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Moving towards Mozilla 1.0
fluedke writes "The latest Mozilla CVS identifies itself as "Mozilla 1.0". It looks like this source will become the official 1.0 within the next days. Read the news posting here." And if you're one of the missing hackers, speak up.
What excites me is to see another open-source project that potentially can become a best-of-breed app, like Emacs or Apache. We're getting closer and closer to the day when nobody can object to open source because they need application X, and the open-source alternative isn't as good.
Find free books.
Sometimes I get the feeling that even if Netscape/Mozilla were 100 times better than IE the the majority of Windows users would still use IE because it is simply there by default. IE despite all its faults and security holes gets the job done for most users so why would they bother using anything else?
Now don't get me wrong I reckon Mozilla is a great browser, better than IE ver 5 in my opinion but I think it's in for a hard time making a huge dent in MSIE's monopoly, at least as long they bundle and integrate IE with their operating system.
aus.music.scrapbook
I think it depends on in what way it is better. I do not see the average user downloading a new Netscape, but Mozilla is possible. Why? Because it gets rid of popups, which are universally hated.
Mozilla has a lot of features that are better than this, but this one feature hits a such known problem area that it could get a large group of people to switch.
Of course, since Mozilla has no marketing budget, it is unknown whether anyone will ever know this besides us.
Engineering and the Ultimate
> make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world?
And I retort, who fricking cares?
Mozilla is open source, freely available, and heavily cross platform. Even if AOL mothballs netscape and lays off everyone that can't be changed.
Why's it always gotta be about "conquering microsoft"? Can't people just USE the software and get on with their life? Let the dominance, or obscurity, come naturally. Long as you get software that does it's job well for you, it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using.
I've always figured some people in microsoft thought so much of IE, or rather the fact that people wrote pages for IE instead of to w3c compliance that not releasing IE on Linux would keep people from moving to that operating system.
OK, it's a crazy conspiricy theory. But seeing some of Microsoft's statements about Linux in the past, or their view of themselves as benovlent shepards of the ignorent computing masses I wouldn't put it past them.
Everything will be taken away from you.
...and please people, before you report a bug, search through the list of duplicates and most reported.
The open source community will likely cause the mozilla.org people more work by all reporting 500 versions of the same problem - especially with all the publicity 1.0 will be getting.
And, if you report a bug, please follow through. There are umpteen bugs in bugzilla that are sitting there with a bug reporter that's MIA.
It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser.
Really? When was the deadline?
So what happens if the hacker dies in between?
In that case, tough beans.
United States copyright law, 17 USC 302, provides for a perpetual copyright on all works created on or after January 1, 1978. Currently, it's 150 years (life plus 70), but Congress reserves the right to pass a 20 year copyright term extension every 20 years, and if Eldred loses the Supreme Court case this fall, count on an immediate 1,000 year extension act.
And don't count on being able to talk the heirs into re-licensing the software. In general, heirs tend to be greedier about copyrights than the author was.
Will I retire or break 10K?
---"Hi guys. I have sleeping, Rip Van Winkle-ike, and have recently awoken from my slumbers."---
:-)
:-( "---
Umm... good morning
---"Truth to tell I last used Netscape 3 or was it 4. Then I turned to the evil empire and used MS IE. Recently I decided to go back and see what Netscape had been up to. Of course since then Netscape got taken over and Mozilla got to be separate from Netscape and all that stuff which we know."---
Netscape 3 was great. I ended up hacking all the nasty code outta of it and making my own modules using resource hackers and assembler. 4 was starting to be big browersaurii.
---"I ran Netscape 6.2 and also Mozilla. Boy oh boy. They are bloated and slow. Now how did a group of really very clever people come up with this? Four men and a dog (woof! - well ok, a lot more than four but you get my gist) in Norway have come up with a browser in Opera than beats the daylights out of Mozilla and/or Netscape."---
Opera's fast, Ill give you that. But it messes up on some standard webpages. It just either crashes or mis-renders. NutScrape 5 or 6 whatever just plain sucks. Bloat for nothing. Mozilla isn't as bad, but it chews up CPU like candy.I have a 333 p2. When I load up Moz, it takes minutes to load up. That aint right.
---"So how is it that all these clever people with brains the size of a minor planet screw up?"---
If you want to screw up something, put it in committee.
