AP reports on renewed "Browser War"

An anonymous reader writes "CNN and others are reporting an Associated Press story on "the revived browser war" with Mozilla paired against Microsoft. It seems the 1.0 release is creating some waves out there. " Considering most people consider the war long since over, I can't imagine this mattering much.

Comments

90%+ for IE still

[dpete4552]

Until my logs show something close to 50/50 for IE/Mozilla I don't believe it. Still showing 90% for IE, and I promote Mozilla on my site.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[loply]

My logs go something like: 50% IE 20% Moz 10% Konq 20% CodeRed

Re:90%+ for IE still

[ryants]

Keep in mind that you can change the User-Agent string for Mozilla for various reasons, from security to working with broken sites. Pretending to be IE with Mozilla (or Konq or Galeon...) is not too uncommon.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[killmenow]

And I use Opera, but identify as IE5.

And when I use curl, I use an IE5 user-agent string. Some sites just won't let you in otherwise.

We've all heard it before: when (yes, I said when) AOL switches to Mozilla, there will instantly be millions of Mozilla users.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[zulux]

And I use Opera, but identify as IE5.

You want a site to fix this in under 24 hours? Just tell them that you're blind and that their site won't let your blide-enabeled web-browser in.

Dreams of ADA lawsuits start dancing in their heads. It works really well for government sites, and moderatly well for medium sized corporations.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[andred]

No, there will not *instantly* be millions of Mozilla users when this happens, because AOL users are not known to upgrade *instantly* when new software is out.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[cphirman]

I've got 22% using non-MS browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, etc). The rest is various incarnations of IE. More than in the past, but still a long way to go.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[malfunct]

Actually they are shown to almost never upgrade. Until AOL sends them a notice they won't be able to connect any more most of them sit there happy in thier little walled garden seeing only what the content nazi's at AOL want them to see/pay for.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[captain_craptacular]

For those numbers to mean anything at all we'd have to know what your site is. Obviously somewhere like /. or linux.org is going to have a much higher proportion of non IE browsers than say MSN.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[treat]

happy in thier little walled garden seeing only what the content nazi's at AOL want them to see/pay for.

AOL provides an Internet-connected IP address, and software that handles the most commonly used Internet protocols. What more could they do to not be a "walled garden"?

Re:90%+ for IE still

[GSloop]

Lets see...

35+
40+
20+
25+
30
---
150%

Methinks you need remedial math or reading skills, but probably BOTH!

Cheers!

Re:90%+ for IE still

[killmenow]

There are 34 million people using AOL.

I just read where some people estimate at least a million of them are using their "1000 free hours for 45 days" and will never pay AOL.

When their time runs out and AOL ships them a new CD the month after switching to Gecko, there will *quickly* be a million users on it.

Additionally, while I'm sure a lot of AOL users don't upgrade regularly, if only 5% do, there's 1.7 Million new Mozilla users, *quickly*.

But, you're right, not instantly...my bad.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[killmenow]

My father-in-law uses AOL.

If I am visiting and need Internet access, I connect with AOL. As soon as I connect, I minimize AOL and launch Opera.

Do you suggest AOL is censoring what I can see this way?

Or do you suggest my father-in-law and the hordes of AOL users lack the ability to do the same as me?

Re:90%+ for IE still

[cheezedawg]

Pretending to be IE with Mozilla (or Konq or Galeon...) is not too uncommon.

Not too uncommon for the nerd minority, but still extremely uncommon in general. Thats not going to influence the numbers.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[fault0]

> We've all heard it before: when (yes, I said when) AOL switches to Mozilla, there will instantly be millions of Mozilla users.

Probably never going to happen unless things change fast.

1.Microsoft really does not want to give up it's control over the browser market (and pragmatic Internet standards at that).

2. AOL does not want to lose the AOL icon on the Windows desktop/Start Menu.

3. There are existing contracts between MS and AOL about using IE as AOL's default browser.

4. There would be a service/support nightmare in AOL as customers ring in and ask why obscuresitexyz.com or obscurestoreasd.net do not work suddenly.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Jonny Ringo]

Just tell them that you're blind and that their site won't let your blide- enabeled web-browser in.
Yeah, that's a great idea. Here are some others.
park in a hanicap area and pretend your retarded.
pretend you can't walk and use a wheel chair and try and get into buildings that do not have wheel chair ramps (you can also pretend your stuck on a curb).
What the hell??? Do we need to start pretending we are blind because we don't want people to use IE. Shit, man thats pretty lame.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[rseuhs]

Well, that's still 70% Microsoft... ;-)

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Eil]

Believe it or not, this doesn't seem to work with the newer builds of Mozilla.

By this I mean you can set the user agent pref (See prefs.js and edit/create user.js to set your own) and the about:mozilla page reports the correct faked agent. But go to any web page that reports your user-agent string back to you (such as here near the bottom) and it still gives the old built-in user agent string. Since I have no real reason to fake my string, (and this therefore doesn't affect me) I haven't filed a bug report.

Curiouser, an outdated mozilla.org page reports the correct values. (Scroll down to "Profile of Your Browser".

Another thing is that navigator.appVersion string cannot be changed other than modifying the source... it won't get changed with a faked user agent string. There's an entry in bugzilla for this.

So what gives? I dunno, other than there seem to still be a few quirks of Mozilla that won't likely be worked out for a few more versions.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[bigbadwlf]

AOL does not want to lose the AOL icon on the Windows desktop/Start Menu.

They already have.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[zulux]

What the hell??? Do we need to start pretending we are blind because we don't want people to use IE. Shit, man thats pretty lame.


Blind enabeled browsers are very delicate, and are very hard to get working right. Any webmaster that throws artificial blockades up need to fix them ASAP - if it happens to help other standards complient browsers, than this is a small benificial side-effect.

I feel that it's appropriate to take any reasonable measures to see that webmasters fix this particular problem - and if a little creative lying gets the job done than so be it.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[ceejayoz]

If you'd heard "but isn't AOL the Internet" as many times as I have, you'd understand the problem...

Re:90%+ for IE still

[blashyrkh]

I think it really depends on the content on your site. But nevertheless hope giving figures. I still think it's "too soon" for mozilla to be widely used. I have heard nothing but good reactions on mozilla 1.0. And a lot of windows users just recently started using mozilla as their default browser. (windows users think if something with a version number lower then 1.0.0, it's not good :)

Re:90%+ for IE still

[ealar dlanvuli]

It's silly for mozilla to lie to a site. It's the sites problem not yours, send an email.

To be honest the only site I've seen so far is the passport website, but then again about every page on it is non-standard HTML and br0ks the w3c validator.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Eil]

We've all heard it before: when (yes, I said when) AOL switches to Mozilla, there will instantly be millions of Mozilla users.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I realize that you may be lumping Netscape and other "value-added derivatives" in there when you say Mozilla. But what makes Mozilla the best browser for me is the complete lack of commercialism and additional bloatware. Netscape 6.0> and Mozilla are two opposite ends of the spectrum in my opinion, even if they do share most of the same code.

But I'll continue, assuming you mean "Mozilla" as in the binary distribution available from mozilla.org, mostly for the sake of argument.

AOL will do one of two things:

1. They will simply ship Netscape with their software, and probably modify the AOL software itself to use gecko for rendering HTML. (It might be interesting if they did the entire AOL suite in XPCOM, but I wouldn't hold my breath.)
   
2. They will repackage Mozilla, much like Netscape has, and brand it The AOL Browser or something like that. This is far less likely though, as since they own Netscape, they've already got a browser to use without hiring programmers to redo it all.

But the point remains that most of the mediocre Joe Sixpacks in the world will probably never know Mozilla exists. Therefore, there can never and will never be a Mozilla vs. Explorer war.

The best we can hope for is that the multitude of Mozilla-based web browsers stick to adherance of standards as adamantly as the Mozilla team has. If that can happen, then web developers will hopefully take a stronger stance towards standards and begin to reject the horribly standards-broken Internet Explorer[1]. From there, Microsoft has the chance to fix their browser and make it a worthwhile competitor or release a new version of the same tripe and wonder why their market share is going down the tube.

1) IE is particularly crappy with respect to CSS compliance and PNG support. I know, because these are two things that I've been playing with recently on my own. Mozilla isn't 100% CSS compliant either, but it does a lot more stuff the correct way. This is where I think Mozilla will make a great impact on the web. By testing out Mozilla developers will see the advantage of standards and more and more will have standards in mind when designing web sites. My dream is to see John Q. Random Webpublisher using w3.org as a techincal reference instead of "Designing Websites for Internet Explorer" by Joe Clueless.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Mansing]

After reviewing 12 months and 10 million requests on one of our sites, IE 80%, Netscape + Mozilla 20%.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[nil_null]

I use Mozilla on all my boxen, but on my Windows box I have it saying its using the Linux version.

Nice little line to add to your user.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529");

How's that for skewing web server statistics? :)

Those who have IE users on their network and want to skew results in favor of Mozilla can do so by using a web proxy (such as Squid). Hmmmm.. this could account for the large number of IE in web server logs. Many web proxies will send a set browser name to the web server, and I imagine most of these proxies are set to say its IE.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[blazerw11]

There are existing contracts between MS and AOL about using IE as AOL's default browser.

Nope, the contract expired.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Atzanteol]

There would be a service/support nightmare in AOL as customers ring in and ask why obscuresitexyz.com or obscurestoreasd.net do not work suddenly.

Have you ever used AOL? The AOL browser is *not* IE. It's a bastardized version of IE. The result is that it is truly the *worst* web browser in existance.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Anonymous Coward]

Try doing that for a PORNO website.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[loply]

Opera pretends to be IE by default. Id guess 98% of Opera users are wearing an IE user agent..

Re:90%+ for IE still

[evilquaker]

Try doing that for a PORNO website.

What if you just want to read the articles?

Re:90%+ for IE still

[mark_lybarger]

use it? try to code to it. that'll shake your tail feathers a little.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Eil]

I'm definitely not calling you a liar, but for most site statistics I see (including my own), browsers in the "Other" category (Opera, Galeon, Dreamcast, lynx, WebTV, etc) usually pull anywhere between 10%-15% (+/- 5% based on your audience) of the hits.

Since your numbers add up to 100%, I'm taking a guess that the "Other" browsers are lumped into Mozilla/Netscape because other sources claim IE to have upwards of 80% or 90% of browser market share.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[WowTIP]

But, do we really want 34 million AOL users propagating *for* Mozilla? :)

Re:90%+ for IE still

[nil_null]

In other words not content for the product to be the best and win on its own merit you advise riggin the stats to thus inflate the results and give an incorrect picture and invalidate all statistics?

Nah, I was just showing that web stats can be easilly rigged and that they can't be trusted. Just something I did today to prove a point. I'm not advising anyone to do anything.

I think my point about the web proxy is pretty clear. It shows that all users are only one type of client. So if the web proxy shows IE, it doesn't matter if users use Mozilla.

Why do I bother explaining myself to AC's...

Re:90%+ for IE still

[lambsonic]

Although he did say "roughly".

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Hassan79]

Pretending to be IE with Mozilla (or Konq or Galeon...) is not too uncommon.

I think this is a bad method, because then, you don't get seen as a user of a non-IE-browser any more. Web designers will just say "Well, we've 95% IE users here, so why bother about the rest?".
Complaining is always the better solution!
Unfortunately, Konqueror is the only browser where you can set the UserAgent to an individual value for each site.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[00_NOP]

The really depressing thing about all these browser statistics is that they punch through the geek bubble and remind you just how few people are using 'nix based systems.

Granted, some of the IE users will be on OS X, but not many.

And the majority of Netscape and Opera users will be on Windows and quite possibly the majority of Mozilla users too.

I love Linux, I would never dream of giving it up now. But clearly, I am eccentric in that regard.

Hell, even now I am posting this off IE5 and NT4 (not my system).

Re:90%+ for IE still

[El buen guiri]

You realise of course it's possible to identify your browser without using any user agent string - if document.All fails then it's not IE, etc.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[killmenow]

Well, I realize there are other things one can do to try to nail it down, but...two things:

1. You can't get that to show up in your web server log, which is what I was talking about
2. What if I turn off javascript? Can you then tell I'm not IE?

Re:90%+ for IE still

[malfunct]

Get rid of thier default (and automatically installed and hard to get rid of for normal people) software. And fix thier internal content. Do you realize that if you search for Microsoft in the AOL search engine provided with the default software you are sent to an AOL page that describes MS as a software company that makes windows and has NO links to the Microsoft official site?

Re:90%+ for IE still

[Eil]

Note my wording carefully. I said that I don't have a need to fake my browser string, only that the Mozilla setting seems to be borked.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[WowTIP]

Why do you assume I am American?

No, I am afraid 34 million AOL users will get very confused when the Mozilla driven AOL doesn't behave exactly the same way as it used to, and blame it all on Moz.

Don't take it personal, I guess there are a few computer litterate users in the AOL horde, just like you.

Re:90%+ for IE still

[r3v]

Actually, most long-time windows users don't trust anything with a version number lower than 3.1

If you don't know why, ask someone who used Windows 3.0...

Re:90%+ for IE still

[welshsocialist]

Give me a friggin' break! We all know MSIE's real total is around 60%. The others are spoofer or bald face liars.

Browser War over? Not yet.

[kju]

With Linux gaining popularity, Microsoft is loosing marketshare for IE. And i really believe in AOL choosing Mozilla over IE.

Re:Browser War over? Not yet.

[TweeKinDaBahx]

This is only funny because it's a dream, not a reality.

Re:Browser War over? Not yet.

[lunatik17]

I like to think of it as "the future" ;-P At any rate, Mozilla will certainly outlive IE through pure portability.

Not objective

[Shimmer]

Keep in mind that CNN and Netscape (which is based on Mozilla) are owned by the same company: AOL/Time-Warner.

-- Brian

Re:Not objective

[tswinzig]

Keep in mind that it's an AP article, not written by CNN.

Re:Not objective

[slavemowgli]

I don't think that this it is really justified to say this.

For one, this is originally an AP report, not something CNN came up with themselves; also, the people at CNN are first and foremost journalists, as well, so one'd expect them to be dedicated to objectivity even when reporting about issues relating to another unit of their parent company.

Perception is reality

[Anonymous Coward]

If they say there's a browser war, there's a browser war. When they said it was over, it was over.

So, now it's back. More media exposure for Mozilla (especially when it's quite positive) is a good thing. If Mozilla were bad, no one would care. Mozilla is good, very good, and people notice that.

Go Go Mozilla!

Re:Perception is reality

[LinuxCumShot]

Maybe now its just a browser police action.

Re:Perception is reality

[laserjet]

Maybe it's not an official browser war, but definately a browser police action like Viet Nam?

Either way, I am using Mozilla because it's better for me. I think it rules the earth and the seven seas.

Far from over

[Savatte]

The browser war is far from over. The Mozilla team should be fighting to make it the best browser possible, regardless of the competition. Just because MS has a stronger market share doesn't automatically signal the end of the war.

Re:Far from over

[jazman_777]

The browser war is far from over.

No cause worth fighting for is ever lost.

War is over unless AOL changes default

[acomj]

It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..

Why AOL hasn't switched after buying netscape must say something about microsofts control...

Competition is good though, so hopefully this will help all browsers get better..

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Hollins]

Think about it. You're AOL and half of America's internet subscribers go through you. Because 95% of surfers are using IE, sites are built to display on IE. Many sites are designed to display properly in IE, standards be damned, meaning they don't work on a properly performing browser. Many don't allow anything but IE to use their services.

Now, to convert your entire userbase to Netscape will mean a significant portion of sites will no longer look correct or will cease to work entirely. Your customers don't understand browser compliance, they merely know that they could visit sites with AOL 7, but not AOL 8. Is the deluge of customer support phone calls and email really worth the hassle?

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[pi_rules]

It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..

No... it will mean designers will have to think about W3C compliance. The days of dual-coding for NS4 and IE4 are long gone. Anybody who can't right a page that works on both browsers without even detecting which one you're on has done of one two things:

a) Designed it poorly.

b) Written it without ever looking at the standards.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Eusebo]

I suspect they haven't done it yet because of the potential support nightmare that could follow.

FWIW, AOL has started bundling Gecko with CompuServe, reportedly to use as a test market before deploying to all AOL subscribers (see this article)

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[BrainInAJar]

They haven't switched over because they were trading "being pre-installed on windows machines" for "using IE". There was a story a while back about AOL using moz for their latest version (aol 6 or 7 or something) because that contract is over

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[chris_mahan]

or both,

Because in fact, a site not designed according to the standards is poorly designed.

Like Lenno: "Flame all you want, we'll make more..."

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Anonymous Coward]

Many sites are designed to display properly in IE, standards be damned, meaning they don't work on a properly performing browser.

AOL users all use an AOL proxy, don't they? Just auto-spoof for them. Most sites that "don't work" with non-MSIE browsers, actually do.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Apreche]

95% of surfers use IE because 95% of surfers are AOLers. Remember the number 1 ISP is AOL. IE is only the number one browser because AOL counts as IE. If AOL switches to Mozilla, then the #1 browser becomes Mozilla. I'm at a technical college with lots of computer nerds, and lots of non-nerds too. Since we have a LAN you can get a good idea about what browsers people use without AOL getting in the way. WRONG. Most of the non-nerds USE AOL. That's right, given for free the best ISP in the world, "stupid" people just put AOL over it, because they don't know any better. Other than that it's pretty much a 3 way tie between Mozilla, Netscape Communicator, and IE. There are actually quite a few funky opera users out there.

I personally use IE for most browsing, I have win2k and IE is fast, and it works. I disliked Mozilla because the last time I used it it was very slow. I recently installed 1.0, and am very pleased. Now I use both browsers. IE for my daily site roundup and Mozilla for browsing (pop-up protection is great). My roomate a rabid IE fan even installed Mozilla, he also only uses it when he needs to block pop-ups.

So there is no browser war. AOL just decides which browser is the standard.

And Konqueror is kool too.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[CommieLib]

I've got news for you; when it targets 95% usage, that IS THE STANDARD...

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Coplan]

Get the Major Websites by the ear!

If I were in charge of AOL, and I wanted to once again make one of my products (Netscape) a staple on the internet, I would employ one simple strategy. I would pick a version of the Mozilla engine (aka, Netscape). Mozilla 1.0 final seems like a good choice, as it's a stable release, and it has reached approval from many critics. Now, I would make a development timeline for AOL version 8 (or whatever version might be next). Then, I would make an all media announcement: "AOL version 8 is scheduled to release on December 1st. At this time, we will fully implement the Mozilla engine into our browser, using Mozilla 1.0 as our framework."

