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.

Comments

Competition

[prof187]

I'm really looking forward to seeing Mozilla becoming a major competitor for IE. I'm actually very surprised that MS doesn't put effort into developing IE for Linux. I'm sure the thought crosses their minds though, probably just afraid that they'd be forced to open source it (and we all know how evil open source is). Go Mozilla.

Re:Competition

[PepsiProgrammer]

http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp actually it seems they have IE 5 for HP UX and Solaris, interesting isnt it? "We have the way out, but just in case your still stuck...."

Re:Competition

[pacman on prozac]

According to this page the IE for solaris/HPUX does actually include bits in the installer script for linux_x86 so it looks like they might be preparing it for a linux release. I couldn't be bothered to download it and check. I don't miss popups that much :)

finally

[nilstar]

Finally, years after promising it, the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late? How can Mozilla & Netscape (not to mention Opera & others) make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world? I think it is too late, but maybe with the 700 pound gorilla of AOL Time Warner behind it, they can fight the 800 pound gorilla of Microsoft. Maybe the new XP service pack will convince some OEMs (that want to cozy up to AOL) to include Netscape.

Re:finally

[anthony_dipierro]

It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser. But overall, I'm extremely impressed by RC3. The only major problem I have with it is that plugins are very hard to install (on Win2K) compared to IE. The positives are turning off pop-ups, and turning off Doubleclick BFAs.

Actually my other problem isn't so much with the product, but with the source code. I wish it would compile without using Visual Studio. Then the fact that it was GPLed would actually mean something to me.

Re:finally

[SurfsUp]

the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late?

Too late to become the dominant browser on Windows? Probably. But too late to help Linux continue its march into mainstream operating system land? No way! And the fact that it runs on Windows is a definite help there.

Also not too late to put a stop to Microsoft's attempts to privatize web standards, not to mention put a serious kink in attempts to force .NET down everybody's throat by way of the browser.

Also, not too late to make all those surfers who like to kill popup ads very happy.

Re:finally

[rseuhs]

It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser.

What about:

• 30 million AOL customers?
• PS3 will use Mozilla and if it is as successful as PS1 (100 Million) or PS2 (30 Million and selling over a million per month), there will be tens of millions new Mozilla-users in the net.
• Yes, Linux is making inroads into the desktop, like it or not. South Korea's governement has recently decided to convert 1/4 of their desktops (several hundred thousand).
• Being multiplatform is an advantage. For example people will prefer Mozilla over IE at work if they know it from their PS3 at home.
• Mozilla has features people want. Modem users want to safe time with HTTP1.1 pipelining, almost all users don't want popups. If you look at browser stats you see that a lot of people are willing to download a new version of IE, why shouldn't they also download a version of Mozilla? Especially because Mozilla isn't entrenched into the OS, so upgrading to Mozilla is certainly not as risky as upgrading IE.
• Also don't underestimate people's tastes and opinions. It's IMPOSSIBLE to do a product that everybody likes best, so even if Mozilla wouldn't have mroe functionality than IE, SOME people will like the interface/look/feel/whatever better. "With everything being equal", not all 100% will choose IE.

In the short term, Mozilla/Netscape7 will almost certainly destroy the de-facto IE-standard (even with only 10% marketshare, webmasters can't afford to ignore Mozilla), in the long term (5 to 10 years) I'd say it has good chances to overtake IE.

Release quality

[Penguinoflight]

Most of us know and love Mozilla, but like all browsers it has a few problems. Could one of the Mozilla developers give a short explination of what will be "special" about 1.0?

Re:finally FEATURES

[SomeOtherGuy]

well the ability to turn off javascript popup windows and such (stuff you will never see IE or Netscape do)....is a big enough reason for some of the IE diehards I work around....And I have yet to see tabbed browsing on IE. Face it -- there are some "killer" features that will send the cocky IE packing...

My problem with Moz. is the way they handle bugs.

[dnaumov]

One of the problems that *I* have with Mozilla is the way they handle bugs. I used to submit a lot of bugs to BugZilla, participate in testing, etc. I can no longer be arsed to. I know it's "their program to develop", but it's very depressing when you find a bug that you find serious and notice it getting pushed from M18 to 0.9.1 to 0.9.5 to 1.0 to post 1.1...

After similar things happened to about 20 of my bugs reports I just thought I had enough of it. I still submit bugs from time to time, but I am not that interested anymore. I would rather spend my time developing and testing ebuilds for the Gentoo Linux portage system.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:IE monopoly

[Da Schmiz]

Part of the reason why a number of sites look broken in Opera is that Opera breaks sites. I used to be a big Opera fan, and I still use it from time to time, but its support for certain W3C specs (document.createElement() comes to mind) is not only missing, but downright munged.

Opera fakes document.createElement() and returns true, so sites that identify DOM-compliant browsers by this test will assume all is well, but the method doesn't actually do anything, so the site fails without an error. Last I checked, this was something the Opera programmers were "going to get around to" someday.

On the flip side, more and more sites are now supporting Mozilla... even my bank, which I could never get to work with any browser but IE, now looks great in Mozilla (or Galeon).

