reviewers, developers and users will take a new view on Netscape so Netscape can gain some of the lost market share. I'm tired of seeing websites which simply don't care about Netscape/Mozilla support...
And don't start saying "hey, I don't need Netscape, I want plain Mozilla!". You're right, but Netscape is for (l)users. If Netscape 7 has success, you'll also have more luck surfing the internet with your Mozilla browser.
By the way, MozillaZine is also a great source of information for Mozilla-fans.
It's a zillion times faster than IE6 running natively on Tru64, Solaris, AIX, Linux, and any BSD. Or was that NaN times faster? ;)
When discussing a new version of a browser, someone always complains about the speed of $NEWBROWSER. I've never had any problems with browser speed, not on any machine (well, except IBrowse on ye olde Amiga, that was _slow_ ;) ).
Come on, are you guys constantly loading multi-megabytes of HTML into your browsers? I think the biggest problem by far is compatibility and not speed (thanks to lame IE-only sites).
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Well, yes and no. If you know that some published standard is *not* supported by the market leading web browser (certain XHTML pages I've seen are horribly rendered by IE), why would you persist in writing the code?
Obviously you would not want to write code that breaks on your target audience's web browser, no matter what the standard says.
I have been pwned because my
You are only partially correct. Mozilla does not and probably never will (in the near future) use native widgets for any OS because of (I think) XUL. Mozilla has its own rendering engine, controlled by JavaScript and style sheets. This allows for mucho customization, by web developers and users alike. It does not, however, earn any brownie points in usability.
You are, however, correct in that Mozilla on XP inherits the visual style of XP's interface (anything Luna or Classic). But that's all. Mozilla does not inherit the accessibility features in XP. Should XP suddenly support a new input device for navigating sheets (or similar), Mozilla wouldn't have any part of it. The Mozilla team has had many a debate on how to mimic the keyboard shortcuts in Windows since none of the interface is native. For the majority of Windows users, however technical ye are, this is a moot point, because it just looks the same and does its job. This argument is most apparent in Mac OS X, an environment associated with pretty colors and UI guidelines provided by Apple. Many, many OS X users have not used Mozilla because it looks and functions like nothing on OS X. And of course, Linux users either don't care or don't have enough time/energy to choose a standard interface and then care. =)
Mozilla, in all of its open source and standards-compliant glory, will always be a second-rate browser if not native to each platform of operation. Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla to no end... I'd just like a native version. (See Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Lynx, etc.)
PS - I don't recall any version of Office using Windows's UI controls... Office always shipped with some new, bleeding edge control of its own, often to be reincarnated into the controls of the next version of Windows. Even Office XP, of all things, has no correlation to native Windows XP controls.
People who started using the Internet before IE don't mind Netscape and would go back for a previous version. Most of the world see IE bundled with Windows, compared Netscape 4.77 with IE5 and say "IE is better", and don't recognize that Netscape could possibly change.
Add one part Mozilla and shake.
The sort of people who would use IE over Netscape because they had a bad experience with Netscape around 4.77 will be impressed with Mozilla, and they don't even need to know that it is based on Netscape! I installed Netscape 7 preview yesterday, which for most people may as well have been a Mozilla skin. Additions: IM, which closes when the browser closes and isn't important in a business environment, and no menu option to remove all those AOL popups.
We don't need to wait for Mozilla 1.0 so Netscape 7 can come out and compete with IE; when Moz hits 1.0, we should be pitting Mozilla against IE. It doesn't feel signifigantly different, but there are improvements that grow on you quickly - tabbed browsing, being able to selectively disable Javascript - which make people stand up and watch. Netscape will have as many ads and links to AOL in it as IE has to Micrsoft. Mozilla is infinitely more pure! And when the last few bugs are ironed out, I'll look forward to seeing what new innovations the crew have in store. (Remember, as far as most people are concerned, all that changed between IE4 and IE6 was the loading logo and the widgets if you're using XP.)
That, and maybe Mozilla could end up being the application that make people think "Wow, that open source community aren't so bad after all."
Why bother.. Its pointless to even try. AA "support" for Mozilla already exists, on an "experimental" branch of the CVS tree. You're looking at a group of developers who think that anti-aliasing the friggin fonts should be relegated to an "experimental" branch!
Now, stop and realize what that means. A feature that every mainstream browser has had, out of the box, since the mid 1990s...and the Mozilla doesnt want to bother to include it. Its like nobody can go the last fucking mile anymore and make something that actually looks good. Personally, I could care less if Mozilla goes 1.0 or not. Without AA font support, people are going to forget about it. Then what will all the work be worth? You guessed it--nothing.
Why is it so hard for Mozilla, a project that has been going since 1998, to have AA font support, when other browser projects (like Konqueror, for example) took only a month or two to add it? You guessed it -- Retarded leadership. Theyre building a browser for programmers, not for end users. And, until they realize that, and fucking DO SOMETHING about it, people will continue to ignore their work. Then, in the end, itll all be pointless. Theyve built a 5-story catapult for a war that already ended.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
My main complaint is that all of your points could have been accomplished much sooner, and with less bloat (Mozilla uses 17MB on my machine at fresh startup...I know memory is cheap, but *dayamn*, that will never fly on older machines...), if they had not decided to reinvent the world, and come up with some new weirdo GUI component and layout system. Mozilla is a major accomplishment, but I fear it could have done so much more if they followed the KISS rule and gotten some form of final usable product out the door long ago.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
When I come across a site that doesn't work in Mozilla, I always send a note to the links I can find. E.g. Movietickets.com wouldn't work in Mozilla. I experimented and was able to lie to the site through Mozilla that I was using IE and the site would work. I sent many emails about the issue and now the site works without problems for Mozilla.
The other site I just had a big fight with was Ofoto.com. They print digital photos etc. There site works perfectly in Mozilla except for a little JavaScript dropdown menu that allows you to edit your photo albums. I sent them the code to fix it and they refused to resolve the issue. I told them that I was running Mozilla on Linux and they responded by saying that they don't support Linux. Seeing that it isn't a Linux issue, the fact is that they don't want to fix their site. I could view the page source, get the URL for the link I wanted on the menu and the page would subsequently work.
Be vigillant people and complain everytime you see little or big bugs.
- You can't apply CSS to native widgets. (border colors and sizes, onHover and onFocus styles, etc)
- You can't control the z-order; native widgets will always be on top of all rendered content.
That's why mozilla and IE render their own controls, and I'm sure Opera will some day, too. (I've never used OmniWeb, so I can't say anything about that)ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
The most needed feature in Mozilla/Netscape is the SVG support. It's quite terrible that it can't be exist yet in the regular binary builds due to only its license, even that there is "other" SVG plugins.
Until now, I saw none of sites with SVG support (not including the SVG demos, SVG tutorials, etc.), which move people to think that "SVG is a bloated SWF clone for wimps", which is completly wrong way of thinking. SWF (Macromedia Flash) is good, but still, it's closed source software, dislike HTML, XML, JPEG, PNG, and others. If sites/companies will have SVG support instead of SWF, which is not a big thing to deal with (I guess there are even today SWF2SVG convertors, with full support for SWF timeline), the web will be much more happier place.
Let's hope for SVG support in the offical 1.O, it's still possible...