The important step is the follow through, however. I can say that, but I have to do two things to make sure I maintain my market share. First, I have to make sure that I do in fact implement the Mozilla engine completely. Second, I have to make some sort of incentive for AOL users to upgrade. Nevermind a minor release. This would have to be a major release with lots of new features. Maybe take advantage of Chatzilla and get that fully integrated into AOL. Whatever it takes...but just changing the rendering engine or the browser will not be enough for most AOL users to upgrade.

The old addage is "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." Many people know that. But many people also know the caveat: "If its got new features, it might be worth a try."

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Col. Klink (retired)]

Do the math... using your number, 1/2 of the population is using AOL (and IE). Web sites are built with IE in mind because 95% of the surfers are using IE.

Most sites, whether designed for IE or not, still look fine with other browsers. It's really a small minority that absolutely don't work at all with anything but IE (and some of them only because they just plain block non-IE referers).

Now if (when) AOL changes to Mozilla, suddenly only half the population is using IE. That small minority of sites will now be blocking 50% of their potential customers instead of 5%.

Why they chose to block any customers remains a mystery, but blocking the entire AOL population is just not economically viable.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[ealar dlanvuli]

Use mozilla for your daily browsing routine, you can set a bookmark to a collection of sites, then bind that collection to a internet 'keyword'.

All of your days browsing will load at once (and not slow like in IE when you try and open 15 pages at once), and you can move between tabs with zero load time.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[msaavedra]

This is mostly true, but it is still possible to come up with theoretically (if not practically) excellent designs that adhere precisely to the standards, but don't render correctly. For instance, it is widely considered a good practice to use HTML only to mark up the logical structure of a page (avoiding using tables for layout, tags, etc) and use CSS to handle layout and style. This ensures a good separation between content and presentation. However, both IE and Mozilla have some quirks with their interpretation of the CSS2 box model and positioning properties. At this stage, it is impossible to design a page that:

1. Uses a complex CSS-based layout (though simple ones work pretty well)
2. Renders correctly in IE5, IE6, and Mozilla
3. Adheres strictly to the standards (XHTML 1.1, CSS2)
4. Doesn't use any browser detection tricks

Things are getting very close, but the browsers are not quite ready for well-designed, browser-agnostic pages using the latest standards.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[ealar dlanvuli]

If you keep point 1, and two, but remove "and Mozilla" from point two, then you have described the current state of afairs.

Show me some CSS that breaks mozilla, and I will believe you, until then IE is the inferior browser by far.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[sofar]

ermmm,

I did that once d00d, and it turned out to be one happy, simple, elegant portal site. It also loaded in a jiffy in any browser without bugs, all je javascript worked flwalessly, it had selectable css style sheets through javascript that allowed you to change pretty much any element in the page, and was even w3c compliant.

IT CAN BE DONE!!!

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[SN74S181]

Sounds like an interesting tactic for AOL to take.

The question is: what would be the business reason for spending all the money to do so?

It's painful enough at AOL to try to get the userbase to move up to the latest release. I know people (family members on the in-law side) who say things like '5.0 is the best!'

It seems like a big expensive proposition, and what for? To spite Microsoft?

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[RedWizzard]

IE for my daily site roundup and Mozilla for browsing (pop-up protection is great).

I did this too until I tried Mozilla's tabbed browsing and group bookmarks. Now a click on a single bookmark and all my daily sites load into tabs at once. The other thing I like is middle-button click to open link in new window (or tab). About the only thing I use IE for now is local html files.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[anball]

I've been using Mozilla for a very long time now and actually, most sites work just fine in Mozilla. Only very rarely will I come across a site that doesn't work properly. I don't think many people will notice much of a difference if/when AOL makes the change.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[msaavedra]

Yes. As I said, if you keep things simple, it works well, so a "happy, simple, elegant" site should be fine. Sometimes complex content requires a complex layout, though. This can result in some bizarre browser behavior (from IE5 particularly), even if your CSS is perfect.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

Realistically, though, if you design and test a site in IE5+, getting it to work on Moz1.0 is not that hard... It's not NEARLY like the effort that has to be put into NS4.x/IE5+ cross-browser support.

Even if you have heavy-duty DHTML stuff (assuming you weren't dumb enough to use visual basic), you just have to remove any IE extensions to the standard DOM API for scripting languages. I had written a little DHTML page that projected some 3D points and you could rotate them and such... I wrote it entirely in IE, no effort to be compatible. It took me less than an hour to get it working under Moz1.0. The changes were basically switching from document.all.x to document.getElementsById("x") (easy regexp replacement) and adding support for event handlers that take the event object as an argument, instead of window.event, which was 2 extra lines of code for each event handler. I'm sure there are other little tweaks, but most stuff just works in both browsers. You just have to go through and check it all, which is a bit of a pain.

The other problem is sites that throw up NS4.7 pages based on the User-Agent HTTP header... that sucks. They will work, but are usually lamer versions of the site. So far, I've only seen this on msn, hotmail, and msdn... microsoft-owned webfronts.

The web is already quite usable with Moz1.0 - and that which isn't could be made so RELATIVELY easily, I expect. I don't see this as a barrier to AOL switching, if they have other reasons for it. Actually, I'd like to hear about specific major sites that DON'T work with Moz1.0... even if they are usable, but obviously broken/ugly/etc... what sites are the major offenders?

-If

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[msaavedra]

I didn't mean to imply that Mozilla's CSS support is just as bad as IE's; Mozilla is far-and-away the most standards-compliant browser that I've used. FWIW, I also checked some CSS that had given me problem in Moz in the past (an issue with the width property), but it renders correctly now. Apparently it has been fixed since I last tried this. So you very well may be right, and proper CSS will not break Mozilla.

However, even if Mozilla is perfect, I still can't exclusively use standards-compliant CSS, because it will not work properly in IE. The best I can do is write a "true" style sheet for Moz, another one that takes into account IE5's broken box model, and force IE6 into quirks mode. Then use browser detection to load the proper style sheet. Hardly an ideal solution, and this is what I was complaining about in my first post.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[LoveShack]

I believe at one point, Netscape's browser was so bad, the source was completely trashed. AOL probably didn't want to build their Empire on that. Now, things are different. And they've got Betas of the AOL software using Gecko right now. I think Compuserve is already using it officially, though I'm probably wrong.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[MtViewGuy]

You have a very valid point.

The thing is that most of the world's major commercial web sites are written for Internet Explorer 4.0 to 6.0 compliance, and to make the sites compliant with Mozilla 1.0 (neé Netscape 7.0) will require substantial investments to completely recoding the HTML, DHTML, XML, etc. source of the web site so it can be read by both browsers.

Alas, that isn't going to be cheap because because of the man-hours involved.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[ealar dlanvuli]

Ah ok, I see your point. I am just starting to grow weary of everyone else posting "Mozilla dosen't display stuff correctly!" when the only pages I've seen not display are UAGENT blocking sites.

The problem lies with IE, and it's MS's problem, you should send some feedback (it took one of my techs 3 hours to figure out how to contact someone about thier passport UAGENT block, so good luck =p)

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[MisterBlister]

95% of surfers use IE because 95% of surfers are AOLers.

Bullshit. If you're going to spout percentages, back them up with some facts/data/links. There's a large number of AOL users online, but nowhere near 95% of all web surfers.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[AntiTuX]

Netscape's source was *NEVER* trashed. Trust me, i still have a CD of the sources and binaries of EVERY version of netscape ever in my cube. They've got a little dried mountain dew on them (loan, if you ever read this, please don't kill me, i tried to get as much off as I could :( ) from a spill I had a few months back.

I can't comment on AOL 8.0, since I enjoy working on the client product release engineering team at netscape. I can probably state (which is common knowledge by now) that AOL was impressed with how gecko handled alongside IE.

BTW, The Gecko engine is made to be embedded, in case you haven't noticed that already.

Anyhow, lots of really cool stuff is gonna happen within the next 6-8 months, with Mozilla, Netscape, Compuserve, and AOL.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[nathanm]

Now a click on a single bookmark and all my daily sites load into tabs at once.

How do you do that with one click, may I ask? Some JavaScript?

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Erotomek]

It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..

I wish only the web designers could consider W3C standards when doing pages... I can dream, can't I?

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[ealar dlanvuli]

Yes, mozilla 1.0 is perhaps the single most significant event in the history of open source. It's starting to sink in to me.

If you think about it, 90% (made up figure) of people use the computer to browse the web/check email and a portion of that uses it for AIM/etc all. Mozilla 1.0 signals the release of the first 'finished' web browser for the new desktop contenders, sure konqueror/opera are great, and they have thier advantages, but Mozilla is almost exactly a drop in replacment for the web browser that joe something has learned to be the 'internet'.

Sure having kde3/gnome(whatever version it's on) is great, it's a drop in replacment for WindowsXP (if you have technicians to install/repair it, which you have for windows anyway..), it's prety and everything. If your running a older box or a terminal, you can use one of the Windows-95 lookalikes that are really light on the memory/processor, and people will get along just fine. The problem before was konqurer/opera (whatever) couldn't display all sites (yes I know they are *great* browsers, but they aern't nearly as fully featured as Mozilla), and I wouldn't even dare suggesting a solution that would stop my users from being able to surf freely (we would become the "evil IT department" in the peroid of a few seconds).

Mozilla can change all of that, I can now get rid of my old Windows95 licenses (it's amazing how long those boxen don't get upgraded after the support stops) and transfer them up to a replacment in Linux/FreeBSD with a look/work-a-like environment. I can do this because my users no longer rely on IE to display somefunnysitethatnoonehaseverheardofbefore.com when they want to, which is the main non-productive use of any computer anymore I'm willing to venture.

As always, all thoughts expressed are my own, IANAL, YMMV, IAABOFH.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Bedouin X]

Yeah IE5's box model has some serious issues. IE6 will emulate that brokeness too unless you include a transtitional+ DTD. I found that out the hard way. Dreamweaver MX's XHTML templates put the DTD below the XML declaration and causes IE to ignore it. Making IE 6 render like IE5. Moving the DTD up to the top of the page fixes that though.

FWIW...

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[rustycage]

Why not put a status message on the bottom of the browser showing that the site was designed without following standards? This would put the responsibility for the shoddy design back on the webmaster. Then maybe encourage the user to contact the webmaster about redeveloping the site to be standards compliant.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[sean23007]

You're absolutely right, but that's exactly the reason why it is so important that people get weaned off of IE. Perhaps someone should write something that translates MS-HTML into real HTML on-the-fly so that it can be read and displayed accurately in Mozilla. I know that isn't what the Mozilla people want, because it doesn't promote standards, but I think we need to fight MS on their own terms. Once this is done, AOL might consider switching to Mozilla. Now that Mozilla has 50% of the internet users (thanks to AOL), they can start enforcing true HTML. AOL can put it in their commercials that some sites don't appear correctly in AOL because of Microsoft's monopoly (which is essentially true, but the point can be made more subtly), and that if more sites don't start cleaning up their code, they could not only lose their customers and fail to garner new ones, but their reputation could be tarnished as they are linked with MS by the consumers. It is in this way, and only in this way, that Mozilla can hope to make a dent in IE and restore freedom to the galaxy- er... internet.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[rgbrenner]

You could also ask, what is the business reason for working on Mozilla and keeping around Netscape?

MS is a threat to AOL - MS has a competeing product for everthing AOL has (AFAIK).

None-the-less, I agree with you that AOL may not want to spend all the money which would be needed to pull off the switch to Mozilla. AOL has already spent the money on Mozilla, and after AOL-Time-Warners stock plunge, I wouldnt be surpirsed if they simply cut their losses.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[RedWizzard]

Nope, it's in the UI. Open a bunch of tabs and then go to Bookmarks->File Bookmark... Check the "File as Group" option and a group bookmark containing all the open tabs is created. In "Manage Bookmarks" it behaves as a folder so you can add and remove individual pages.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[delus10n0]

Yeah, I guess so. Seeing as 90% of the world uses IE as their browser. I'd say that's the standard, fucktard.

And thanks for posting as an AC. You big man you!

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[theflea]

Absolutely! AOL needs to flex some muscle. Their browser product is so stale looking and dated. If it looked a little better, people might stop defecting for other services. I hear their subscription rate is less than impressive lately. With their enormous base, they could turn the tables and get customers to e-mail webmasters. As of now, it looks like they're rolling over.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[nathanm]

Thanks! I think I'm going to switch to Mozilla, that's a feature I've wished for.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[thirdrock]

Perhaps someone should write something that translates MS-HTML into real HTML on-the-fly so that it can be read and displayed accurately in Mozilla.

That's a brilliant idea !! Just one problem though, which you cover here ...

I know that isn't what the Mozilla people want, because it doesn't promote standards, but I think we need to fight MS on their own terms

And the solution to this is ... the translation programme doesn't need to go into the browser, it could be built into the proxy server. If you could build translation intelligence into the proxy server, let's call it RH-Proxy (for Real HTML Proxy), then once you get RH-Proxy installed on the biggest ISP's, like AOL, then the problem is solved. AOL can then switch to Mozilla browsing technology without breaking any websites for their customers.

The only thing though is that this would start a feature war between M$ and the people who make RH-Proxy. If you can get enough Open Source coders working on RH-Proxy, then the resources that M$ spends on adding new non-standards-compliant features to a product they give away will cause a severe economic drain on the companies profitability, until it becomes untenable, business wise, to continue.

I might head over to sourceforge now to start up a project :)

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[RedWizzard]

But Opera's adware. These features are enough to get me to switch from IE to Mozilla but they're not enough to get me to pay any significant amount of money.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Karora]

Think about it, you're a large company like AOL. You are in the business of selling the internet and you want to commoditise the browser business so that you aren't hung out to dry later.

Using Mozilla as the basis for their browser is the best decision they could make for their long-term success.

Sure there might be some short-term pain involved, although I rarely see sites that don't work with Mozilla, and nor does my wife who browses more sites and isn't an internet guru.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Dwonis]

Yes, mozilla 1.0 is perhaps the single most significant event in the history of open source. It's starting to sink in to me.

• GNU Project is started
• BSD becomes completely free of AT&T code
• XFree86 is released
• Linux is released
• IBM adopts Linux
• DMCA passes

s/the single most/one of the most/

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Znork]

Actually, I find fewer and fewer sites that dont quite work with Mozilla based browsers, in fact, by now it's down to about ordinary breakage around the web. I doubt there'd be a deluge; considering most sites will work without a hitch, it's more likely the complaints will go to the site in question.

The advantages of Mozilla are also things that the ordinary user benefits from. Popup blocking, especially, makes the web a more pleasant experience.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[RegularFry]

Anyone know if that's hit any stats yet? What percentage of AOL's user base is that?

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[mr3038]

At this stage, it is impossible to design a page that:

1. Uses a complex CSS-based layout (though simple ones work pretty well)
2. Renders correctly in IE5, IE6, and Mozilla
3. Adheres strictly to the standards (XHTML 1.1, CSS2)
4. Doesn't use any browser detection tricks

It's not possible to comply with all of 1, 2 and 3 because IE5 doesn't follow CSS box model. For example in IE5 width=padding+contentwidth+border but in real CSS width=contentwidth. In addition, not a single version of IE correctly support CSS2 box model. As for 4, if I write html>body h1 {color: red;} does that count as browser detection trick? It's proper CSS2 but no version of IE supports it so it can be used to hide CSS properties that are known to be broken in IE like position: fixed.

Issues like Mozilla's poor/non-existant support for Q-element or lang() selectors look pretty minor compared to IE's bugs.

I make pages according to spec, test with mozilla and hide the CSS that breaks IE or Opera with selector tricks. It seems that Opera is the thoughest one to work around because it implements so much that simple selector trick is hard to come up with but some of it's bugs are so bad that they cannot be left as is. (position: absolute compibined with bottom property comes to mind first.)

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[fredrik70]

nope standards are defined by standard bodies. What you talking about is de facto standards. which necesarily isn't the same thing

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Eusebo]

I read somewhere (though I can't find the source) that CompuServe's subscriber base (~2 Million users) is about 10% of AOL's total subscriber base. I believe the same article also mentioned that a very small number of AOL users have received a version of AOL with Gecko.

One thing to keep in mind is the UserAgent string probably still registers as "AOL 7.0" making it difficult to track the users...

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[sean23007]

:) I'd help you out on the project, but alas I know dick about HTML, MS- or otherwise. But I bet there are a lot of people who could help with such a thing. The problem is that you'd probably need a massive supercomputer to handle all the translation for all of AOL's users. It would probably work better if it started out with small ISPs, because AOL would have to invest a shitpot full of money at the outset, with no guarantees whatsoever. The proxy idea is better than putting it into every browser, however, because it is more noticeable to the industry and less noticeable to the user. Putting it into every browser would completely negate any advantages of the gecko renderer.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[ealar dlanvuli]

Um I count 3 red fields in the Mozilla column, and none of those aern't red for IE. My point still stands, though obviusly Mozilla still needs a little help.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Coplan]

It seems like a big expensive proposition, and what for? To spite Microsoft?

Initial cost would be high, I agree. But as with any business, it comes down to opportunity costs. The reason is simple: AOL owns Netscape. That alone means nothing, so I can see your point. But don't forget two major points:

1) Using a third party's product (in this case, MS's IE for their engine), they have to essentially follow that party's release time line. The reality is that AOL has an obligation to keep their users up to date, and the most logical way to do that is to keep the IE engine fully integrated and up-to-date with each release of AOL. The less that a company has to depend on, the more likely it is for them to make thier own deadlines. Please don't think what the layman might think of marketing -- just because AOL sets the deadlines for the AOL coders, that doesn't mean they don't lose money if they miss their own deadline. Marketing sets deadlines, because they plan to launch promotion campaigns at that deadline. Simply put, the easiest way to get new subscribers is to release a new version and talk about its new features. People gain interest, people subscribe.

2) The costs of maintaining a project like AOL is astronomical. Throw on top of that the licensing that they might have to do to get the support so that they can continue to integrate IE into their engine. Then throw in the cost it takes for their coders to implement each new version of IE into their own engine. Sadly, the reality is that even if MS releases the source code for IE to AOL, it's still not AOL's code, and they have to take time to research the code each time a new stable release of IE is made. This takes time, and costs money. That's not to say this wouldn't happen if they were to use the Mozilla/Netscape engine...but it would be minimized as it would be an internal project.

On a final note, the simple rule of economics applies here: Using a product of another company to conduct your business is only advantageous if your own company does not have the resources to research said product. If one already has the technology, and the resources to build it, it is often cheaper to do it oneself. AOL owns Netscape, and has the resources to maintain it cheaply (and they do, regardless of the fact that AOL doesn't use it in their engine). The cost is being made...might as well save money by escaping IE.

It's an AP story on CNN's site..

