First Reviews of Mozilla 1.0 Roll In

Since the announcement of Mozilla 1.0's release, at least a few journalists have been quick to turn the beast over and poke its belly. Tina Gasperson's review over at NewsForge makes an interesting contrast to CNET's review; strange how they give a rating that would barely merit a "C-" after describing Mozilla's robustness, standards compliance, speed and convenience features.

Comments

You would think that CNET had competent authors

[akiaki007]

But...once you are done with the full review and read "The Good, The Bad..." section...take a look at this.

The bad: Incompatible with some sites built for Internet Explorer; chat client doesn't work with the big commercial IM systems, including ICQ, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, and Windows Messenger.

Last time I checked. ChatZilla was a IRC client, not a friggin chat program to be used with AIM, ICQ, etc. While that would be something nice to add, it's already been done and I don't see why the author would mention this. IRC is much cooler than IM anyhow!

it doesn't surprise me that CNET gave a 7

[peteshaw]

Think about it. CNET has never strived to achieve a benchmark for impartial reporting, they collect advertising revenue. So one of there biggest caveats is to not piss off 'the industry' as they see it. So they give all these least common denominator reports that don't have any useful information. They just gave a Netscape a review, and gave it the lowest possible score they could justify given that it was faster, more stable, and more W3C compliant than the big IE.

Think I'm wrong? By contrast, PCWeek, eWeek, and lots of other industry rags tend to be more impartial, and will generally call a turd a turd and a gem a gem, not vice versa.

But then there's audience too to calculate in too. I dare say that if Microsoft were to behave nicely and come out with a superier product that was priced fairly, some one here would find something to bitch about.

IE 6 gets a C too

[zmokhtar]

Don't worry to much about the 7 out of 10. They gave IE 6 the same score.

Make Mozilla Cooler in MacOS X 10.1.5

[toupsie]

Mozilla is nice on MacOS X but it does not take advantage of the Quartz type smoothing like OmniWeb or Chimera. However, if you install Unsanity's haxie program called Silk, it will allow Mozilla (or IE) to use the Quartz text smoothing along with your other Carbon apps. Well worth the download and it doesn't appear to slow down the system -- which I expected. With Quartz text smoothing, MacOS X becomes the most visually appealing, web browsing platform -- which it should be.

Mozilla did as well as IE in the ratings

[dlevitan]

strange how they give a rating that would barely merit a "C-"

Actually, they gave it the same rating as they gave IE 6, Netscape 7 PR 1, Netscape 6.1, and one more than Opera 6. So in reality, Mozilla ranked as well as the "best" browsers from MS.

Re:Built for IE!

[gambit3]

IIRC, and I think there was a Slashdot story about this, I remember reading that one of the conditions that M$ put forth as a requirement for them to continue developing Office for the Mac, was that Apple had to stop using Netscape as the default browser, and replace it with IE.

Re:On first glance....

[brsmith4]

it uses 3 times the memory space as IE. I thought it was supposed to be more efficient?

Yes... Do you know why??? Because most of IE is integrated into the explorer UI. Most of the bulk of Internet Explorer lies there. When you fire up mozilla, it has to start everything, the rendering engine, its own UI, etc. If you take that into account, Mozilla is far more efficient. Think of it this way: take the time that it takes the explorer shell to start and add the time that it takes for IE to start. Also, add the memory usage. Then compare to mozilla. Have a nice day.

best thing never mentioned: keywords for bookmarks

[tswinzig]

The coolest thing in mozilla is that I can associate a bookmark with a keyword (even just a letter or two), and go to that bookmark through the URL bar with that keyword, even with search terms.

E.g. I have this bookmark for dictionary.com:

http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=% s

For keyword, I have it set to 'd'. I can lookup a word by typing "d " on the url bar, and hitting enter.

I do similar things for Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=%s), for IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/Find?select=All&for=%s), and especially for various customer searches with our database search engine at work.

This feature saves me TONS of time every day. This alone is enough to keep me using Mozilla as long as it remains stable.

Then you add in the oft-mentioned tabbed browsing, popup blocking, standards compliancy, skinnability, programmability, etc., and it just gets better.

And don't forget, the perfect complement to tabbed browsing -- saving a group of bookmarks as one item ! Perfect.

And what about how much more consistently Mozilla handles links for new windows? MSIE has two shitty behaviors to choose from, which drive me crazy. Either you open up a page in a new window each time , or it tries to re-use windows that are already open, usually picking the one I don't want. Even when clicking on bookmarks, it uses this bizarre behavior. I don't know when they added this 'feature', but it drove me bonkerz.

Jeez, I haven't even gotten to the email client! All the things that drive me nuts in Outlook/Outlook Express are fixed in Mozilla's mail client. It only lacks a couple things I like (Eudora's "redirect" ability, for one).

Finally a mail client that lets me use IMAP without constantly reminding me that I'm looking at a remote message. (What's this outlook crap with drawing a line through a deleted message? I like for the message to disappear, and the focus to move to the next message... thanks mozilla.)

Not perfect, but mozilla is getting there.

Re:mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly

[cjpez]

Or even . . .

• View
• Apply Themes
• Get New Themes

:)

BBC story

[Brown]

The BBC has a story on the 1.0 release of mozilla, including the background of Mozilla and the principles of OpenSource.

It seems to be a generally favourable overview: "Mozilla is quick, stable, and virtually free of the default links to manufacturers' products that feature so prominently in commercial browsers". Also mentioned is the recent release of OpenOffice. Includes some quotes from Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org.

Chris

Get the latest beta of America Online

[yerricde]

We need to find an ISP willing to distribute Mozilla instead of IE.

Thirty percent of people who connect to the Internet do so through America Online. After AOL's contract with Microsoft (bundling IE in exchange for bundling an AOL icon on the desktop) expired, AOL switched CompuServe to Gecko, and the next version of the AOL client is headed that way as well (AOL keyword: beta).

Re:best thing never mentioned: keywords for bookma

[snake_dad]

I'd like to mention the possibility to create a bookmark for a group of pages, that you have currently open in separate tabs. Just open several tabs, load one of your favourite news sites in each of them, and create a bookmark, and check the "File as group" checkbox to be able to open all of them in one single mouseclick. I love it.

Re:Mozilla: useless for the intranet

[jonabbey]

They are still working on NTLM. Look up bugzilla bug 23679 for details. Or copy the following URL and enter it into your browser (to work around bugzilla's slashdot referer filter): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23679

Re:Built for IE!

[Elwood P Dowd]

That used to be the case.

They made a deal that expired. There is now no deal, and no contract requiring Microsoft to produce Office:Mac. Kevin Browne of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit keeps telling people that there's no reason MS is going to stop making Office:Mac. There doesn't need to be a contract. There just needs to be goodwill between the companies.

Interview
Keynote

Of course, Apple switching to Mozilla might easily count as an end to the goodwill between the companies.