---"I recall the leaked MS documents. ISTR they were called the October papers or something like that where Bill gates and his cohorts saw the open source communal development projects as a serious threat. Sleep well Bill. You have no need to worry. And yet this saddens me so. I am no definitely apologist for Bill Gates and I would love MS to have a bit of serious competition but Netscape/Mozilla isn't going to worry them much."---
True, IE seems faster and Moz slower, but dont forget that IE is your desktop in Windows. In the newer NT os'es, they seperated memory so that an IE crash doesnt take down your desktop. Add that consideration to that Mozilla will be able to run on nearly every playform. MS has put IE to HP(s)UX and Solaris, but wont with Linux (duh!).
---"Like my subject says, this is not a troll but I would like to try and understand why things turned out as they did. There has got to be an explanation. Back in 1994 or thereabouts I was so pleased with Netscape 0.98 and Mosaic but it all seems to have turned sour since then.
It doesnt seem like a troll, just thought out complaints with Moz. There's a simple explanation: Look at US lawsuit against MS. It's based on that when MS gave away Netscape, the destroyed the company (no more development)
Such as: Bug 82534 - Cannot type in URL/address/loaction bar or text boxes - no caret/cursor. (Keyboard locks/freezes up / no input)
3 4
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825
^_^
Just beacuse they release a version with 1.0 attached to it doesn't mean anything about the quality of the product. Bugzilla still shows thousands of unresolved bugs in the browser, and even the announcement states that there will probably be bug in 1.0 that breaks it on a number of platforms.
As someone who has banned people from the software devlopment list from my own open-source project, I think it may help you to understand why open-source developers sometimes do this.
People often times fail to understand that an open source project is different from a commercial project. In any releation where one person is paying another person, there is an implied releationship where the person paying the money does not have to respect the person whom they are paying. The person with the money can be pretty irrespectable and still act in a socially acceptable manner. The recipient, after all, is getting paid.
People who are used to using commercial software approach open source software in the same manner. They join a NNTP server or a mailing list for the project in question. They start ordering around the open source software devlopers, tell them what features the program must have. They don't say "please"; they certaintly don't give the open source devloper an ounce of respect. They act as if they were paying the free software developer. But they aren't.
This kind of person gets rather flustered when they realize that the releationship between an open source devloper and a user is different than the one between a customer and a company. The open source developer is, in the hierarchy of computer geeks, higher up on the ladder than an end user who can't code is. The sooner the end user understands this, the sooner they can treat the developer in a way which will not result in them getting flamed and banned.
People write software and give it away for a number of reasons, of course; but one main motivation is to obtain respect. The more open source projects one has worked on and finished, the higher the person is in the strange pecking order of the world of free software. Make enough code, and you too can be a demigod like Larry Wall, RMS, Linus Torvalds, or Dan Bernstein. Even if you are not a demigod, saying "I am a developer for this project" where the project is well known will cause you to commanded more respect.
It's simple. Respect the developer, and they will respect you. Don't respect them, and they will not respect you. Once you understand this, you are on your way to having your bug reports being acted on. Pretty soon, you will be patching; if the patch is good, you will gain more respect from the developers. Eventually, an open-source project will call you and you will respond to the call.
Good luck in your journey.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Trying looking beyond simple web browsing. If MS controls the means of accessing the Internet that 99% of users use, then they control the Internet. Repeat after me, then they control the Internet. Now, let's look at how:
1) Any future technological advancements (or 3rd party plugins) for the web are subject to Microsoft's approval. If it's not in their financial interest, it doesn't get included in the browser.
2) msn.com is the default page for IE. Most users don't change their default page. Microsoft can then charge lots of money for people to place their ads on msn.com. Secondly, Microsoft can use msn.com to promote their own products by either placing ads for them, writing "news articles" that promote them, or simply because they control the search engine results.
3) Microsoft's Media Player could be integrated into the browser and IE could more simply and easily play WMA files. If most people use WMA to encode their media files and it becomes the "standard", Microsoft can charge money for encoding music in that format.
4) Microsoft can gradually change HTML (or add a completely new proprietary web format) in their favor so that other browsers (and other operating systems) don't work properly.
And on and on and on...
Why do you think Microsoft wanted to "choke off Netscape's air supply"? Controlling the way people access the Internet gives them almost complete control of the Internet and allows them to further stifle competition as well as become very wealthy.