[Anonymous Coward]

NEW YORK (AP) That's the associated press' byline. CNN didn't write the story, they simply published it. Lots of other news outlets will publish it, too.

Victory this was not, begun this browser war has!

[cyborch]

I have to agree that the browser war is most likely over. Most people have chosen the browser they are going to stay with. IE that is. Some, those who did not choose IE are still, mostly, open to alternatives. You all know there actually are quite a few to choose from.

But since AOL has moved over to Mozilla we might actually see some change. I can't say yet, but time will tell.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

[RocketJeff]

(The browser war) isn't over until we say it's over!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[LinuxCumShot]

um... the germans never bombed pearl harbour. that was the japanese.

A bit of history

[b.foster]

Microsoft won the browser war because IE4 beat the hell out of any other browser that was available at the time. In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.

Unfortunately for Bill Gates, his company has rested on its laurels. IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.

And how can we complain about that? May the best product win - again. It's nice to see open source come out on top.

Re:A bit of history

[cheezycrust]

IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.

These features are always mentioned as the key advantages over IE. Let's see:

• tabbed browsing: Will Microsoft really do this? In Office, they give you the possibility to display all your open documents in the system tray - I can't even turn it off! And if they do this: how long will it take them? Until IE6.5? This won't last for long as an advantage for Mozilla and Opera
• popup-blocking: hmm... I don't see them doing this either. They have probably lots of bindings with commercial sites that use pop-up ads, and don't want to lose this. So my idea is that they wont do this, and follow the idea the ReplayTV and TiVO guys say: blocking ads is stealing
• speed: Face it: IE is fast. OK, it may be unfair that it's libraries are loaded when you load Windows, but for the average user, the end result counts: a IE window opens in a instance
• stability: I don't use IE very often, but I think they are getting better and better. One problem (certainly in my Win98, don't know about others): if it goes down, it takes everything with it. Kinda selfish, not?
• security: Again, the average user doesn't care. He may sometimes visit WindowsUpdate, and get some patches, but only because they tell him so, not because he cares.

Don't understand me wrong: I always use Mozilla. But I understand people who prefer IE.

Re:A bit of history

[Telastyn]

Indeed, and there are popup-blocking patches/tweaks for IE available if you just ask google for them =]

Re:A bit of history

[fermion]

I certainly understand that the rendering engine MS used was very well designed, and the implementation shows MS can actually integrate software, but I never saw that much of a difference. The fact is, most people use IE because it is free and easy. MS agreements with AOL and Apple made IE nearly universally available. MS manipulation of web standards, as well as code in Front Page, sabotaged Netscape and created a critical mass of sites compatible only with IE. Therefore, the average user has little choice but to use IE.

So, the quality of a browser, for most people, is quite irrelevant. In my experience with browsers, which started with Mosaic, moved to Netscape (and a little cyberdog), and now is primarily Opera, IE is largely annoy ware. I have a copy of it to deal with a few sub standard sites, but otherwise it lays dormant.

The browser war may be over, but it was not won by quality software. It was won by monopolistic manipulation of the market. Until we encourage a free market, which will create a new competitive environment, non-IE browsers are toast. Even if Apple and AOL use other browsers, those browser will continue to choke on MS code.

Re:A bit of history

[fougasse]

the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.

I disagree. Mozilla has the chance to become better than IE, but so far they've just been playing catch-up. Let's see:

tabbed browsing: You're right - this is a very nice feature and one of the main reasons I use mozilla. But Opera's had this for ages, and one feature just isn't enough to make droves of people switch.

anti-popup features: will not be in Netscape, the consumer version of Mozilla. Even in Mozilla, they're relatively hidden, and simple addons are available to do the same for IE. People would love this if it were easily and prominently available, but they're not going to go seek it out.

speed: on modern computers, rendering speed is mostly irrelevant -- even if Mozilla renders nested tables 50% faster than IE, that's still less than a second's difference in real-world cases, and I don't care. On the points where I do care -- startup speed, interface speed/responsiveness, complex DHTML -- IE is almost always faster.

stability: Mozilla 1.0 crashes considerably more frequently than IE6, for me at least. Neither is particularly unstable, but in my experience Mozilla certainly isn't more stable.

security: Not something your average person cares about. Also: yes, certainly, Mozilla seems to have fewer security bugs so far. But how often have IE (not Outlook, IE the browser) security bugs been widely used to cause actual harm? Pretty much never -- this isn't a major worry for most users.

Re:A bit of history

[Osty]

tabbed browsing: Will Microsoft really do this? In Office, they give you the possibility to display all your open documents in the system tray - I can't even turn it off! And if they do this: how long will it take them? Until IE6.5? This won't last for long as an advantage for Mozilla and Opera

Microsoft added tabs in Visual Studio.NET, which allows you to browse the web inside your IDE (nice for those times when you have to hit MSDN, but don't want to pull up IE), as well as in the help viewer (MSDN on disk, VS.NET help, and a tabbed web browser, all in one). Thus, it seems that it would be trivial for them to add this into IE7. I don't know if it will be, but it seems that tabbed browsing is becoming more and more popular, and I doubt MSFT would miss that. As for the SDI/multiple docs interface Office has, in the past you've been able to revert to an MDI format. I haven't really used anything from Office except Outlook, lately, so I don't know if that's still an available option in Office XP. I'd expect it is, you just have to dig.

popup-blocking: hmm... I don't see them doing this either. They have probably lots of bindings with commercial sites that use pop-up ads, and don't want to lose this. So my idea is that they wont do this, and follow the idea the ReplayTV and TiVO guys say: blocking ads is stealing

Microsoft won't be doing this, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it instead. Internet Explorer has a very powerful extension mechanism via COM. <pimpage> Try NoPopIE for example. </pimpage> Think of it as the same way that Netscape will not support blocking pop-ups, while mozilla does -- IE doesn't do it, but you can get an extension that does.

stability: I don't use IE very often, but I think they are getting better and better. One problem (certainly in my Win98, don't know about others): if it goes down, it takes everything with it. Kinda selfish, not?

That's mostly a function of the OS, rather than the browser. Netscape has been known to kill Win9x, as well. Try Windows 2000 or Windows XP for a much more robust and stable experience.

Overall, I agree with your assessment as to why people like IE. I like IE. It's a very good browser, imho. Yeah, sure, I can download mozilla and use that instead, but why should I bother when I already have IE? I keep a version of mozilla around just to periodically check my web sites to make sure they don't look like crap in Mozilla, but otherwise I use IE all the time.

Re:A bit of history

[rmohr02]

You should be using Hotmail.

Re:A bit of history

[rmohr02]

Sorry, IE isn't going to do this. I had MSN Internet for awhile, and msn.com and all of the ____.msn.com sites used a popup on nearly every page.

Re:A bit of history

[mangu]

speed: Face it: IE is fast

Well, you may be surprised to learn about my experience. I set up a set of dual boot linux+win98 for a bunch of guys that had to use DECnet at my company. Although they complained about sites that weren't compatible with any of the Linux browsers, they prefer to use them over IE because all three (Mozilla, Netscape, and Konqueror) are significantly faster than IE. They have vmware, so, for them, it's very quick and easy to switch between IE and Linux browsers.

Re:A bit of history

[crimoid]

IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon

I doubt IE will loose much market share anytime soon. What incentive does the average Windows user have to spend the time to download any browser, especially Mozilla/Netscape? Very little. With IE built/bundled with Windows the vast majority of Windows users will simply fire up IE and start browsing.

It will take a major event to begin to unseat IE. AOL changing its engine would be one such event, as would legislation forcing Microsoft to bundle (or unbundle) various browser options. The least likely would be the "comeback" of a browser on features alone.

Re:A bit of history

[Dunkelzahn]

Its been my experience with Internet Explorer 6, in an objective manner, that it was engineered from the ground up for use on an NT5 or greater system, such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP. On those operating systems, it runs very stably in my experience. On a 9x system, yeah IE6 will run, but it will as the parent said, bring the whole damn system down with it. I really don't have any experience with IE 5 or 6 on ME, because it was such utter garbage when I installed it, that I formatted the drive it was on the next day and didn't look back. As for linux or other platforms, Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror all have their pros and cons, and are all MOSTLY good browsers. All in all, I would say never put any version of IE greater than 5.5 on a win 9x system, but if you are running 2000 or XP, 6.0+ should be fine, in most circumstances.

Re:A bit of history

[skt]

I think that you missed the biggest reason why people use IE vs. mozilla or opera. They use IE because it comes with their computer or they use it because the IT guys put a shortcut to Internet Explorer on their desktop. Internet explorer isn't a bad product, so there is no good reason to switch.

Netscape4 and mozilla aren't bad products either. Around work, I would say that 90% of the users use Netscape4. The reason is that it is advocated and that I put shortcuts on the desktop. IE is still there (not desktop, the Programs menu), but only a few people actually use it on a regular basis. It all goes back to the M$ monopoly. If mozilla were available and displayed on computers, more people would use it. I don't really know what the answer to the problem is though.. one one hand I understand that users don't want to choose between three different browers. They just want to "browse" and are confused by choices. On the other though, I think that it is unfair for microsoft to include only Internet Explorer with Windows, because it allows them to control such a huge portion of the market.

Re:A bit of history

[FyRE666]

In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.

Sounds good! Where can I get the rpm of IE for linux?

IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.

Sorry, you were making sense up until the "Speed" part there. I'll admit it's getting much better with 1.1a, but it's not nearly as quick as IE4/5/6 yet (at least with DOM manipulation via javascript).

I'm using Moz more these days, mostly to test pages, but it's not quite good enough to become my default browser under Windows as yet. Maybe on the next release...

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

Microsoft won the browser war because IE4 beat the hell out of any other browser that was available at the time.

And I guess the fact that MS:

1) "Integrated" IE into the OS so that you got it whether you wanted it or not, and
2) Threatened the computer OEM's with withheld Windows licenses if they installed Netscape on computers going out the door, thus forcing them to pull Netscape

had nothing to do with it.

Face it, with actions such as these, in which MS used their power to skew the market by shutting off marketing channels, you do not have a fair fight. If MS had played fair AND achieved the market share they have, THEN they would have something to brag about.

Re:A bit of history

[Anomie-ous Cow-ard]

Microsoft won the browser war because IE4 beat the hell out of any other browser that was available at the time.

Actually, no. IE4 was more or less equivalent to Netscape 4 (although Communicator really was crap). IE4 was also bundled with Windos, so all the newbies started using it.

In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.

Hmmm... Let's see here:

# apt-cache search netscape
[... mozilla and other random packages ...]
navigator-base-477 - Navigator base support for version 4.77
navigator-nethelp-477 - Navigator online help for version 4.77
navigator-smotif-477 - Netscape Navigator 4.77 (static Motif)
netscape-base-477 - 4.77 base support for netscape
netscape-ja-resource-477 - Netscape 4.77 Japanese resources.
netscape-java-477 - Netscape Java support for version 4.77
netscape-ko-resource-477 - Netscape 4.77 Korean resources.
netscape-smotif-477 - This installs a standard set of netscape prog
# apt-cache search internet explorer
camserv - stream video out onto the web
wwwoffle - World Wide Web OFFline Explorer
#

Yep! By not existing, IE4 beats Netscape 4 on my Linux box! </SARCASM> (yes, i realize there could be a version available but not packaged for Debian. However, there isn't)

Even on Windows, i still find IE and Netscape 4 about equivalent for most purposes. It's amazing how little DHTML is actually used, as long as you avoid sites whose only purpose in life is to flash and blink at you (or to show off DHTML).

Mozilla easily beats any IE release.

Re:A bit of history

[71thumper]

I Agree! I was one of the loyal Netscape users who couldn't deal with the incredibly, tongue-tyingly horrid Netscape 4, and went with IE4 instead.

However, for the exact reasons above, I find myself using Mozilla 1.0 as much as possible now, mainly because 1) it works as well as IE including plugins, et al (except ActiveX, of course) 2) I prefer the Mozilla IMAP client, and 3) IT STOPS THE DAMN POPUPS!

Re:A bit of history

[Dwonis]

IE4 sucked! You must not remember what it did to Win95 machines. Ever try re-installing Win95 after installing IE4?

Re:A bit of history

[Prof.Phreak]

If it wasn't for Microsoft and their unfair power to skew the market, we'll all still be paying for Netscape. Or do you forget that Netscape was actually selling the browser before Microsoft got into the game?

You're making Netscape sound like a victim, but at the time, it was Microsoft who was the underdog.

Re:A bit of history

[alexpage]

Still doesn't change the fact that IE kicked the crap out of every other browser. Then again, IMHO, it still does. I know I'm gonna get flamed to hell for this, but having tried Mozilla, IE, Konqueror and Opera, IE is tops for me in terms of ease of use and stability. Then again, I prefer w3m for reading /.

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

If it wasn't for Microsoft and their unfair power to skew the market, we'll all still be paying for Netscape. Or do you forget that Netscape was actually selling the browser before Microsoft got into the game?

You're making Netscape sound like a victim, but at the time, it was Microsoft who was the underdog.

If they were truly the underdog, they would not have been able to skew the market the way they did.

I'm saying that we cannot say that IE won the browser wars because of its quality and usefulness, since it and Netscape were not on a level playing field in which the consumer makes the decisions. MS avoided a good deal of competition by taking the decision out of the hands of those unsophisticated users that were buying PC's in increasing numbers. If there had been a level playing field, perhaps (or not, who's to say) Netscape would have been able to react to IE with improvements, rather than basically rolling over because they were no longer getting paid by computer OEM's to install their browser.

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

Still doesn't change the fact that IE kicked the crap out of every other browser.

You're missing my point here. Virtually overnight, the market share went from Netscape to IE, not because the consumer decided IE was better; a majority of people made no such decision. MS used its monopoly power to force only IE to be delivered on new PC's. Unsophisticated new users, who would not be likely to download Netscape or even to know of its existence, would stick with what came on their PC's. Many of them probably think MS invented the internet! My point here is that MS unfairly (and illegally, by forcing OEM's to not install Netscape on outgoing PC's) manipulated the market in their favor. Netscape couldn't have competed by coming out with a better browser, since their primary marketing channel had been closed.

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

I know I'm gonna get flamed to hell for this, but having tried Mozilla, IE, Konqueror and Opera, IE is tops for me in terms of ease of use and stability.

Good, at least you have come to this decision through a comparison of the features of each product. My point, though, is that MS used its monopoly power to close off a distribution channel for Netscape (installation on new PC's by OEM's), and forced the situation so that only their browser could be installed (through "integration"). This way, the only browser that most people (especially new, unsophisticated users) would ever see is IE. They did not have a head-to-head competition on a level playing field in which the browser that is the most useful to the most people wins. MS didn't win a competition, they changed the rules of the game so that they were substantially in their favor, essentially avoiding competition. If their browser was so good (especially in 1996, when this all started), why did they need to integrate the browser and force the OEM's to not install Netscape?

Re:A bit of history

[Prof.Phreak]

Why is it that everybody objected when IE got pre-installed on Windows, yet nobody objected when Netscape was pre-installed?

I'm sure there would be no complaints from the public if OpenOffice and Mozilla were pre-installed, but if Microsoft all of a sudden decided to pre-install their MS Office for free (just to shut down all competition), everybody would be outraged. Why is that?

Is it evil? Or just a different perspective on things?

And btw, in mid 90's, Netscape was king, and IE was just a lowly crap browser. There was no competition until IE3 came out. Only after version 3.0 did the browsers really got into a fight. So yes, Microsoft was an underdog in its browser market until their IE4 and IE5 effectively buried the competition. And more so because of the better quality rather than marketing. IE was and still is faster and uses up less memory than Netscape (Mozilla).

I have nothing personal against Netscape. I still use Netscape 3.0 from time to time, since NS3 is faster than IE, but that's just once-in-a-blue-moon to test my site for compatibility with old stuff.

Re:A bit of history

[Fjord]

I think he was refering to speed of rendering or possibly speed to start. I've timed mozilla and it's definitely faster to start (3 seconds click-to-render of my.yahoo.com homepage vs IE's ~10 seconds) and it feels faster than IE in rendering.

It's possible that the javascript doesn't run as fast, but I've never noticed a difference, and my applications use DOM fairly extensively.

It's odd, because I'm the opposite. I switched to Moz on 0.9.9 and really can't stand using IE anymore, but will to test the applications I write. It's not anything idealistic, it's just the little things like time to start, which is ultimately why I switched to IE in the first place, and the lack of tabs. The popup/under thing isn't that big of a deal as few sites I go to have them. Also, when working, it's just easier to work in Mozilla than IE. The javascript errors are more sane and the DOM inspector is crucial when your DOM tree is partly generated, where using view source really doesn't help a lot.

As with all things, YMMV

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

Why is it that everybody objected when IE got pre-installed on Windows, yet nobody objected when Netscape was pre-installed?

OEM's were pre-installing Netscape because that was what their customers wanted. When MS forced IE onto the machine, and Netscape off, it was done against the wishes of the OEM's and their customers, thwarting the wishes of the free market.

Only after version 3.0 did the browsers really got into a fight. So yes, Microsoft was an underdog in its browser market until their IE4 and IE5 effectively buried the competition.

IE4 and IE5 were fair browsers, but IE3 was not. Yet, everyone got IE3 because of MS' strongarm tactics. Without those tactics, IE3 would not have had any market share, since Netscape was synonomous with web browser at that time. Without the inroads made (illegally) by IE3, and the sudden drop in revenue for Netscape (OEM's were paying to install the browser), the landscape may very well have been very different in subsequent years.

You can't just ignore what went on in the browser wars from 1996-1999. It has significan impact to the situation now.

Re:A bit of history

[sciencewhiz]

Sorry, you were making sense up until the "Speed" part there. I'll admit it's getting much better with 1.1a, but it's not nearly as quick as IE4/5/6 yet (at least with DOM manipulation via javascript).

wouldn't it be more accurate to say that mozilla is faster the IE4/5/6 for everything except DOM manipulation via javascript. At least that is my experience...

Re:A bit of history

[Prof.Phreak]

As far as I remember, IE3 did not come pre-installed on anything. You had to separately download it, so what strong arm tactics? (the same tactics Mozilla uses now? Ie: if you're interested, you download, if you're not, you don't).

IMHO, Netscape realized that they can't compete in a market where their chief competitor is a free download, and so they folded (complaining even to this day that it was all Microsoft's fault). Microsoft did what it does best: kill a competitor, gain a lot of users for their software, and make a ton of money (isn't this what every company strives to do?).

I think a free browser is a key part of a 'computer', and even most Linux distributions now come with some browser (can you imagine it otherwise?), so what's so bad about Microsoft including a free good-quality (by Win98 - IE4, quality got better than Netscape) browser?