And that's the thing: every killer feature that made me switch from IE to Opera (when I was running Windows) was there in Galeon on Linux. I've got Opera, but these days Galeon is faster, renders more correctly, and has more truly useful features than Opera.

When I design websites, I'll still keep inserting workarounds for Opera, just as I still keep kludging ugly workarounds for Netscape 4 (icky, icky). Hopefully, though, Opera will eventually become fully standards-compliant, and then we won't have a problem.

Re:My problem with Moz. is the way they handle bug

[Reziac]

Personally I've been led to wonder about Moz's bug-fixing myself. Frex, I can't be the only person to notice the horrendous resource leak it causes on Win9*, just from viewing a large local directory tree. Sometimes up to 75% of resources in a few seconds flat. Or that it crashes 100% of the time when exposed to certain commonly-accessed pages. (Both are consistent and reproducible.)

Gave up on the idea of submitting bugs after being flamed on (and then apparently banned from) the NNTP server just for arguing (as civilly as this post) that removing certain features was highly undesirable from a user's POV. :(

A shame since I would really love to be able to embrace and endorse Mozilla with no reservations.

Re:Bugzilla.mozilla.org

[Reziac]

Question: if I submit a bug, will it be taken seriously, or if someone doesn't like what I find, will I get some BS about "must be just YOUR system"?? (Which considering I have a lot of experience as a software tester and bloody well know how to properly document bugs, is pretty annoying when it happens.) Because I know of two FATAL bugs right now, but my experience with the NNTP crowd (see another post I made in a similar thread) did not encourage me to bother pursuing it.

NS is the worst thing for web developers

[NineNine]

Obviously, everybody saying "yaay for Netscape" isn't a real web developer. Netscape went out of their way to *not* include any kind of backwards compatibility for any DHTML. 90% of all DHTML written in the past 3 years or so simply doesn't work in NS 6+ because although NS conforms to the W3C specs (as does IE), unlike IE, there's no support for older scripting. I've tested lots of various DHTML, and virtually none of it works with NS. Sure, it'd be nice to see a new browser, but the developers' incredible idealism (the W3C "standards" and none others, whatsoever) is gonna prevent NS from going mainstream.

Re:my question

[thales]

"i never could figure out why the mozilla browser keeps switching from instant skin changing to skin changing upon reboot:

Because Parts of the old skin keep showing up in the new skin. This mainly happens when the old skin has a css rule that the new skin lacks. going to reboot flushes the old skin out of memory. They drop it to cut down on the number of bugs in an impending milestone release, then pick it up again later only to drop it again for another release.

Re:Standards?

[NineNine]

It's too late to affect de-facto standards

That's funny.. Mozilla isn't trying to change the standards [w3.org]. Get this... it's actually FOLLOWING THEM!


You obviously don't understand what "de-facto standards" mean. That means that the standards came about by sheer use and popularity. The W3C "standards" are arbitrary standards... a third party that has no control whatsoever over web site creation (other than their own) or browser development. The W3C hasn't been truly influential for a long time. Just because somebody writes something and calls it a "standard" doesn't make it so.

Thanks, Mozilla hackers

[kitzilla]

Congrats on the upcoming 1.0. I've been with you guys since 0.93 or so. Am also using Netscape 7PR1 (as my default on OS X, in fact). These are great browsers, full-featured and stable. No need to use IE anymore, and I enjoy using the same browser across all my platforms. Thanks for all the long nights and great code.

Best thing of all is...

[Jack William Bell]

hmm... I just read all the +1 and higher responses and no one has mentioned the thing I personally think is the best thing of all about Moz going 1.0 -- It means they finally freeze the API's.

I don't know how many of you have checked out XUL and the Moz extension API's, but with them you have the ability to write literally any kind of application with an Open Source, Cross Platform, UI built using Moz via XML, HTML and a little javascript. This, I believe, is the most revolutionary thing about Moz! Using it for a UI surface, I can encapsulate routines that require speed in a C or C++ module (or even Python, Java and some other languages) and do the rest in not too much a different way than creating a DHTML web page. And the resulting UI code is portable...

And the end result is fairly fast as well. All of the browser itself, all of the built-tools like the mail manager, the calendar, the IRC chat and so on are implemented this way. The potential of Moz as a UI development API is huge, assuming anyone creates a decent IDE for it. Nonetheless you can do things right now without an IDE, and (because the API's are frozen) you can be confident it will work with bug fix releases until they do a major update.

During development many projects demonstrating these capabilities were obsoleted when the API's changed out from under them, causing the developers to stop work until the API froze. With this at an end I fully expect to see some really cool stuff fairly soon. Check http://www.mozdev.org for some example projects (most of which probably won't go anywhere soon, but some of which are the kinds of thing I am talking about).

Jack William Bell

Re:Failure?

[N0Nick]

It was very ironic to go over some old slashdot stories about mozilla and see how the project was indeed considered "a failure" as opposed to how it's praised today.

Or as michael, the poster of this particular story, have said before:
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Ahem.