Slashdot Mirror
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.
Unless you want to read ass-kissing, don't go there.
They can even write pap about desktop Video and FireWire without even mentionning Apple existence.
They're strange that way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
A while ago (M17?) I decided I was going to wait for 1.0 before I switched over to Mozilla.
Since then I fell in love with Opera's gestures and tabbed browsing. I think that Mozilla handles Tabs Awsomly, but that its gestures are kinda lame.
ex: in Opera I can right click hold and mouse wheel to change windows.
and can go foward and back with just the buttons (no motion). In Mozilla I am stuck with holding a button that has another function and moving the mouse, and with my spazzy hand I fail half the time succeed.
Amyway, I like Mozilla but it won't become my browser of choice anytime soon (I predict).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And I've been wondering about Apple. Many web designers still use Macs for web design.
If Apple started to distribute Mozilla as the default browser instead of IE, it would also help Mozilla to gain market share.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Thanks for the thought. I appreciate your advice and your honesty.
However, I'm not going to do it because of propaganda. I'm going to do it because my first experience with an Open Source product (Mozilla), has been excellent. Especially the power to customize it to what I want it to do. This is the one thing that absolutely caught me off guard. I don't have to Beat It Into Submission like I've had to do with commercial to mold it to my liking.
From what I've read about Linux users, that it also a strength of Linux, and THAT'S why I'll probably give it a try.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
It does too discriminate (or can). You can disable all popups or only "unrequested" (for instance, onLoad) popups. You can also diable moving or resizing windows (take that hollywood.com!). It's granular and configurable, as the C|Net reviewer would have discovered had he done his job.
...the help documentation filled out before release. A 1.0 release shouldn't have vast gaping holes in the docs that say "Information to be filled in". There are actual things I'd like to know. For instance, is there a way to switch between tabs, using the keyboard? If I can't, it's arguably faster to have multiple windows open and cycle through them that way.
It's all well and good that the browser has lots of features. They're pretty useless if I can't figure out how to use them.
First off, I don't use Chatzilla, but from what I read, it gave me no info. on Chatzilla itself.
:)
The editor reviews Chatzilla as a IM client? You can't really compare. That's like saying, "Computers suck, they don't cut my lawn well". It would have been wiser to perhaps compare Chatzilla to say, BitchX (my IRC client of choice), or XChat or *another IRC client* ???
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
At work, web access is controlled by a Microsoft proxy server. The MS proxy server requires NTLM authentication support. Guess how many browsers support NTLM? (See also: how many Internet browsers has Microsoft released?)
Given that there is and has been PLENTY of information on the NTLM-over-HTTP authentication process, it is inexcusable for a 1.0 browser to not have support for this protocol.
Nathan
Now I haven't used Mozilla 1.0 extensively yet, what with it just having come out, but I can tell you that Netscape 6 and espically 4 have problems of just rendering HTML WRONG. Some examples:
I was designing a site and, as I'm won't to do, doing the whole thing in a text editor and using IE to look at it. Now because my intention was compatibility, I strictly adhered to the HTML spec (using the W3's validator to check myself) and used only tags I knew that both IE and Netscape implemented. The result was broken in Netscape. It was a 3 column, expanding design somewhat similar to Slashdot's. The code was 100% compliant and rendered properly in IE 4, IE 5 and Opera (don't remember what the current version was then). In Netscape 4.7, half the right hand column failed ot display. It to a real hack ofa workaround to make it display properly on Netscape and still maintain standards compliance.
Or another time, I was messing around with CSS and managed to create a neat little script that did text dropshadows. It took the length of the text based on font type and size (it only worked with one font) and calculated the correct offset for the top text. It worked really nice. Now I figured a neat trick like this was bound to be broken on anything but IE 6 since that was what I designed it for. To my plesant supprise it wasn't, it rendered great on IE 5 and 6 for both Mac and PC. Not on Netscape 4.7 or 6, however. The alignment was all off. Worse, it was off by different amounts on different platforms. I ended up just canning the idea.
The problem I've had with Netscape up to this point is that many of the standard they impliment, they impliment WRONG. Now since I haven't used Mozilla much for design checking (I quit doing web design) I can't speak for it's release, but NEtscape 6 which was based form it's code still had some massive problems.
Er, uh, have you tried Opera [opera.com] yet? They practically invented tabbed browsing.
I love Opera, too, but the first browser *I* ever saw with tabs was the bundled browser from (IIRC***) the now-defunct GNN internet service.... in 1996!
I'm just shocked it took that long to catch on, it was a pretty cool feature even in a time when IE didn't fully support TABLE!
*** NOTE: It might have been SPRYnet, not GNN - it *was* six years ago, after all...
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Seriously, have you never heard of the Web Standards Project?
http://www.webstandards.org/
Web developers are sick of coding HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for one browser, and then debugging it for every other browser they have to support. Netscape 4.x and 6.0 are definitely high on the list of sucky browsers to have to support, but IE 5, 5.5, and 6 aren't perfect. Also, IE 5, 5.5, and 6 differ greatly, not to mention the Mac versions of IE which also differ. You can't just target one IE version and get 100% compatibility with the others.
So, rather than looking at the ridiculous statistics that say stuff like "97% of browser users use MSIE" (which I just don't believe), start looking at stats about which browser AND VERSION your users are using. Surprise, chances are there are a hell of a lot of IE 5 and 5.5 users. Chances are there is no one browser+version that covers the majority of your site's users. Doh! So much for just targeting "one" browser.
So, forget about this silly notion of "IE won, all web sites will be IE sites from now on." That's not financially viable, since IE is actually serveral products which must be QA'd for separately. The solution that web designers are rallying around is "code to the standard, and debug for supported browsers from there." Screw IE 5, make people upgrade to IE 6. Screw Netscape 4.x, make them upgrade to 6.2, 7.x, or Mozilla 1.0.
Otherwise, why even bother with HTML at all? If you're going to target Windows only, you're wasting your time trying to get a good GUI user experience and robust application functionality implemented with tools as crappy as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The only reason to use them is to get thin-client, cross-platform, cross-browser functionality with zero download time. Use Delphi or Visual C++ or Java or something if you want total control over the user experience and you don't care about porting.