Re:A bit of history

[lgraba]

IMHO, Netscape realized that they can't compete in a market where their chief competitor is a free download, and so they folded (complaining even to this day that it was all Microsoft's fault). Microsoft did what it does best: kill a competitor, gain a lot of users for their software, and make a ton of money (isn't this what every company strives to do?).

How many times do I need to repeat this? MS told at least one and probably other OEM's that they would not be able to buy Win95 licenses if they continued to install Netscape on their PC's. This immediately "cut off Netscape's air supply". You may have heard about this anti-trust trial, in which these tactics were judged illegal. A monopoly cannot use its monopoly power to limit its competition. I don't know how I can put it any clearer than this.

In Linux, no one forces you to install any browser, or prevents you from installing a browser. Linus Torvalds does not tell Red Hat to not install Opera, that only Mozilla can be installed. This is simply not possible.

IE7 and CSS

[Dr. Eric Peters]

Based on secondhand reports, it sounds to me as if IE7 is going to bring *major* advances in CSS support for Windows Internet Explorer. They're going to fix the box model, with bugwards compatibility handled via a DOCTYPE sniffing strategy similar to IE6/Mac's.

This is a hugely significant event for advocates of CSS. I'm eagerly looking forward to this, even though I don't plan on ever using Windows on a regular basis. Given Microsoft's ability to bulldoze Windows users into upgrading, we may soon have a world in which, for the first time ever, *the dominant Web browser* has good CSS support.

This could improve things for CSS in general even if we don't end up with the dreaded Microsoft-only world. Developers of *other* browsers will no longer be able to hide behind claims of industry-leader compatibility when releasing buggy CSS implementations.

Of course DOCTYPE sniffing is going to complicate the situation somewhat, since IE7 will still have a bugwards compatibility mode. I'm hoping that the existence of IE7 will cause enough people start intentionally invoking standards mode that other browser developers notice. While from a theoretical point of view DOCTYPE sniffing makes no sense--it's a pure hack--in practice it's a lot better than no standards mode at all, which is the only likely alternative.

Furthermore, my secondhand source also tells me that IE7 will finally bring full PNG support to IE. This is a major step ahead in InterNet graphics.

Re:IE7 and CSS

[ActiveSX]

Did you just say "InterNet". Don't walk, run your ass back to the marketing department.

;)

Re:IE7 and CSS

[msaavedra]

Actually, IE6 already has doctype sniffing. Unfortunately, it has a glitch so that if you put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> or something similar as your first line, which is standard for XHTML, IE becomes confused, even if you specify the proper doctype on the second line. The result is that this puts the browser into "quirks" mode, which is probably exactly what you don't want if you're writing XHTML.

Of course, even in its "strict" mode, IE6's CSS layout is far from perfect, so the changes in IE7 will be great. And finally being able to use PNG's properly will ROCK!

Re:IE7 and CSS

[Saxerman]

Based on secondhand reports, it sounds to me as if IE7 is going to bring *major* advances in CSS support for Windows Internet Explorer.

Sounds a lot like the standard MS "the next one will be much better" FUD. Now don't get me wrong, I've sung that party line for Open Source software for a few years now. It's a nice change to be on the side of the fence where the grass is actually greener.

To sum up, for everyone who hasn't bothered to switch from IE to Mozilla yet, "Nanny-nanny Boo-boo!"

Re:IE7 and CSS

[rat7307]

InterNet..... now with extra Zazz Kapow and Zork...

Re:IE7 and CSS

[aztektum]

Given Microsoft's ability to bulldoze Windows users into upgrading...

Of course we know sys admins are exempt from that statement.

Re:IE7 and CSS

[bitfoam]

They're going to fix the box model, with bugwards compatibility handled via a DOCTYPE sniffing strategy similar to IE6/Mac's.

Does this mean that the new bugs are guranteed to work the same way as the old bugs?

(Just couldn't resist.... ;-)

Re:IE7 and CSS

[Fjord]

Given Microsoft's ability to bulldoze Windows users into upgrading, we may soon have a world in which, for the first time ever, *the dominant Web browser* has good CSS support

Actually, according to the server logs for my wife's animal shelter site, only 38% of the windows users (which are the vast majority, 96%, the rest being Mac and .1% linux) are on IE6. 23% are on 5.0 and 29% on 5.5. When you consider that 16% of the windows users are on XP, you'll get that only 22% have bothered to upgrade. Less will probably go to IE7 in the same amount of time.

Luckily, the applications I work on are deployed in an evironment where we can set what browsers should be used. Also luckily, I feel the IE5.5 feature set is good enough for everything I've wanted to do, DOM and CSS wise.

the war will never be over

[daanger0us]

As long as ms has the ability to make inferior products, then the browser war will never be over, and I can't see MS ever making the best of anything.

Even though IE is popular now, it can easily lose that perception quickly. With Mozilla 1.0 out now, it may be time to start thinking that new ripples are in the pond.

Show me the links

[Shimmer]

I like how the posted story links to www.ap.org in a (lame) attempt to establish the objectivity of the report.

I'll be curious to see how many other major sites run the story.

-- Brian

Re:Show me the links

[reverius]

"lame attempt to establish the objectivity of the report"?

It is objective! That's because it's on AP. That has been established, duh!

What would you rather link to? Does the fact that it's on CNN mean it's no longer objective? They didn't change anything from the original AP article...

It's just as objective as if CNN had never touched it at all.

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[cyborch]

yep, the germans bombed Perl Harbor, damn those japs for taking all the honour!

So you and the other 5 people using curl...

[Steveftoth]

say that you're IE? Wow, that must account for like a huge market right? All those curl people who also use Opera and say they are IE.

Re:So you and the other 5 people using curl...

[killmenow]

Nice troll. I'll feed you...

You miss the point. I am nothing special. My example merely illustrates that server logs are not very reliable measures of what users are actually using to connect to their web site.

Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, curl, wget, and many other tools allow you to change your user-agent to look like IE.

Many web sites will not even come up if you don't identify as IE.

Point is, web server logs are as meaningful as web polls.

Re:So you and the other 5 people using curl...

[Xunker]

Point is, web server logs are as meaningful as web polls.

Are you sure they're meaningless? I have the PROOF that the meat industry has paid good money for market research! After all, how else could 'Neal afford his Mountaineer? Subscriptions? Pshaw!

Re:So you and the other 5 people using curl...

[Rob Simpson]

Not to mention that Opera (and perhaps others) default to "identify as IE". You have to alter a setting in the preferences to change this, and all that does is lower your compatibility.

The key to the Browser Wars...

[tm2b]

Mozilla will have a chance on the broad desktop (beyond AOL, that is) if and only if a killer app can be conceived for it.

For IE, the future "killer app" will be integration with (blech) .NET. Will there be something else for Mozilla that makes people say "gotta have it" and that Microsoft can't or won't duplicate?

We'll see. My money would, alas, be on Microsoft right now. Monopolies are just too damned effective in this space.

Re:The key to the Browser Wars...

[Danse]

As long as enough users adopt Mozilla, sites will be forced to write standards-compliant pages. That is all that really matters. AOL alone could bring in enough Mozilla users to cause such a change.

Re:The key to the Browser Wars...

[meta-monkey]

I'm not sure about this. I use Mozilla about 90% of the time, but sometimes I'll load up a site...and there's nothing there. I'll turn on all the javascript stuff, load it up...and still nothing. I can't use Mozilla to visit my credit union's online banking site, because Moz (1.0 and 1.1a) refuse to render the toolbar that gives you access to these features. So, instead, I turn my chair around and use my Windows computer instead, and IE renders it fine.

I think if AOL switches to Moz, and all of a sudden millions of clueless aolers can't visit their favorite porn sites, they're going to start flooding AOL with complaints, not the site designers. That is, AOL users will not force websites to write standards-compliant pages, but will force AOL to use a webpage-compliant browser (IE).

Re:The key to the Browser Wars...

[Danse]

If even a few people start complaining to the banks and the banks realize that AOL users can't view their site, then I think it will cause them to fix it. I don't know why the banks would do something stupid like creating an IE-only site in the first place, but they should realize its a mistake as soon as the first AOL users start to complain. They should realize it a lot sooner than that, but it sounds like some banks don't have very intelligent web developers.

Re:The key to the Browser Wars...

[meta-monkey]

My point is that the AOLers would most likely complain to AOL, not to the bank. They probably wouldn't even realize the browser was a completely different program. Most likey, they would call up AOL and say "AOL 7.0 worked great, but this new AOL 8.0 makes all my pages look funny!" and then AOL would have to placate the masses with a return to IE.

IE4 and netscape 4.7

[BrookHarty]

Im stuck with old technology that only works with older browsers. Document warehouse sites that only work with netscape 4.7x, E-Room sites that only support older IE4/5 sites. IE6 isnt even supported on the corporate sites yet! Admin sites for netscape proxies that only work with netscape, solaris app guis in java that only work with IE... java applets break on everything, but somehow is a standard, pop ups that dont pop up, pull down menus that wont display... argh.

Who can only use 1 browser? I have to have 4 on my pc, just to get my damn work done. War, hell ya its a cluster fuck.

-
Mozilla, sweet sweet mozilla...

Why Mozilla?

[jukal]

This clip says it all:
<clip> Mozilla's Baker insists the project's success is critical to the Web's future: "If there's only one browser and that browser is tied to the business plan of a particular entity, it's quite likely that what we see on the Web will be limited." </clip>

In otherwords, eventough the trouble of installing Mozilla instead of IE is a pain for most average people, and the gain might be minimal, people should do it just because: otherwise we are doomed. If this is the motivation, it will never happen. Getting it pre-installed on Windows (AOL,IBM, HP/Compaq to the rescue?) is really the only chance IMHO.

Re:Why Mozilla?

[captain_craptacular]

I didn't think it was hard at all to install mozilla on my windows box. I just downloaded the exe and ran it while mindlessly clicking the "ok" or "next" box whenever it popped up ;)

Re:Why Mozilla?

[jukal]

Yeah, it's a shame Bill never invented /usr/bin/yes on Windows. Everything is just /usr/bin/maybe :)

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[Shimmer]

It's a joke. A quote from Animal House.

If the Army of Lemmings (AOL)

[smittyoneeach]

put out a branded AOL on those Lindows boxen down at Wally World, you could be in a browser war zone...

Re:If the Army of Lemmings (AOL)

[Reziac]

That's actually a damn good idea. High exposure, zero risk, zero cost. AOL promoted by AOL-Netscape (or Mozilla, who cares so long as it's an *alternative* to IE) and WalMart, a natural partnership.

I don't want to be locked into an IE-only web, and if that's what it takes to prevent it, hey, go for it.

Re:If the Army of Lemmings (AOL)

[SN74S181]

'The enemy of your enemy is your friend.'

Oh, look! Your new friend just wiped out all the storefronts downtown!

Re:If the Army of Lemmings (AOL)

[Reziac]

Nah, the storefronts here went away because the whole area was economically depressed, and stayed that way for too many years for anyone without corporate backing to survive it. The local economy is finally coming back up from the dumps, and the fact that we have FOUR WalMarts (including the one with the highest gross in California) for 270,000 people doesn't seem to be hurting all the mom-and-pops that are sprouting in every strip mall, either.

Anyway, not that WalMart is out for anyone but WalMart, but the original point was that anything that preserves browser choice has SOME merit, and if adding AOL to these Lindows desktops helps with that, why not do it??

The War War

[tswinzig]

I'm starting a new war. It's called the War on War. If you're sick of all these Wars, please join my war.

Seriously, who really wants to read about browser wars any more? The market will dictate which browser "wins." The rest of the browsers will have to be happy with less than a majority of users.

Big friggin whoopty-do!

I use mozilla because I like it. If MSIE comes out with something better, I might use it instead.

Re:The War War

[chris_mahan]

In today's report on the Browser War, Pentagon spokesperson Colonel John L. Bruegghammer announced that following sustained bombing of Mozzillite position during the night, the Softies thought they would simply need to perform a mop-up operation. However, the fighting intensified during the morning, and the Open Reporters quoted a source in the opposition: "We are in high spirit, and even though we lost a lot of ground, we are poised to carry the day".

Re:The War War

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't join his war, join mine instead! I'm declaring war on all wars that don't declare war on themselves.

Re:The War War

[Anonymous Coward]

The market will dictate which browser "wins."

That's a rather interesting statement to make. Were you, perchance, unaware that the market certainly did not dictate which browser won the last time? Micro$oft's monopoly power did.

What is interesting--yes, interesting--is the question as to whether they will be able to get away with it again and, in fact, have the market not dictate nor indeed have any say whatsoever.

Re:The War War

[chris_mahan]

It's spelled Sepukku.

Please, check your spelling when you flame, will ya?

"Be quiet now, like a good gentleman..."

(10 points if you know what war movie that's from)

(hint: English accent)
(hint: same man also says: "Because we're here")

Re:The War War

[Frank of Earth]

In related news, France surrenders to the Lynx browser.

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[chengj]

Germans?

If the war is over, who's the loser?

[donutz]

Clearly, the consumer.

If I added up all the time spent closing those annoying pop up/under windows with IE, I'm sure it'd more than make up for the time spent waiting for Mozilla to get swapped back into memory (I often run a lotta apps, and Mozilla uses a lot of RAM (who doesn't these days?)...

And then there's the seizure-inducing rapid-flash animated gifs that loop to infinity in IE...in Mozilla I can set them to run just once. Or not view them at all (or only ones from the same server). The savings from not paying those medical expenses...I could put a down payment on a house with that money instead!

The Tabs are a nice feature...when I'm running a lotta apps, there's no room for text on the Taskbar...but my tabs can tell me what page they're holding for me.

If everyone else sticks with IE, at least I know I'm happier browsing now than I was before. Thanks Mozilla!

AP story

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an AP story that they're running. The AP is not associated with AOL-TW.

It's not a real war....

[Steveftoth]

because IE renders most Mozilla pages fine, but mozilla doesn't render all IE pages fine.

Since Mozilla is the 'better browser' but doesn't accept sloppy coding, IE has an advantage.

There is not a huge difference inbetween the commands that Mozilla accepts but IE doesn't.

Re:It's not a real war....

[Thorgal]

I am afraid that IE does not render most Mozilla pages fine, if by these you understand the ones that use transparent PNGs, XML, iframes and parts of other standards that are currently poorly implemented in IE.

The number of such pages is a different matter altogether.

Re:It's not a real war....

[tswinzig]

because IE renders most Mozilla pages fine, but mozilla doesn't render all IE pages fine.

Ohmygod this is funny!

Another way to write your sentence above is:

"because Mozilla renders most IE pages fine, but IE doesn't render all Mozilla pages fine."

Since Mozilla is the 'better browser' but doesn't accept sloppy coding, IE has an advantage.

The only reason there is sloppy (i.e. broken) code out there is because MSIE dutifully rendered it without generating any errors that a web designer could address.

On top of that, Mozilla does have a quirks mode which is enabled unless a site specifically specifies the browser is HTML compliant with a DTD.

But mostly I liked your circular logic.

Re:It's not a real war....

[Dixie_Flatline]

> because IE renders most Mozilla pages fine, but mozilla doesn't render all IE pages fine.

What you just said there basically translates to:

IE renders most Mozilla pages fine, and Mozilla renders most IE pages fine.

For the most part, there is overlap in the two sets of pages that the browsers render. However, there're a few pages that won't render in one or the other. No big deal, really. It's a question of which 'most' is more important to you.

Re:It's not a real war....

[Peyna]

While not quite the same thing, I wouldn't want to use a compiler than would accept sloppy code, or try to do its best with crapped up code. It should report an error to inform the coder what they did wrong, and what would happen if it was used. That's what Mozilla does, it says "This is messed up, it shouldn't be like this at all, I don't know what to do with this", IE says, "Well, I think this is what they MEANT to do, so I'll just do it for them." The latter can be pretty dangerous.

Re:It's not a real war....

[cheezedawg]

Like it or not, but IE's acceptance of sloppy code did wonders for the growth of the internet. Suddenly it wasn't only the nerds who cared about matching brackets or tags that were publishing web sites. Ma and pa could throw some pages up there, and it still looked ok even though they didn't study the HTML syntax.

Re:It's not a real war....

[Steveftoth]

While not quite the same thing, I wouldn't want to use a compiler than would accept sloppy code, or try to do its best with crapped up code. It should report an error to inform the coder what they did wrong, and what would happen if it was used. That's what Mozilla does, it says "This is messed up, it shouldn't be like this at all, I don't know what to do with this", IE says, "Well, I think this is what they MEANT to do, so I'll just do it for them." The latter can be pretty dangerous.

I would'nt want to use a compiler like that either, but I bet that many people would. People who probably shouldn't be programming, but still there are those that would.

I'm unimpressed with Mozilla. Opera, though...

[Pop n' Fresh]

If there's a browser war, it's between Opera and IE right now. Mozilla 1.0 looks and feels (to me, anyway) just like the most recent versions of Netscape, which are inferior to IE. Maybe once the Moz 1 source gets out there more and people start using it as a platform for more useful browsers, we'll see the flubber fly, but until then I'll stick with Opera. If only I could cruise around without IDing myself as an IE5 surfer...

Re:I'm unimpressed with Mozilla. Opera, though...

[Christianfreak]

Mozilla 1.0 looks and feels (to me, anyway) just like the most recent versions of Netscape, which are inferior to IE.

Not really sure what your complaint is. If its just that the default theme looks like Netscape 4x then change the theme. Its not hard and it ships with the Mozilla Modern theme which I find very pretty. Heck I read somewhere that there's a theme that makes it look like IE!

The 'feel' is the same in someways but again the themes can change the button locations and there are tons of ways to customize. Just take a peek at the prefs menu before you dismiss it so easily.

Re:I'm unimpressed with Mozilla. Opera, though...

[souja]

If only I could cruise around without IDing myself as an IE5 surfer...

--

Easy, File/Quick prefs/Identify as...

Self-Hype

[TWR]

Quote from article:

Mozilla may thrill some tech-savvy users, "but it's not going to make a dent with the mainstream," said WebSideStory's Geoff Johnston, unless, that is, AOL Time Warner puts major marketing muscle behind it.

Like, oh, I don't know, having the news division of AOL Time Warner run stories on the browser?

-jon

Re:Self-Hype

[TweeKinDaBahx]

No, like having Mozilla bundled with the newest AOL. Nothing short of that will ever give mozilla more than 20% of the market.

Re:Self-Hype

[ealar dlanvuli]

My corp (3k empl) is currently considering using it on our new ghosts, we are running 30 trial users currently to weed out any bugs, or to figure out if it dosen't agree with anyone. So far almost all the feedback has been positive, the only hitch we have found is passport dosen't honor the UAGENT string, we are currently talking to MS about that.

