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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.
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 uses native widgets. I.e., unlike a lot of other apps - eg, Microsoft's own Office XP - Mozilla actually uses Windows XP's `styles'. If you get rid of the GreyModern / Netscape 4 themes and replace them with the IE theme, Mozilla actually looks and acts like a rather pleasant and featurefilled native looking web browser for Win32. Without the security holes of IE, plus tabbing, popup control, and lots of other goodies IE doesn't have.
Bloated? A ten meg download that includes browser, mail, news, irc client? And I don't know what machine you are using, but Moz is as snappy as anything else on my computer. I'm sorry, but nothing about this excellent peice of software seems bloated or slow to me. This is by far the best web browser I've ever used IMHO.
Basically, this is what posts you'll see.
"IE is faster, Mozilla cant beat IE"
Lets respond to this post right now. OF course IE is faster and always will be faster because its build into the damn OS. MSN msger is faster than ICQ and AIM, anything made by Microsoft should be the fastest considering Microsoft has advantages in terms of knowing the source code of the entire OS.
"IE has won, its too late, Mozilla team should just give up"
Isnt this exactly what the IE team should have done back in 1998 when Netscape 4 was winning 70-30 in terms of percentages?
"Opera's done it all first, Mozilla is copying"
Of course Mozilla and Netscape will copy Opera the same way Opera and IE copied Netscapes Bookmark system.
"Opera is better than Mozilla and IE because its faster"
Are you using Windows? Perhaps you should try linux on your 486, its faster. What? You arent using a 486? Well stop complaining about speed, if Mozilla is slow, its because you are too slow to upgrade
"Mozilla/Netscape cant render page X"
Maybe it WOULD render page X if you stopped using IE and wrote that same msg to the site owner
"Mozilla is bloated and slow"
Try Kmeleon, Galeon, or if both those are slow try lynx.
"AOL isnt supporting Mozilla, why wont they put gecko into their AOL package?"
They have. AOL 7.0 gecko beta. Also try Netscape 7
This ends all arguements you people will have before they begin, the rest of the arguements will be about bugs in mozilla, when will 1.0 release, why mozilla isnt availble for your obscure OS, or why the mozilla team took 4 years to build the best browser.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Yesturday, as rc3 was released, bug ID 82534 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82534 copy and paste - they dont allow links from slashdot) was changed from Mozilla 1.0 to Mozilla 1.0.1
To summarise, this bug freezes any keyboard input to mozilla under some circumstances - so its kinda major
It only happens on windows, but is very easily reproducable (there are many examples of how to produce it in the bug thread)
Two friends of mine tried using mozilla on windows, and both encountered this bug and were stumpped
I cant believe they are planning to release 1.0 with this bug still in since it will for sure put a lot of people off mozilla for a long time - what with it being a point zero...
I have just read one page of trolls and flamebait and the usual anti Mozilla responses such as it is bloated, slow, non CSS compliant, buggy, no one uses it, etc.
Consider this:
1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant. IE's non-standard standards may be de facto standards in many cases, but those pages on the web that do in fact use those are very small in number and are usually on websites which are not heavily frequented, Microsoft's own pages being the exception to prove the rule.
2.If you use Quick Launch with Mozilla, it loads part of itself into memory and then starts up about as fast as IE does.
3.It is the *one* browser that renders pages in the same manner across all supported platforms. IE does not do this for example between the mac and Windows. Opera is one version behind on the Mac and it remains to be seen when they get to 6 there.
4.It is, in my experince, more stable than IE on Win and Mac. I experience fewer crashes with the latest RC's than I do with IE on Win and mac.
5.It is definitely more secure than IE. It has it's security bugs, but in no way as many as IE does.
6.You can have an influence in the way this browser is developed. Do you have the same influence with IE or even Opera for that matter?
If Netscape dies, Mozilla will carry on.
7.For those who say that the browser share market belongs to IE, I say let's look again in a year. Netscape used to own the market and lost it because of Microsoft's tactics and a poor product that was less standards compliant than IE. This could change again.
8.For those who troll that Mozilla is only at 1.0RC3 and in one year has only gotten here from a 0.9 version, perhaps you should realise that the Mozilla developers are not in a competition for version numbers with IE. Netscape plays this game and has released version 7.
All that said, you're free to use whichever browser you like best on your platform.