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

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: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.