It beats IE out of the water performance wise (we are going to find out stability as we go, of course), and we can start using more dumb X-terminals instead of full blown 500mhz citrix/app running beasts.

Re:Self-Hype

[Mansing]

Why is it that "WebSideStory" is the web browser authority? Because web site owners allow their sites to be counted? Does anyone have any idea if "real," high volume sites like Yahoo, CNN, and, perhaps, the New York Times contribute to their statistics?

Web sites with HitBox counters (used by WebSideStory to generate their stats) are small, niche, and nothing like the mainstream. I tired of these self-appointed experts dictating who uses what browser.

WebSideStory: the definition of "Self-Hype"

Re:Self-Hype

[catenos]

Oh, come on! What else is new? They explicitly state that they are related:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A Web browser project run primarily by volunteers and backed by America Online is making one last stab at challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp.

The group released its Mozilla 1.0 package this month -- some four years after AOL's Netscape unit launched the project. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.)

And I wonder whether those people modding this up to 5 (Informative) did bother to read the article?

Re:Self-Hype

[zericm]

Web sites with HitBox counters (used by WebSideStory to generate their stats) are small, niche, and nothing like the mainstream. I tired of these self-appointed experts dictating who uses what browser.

I did not know that Hitbox and WebSideStory were related. I find WSS so lame that I never bother to look at the site, let alone read how they compile numbers.

This matters because I have Mozilla block images and cookies from HitBox, and I'm sure that many Mozilla users do the same. I suspect that IE's numbers would take a bit of a hit if all Moz users where included in the mix.

eric

eric

It's not over until the fat lady sings. .

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Microsoft may have won the battle against Netscape.
But they have been very unsuccessfull of winning the war.

MS did not make versions of MSIE for Linux and other UNIX variants. They also have been unable to stop the Linux tide so far - it means that there will always be room for at least one more browser.

Basically it means Micosoft can never win the war until everybody uses MS Windows. And since this looks like it never will be true since Linux and other unices survive - irregardless what MS tries to tell everbody.

Thus Micorosft can NEVER win the war as long as they do not provide MSIE on all platforms. They might win some battles but in the end they will lose the war.

Mozilla (together with all other browesers using the same engine) on the other hand are multi-playform and can thus has a chance of winning the war since it will run on any platform and is very standards compliant.

MS may have won the battle against Netscape but cannot win over Mozilla....

Browser war over for me since 0.9.2

[aralin]

The browser war is indeed long time over. For me its since Mozilla 0.9.2, which was the last time I had to reboot in Windows to view some web page.
There is no question of which browser is far superior. And since these products do not generate direct revenue, I'd say that the better one is clear winner.

My experience with Mozilla

[Pappaschlong]

I love it, what can I say. I am not a strictly open-source guy(I quite frankly don't care one way or the other), but mozilla has been (for me) fast, stable, and capable. I have not had ONE crash yet running Mozilla 1.0 on XP. I have even tried to crash it by following links that reportedly crash Mozilla (ie huge big fonts in CSS)- it has been running like a champ. I especially like how sites designed for IE display pretty much the same on Mozilla. As a web developer myself, I had been making sites and testing them in Netscape 4.x, IE, AND Netscape 6 (damn annoying). No more! I have found a browser I love, plus I can download the source and yank out anything I do not want in it- goodbye to a bloated browser!

It's Over

[Lysander Luddite]

This is the media simply trying to stir up a story. The fact that it is being pushed by AOL properties like CNN, Fortune etc makes it even more apparent.

It really doesn't matter to me which browser people use as long as it supports 95% of the latest specs (in this case HTML 4 and CSS-1). If it supports DOM, XML, and CSS-2 even better.

links on greycat linux

[rapidweather]

That's where I first came across links. Greycat is supposed to have a version 3.0 one day, and feature Netscape 3x.

• http://www.greycatlinux.myweb.nl/30/readme.htm

Browser war?

[hikeran]

well .. the webmaster asks me to look at pages in mozilla since i'm the only one with a linux box at work .. and he doesnt bother to fix a few flaws because ie does not show them .. (the flaw being something in a javascript and tables causing a 1/8th of an inch offset throwing graphics out ... The standard is now set my m$ .. if mozilla wants to take it they have to be able to display everything as good if not better than ie .. and do it faster, more stable, and better... untill then mozilla/netscrape users are going to have to put up with pages made for ie ... I fully expect to see mozilla/netscape feautures in ie soon . (such as ability to kill popup windows and tabbed browsing..)

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[Anonymous Coward]

> Germans?

Forget about it. He's rolling.

Mozilla's path to victory: Annoyance free browsing

[sterno]

The big problem I've found when I am pressed into using IE for whatever reason is the ridiculous amount of ad-related annoyances I have to deal with. Pop-over ads, pop-under ads, animated things flying all over my screen, etc. And this isn't even at the pr0n sites!

I think Mozilla's chance to grab some market share is by pushing for the fact that it gives you control over these annoyances. Turn off all of those unrequested popups with a couple of mouse clicks, or you can go back to using IE and have to close a bazillion windows every time you are done surfing.

So, I think the browser war isn't quite over, it's just going to be fought on a different front.

Re:Victory this was not, begun this browser war ha

[jweatherley]

But since AOL has moved over to Mozilla we might actually see some change. I can't say yet, but time will tell.

Don't forget slashdot's refusal to fix PWPs for IE - it made me switch to Mozilla at work as well as at home!

Re:Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbo

[captain_craptacular]

Animal House. Look it up.

Washington Post has a story too

[peterdaly]

The Washington Post has a favorable review of Mozilla 1.0 as well, with I though was interesting because a) it's read by politicians among others, and b) it is a review of Mozilla and not Nutscrape.

Anyway, here is the link. One of his favorite features was the ability to block ads. He even tells people how to turn that feature on.

-Pete

Re:Washington Post has a story too

[blibbleblobble]

W.T.F. ???

The Washington Post says:

"Its mail-and-newsgroups module offers limited support for multiple mail accounts and weak filtering options compared with Eudora or Outlook Express."

Excuse me? I've got 3 email accounts and 2 newsgroups setup on my Mozilla mail, and its "weak filtering" is correctly deleting some 30 spam per day, something which Outlook Express never managed to do.

"The ChatZilla instant-messaging program connects only to Internet Relay Chat networks, not the more popular systems of AOL, MSN and Yahoo."

Right. So it only supports the 600,000 people on DALnet, to name just one of the tens of thousands of IRC servers available, each of which is the equivalent of Yahoo!Chat...

Some surprise they didn't support these other advertising-supported networks then, given their history of changing protocols to try and make 3rd party clients break. (lookup the GAIM history as one example, or see the prominent, flashing advertising banners on Yahoo's own chat client)

"Future versions of Mozilla may fix these problems"

I sincerely hope not. I hope they work on the IRC client, rather than wasting their time on Yahoo. I hope they keep the filtering pretty much as it is, and continue their support for multiple email clients.

The only feature I really miss is having "popunder" tabs like in Galeon, so you can open a whole array of links without having to switch back to your original window. Being able to filter flash animations would be good too, although kudos for filtering the signal-to-noise ratio of most sites by removing animations, doubleclick banners, and popup windows.

And at only 15Mb, no excuses for not taking ten minutes to install it!

Re:Washington Post has a story too

[derobert]

Mozilla does have popunder tabs. It's called "Load links in the background", and it's under Preferences->Navigator->Tabbed Browsing.

HTH.

Re:Washington Post has a story too

[David Gerard]

The only feature I really miss is having "popunder" tabs like in Galeon, so you can open a whole array of links without having to switch back to your original window.

Check the tab preferences :-) Mozilla does this just fine.

Being able to filter flash animations would be good too, although kudos for filtering the signal-to-noise ratio of most sites by removing animations, doubleclick banners, and popup windows.

It's a much-demanded feature, and there's an RFE bug open on it. Does Galeon do this already?

losing a significant amount of market share

[glrotate]

IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon

Bookmarked.

Care to bet on this?

Re:losing a significant amount of market share

[zulux]

Bookmarked.

Care to bet on this?

Don't you mean "My Favorites" ?

Here's a hint: Right click on "My Computer" then rename it to "My Komputer." Then all your fiends will think youre a cool KDE Linux user.

Gotta go.. The paperclip is helping me write a letter.

Re:losing a significant amount of market share

[zulux]

I've seen you post a couple times, and I just gotta say, damn, I love your sig. It just really sums up everything very nicely.

Thanks. It took a while to fit it under the Slashdot sig cap.

There's a gentleman who setup a website calld newslavery.org that focuses more on the coporite side of things but is worth the read. I'm probably a little bit more pissed at the scheming welfare class than I should be, but their GIMMIE GIMMIE, opps I HAD ANOTHER BABY attitude is really grating on my nerves.

The easiest solution that I can figgure out would be that people who take out of the government more than they put in should not be allowed to vote. And anybody that spawns a child that the government has to pay for should be spayed/neutered. (yes I know those are terms for animals, but REAL humans woulden't bring a life into the world that they know they coulden't take care of)

Oh well, sorry for the rant and thanks.

Re:losing a significant amount of market share

[zulux]

Including people who are too physically disabled to work?

If disabled through no fault of their own AND are otherwise trying to be productive, then they should, of course, be allowd to vote.

But if they caused their own diability, say by driving drunk, and they are spongin off our tax money, then they obviously don't have enough inteligence to determine the course of our union.

I don't know where the line should be drawn, but it needs to be considered.

Re:losing a significant amount of market share

[Fjord]

I'm doubtful that the majority of healthy people on welfare don't pay for themselves one way or another. It's pretty hard to find official national statistics because individual states oversee their own program but I've seen 2 years average time on welfare and $15000/yr average paid on welfare (actually these are worst case: I really saw was "less than 2 years" and $12000-$15000). This amoutns to $30000 which I believe (although there are no sources for this kind of data), exceeds the average amount a person on welfare pays in taxes in their lifetime.

The reason this is important is because, while it's easy to feel that it's "our" money "they're" spending, it is just as easily their money. Some people lean on different governmental programs more than others.

Of course there are problem cases. These are either there because of a failure in protocol or a failure in implementation of protocol. But to say that non-working poor are turning us into tax slaves ignores both the fact that the vast majority of todays non-working poor will be tax payers tomorrow and the fact that the non-working poor can't really do this to us: they don't set policy except with the minority vote that most of them don't understand how to use anyway.

And even if they were able to affect the policy, the fact is that less than 1% of taxes go towards the entire welfare system. That includes all forms of welfare, including sheltering and medicaid as well as TANF and other personal subsidies. <1% is hardly a dent in the budget and doesn't really amount to making us tax slaves. Even if it were true that all the people on welfare are lazy "gimme gimme" bums that never return anything, to say they are subjugating us is an exaggeration of the actual costs.

I want to see Slashdot Log Files

[puto]

Flame me, kill my dog, curse my unborn children but...

I use Linux, I use Windows, and I develop site every now and again. Noting to fancy shcmancy but just for pocket change. So I keep all browsers on my system so I can see that whatever I am developing remains uniform. And usually it does. I do not develop for any one but so all can see it in pretty much the same way.

Netscape sucks the big one, while I can make anything run like a charm on IE and Opera. And stability issues(Java applets working and not crashing browser, win again with the IE and Opera).

So what do we do? For one lets stop turning this into a MS bitch and moan session. Tired of it, it is worn out. We are talking about browsers and ya'll are whining about all Microsoft products. Show me the slashdot logs and see how much traffic is IE. And do not come back the the fricken answer"I gotta use IE cause it is a work box" BULLSHIT. If we are all the hotshot admins we claim to be we can run a nix on a box at work, or at least another browser of choice on Windows to show we are fighting the good fight.

I imagine that the /. logs show heavy IE saturation.

Hell, I use IE, no skin off my nose. I have one box just for browsing and I use opera on it and it works fine. Ilove opera. But IE ain't bad in many ways. Show me the logs TACO

And MS might be the monster that ate the world but some of there products are not too bad. Office works and people like it. Star Office eats it, open office eats it less but still bites. I would rather use wordstar.

You know what the next killer app would be? Us coming off the high horse that linux is the be all end all salve for anything that ails a computer. It is good stuff, but UNIX is UNIX, and a new Nix is just an old nix.

Christ, I love /. but sometimes I wonder.

Puto

Re:I want to see Slashdot Log Files

[gol64738]

this is moderated as interesting? you must be kidding me...

what a troll..

Re:I want to see Slashdot Log Files

[puto]

Well, i usually do not defend myself, but I hate AC's, ball-less cowards. I never mentioned what versions of the browsers in question. You assumed what versions. And when I test I take into account general user experience. Not for us technically inclined. I don't care if my browser pops and fizzles but the users of the sites I sell do. So while I make sure the sites look good in IE I also make sure they do in other browsers, I just notice that bending over backwards to make something work in Mozilla and the Scape can screw the pooch for the others. Standards anyone? Or crappy products? Puto

Re:I want to see Slashdot Log Files

[festers]

A lot of us are at work and are forced to use the company browser (IE), dumbass.

BTW, weak troll.

Re:So, If MSFT advertises with them != Objective

[PeeOnYou2]

It's AP... how about your read the article before you start your bashing..

Konqueror port

[dlur]

I'd also like to see a port of Konqueror to win32. Unfortunately I'm stuck using Windows at work and although IE6 isn't the worst browser I've ever used, I'd still rather be using my favorite, which is Konqueror.

Mozilla Stories

[PeolesDru]

I for one am glad we already have the weekly Mozilla story out of the way. In past weeks we've had: Mozilla alllllmost out Mozilla Out in Two Days Mozilla Out in One Day Mozilla Out in One Hour Mozilla Reported to Be Out! Mozilla Out! Mozilla Out for One Day etc... ;)

Re:Mozilla Stories

[EvlG]

Some of us are very excited that the browser is out.

Having the same browser which is stable, fast, and rock-solid standards compliant on all of the platforms we use is a dream come true.

Re:Victory this was not, begun this browser war ha

[cyborch]

PWPs? I've forgot, please enlighten me.

AOL...So what...

[burnsy]

Even if AOL uses Mozilla under the covers, how many AOL users are even going to know that they are using the Mozilla http rendering engine? AOL slaps its own UI chock full of ads, pop ups, and in house email.

Mozilla will be wasted on AOL. It is much better suited for the non-Windows world.

Market broken

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with the market. IE comes bundled with Windows, which comes bundled with your computer when you buy it. There is little incentive to switch browsers when your computer already comes with one.

Re:Market broken

[joto]

And especially when almost any site work well with IE, and a few have problems with Mozilla. IE has won the browser war, it's a sad fact, but even I am not going to switch just to be politically correct. I use IE under windows as long as it works best, and is still a free download.

Re:Market broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things... one, sites work with IE because they were made/tested for that. I can do all sorts of things in Mozilla I can't in IE (transparent PNG, advanced CSS, etc), but I have to cripple my work just so IE users can see it.

Second, have you downloaded Mozilla? How do you know it "works best"? I know quite a few people that like the way Mozilla works better (pop-up blocking, tabs, etc).

Re:Market broken

[rseuhs]

Mozilla is a lot better than IE (tabbed browsing, http-pipelining, etc.)

And millions of AOL-users - while not reaching majority - will make sure that Mozilla reaches enough marketshare so it can't be ignored by webmasters.

Hell, I use it all the time and I don't have any real problems, maybe once per week I see a misaligned graphic, but nothing really important.

Wasn't she fired?

[Otter]

from the god-I-read-too-much-Slashdot dept

Mozilla's general manager Mitchell Baker says the browser is "a critical component of keeping the Web open and allowing innovation.

Wasn't she fired last year?

Please don't point out what I could otherwise be doing with the brain cells I used to store and retrieve that bit of information. I'm pretty concerned about it myself...

Re:Wasn't she fired?

[sconest]

She was fired from AOL/Netscape.
She kept her position in mozilla.org

Frosted glass

[jlusk4]

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspira l/glassy.html

Those of you using IE will need to switch to Mozilla. Those of you using Mozilla won't even notice the part that doesn't work under IE, it feels so natural.

Cool effect that works only under Mozilla and just feels right. Now who's at the disadvantage?

Re:Frosted glass

[dillon_rinker]

I'm using IE6, and I guess a picture is worth a thousand words, becaus I don't understand from your explanation what it is that I'm supposed to see that I'm not. Would you care to post a screenshot for comparison purposes?

Re:Frosted glass

[Thorgal]

here it goes

Re:Frosted glass

[Per Wigren]

Works perfectly in Konqueror (KDE3)! :)

Re:Frosted glass

[bartjan]

A screenshot won't show it in it's full glory, because you'll really want to scroll the page.

Re:Frosted glass

[Sloppy]

Now who's at the disadvantage?

Whoever made that web page, that's who.

I looked at that page (with a browser that has CSS), and it was pretty cool! So then I looked at it with a completely CSS-ignorant browser, and the page still worked fine. It just looked bad. When I see a web page that looks bad, I don't think, "Oh no, my browser sucks." I think, "Wow, whoever made this page, was clueless."

MSIE users will surely draw the same conclusion. And it's the right conclusion too. If someone makes a web page that requires CSS (or requires that some specific style be used) to look good, then they're messing up.

Re:Frosted glass

[Sloppy]

The more I poke around that site, the more I realize just how lame all my pages are.

Re:Frosted glass

[dontkillme]

It doesn't work right in Opera 6... If you'll notice the bands of brown are not semitransparent like they are in Moz. Also, the filtered image does not seem to be aligned properly. At least it doesn't display right on my copy of Opera 6 for Linux.

Re:Frosted glass

[weave]

If someone makes a web page that requires CSS (or requires that some specific style be used) to look good, then they're messing up.

Oh, so you admit that people who make pages that require IE to look good are messing up too?

I hope you also realize how some really neat stuff is not being done because of lack of standards support in IE. IE is to Mozilla now what NS 4.x was to IE before now.

IE = Old and Busted
Mozilla = New Hotness

:-)

Re:Frosted glass

[Osty]

Nice effect. I wouldn't have thought one could have a fixed background image under a moving foreground, and have the image changed by the moving foreground. Wild. I have to look up CSS one of these days..

That's not possible, because that's not what the page is doing. It's a neat optical illusion, but all the site is doing is attaching a fixed background (shifted to match the real background) to a non <body> element. The interior image is just the shell under a frosted glass layer (simple Photoshop stuff), the <body> background is just the shell itself. When you scroll the interior element, it just looks like frosted glass moving over the shell. Check out the real image here. The darker bands are also separate, fixed images.

Neat stuff, but not quite as fancy as you think it is.

