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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.
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.
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.