You've tested "lots of various DHTML - I want to bet they all failed because of the same two or three issues. If you're a "real web developer", fixing them is a matter of minutes. Don't complain about Mozilla just because you are incapable...
Well, speaking as a 'real' web developer, who has to develop web-applications that must work across platforms, DHTML could go away now and I would be very happy, and my applications wouldn't suffer a bit for it. DHTML is a client-side toy that 'real' web developers should never use for application-dependent functionality. It's nice for simple effects and short-term oohs and ahhs, but you're missing the point of web-development if your applications contain tons of client-dependent code.
Who are the people on the nntp server who treated you unfairly? Are they the mozilla developers? If yes, hey, then fine, you have a right to bitch. If no, then what are you complaining about, go file those bugs!
Yet it appears on the following systems:
Linux with KDE, Linux with GNOME, Windows 98/XP and MacOS..
^_^
There is a certain responsibly that the open source devloper has to listen to bug reports and comment on them in some way. My experience with posting bug reports for Mozilla is that they are very professional and responsive. I said "opening this page crashes Mozilla", and very quickly got alot of "works for me" replies from the developers. I was using the last M## snapshot and they made it clear that the snapshot was out of date and that a lot of work had since been done correcting those kinds of bugs. Yes, they were a bit short with me when they explained that I need to use a CVS snapshot if I am going to report bugs, but they exaplined to me what I was doing wrong.
As for features not being implemented, there are a lot of factors at play here. One is that any open source project does not have enough developers to implement all of the features the users want. Another is that implementing too many features without having a strong foundation to build the features on can cause the code to quickly become unmaintainable. Another is that, form the OSS coders point of view, it looks like people saying "We want lots of shiny toys" where the people asking for the shiny toys don't understand what it takes to make the shiny toys a reality. Getting a 1.0 release out which is stable is far more important right now; the general consensus at this point is that Mozilla was over-ambitious and took far too long to finally reach 1.0.
OSS development just does not work under the rules of a consumerist culture. It's not about shiny toys. It's about learning to become very, very good at something and sharing that skill with the world.
In the consumerist point of view, going to a foreign country consists of reading a tourbook and going to all of the well-trodden "tourist attractions" and bragging to ones friends that one saw the Eiffel tower. Learning a foreign language is strictly optional. They only people this tourist sees, in general, are the overtly pushy salesmen trying to sell them useless trinkets.
Compare that to a more "hacker" (I mean hacker in the positive meaning, not the consumer-driven 'they are trying to break in to a computer' meaning) way of travelling to a foreign country. First, the hacker goes to a lot of effort to learn the foreign language for the country in question before entering the country. One, perhaps two years, of schooling in the language. Next, the hacker goes to some effort to talk to the people in the country in question in their language. Since the hacker has gone to a lot greater effort to learn things and apply their knowledge, their experience in the country is far more rewarding, allowing them to make many more friends and see many more things than the consumerist too lazy to learn the foreign language.
This isn't a hypothetical analogy. When I was in México, I noticed that the people who knew English and were trying to get me to buy things were downright offended when I spoke to them in Spanish. They knew that my Spanish was good enough that I could experience México without needing to buy their wares. I was able to get high-quality hotel rooms at a fraction of a cost of the hotel rooms english-language tour guide books hawk. I made a lot of friends who I still email in Spanish with to this day.
Just as the English-speaking vendors are offended by the hacker that can actually (somewhat) speak the local language, Bill Gates does not like a world where computer users are empowered because they have gone to some effort to learn how things actually work, allowing them to use solutions which are not controlled by him.
I hope I am not coming off as elitist here. What I am saying is "If you want something meaningful, you will have to work hard to get it". Something sometimes forgotten in today's consumerist world.
I had no idea just how hard it would be to write even a small open-source program until I started actually doing. I very quickly developed an incredible respect for what people like Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Alan Cox do. Once you understand this, I hope you can see why we sometimes act "elitist" from a consumerist point of view.
Man, that rant was far too long.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
AOL embeds a rendering engine in it's application. There are very few Mozilla usability issues in any embedded context since the majority of the UI is not Mozilla but rather the embedding application.
Right now AOL embeds a microsoft rendering engine in its AOL 7 client and a Mozilla rendering engine in its Compuserve cleint. Users shouldn't notice the difference between the microsoft and Mozilla rendering engines. Your usability arguement doesn't make a lot of sense in the embedded context (with the exception of web applications and other "in content" usability issues).
--Asa