Re:Frosted glass

[rseuhs]

Oh my god, before I will *gasp* download Mozilla I would rather troll on slashdot and request screenshots about a feature that can't be shown on a screenshot.

Hey, what's up with you? Is Bill Gates standing behind you and holding a Magnum on your head? Did you sign a live-long contract with Microsoft? What exactly is holding you back from downloading Mozilla?

This "I use Microsoft and will always use Microsoft even if it involves great pain." - kind of attitude is not going through my head, care to explain it to me?

Re:Frosted glass

[Sloppy]

Oh, so you admit that people who make pages that require IE to look good are messing up too?

Of course.

I hope you also realize how some really neat stuff is not being done because of lack of standards support in IE. IE is to Mozilla now what NS 4.x was to IE before now.

After looking at meyerweb.com, I'm starting to get a clue that there's some good stuff that isn't happening much. (Ugh, if my high school English teachers ever saw that last sentence, they would kill me.) But I will have to get to a machine that has MSIE sometime and see how well/badly it works, though, before I blame MSIE for CSS not catching on.

Re:Frosted glass

[Mubarmij]

Works well in Opera too.

Re:Frosted glass

[jsebrech]

Well, in _this_ page the foreground isn't modifying the background. But css2 can do things like cast shadows, so ... It is possible. Nobody can do it yet though because of IE's sucky support.

Re:Frosted glass

[dillon_rinker]

...I would rather troll on slashdot...

If you insist...YHBT.YHL. HAND. =)

Is Bill Gates standing behind you and holding a Magnum on your head?

Metaphorically, yes. I'm at work where we use nothing but Windows, and I can't download and install unauthorized software. My home Linux system does not have an internet connection.

Think of it more of "I use Microsoft and am delighted to see its flaws but need a bit of help sometimes" kind of attitude. Making Mozilla the default browser would be a coup of sorts, but I'd need evidence for it...

AOL 8.0 Beta still uses IE

[cpeterso]

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for AOL to use Netscape, considering AOL 8.0 Beta 1 was just released and it still uses IE.

Re:that's right!

[lungofish]

No way dude - links kicks lynx's ass all day long without breaking a sweat.

Seriously.

It's the plaintext browser war, only really, really confusing because they have almost the exact same name.

Re:Wait till there's a security hole

[joshki]

How long did it take MS to fix the last IE hole? And the one before that? And......

The fact that the source is available doesn't make a program more vulnerable. You need to do some research on insecurity through obscurity before you start spouting -- it's a well-known fact that crypto algorithms are made available for peer review for exactly this purpose. A thoroughly reviewed code-base is much more secure than a closed-source one, and can be fixed much more quickly if a vulnerability is found.

There shouldn't even be a browser war

[nrosier]

Mozilla is not a weapon to fight a browser war, it's a weapon to fight a standards war. Fight MS in following the W3C standards.

All the discussions about IE looking, feeling, being better then any other browser don't matter to me. IE is MS's tool to internet domination through bad standards support and proprietary tags. This is what we should be fighting against. Educate web-developers not to take the easy road but follow the standards, drop IE-only tags, use validator.w3.org. If I can do it for my personal pages, they should be able to do it too.
---
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

Favorite Quote

[Selanit]

Microsoft declined comment on how much of a threat it considers Mozilla, saying it cannot speak on rival products.

Eh? What's that? Is this the same company that called the GPL "pac-man like" and Linux "unamerican?" How is it that all of a sudden that can't speak on rival products?

<snort>

Re:Favorite Quote

[Izanagi]

They must be in shock!

Bill's reaction, "WTF, There is a CNN article on Mozilla? I won that war, Like Nazis invading Poland!!"

Re:Favorite Quote

[Lagrange5]

Microsoft declined comment on how much of a threat it considers Mozilla, saying it cannot speak on rival products.

By admitting that Mozilla is a rival product, Microsoft has already conceded the first battle.

bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft won because they bundled their browser with their OS. Thus few people were willing to switch to Netscape because their computer came with an adequate browser already.

Modular OS X Version needed

[joel8x]

I love Mozilla on Windows because you can install just the browser and opt out of all the other components, creating a bloat-less package. Unfortunately there is no installer on the OS X version, just a .dmg that you drag the folder from onto your applications folder to install. There are no options to minimally install it. I would love to cut out the components that I don't use as I feel it would greatly lighten up the browser itself. Anyone know how to uninstall the different components?

(sorry for being a little OT)

Re:Modular OS X Version needed

[DaDigz]

Amen! I've been waiting for that for a while now! So far, looks like the only option is Chimera (and that's because it doesn't support all the extras yet).

That is a cool effect....

[Steveftoth]

damn that is a sweet effect!

It does use a lot of CPU, but oh well. That's what the CPU is for right?

The War is Over

[asv108]

Lynx won!

Re:The War is Over

[Jonny Ringo]

I know, my perl script uses Lynx every day!

Re:The War is Over

[blibbleblobble]

My site usage policy

( -5: Not funny.)

Re:The War is Over

[chrisvdp74656]

Excuse me, but I think you made a typographical error. Didn't you mean Links?

Chris

They should join forces. Like in the movies.

[rice_burners_suck]

I'd like to see Mozilla and GNOME join forces. Their project goals, which are already quite similar (Internet operating system versus network object model environment), would be merged. As one project, an efficient, platform-independant desktop environment would become reality. Its quality would blow away anything made by Microsoft or Apple. I see a consolidation of that nature heavily reducing the amount of duplicated work. And it would work because it would be cool.

I don't care the market

[hokanomono]

I don't care who uses IE. It's just that i don't want to be forced to use IE.

To avoid the web using proprietary formats, all we need to do is, to keep public awareness of the browser war. We don't need to win the war for Mozilla. We just have to remind content providers, that they may not decide the war.

For this aim, I see a good future. The amount of word documents offered to me as single choice is decreasing and the local online newspaper is fully mozilla compatible.

It's on MSNBC.com

[SirNarfsALot]

And here's the link.
Actually, MSNBC has been interesting to behold. They had a very positive review of Lycoris Linux not too long ago, reported that MSN Internet has low customer satisfaction, and a May review of Abiword proclaimed it to be "Wonderful," "a success" and said "you should try it."
Seems objective to me.

Re:It's on MSNBC.com

[ceejayoz]

They also had a glowing review of OpenOffice about a month back... the reviewer was VERY pleased with it.

Microsoft lost the browser war.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Yes, you read that correctly: Microsoft lost the browser war. Standards won. And that means everyone won, except Microsoft.

Think about it: why did Microsoft have such a low opinion about the Internet? They recognized the same thing that Marc Andreesen did: that it was a new platform for delivering applications. Microsoft didn't want that to happen; the incumbent platform was Windows. They were eventually forced to get into the browser business because the monopolist doesn't allow third-party applications with an installed base of more than a few thousand seats, of course, but it's all still standards-compliant.

Applications and information services are now delivered on the Web, not as little standalone Windows apps that you have to download and install. And that means the paradigm has shifted. The war is most definitely over, and Microsoft has lost.

The Real War -- Battleground Web Developers

[Mansing]

When AOL moves away from IE, then the battle will begin. The release Mozilla 1.0 is only the opening salvo. Mozilla (and all the Gecko based browsers) will need to achieve a critical mass before real changes will occur.

The battleground will be the Web Developers. When they realize that Moz and Moz based browsers command the largest collection of suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H consumers on the Internet, then they will change their sites to make the pages look "good". When they change their sites, others will move to the browser that displays the pages best.

And the browsers that are W3 compliant, and render pages correctly, will move back into a position of competition.

If IE really did suck

[Steveftoth]

then people would get netscape. Look at IE version 2.0. However, IE is a decent browser, not the best but it does most of what people expect it to do. And since people code to it, the web works on it.

It's our job to change that. To make sure that people move to bigger and better browsers. ;)

Re:If IE really did suck

[NanoGator]

Agreed.

I'm an Opera user, but I'm relatively happy with the web basically working like it should now. I don't wanna muck it up with having to use one browser for some sites and another for others. That is so 1995.

Re:If IE really did suck

[Random Feature]

When "people" (i.e. everyday users) encounter a "broken" site, they assume it's the SITE that's broken. Not IE.

That misperception is the crux of the problem. People won't move off IE because they don't perceive that the reason a site isn't showing correctly is IE's crappy CSS support, they assume it's the site's crappy coders.

Fix that perception and you can change the world.

More than that...

[Mulletproof]

Annyonce free is nice, but you need serious visibility to even put begin to think of assaulting IE domance of the Galaxy's browser of choice. The common person, not just your resident open sourcer or /.er actually needs to know it exists. You know, Joe AOL? Speaking of AOL, it's how they became one ot the leading ISP's around-- A massive CD push creating tons of visibility... "What? Another disk!? well, it does have 1,000,000,000 hours on it... Aw, sure. What the hell." AOL wasn't nessisarily better, they were just more visible.

The second thing you'll need is an interface a two year old can use. Perhapse that's a bit over the top, but it needs to be A) Pretty Looking B) Easily navigated; all the core features within easy reach C) all while retaining the features that will kick IE's ass.

I know, all the elitists will argue that Mo' is as neat and as shiney as it needs to be and if Joe AOL doesn't like it, screw em'; And with that attitude, mo' will foever be a bench warmer. Hell, I think Netscape has more acceptance than Mo' cuz why (yes I know what Mo+NS=)? It's bright and shiney and pretty. Shitty, yes. But you have to start somewhere.

Another very useful think they could do is pack it in with downloads... hell, you get your computer infested with Gator everytime you download, so why couldn't you have one for Mozilla? Or a link to it at least... "New Mozilla 1.0!! Faster than Internet Explorer! Rock solid stability! 1,000,000,000 free hou--" er, you get the idea.

All I know the primary thing that's keeping EVERY browser in second is visibility first, usability second.

Re:More than that...

[sean23007]

There is such a thing as "bad visibility" or even "too much visibility." You mention the Gator thing that tags along and presses the user to use it. Well, people hate that. It's all over the place, and everybody knows about it, but everyone who knows about it absolutely hates it. You don't really want people to hate Mozilla in the same manner, do you? Because I don't.

Re:Wait till there's a security hole

[litewoheat]

This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. What if, for example (not real), when the rendering engine gets something like Hi it crashes or worse makes Mozilla think that its running in local mode (file://) with access to stuff that should not be accessable from a remote URL?.

Now I'm not saying that the hole will be that easy but the one that IS there will be easier to find and exploit with the source.

on a common note...

[TweeKinDaBahx]

I think AOL paid for this article and you should be modded down if you think otherwise because i'm more important than you and you don't have a brown 'w00t' t-shirt.

"Browser War Already Over"

[pyrrho]

This sets off a few of my "old timer" bells (that's right, I'm old, aka "over thirty")...

One, did you ever read about "The War to End All Wars"? That was WWI! They were much more realistic about naming WWII.

Also, please realize what you thought about history perpetually progressing forward was a lie. Things are never determined. It's all still up for grabs. Winning is what happens in board games, in the real world it's a perpetual struggle. Yes, even among browsers.

Re:"Browser War Already Over"

[Ztream]

"A political struggle!"

IE's dead, Jim

[WillSeattle]

I kanna make it go any faster, the virus-antivirus engines arr held tahgether wi' balin' wire as 'tis.

Spotty, I need more power, there's a worm out there with our name on it, and Sulu can't target it with all those popup windows in the way!

Ah'll see what I kin do ... [looks sadly forelorn]

Re:1 battle.

[Christianfreak]

This is a troll but I'll bite.

Mozilla is slow,

Moz 1 beats IE on page loads. The slow part is start up and the only reason that IE can do it faster is that you load everything but the window when you start your computer!

large

well apps usually take all the memory they can get (at least on Linux) and me not running much right now top reports that its taking only 35 megs right now. That's not bad and moz will run on a machine with 16 megs.

buggy at best

I can count on one hand how many times moz has crashed on me since 0.96, oh maybe you're talking about IE only webpages. You should stay away from those anyway.

The war of the browsers is over and IE won. Not because it's the better browser, but because everything is now written to be IE compatible rather that standards compliant.

No not everything. I'm in charge of a web development team and we write standards complient code. We've designed dozens of sites, they all work and work right.

And I'm not the only one either. I have visited maybe one site in the last few months that didn't show right in mozilla. So try it before just assuming things. Sweeping generalizations are bad.

CNN article does Moz a serious disservice

[Sanity]

The Mozilla team officially makes versions for Macintosh and the open-source Linux...

...and at that point tens of thousands of Windows users stop reading, unaware that Mozilla is available for their platform too :-(

Re:1 battle.

[sulli]

You must really like popup ads.

the point of the article...

[deviator]

I think the point of the article isn't so much whether Mozilla will beat IE for general use... it focuses on the REAL advantage of Mozilla; that is, the use of the Gecko engine in lots of other devices and scenarios. It will be interesting to see Gecko slowly supplant IE as the engine of choice for all non-MS companies who need to render HTML.

The Mozilla name

[arbofnot]

From the article:

The power of Mozilla, which got its name from Netscape's dinosaur-like mascot, is its open-source nature.

True, I suppose, almost. As I remember it, NCSA first developed the Mosaic browser, which was further developed into Mozilla and then Netscape Navigator.

Re:The Mozilla name

[BitwizeGHC]

Mozilla was always a code-name for Netscape, and was to be originally the real name for the browser.

The READMEs that came with Netscape downloads said at the end something like, "Remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but pronounced Mozilla."

Re:Frosted glass (Konqueror)

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

In case anyone cares, the current Konqueror seems to handle the effect properly as well.

Mind you, I'm using a CVS version from about a week ago, but I suspect KDE 3.0's probably handles it okay as well, and perhaps 2.2 as well.

Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[wrinkledshirt]

If the AP ran a story about how everybody in the world thought that Mozilla was crap, and Netscape was crap for basing itself off Mozilla, you could bet CNN would keep that little tidbit off their site.

You can show editorial bias in many ways, one of which is simply by skewing the presentation of the information -- pumping up stories that benefit the corporation to prominent status, and relegating others to out-of-the-way places (or even neglecting them altogether).

Re:Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[tswinzig]

This slashdot article isn't about how CNN is biased towards pro-AOL material. This story is about an article written by the AP on the browser wars. Deal with it.

Re:Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[wrinkledshirt]

This slashdot article isn't about how CNN is biased towards pro-AOL material.

Well, surely examining the publisher of an article for reasons of credibility is only fair? Last time I checked we were still a number of chromosomes away from being sheep.

Deal with it.

Consider it dealt with. The story is a non-event. CNN would be quick to latch onto any story that benefits the parent corporation, no matter what source it's from. The only reason anybody HERE knows about the article is because of CNN highlighting it.

Consider if MSNBC put up a story about how IE dominance is still strong, according to an AP article. Does the bias seem more apparent now? Does the lack of news-worthiness shine through a little more?

Re:Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[wrinkledshirt]

That's odd. I can't find any links to it on MSNBC.com. If they are there, they're not very prominently placed. I was able to locate it by search only, and while it was in the News section, it's no longer there now.

Perhaps it's no longer a timely item, except it's still one of CNN's top stories in the Tech section.

Coincidence that MSNBC has shuffled a story about a competing browser under the rug, while CNN is still pushing it?

Re:Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[wrinkledshirt]

Ha. Tell you what. I'll check back into this thread in three days and eat crow if CNN's dumped this story on the backburner.

I'd still be interested to see if the link got the same treatment on MSNBC's page as it does on CNN's...

Re:Unfortunately, your point is irrelevent

[wrinkledshirt]

Ha. I just came back here to eat crow. Between this and that article on MSNBC talking about crappy software (and MS's part in authoring it), I will have to mollify my position.

Very strange, though. Very very strange. Illogical.

It All Depends on AOL

[RAMMS EIN]

AOL really has the chance to initiate some good developments here. If they switch to Mozilla, so many people will be using Mozilla that webmasters will actually care about their pages in other browsers than MSIE again. That would, in turn, make the web more accesible to people using alternative browsers, so that webmasters have to care about standards more, ...

See also the recent discussion about browser wars

You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[PhxBlue]

Turn off all of those unrequested popups with a couple of mouse clicks, or you can go back to using IE and have to close a bazillion windows every time you are done surfing.

Actually, that's all it takes for IE, too--just use the highest possible security settings, including "Disable Active Scripting," for your "Internet" zone. Probably 90% of the websites I surf render just fine without it. And if I think I'm ever going to come back to one of the 10% that don't, I can add it to my "trusted" sites list, which uses "Internet"-level security settings.

Re:You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[Tokerat]

I can add it to my "trusted" sites list, which uses "Internet"-level security settings.

Which is burried under Edit->Preferences... then "Security Zones", then Zone: Trusted Zones then "Add Site..." THEN "Add..." THEN type the friggin URL (or well yea, paste). AHHHH Why isn't there a "Trust" button I can add to my Toolbar that just does this?

Microsoft: As feature-rich as a Mac with all the ease of use of a Univac.

Re:You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[cybermage]

Probably 90% of the websites I surf render just fine without it.

That means 1 in 10 don't render fine. Would you buy a car if it didn't start 1 in 10 times?

Having "toggle JavaScript On and Off" as your only option isn't an option. Deciding what Javascript can/cannot do is better. In Mozilla, you can tell it, specifically, no unsolicited pop-up windows. Yes, it even differentiates between click-generated pop-ups and automatic pop-ups.

Re:You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[evilviper]

Well, the highest security level doesn't even allow you to DOWNLOAD from a site.

Secondly, you have to be an idiot to like the new mozilla features. Firstly, anyone with an ounce of intelligence shuts off java and javascript completely, getting rid of all popups. So, this is just for the group that isn't smart enough to know to disable javascript, but knows where to looks, and knows that you CAN disable popups. It's a select group.

Finally, if you wanted those features, along with many others, they've been available in many filtering proxies for quite some time. Hell, that's how I get rid of IFrames, and disable image sizes so that blocked images don't display an exmpty frame or take up any space.

Mozilla would win the browser war

[cr@ckwhore]

Here's my theory. If the word was spread that mozilla can block pop-up ads by simply checking a checkbox in the preferences, then I bet people would come to mozilla by the millions.

Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of that simple, yet extremely powerful feature.

Re:Mozilla would win the browser war

[jesser]

I'd like to go one step further and disable pop-up ads by default (bug 111542). However, I think we should make Mozilla's pop-up blocking more robust first. There are currently several ways around our pop-up blocking, such as auto-submitting a form that is set to submit into a new window (bug 144726). Luckily, advertisers are finding those holes for us quickly.

Re:It's not over until the fat lady sings. .

[ActiveSX]

internet explorer is available for solaris/sparc and hpux/hppa (as if it ran on any other chips:)

IE is a virus

[Glanz]

....that proliferates among the stupid.....

