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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.
If you feel a sudden urge to help now that the project is entering it's final stages, checkout bugzilla.mozilla.org. You can help troubleshoot other bugs by trying to replicate, and figure out if there are browser problems, or webpage problems. You have to be a member, but the form is short.
Check out http://bugzilla.mozilla.org
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
that these missing mozilla hackers are, as we speak, being ruthlessly questioned under a single, dangling lightbulb ... probably in the dark basement of some government facility by various operatives from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, held under the pretense that they have somehow violated the dmca...
just a hunch.
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
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.
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...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
The main change is that many APIs (Application Programming Interface) have been frozen, which means that you can now create skins, plugins, add-ons, XUL applications, applications which embed Mozilla's layout engine Gecko, etc., which will work with all future Mozilla 1.x releases. In the past, it wasn't unusual for, say, skins developed for Mozilla 0.x to break as soon as Mozilla 0.y was released.
Of course 1.0 is also more stable and polished than 0.9.9, just like 0.9.9 was more polished and stable than 0.9.8 and so forth, but the main thing is the API freeze.
See also the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
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.
the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late?
.NET down everybody's throat by way of the browser.
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
Also, not too late to make all those surfers who like to kill popup ads very happy.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
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...."
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)
Set them up with the MSIE skin for Mozilla. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Silently, as opposed to a dialog that says "Corrupting preferences" with a progress bar?
:)
Time to file a wishlist bug.
"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.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
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.
There's a newgroup for user discussion and questions. You can get support there, please don't use the developer forums. This the users' group:
. user.general
snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla
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
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
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.
What about:
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.
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...
I'm not a coder, but I'm an *experienced* beta tester and I've worked on longterm volunteer projects that involved a pack of professional programmers with a dedicated testing team. IOW I'm not a beginner at this. I *do* know how to recognise and document bugs (in tedious detail :) Frex, on one project, 75% of bugs and performance issues listed in the changelog were those I'd found (and there were 8 core testers in that group).
But turn it around -- the problem I see, with Mozilla and too often elsewhere, is that testers get no respect, no matter how good they are at that job (IMO, itself as necessary as coding! What use is beautiful code that doesn't work right?) Coders too often consider testers a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst ("how dare those scum break my perfect code!")
Coders need to respect testers' work as well, but all too often the tester is treated as a second-class worker who has no right to a viewpoint on how the program should behave, at least if the coder doesn't feel like fixing the issue at hand. How does a coder expect to get and keep respect from testers if they don't feel they need to respect their testers in return? I realise bugs need to be prioritized and all that, but there's a difference between marking one "low priority" and entirely blowing it off as being too much of a PITA, or "not what *I* want" even when users are clamouring for it. (Ooops, I forgot, Mozilla is for *developers*, not for lowly users!)
And *that* is the problem I've observed with Mozilla. There are open issues that have hundreds of "votes" to fix, which remain unfixed because the coder doesn't LIKE that feature. (Check out some of the context-menu issues for examples.) Not part of the coding group? Then your opinions, and your bug reports, don't count.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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