Re:Mozilla's path to victory: Annoyance free brows

[Anonymous Coward]

** LAMER ALERT **

Omfg, you must live in 1996. There is like 100000000000 pieces of free software that let you disable popups under windows/IE. A lot of them block more than Mozilla does.

** END LAMER ALERT **

Overkill..

[sterno]

Many of the sites I visit use some sort of scripting that I would like to remain working. Specific things that scripting is used for is all that should need to be disabled. That's a little too "all or nothing" for my taste (and I suspect for others as well).

Re:Overkill..

[Dave Emami]

Many of the sites I visit use some sort of scripting that I would like to remain working. Specific things that scripting is used for is all that should need to be disabled. That's a little too "all or nothing" for my taste (and I suspect for others as well).

More than that, many sites use the script/noscript tags with just "This site requires JavaScript" in the noscript section, or often nothing at all. Or if you get to it, all the links cease to work, because they use OnClick (or somesuch) rather than HRef tags.

What's worse, I've seen at least one site that prevents you from accessing some pages if you have popups disabled in Opera (and presumably Mozilla). I'm not well versed in JavaScript, but as far as I could tell what it does is try to open a temporary popup window, then check whether the popup exists. If it finds the popup it closes it and proceeds to what you were trying to get to. If it can't find it, it stops.

Re:Wait till there's a security hole

[joshki]

What you don't get is that everybody gets that source. Including every single programmer in the world who wants to download it. Have you heard of Open-BSD by any chance? The most secure(modern) OS available right now -- I don't think there's been a remote root exploit. Why? Well, partly because that's what the lead developers obsess about. But there's also the fact that it's reviewed by a lot of people. The more people who get the code, the more likely it is to be secure. Pretty much the only people who debate that point are either MS, or MS funded.

My point was that closed source is usually less secure -- not more, and open source is usually more secure. The whole security-through-obscurity debate has been had many times here, and you're just spouting all the old arguments that have been debunked way too many times to make it worth my time to do it again.

related stories

[cicatrix1]

Hah! if you check at the bottom where the site lists related stories, what do you find? RELATED STORIES: Serious flaw in MS server software June 13, 2002 Microsoft warns of software flaws June 12, 2002

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[Reziac]

Type the obvious: webmaster@whateversite.com Anyone can do that, whether a mailto link is visible or not. And often one can see the first page, or a sitemap, but nothing else.

I have two clients who are legally blind, but when I write webmasters and complain about poor site accessability on my clients' behalf, I have yet to get a response.

Mozilla has a greater advantage over IE

[AnimeFreak]

How so?

First of all, any issues involving bugs are fixed from a meare few hours to a few days. If I do recall correctly, Microsoft takes a few days to a few weeks, even longer and in fact, they don't even fix the bugs, they just remove the part that doesn't work (IE: the gopher hole).

Second of all, you OWN the browser. Once you download it you are free to do what you want with it within the policies of the GPL. If you have the skills to write an addon that will stop popup banners and banners in general, you are free to do so. If you want to make it so it runs on your PalmPilot or even your refridgerator, you're welcome to. Microsoft basically states they own the browser and they are free to rape your computer at will. To make matters worse, you are only able to get it for Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and HP-UX, nothing else. Mozilla? It can run on almost any OS these days.

Mozilla, or Gecko rather, will be availble in the newer versions of AOL. What does this mean? This means that there is potential to have at least 1,000,000 new Mozilla users as there are something like that number using the free 1,000 hours. Over time it might mean that the 35,000,000 AOL users will be using Mozilla over IE and that can cause a huge dent in the amount of hits our webservers get with IE.

Mozilla may not just a web browser either. It has been said that you could write spreadsheet or word processing software from it's rendering engine. If this is true, then Mozilla is way better than IE.

Re:Mozilla has a greater advantage over IE

[David Gerard]

Once you download it you are free to do what you want with it within the policies of the GPL.

MPL/NPL, not GPL - most of the code has been relicensed under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, but not all (they're trying to track down those last few contributors to get permission to relicense their bits).

But the MPL offers a lot of freedom too :-)

And notice how http://mozilla.org/start/1.0/ has Open Source/Free Software at the top.

Most Mozilla users don't use Windows either

[micromoog]

Let's face it: most people who use Mozilla are using it on a non-Windows operating system. I tried Mozilla 1.0 on Windows, and quickly went back to IE when I realized that IE is still both faster (inital load and page rendering) and more stable.

Mozilla may be the best thing available on Linux or other systems, but nothing can yet touch IE on Windows.

Also, don't expect IE to come to a Linux box near you anytime soon without a court order. Not supporting Linux is a key part of their rule-the-desktop strategy. When Joe Avg. finds out Linux can't run his two favorite programs, IE and Word, he'll think twice about installing it.

Microsoft has won the Windows browser war. Any browser war now is inextricably tied to the OS "war".

Re:Most Mozilla users don't use Windows either

[unconfused1]

Personally...I think that Mozilla 1.0 on Windows is quite a bit better than IE on Windows. Namely, it is faster rendering pages. Just about every site that I go to is faster to a degree that is noticable.

And the quicklaunch pre-loaded app is nice too. It puts IE and Moz on the same playing field, since most of IE is preloaded for the Windows Explorer. Now most of Netscape is preloaded...and it can open a new window faster than IE.

I have long time IE user friends that have given Moz 1.0 a shot and liked what they have seen. Even if they don't stick with Moz on Windows...at least they looked and made an informed choice.

Re:Most Mozilla users don't use Windows either

[skt]

mozilla on Windows actually works very well. I use it on NT4 and 98 and rendering performance and initial load time is very good. If you want quick load times, you have to use mozilla's turbo feature to load the libraries into memory. IE does the same, so it isn't fair to compare initial load times between mozilla and IE w/o using turbo mode.

I don't think that you can prove that rendering performance is any better in IE vs. mozilla, I think the consensus is that both are basically about the same, and you can't tell the different from a user POV. If your system has a decent amount of memory, mozilla performs very well on any platform.

Re:Most Mozilla users don't use Windows either

[SuperKendall]

I use Mozilla on Windows at work (even as I type this). The only time I load IE is when I'm forced to by internal web apps...

But that's another issue. Basically, I don't see how anyone can browse at all anymore without popup blocking and tabs. I use those features so heavily and they are so useful, it would be worth some slowdown to me - even if there were any, which I haven't really seen. Especially when rendering complex pages Mozilla is really fast, and just more pleasant to use - I also like it's password storage behaviour much MUCH better that IE.

It can? Sweet!

[uberred]

*check*

Re:Frosted glass (Konqueror)

[JensChr]

So does Opera 6.01 for Linux

Keep in mind that "the browser war" is not only about one or two browsers, but about the fact that everyone should be able to use their choice of a standard-complying browser, and be able to see every site out ther correctly

Word to the wise...

[SPYvSPY]

...if you want to make sense, learn grammar. Don't tell me that English isn't your first language, either -- I don't really give a flying freak.

Re:Idea - warn them, comply to standards...

[joepa]

What if AOL made an announcement in advance (perhaps as far as 6 months to a year) that they would be switching to Netscape, and that they would be making Netscape as w3-compliant as possible.

This would force web developers to choose between AOL compliance (and therefore w3-compliance) or MS compliance... eventually, if AOL compliance was the majority choice, MS would have to modify IE to be (more) w3-compliant -- they would essentially have lost their ability to set false standards.

Yes, the proposed situation would be an idealist solution (for the community), but I don't think anyone can justifiably say that it is not possible (though perhaps not probable).

Re:Victory this was not, begun this browser war ha

[jweatherley]

PWP - page widening posts as popularised by Klerck. I won't post an example as that would be impolite but check out Klerck's user page if you're using IE and want an example.

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[zulux]

I have two clients who are legally blind, but when I write webmasters and complain about poor site accessability on my clients' behalf,

I've never gotten a response myself from the webmaster - I've always gone directly over their head. Pick someone at the business who looks like they would be afraid of lawsuits. It's suprisingly effecftive to combine your complaint with official sounding ADA referances.

Some of the ADA requirements are over the top, but it's unexcusable that whole sections of the web are offlimits to blind people due to bad coding by idiot webmasters. The web could be so enableing for blind people if given half the chance. Good luck!

"war" is the wrong word

[Lewis Mettler, Esq.]

"Competition" is the correct word.

And, it can never occur as long as Microsoft illegally bundles IE.

I dunno...

[Sivar]

I wouldn't say it won't matter much. I made some posts on Storagereview.com which linked to images on my server and almost all of the hits to the server (about 80 of 86) were Mozilla, according to Apache's weblog.

They don't know, but they do care

[mangu]

Why they chose to block any customers remains a mystery

I like to browse with konqueror and I try to do something about it when I can't. I send a polite email to the webmaster telling my problems. They usually are surprised that their site, created with whatever "point-and-click" website creation tools their artists are able to use, doesn't work for standard browsers. They are even ignorant of the fact that the web standard is published by the W3C, not microsoft. The happy ending to the story usually is that one more website becomes compliant with the *true* standard and one less website requires IE.

Re:They don't know, but they do care

[isorox]

I have complained nicely before about the crapness of the odeon's website here in the uk not working with konq 2.2.1. Didnt work

Last night I sent a very rude email saying that as I cant find any information about the film, I couldnt go and I'm off to their competitior. No luck there either.

Re:They don't know, but they do care

[Bongo]

I have complained nicely before about the crapness of the odeon's website here in the uk not working with konq 2.2.1. Didnt work

I believe that they are the worst web site I've ever tried to use. Never mind the standards compliance issue; the usability is terrible. They used to have these menus that mouse roll-overs would cause info to be showed on the page, but to get to the links in the info you'd have to move the mouse across other menus that caused the info to dissapear....

Right now they've got a splash page for Spiderman saying "BOOK NOW". Unfortunately that's all it says on the splash page. I wanted a list of films... I didn't want to book Spiderman... but there was no mention of anything other than "BOOK NOW". So I click "BOOK NOW" to get to the main page... which is blank because they've used some wizzy flying menu animation that totally doens't work in Opera(mac) or Mozilla.

Why is it that some of the most commercial sites are utterly useless???

Do people just sit around saying, "we can only afford to support IE, as it's got 95%", while deliberately spending money writing ie only wizzy stuff?

Re:Victory this was not, begun this browser war ha

[Qrlx]

I believe he's referring to Page Widening Posts, which can sometimes be found at the -1 level. They cause the page to get really wide in IE, as whatever it is that's supposed to make the text wrap doesn't do it anymore.

I just fired up IE and went looking for an example in recent stories and I can't find a widened page. So maybe they did fix it. If not fixing PWP was a tactic to get me to switch to mozilla, it worked.

What war?

[Ogerman]

Considering most people consider the war long since over, I can't imagine this mattering much.

Browser war? For crying out loud, they all use the same standards now. Nobody's developing pages that absolutely require MSIE or Netscape. (with respect to rendering that is.. you may have to tell your browser to report a different ID for a handful of lame sites). The "browser war" ended when all parties gave up on including proprietary HTML extensions / quirks / etc. All that remains is the polishing of user interfaces--which, IMO, Konqueror 3.x is leading.

OT, how can I get mozilla to stop this?

[Qrlx]

Trying to get rid of a few annoying ads, I added this line to my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

Now, whenever mozilla tries to show those ads I get a error message popping up; "The connection was refused when attempting to contact ad.doubleclick.net" and I stupidly have to click OK.

Any ideas on how I can fix that? IE doesn't do it, it just puts its lame "The page cannot be displayed" box wherever the ad was. but at least there's no extra clicking.

Re:OT, how can I get mozilla to stop this?

[moncyb]

You can try running a web server bound to the loopback interface. Then set up virtual hosting for ad.doubleclick.net. ...and there must be a way to return a 1x1 pixel jpeg for every request...

Re:OT, how can I get mozilla to stop this?

[Vann_v2]

I used Galeon, which uses gecko to render stuff, so I don't know if these options actually exist in Mozilla. But, with Galeon, one can block images from a specific site. Why not just choose to block image from ad.doubleclick.net?

They could always do like M$

[Erris]

Your customers don't understand browser compliance, they merely know that they could visit sites with AOL 7, but not AOL 8. Is the deluge of customer support phone calls and email really worth the hassle?

Ha! They could just get the browser to pop up a little message, "This site uses non standard methods and may not display properly," for every site that does so much as ask what browser you are using. This would let the user know who is at fault and prevent many irritated phone calls. Most of the pages would display OK, those few that don't would just get shafted as they deserve to be.

Re:They could always do like M$

[MisterBlister]

Ha! They could just get the browser to pop up a little message, "This site uses non standard methods and may not display properly," for every site that does so much as ask what browser you are using.

Sites don't "ask" what browser you're using, the browsers automatically tell the server the browser type as part of the initial HTTP request, as per the HTTP STANDARD. Ass-face.

Re:They could always do like M$

[MisterBlister]

Could you be a little more specific, Mr. Blister dick? Are you refering to an RFC, or some kind of M$ flavor of the day "standard"? It's kind of hard to imagine that kind of waste of bandwith being automatic. I'm not sure anyone but the designers of NetBIOS would think that way, but you never know user agent might be part of a real standard. Denying service, like you do with all those great first post loser drools of yours, is more a MicroShit kind of thing.

Hahah. I hope you're trolling and not really that dumb, because if you are you just gave a black eye to Linux users everywhere. Ever try learning about something before you make baseless anti-MS claims? Oh wait this is Slashdot.

Sorry ass-munch but Http-User-Agent is part of the fucking W3 standard. It was first implemented not by Microsoft, but by Netscape. In fact, due to the fact that people used to code pages for Netscape only and disallow other browsers, MSIE *still* identifies itself as a Mozilla offshoot. So you can't really blame the stupidity of writing pages for one browser only soley on Microsoft. Lazy web designers have been doing it since the dawn of the web. In fact, Netscape used to encourage it...Until, that is, they got bitch-smacked by Microsoft's superior browser.

Re:They could always do like M$

[Tony-A]

Sites don't "ask" what browser you're using
Agreed. "ask" is not the right term.

from microsoft.com
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
var userAgent = navigator.userAgent;
var MSIEIndex = userAgent.indexOf("MSIE");

"demanding" maybe more like it.

You are not forced to breathe.

[mangu]

You are not forced to use IE. You are not forced to use Windows. You are not forced to use the web. You are not forced to even use a computer.

That was not the complaint. The problem is having someone tie IE use to web use. I don't like that either, why shouldn't I be allowed to browse without having to constantly close those pop-up ads I never read? Besides, pages that do run in Konqueror load twice as fast than in IE, in the same hardware.

Don't forget the PS3

[rseuhs]

Playstation3 will use Linux for everything online-related. If it is as successful as PS1 (100 Million sold) or PS2 (30 million sold, another million sold EACH MONTH), there will be millions of Mozilla-users who won't accept a "use IE instead" because they *can't* use IE.

Add to those:

• 30 million of AOL users who will sooner or later upgrade to a Mozilla-based browser. Few computers last longer than 4 years, also Widows tends to be reinstalled sometimes even without upgrading hardware, so I guess that in 3 or 4 years we will see at least 20 million Mozilla-users coming from AOL.
• Windows-users who like Mozilla's features (tabbed browsing, http-pipelining, stop animations)
• Windows-users not liking Microsoft (actually I know more Windows-users hating Microsoft than liking them. Yes, you can flame me for this.)
• Linux users. Yes it's starting to happen. South Korea switching 1/4 of their desktops to Linux, allmost all Hollywood studios switching to Linux, Walmart starting to sell Linux-preinstalled computers to the masses - this is just the beginning, Linux will make inroads in the desktop in the next years.
• People who want a multiplatform browser. No, IE/Mac is not the same as IE/Win and see above for PS3 and Linux/desktop in the future. Those people who use any non-Windows OS either at work or at home will probably also use Mozilla on their Windows-machines because Mozilla makes it easier to share bookmarks etc. between platforms.
• As the article suggests, people using embedded devices, etc.

Mozilla will almost certainly break IE-domination in this year (by reaching more than 10% marketshare, which is too much to ignore for webdesigners) and will become the standard browser within 10 years.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[rseuhs]

It is entirely reasonable for them to use a computer to surf the web rather than a wannabe-computer like the PS3.

No, it's not reasonable to expect from your customer/visitor to write down your url on paper, leave their comfy couch, walk into another room, boot up their computer, type in the URL they have written down and watch your site.

And BTW, not all Playstation owners have a computer in the first place.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[groomed]

there will be millions of Mozilla-users who won't accept a "use IE instead" because they *can't* use IE.

Actually there is an alternative perspective. Instead of "locking out Mozilla users" you can say that you are "adding value for IE users".

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[jesser]

Instead of "locking out Mozilla users" you can say that you are "adding value for IE users".

Go ahead and "add value for IE users", but do it in a way that users of other browsers can still use your site. For example, if your site accepts HTML comments, you could give IE users the option of editing the comment with IE's somewhat-built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor and simply hide the WYSIWYG option from users of other browsers. This does not require you to lock out Mozilla users.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[jsebrech]

Given mozilla has a great built-in wysiwyg html editor itself, I don't see why such a feature would have to be IE only.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[RegularFry]

Ok. Got that. Next question: are Microsoft panicking? What is their next move? You can bet that they're not about to take a potential *massive* hit like AOL's shift lying down. Any ideas as to what their strategy for this might be?

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[rseuhs]

Microsoft already tried to take on Playstation with the XBox (and failed badly).

They can't lower Windows and Office prices (that would destroy Bill Gates valuable stock.), so they will slowly lose to Linux and OpenOffice.

Nothing lasts forever, neither does Microsoft's desktop domination.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[jesser]

Mozilla currently doesn't give web pages a way to create a form control (or something that looks like a form control) into which the user can enter HTML using Composer commands.

IE has a built-in HTML editor that afaik can be accessed only by setting the "contenteditable" attribute of a node such as a div. IE provides keyboard shortcuts but does not provide a formatting toolbar; instead, it lets scripts create buttons that do the same thing as Ctrl+B=bold, etc. Unfortunately, this includes clipboard functions. Allowing scripts to paste is bad (password leak), but allowing scripts to copy is worse (root hole with a little social engineering).

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[RegularFry]

I'm not so worried about the desktop domination. It's the browser domination that's more interesting, and AOL's potential shift away from IE would clobber that.
I think they can, and probably will, drop the home price of Windows through the floor at some point. Remember, most people get it "free" with a new PC anyway. The home price is likely an inflation to counter the "get what you pay for" mentality. They can still make buckets on the Office suite. What was that economical model? Commoditise your complements? If they make the desktop OS a pseudo-commodity, they can clean up on Office sales and still remain market leaders.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[Red Avenger]

Big mistake you make is that Microsoft is just going to stand still. Nice dream though. But not very realistic.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[rseuhs]

You forget that Microsoft's revenue consists of 80% Office and Windows.

So if they half these prices, they nearly half their revenue (because the market is saturated) and actually start to make losses instead of high profits.

That's why they simply can't drop these prices and constantly raise prices instead.

Microsoft is a lot more vulnerable than most people believe. They trapped themselves in the stock-option house of cards they built around themselves.

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[rseuhs]

That's probably the most funny post I've seen for a while.

Microsoft not standing still?

I quote Bill Gates:

"The Internet will never be popular"

Microsoft ALWAYS stand still, they NEVER pick up really NEW ideas. They look where everybody is headed, then use their huge ressources to pick up.

Just look at PS, if we are at it. PS2/3 threatens Microsoft stronghold on home-computers, so what did Microsoft do? Copy Sony by putting out a console. The XBox is not offering anything new (no, a harddrive isn't anything new, you could save your games before, too.) they just bought the latest-greatest hardware and put it together, thought that if they through enough money at it, it will become a great success.

Now, half a year after launch, they have sold 2 millions less than expected, have to take 100$ more losses per box than expected and see already developers leaving and XBox failing miserably.

They would have to sell more than 10 games per box to break even and that's only hardware costs, if you count in the bloated marketing costs you would probably need 15 or even more games per customer to reach a cool zero. That simply ain't gonna happen.

So Microsoft is the only one taking huge losses and is still miles behind Gamecube everywhere (which overtook XBox in the USA recently and was always in front everywhere else) and lightyears behind PS2 which wipes the floor with XBox all over the world even though it's 2 years old.

What will Microsoft do against PS3?

Re:Don't forget the PS3

[Red Avenger]

lol.

Man you really hate MS don't you!

I think the xbox is pretty cool. The online stuff looks impressive as well. You conveniently neglect that part of the xbox didn't you?

They are the only ones pushing the envelope on online doing something truly innovative. This isn't just connecting up to a server to play games like pc. This is a completely new experience. Add to it the Xbox Communicator and you have an incredible combination.

As for the hard drive thats a pretty big deal as well. Can you play ripped music off your PS2's memory cards? I didn't think so...

PS3? Who is that? I think Sony has to worry more about Xbox 1.

Re:Wait till there's a security hole

[ealar dlanvuli]

I'd rather it be found and exploited/fixed than found and kept to the very very good black hats..

But then I could be wrong, letting the real hackers in is obviously less of a threat than patching and no threat at all.

Screw the browser wars...

[MayorDefacto]

I wanna know who's winning the cola wars!

Re:IE7 and CSS QWZX

[weave]

PNG offers really nice alpha channel support. For an example, check this out...

http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/demos/eagle-sun.h tml

btw, it looks like shiat on IE 6...

It's an arms race

[mangu]

what it does is try to open a temporary popup window, then check whether the popup exists. If it finds the popup it closes it and proceeds to what you were trying to get to.

So, what Mozilla needs now is to report as "existing" any window it was told to pop up.

Yahoo has already gone one step further. It shows a random word as a pixmap. You have to read that word and type it in a box. That's supposed to avoid bots from creating new Yahoo users. Next step: OCR-enabled bots...

Re:It's an arms race

[Dave Emami]

So, what Mozilla needs now is to report as "existing" any window it was told to pop up.

More generally: create whatever internal data structure it uses for said popup windows, and handle JavaScript calls exactly as they'd be handled otherwise -- just don't do whatever low-level calls result in actually showing the popup. This handles the next obvious route the popup writer will take -- create a popup window, set some property of the window, and then query that property and compare it against what you set it to. "Create me a popup. Is it there? It is? Yeah. Uhuh. Sure it is, you ad-evading bastard. Alright, set the width to 321. Now, what's the width? It's not 321? No page for you!"

Perhaps the first time I can use this model

[jskarzin]

It is official; CNN confirms: Windows is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that IE market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all users. Coming on the heels of a recent CNN survey which plainly states that IE has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to predict Windows' future. The hand writing is on the wall: Windows faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows because Windows is dying. Things are looking very bad for Windows. As many of us are already aware, Windows continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Windows is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. There can no longer be any doubt: Windows is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Fact: Windows is dying

Same ole same ole...

[weave]

Every few days a mozilla story is posted, and then the same old tired replies are repeated.

Editors of slashdot could improve the productivity of the entire geek world by simply posting mozilla stories and point the comments to an older mozilla story comment section. Then we wouldn't have to repost our same old arguments...

Oh, but it does. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

However, IE is a decent browser, not the best but it does most of what people expect it to do.

And more!

Having my desktop re-organized in terrible ways by IE 6, allowing Windows to make unauthorized connections to the web even when I don't have my browser fired up. . , well that just pisses me off.

I don't like to be a shill in some corporate control ploy.

Mozilla 1.0 is like a breath of fresh air! It does what I ask, it gives me power over simple things IE does not, such as turning off pop-ups, "unrequested windows" in the preferences, among many basic, sensible features. --Features which would only ever be written by non-corporate, private individuals who want a good browser.

IE is for the uninitiated, the unaware, the manipulated consumer sheep of the world.

And damn it, I AM NOT A NUMBER. . !

*ahem*

-Fantastic Lad

another reason moz cant win..

[mister sticky]

microsoft wont play fair, a lot of people use Hotmail..

try changing the personal preference options for a hotmail account in moz. You're in for an ugly warning.

"MSN Hotmail, More Useful Every Day"
hey, they stole my motto!

Make mozilla.org your signature.

[alfredo]

Put a link to mozilla in your e-mail, at BBS's, anywhere you think your writing will be read.

Get the word out as best you can.

Re: Your sig

[Quirk]

re: your sig

criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

So, uhm, while possibly not all prisoners are criminal, surely, all are equally a burden to tax payers. Further, if a non-criminal prisoner should successfully sue for wrongful incarceration, then would not the cost to the tax payer be all the more? Well, I'm off to gather my nits while I may. :)

Re:1 battle.

[rseuhs]

Mozilla is slow

It loads faster than IE (with Quickstart enabled) and HTTP 1.1 pipelining will make webpages load about 10% to 20% faster for modem-users or DSL-users with high-latency connections.

Oh, no I fed a troll again...

Bad bug with IE6 (which does kind of suck)

[FyRE666]

I use IE6 as my default on my Windows machine. Recently been working on adding file uploads to my forum and found an interesting way to crash it. The last time I used a file upload I was sending a file from a samba server on my local network. That server no longer exists, so what happened when I hit the "FILE" button on the form? Yep, total lock up :-) Actually I decided to leave it locked to see if it would give up and show the files on the desktop, and sure enough it did, after 5 minutes! While it was locked, I was using Moz to test the uploader script :-)

Re: Your sig

[zulux]

So, uhm, while possibly not all prisoners are criminal, surely, all are equally a burden to tax payers.

I'm not entirly sure that our criminal justice system incarserates only those that are truly guilty of harming our union. One can argue that there are a a few of people who don't belong in prision, either due to stupid laws or malicous prosecution. These people are fortunalty rare.

My general thought is that people in prision should work at least 60 hours of hard labor per week - just like the rest of us. If they don't want to work, then they should starve. Just like the rest of us. They should not keep the fruits of their labor - just like the rest of us overtaxed suckers who keep collectivly voting idiots into office.

Bzzt, wrong.

[Inoshiro]

If your page looks like crap, but people can still read the content, it's ok. My changelog uses CSS for everything. If you look at it on NS4, it will look "like crap" as you puh it -- but people can still scroll down and read everything just as it was intended.

Mozilla/Netscape as an OS?

[moncyb]

Not to knock your post or the Netscape people, but what is up with them always saying their browser is going to become an operating system? One could probably create a spreadsheet or word processor with Crystal Space, but I wouldn't recommend it...

I'm sure it's just as easy (or easier) to use GTK/ wxWindows or write the program in Python / Java than it would be to use Mozilla. It would be as portable, and you wouldn't have as much bloat either.

The point is it's easy to switch between the two.

[Bistronaut]

AOL has also released betas using Gecko. The thing is that Mozilla uses the same embedding API as IE, so it's easy to switch. I really hope that AOL pushes the Netscape thing, because if IE doesn't have competition, they have no incentive to fix their non-security-related bugs and inconsistent standards support.

NO ONE ever "Chooses" IE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is the biggest not because people go out of their way to download it, it's because it's already on all the neophyte PC owner's shiny new windows machine. They don't go, "hmmm, I think I need to get a browser, I better FTP to my nearest microsoft mirror and get the latest IE. Boy I sure love IE. IT beats the pants off those other browsers." I challenge you to ask an "IE user" to name two other browsers.

Nope. No one chooses IE. Bill already chose for them. That fine for people that don't understand. For those of us that do understand, we see IE for the WebDialer installing, non standards compliant, stupid question asking, piece of M$-ware it really is.

Being a Netscape 4.6 user, I was suffering on slow page downloads (news.com was one), but I didn't switch to IE (hehe switched to a different tech news site). I downloaded Mozilla after reading about the golden on /., and went to news.com.

Needless to say I have a new favorite browser. And the source code to it too.

Great Job Mozilla Team!!

bad metrics

[epine]

Come on people. Not long ago I read a retrospective on the dotcom era where they stated outright that eyeballs were one of the worst business metrics ever invented.

I think Mozilla has a significance that goes far beyond the total number of eyeballs it captures.

One point I can think of off the top of my head is the arms race between the desires of the user population and the cupcake engineers. IE takes a very lax stance in this department. Mozilla has the potential to restore the voice of the user to the user experience.

While Mozilla was stuck in the shipping bay door like a sideways piano, it wasn't the right time for the outside community to put forward these enhancements. I

MS can't afford to let Mozilla gain a clear upper hand in cupcake sobriety.

Too bad the justice dept. hasn't imposed upon MS the requirement to put in the right button menu the option to "open link/page in other browser".

I'd use this on every shitty page that displays in microfonts, every shitty page that opens a pop-under, every shitty page with more shimmering JPEGS than text. If I had that feature in IE I'd almost wear it out.

Even better, a way to mark my preference for each web site as to which browser opens each window (regardless of the browser used to click on the original link).

But don't listen to me. I'm one of those weird people who bought a bread knife when I already had many other knives in my kitchen.

CmdrTaco hates Mozilla.

[sohp]

"I can't imagine this mattering much".
How hypocritical to be so in favor of open source but irredeemably dissing Mozilla. Oh wait, compare the kind of work that went into slashcode and the quality of the resulting codebase to the Mozilla project. Maybe Taco's definition of open source doesn't include quality code developed by a professional team using good software engineering practices.

The harsh truth

[inkswamp]

I'm seeing comments here about how it must be one or two features of Mozilla that make it attractive to people, but the harsh truth is that until the 1.0 release, Netscape/Mozilla sucked ass and now it's an uphill battle in pulling people away from IE.

I'm not trying to troll here, but it's the truth. And don't give me the typical "but IE breaks web standards, etc." I'm not talking from a developer's perspective, but from a user's perspective which we have seen time and time again is the real deciding factor in most technology "wars," fair or not.

I try my best to keep my machine MS-free, but when it comes to browsers, there was little choice in the matter. Netscape 4.x was a joke and Netscape 6.0 was freaking slooooowwwwwww. A lot of people (even those who despise MS) fled to MSIE for relief, and let's be honest. MS did a decent job with it, at least from a user's perspective.

I'm using Mozilla 1.0 now, trying to give it time to grow on me and replace IE. Mozilla has a few quirks, but its benefits outweigh the negatives and I see significantly little difference between it and IE in terms of user experience. I've been actively encouraging others to try it out, but it will take time. Netscape botched the browser war very badly and IE has rooted itself in the public mind as THE ONE AND ONLY BROWSER. Although I like Mozilla, I have real doubts that it will get far, but best of luck to them. I'm on their side.

--Rick

Battle with CDN Gov't

[|<amikaze]

Sadly, many of the more graphical Canadian gov't websites are not Moz compatible. Not only are they incompatible, but they are EXTREMELY hard to decipher. I believe archives.ca has some WWI-related pages that render like ass.

Mozilla crashed

[nhshah]

Mozilla 1.0 crashed within 30 minutes. I'm not arguing anything, I'm just saying...

I hope it's not true

[javacowboy]

Mozilla's my favourite browser, and I think it's the best thing since sliced breead. What I like even more about it is that it's my own little secret. 90% of the masses will keep using IE, blissfully unaware of Mozilla's ability to block annoying pop-up ads.

The more popular Mozilla becomes, the more people will start blocking pop-up ads. The more people start blocking pop-ups, the more site with advertising get annoyed. This means they'll find another ways of innondating me with advertising that get around Mozilla's features.

What's even worse is that if Mozilla starts denting M$'s share of the browser market, M$ WILL start programming Windows to become incompatible with the browser. Since I use Windows 90% of the time (mostly because of work), that would really mess me up.

Dude, Galeon, j0

[rwa2]

You've got to try galeon! It's like a browser done right! Here's my personal list of favourite features not offered by IE or even the Mozilla UI that it derives its rendering engine from:

• popups can come up in new tabs, and each tab can have its own close button. You can kill popups without even looking at them! It also makes it easier to kill tabs without leaving the tab you're looking at (unlike the middle-click in mozilla)
• The searches text inputs are very unobtrusive. It doesn't pop up that big ugly sidebar that insists on popping up even when you're doing normal searches in the main window.
• It saves the state of your browsing session, so you can open everything just like it was when you left off after quitting / rebooting / crashing / etc. Big time saver!
• The Preferences are in the Settings menu item, and not "Edit" or something silly like that
• Nice autobookmarks feature of your most-browsed sites, when you don't feel like mucking around in your history
• A bunch of other inane but useful features that really click in a way no other browser has clicked for me :P

Of course, it's a challenge building it to keep up with the pace of Mozilla development, but once it works, it's really nice... (of course with debian, it's just a simple apt-get source -b galeon )

Re:Dude, Galeon, j0

[kigrwik]

Don't forget to add that bookmarks have support for 3 different clicks:

left-click opens in the current tab,
middle-click opens in a new window or tab
right-click pops up the 'Properties' menu.

You can also manage your own toolbars, easily add bookmarks in folders (not like File Bookmark, scroll, scroll, etc)
Just open the folder and do 'Add Bookmark'. Need a new sub-folder ? Open the folder and 'Add Folder'. Just like Konqueror actually. Now if antialiased text in gecko looked as good as kHTML's it would be paradise.

You can also open a whole folder of bookmarks in tabs or windows , in one click !

It is a wonderful browser.

The only complaint I have is that when it creates or renders a tab it's not very snappy, but I've got not-too-recent hardware :)

Re:Dude, Galeon, j0

[Icculus]

The searches text inputs are very unobtrusive. It doesn't pop up that big ugly sidebar that insists on popping up even when you're doing normal searches in the main window.

Seriously, turning off that damn sidebar is the first thing I did when I installed Mozilla.

2 places:
a) View->Show/Hide->Sidebar (or F9)
b) Edit->Preferences->Navigator->Internet Search. Uncheck "Open the Search Tab..." This will fix the behavior you're complaining about.

Re:Mozilla's path to victory: Annoyance free brows

[Surak]

Yeah, but you can do this with Opera too. You can elect for popups to be opened only in the background, or refused all together.

You can't, unlike Mozilla, tell Opera to display only popups that are requested. However, you can turn this feature on and off very quickly via the F10 'quick preferences' menu.

Of course, on the other hand, Opera is faster. :)

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[Reziac]

I've occasionally gotten responses from webmasters and even seen stuff get fixed (M$'s first insane foray into nested frames, back in late 1996, may well have gone away because of a screenshot I sent 'em.. the frames were gone less than 2 weeks later) but not wrt issues affecting the blind.

I've also sometimes complained to sales@, info@, corporate@, etc. particularly when site problems affect my ability to evaluate or even *gasp* purchase their product. Oddly enough, those are the ones LEAST likely to respond, even tho the access problems represent lost sales.

Even if only 5% of potential clients can't access the site, that's still a lot of money to turn away. Personally, I can't afford to lose 5% of my business; it croggles me that online outfits will cheerfully accept even 10-20% "can't even get in the store", when that would be enough to break a brickstore's profit margin.

Galeon == ++convenience

[Alien Being]

I agree.

Galeon takes it an important step beyond mozilla by putting the toggle in the "Settings" pulldown on the main menubar.

Other options on the Settings menu include "use own fonts" and "use own colors" which are a godsend for reading poorly designed pages. Each function can be bound to a shortcut by pressing the key combo you want while also pressing the menu option. Now it's a single, easy to remember keystroke to kill popups, make the page legible, etc.

If they gave me a billboard to advertise Galeon, I'd put up a snapshot of the Settings menu with the caption "don't let the web surf you!".

Really quite simple

[dalutong]

The power of AOL...

they say "we're switching to the super-standards compliant Gecko rendering engine."

MS says "We're going to stick to the defacto standard."

everyone NOT under MS's belt says "we want people to shop/surf/contribute to/read news on our site... 22 million users... let's say "ALREADY COMPATIBLE WITH AOL 8.0!!! Go to our site. We do The Right Thing."

It's amazing.. but Joe Shmoe really will fall for a campaign if they think that he's "supporting standards and freedom on the internet."

hell... call it "The American Way, Freedom for all" and have a little flag flapping around and most everyone will happily say "Yeah! I'm an american! Go Dinos!"

or at least i hope...

it figures

[CakerX]

Well since AOL-Time-Warner owns cnn and therefor owns cnn.com, as well as netscape, I say this artical is nothing more than mere publicity. Itsn't it intresting how there are only two sides to this argument(and most media) arguments. AOL-Timer-Warner on one side, Microshaft on the other. Evil is in dirrect competition with itself.

Cash bonus opportunity!

[El Camino SS]

Here's how you play! If you can be the first one to slide this story again under the nose of the slashdot editors, I will personally send you five whole whopping bucks!

No purchase necessary! Eneter as often as you like... void where prohibited.

Where are these websites?

[browser_war_pow]

With the exception of my online banking service, every website I visit with Mozilla renders and functions quite well.

Re:Where are these websites?

[Hollins]

Exactly my point. If 10% of AOL users have just one site that they're used to using, especially one so important as a bank, this is over a million new customer complaints. And 10% is probably very conservative.

Re:Where are these websites?

[zenyu]

With the exception of my online banking service, every website I visit with Mozilla renders and functions quite well.

My banking and credit card sites work fine. I once had a problem with my bank and sent an e-mail and a reply the next day saying they didn't officially support it but the site was now fixed. Unless their fees are fantastic you should consider another bank. Internet banking is a good thing (Well now it is, they lost some of my money when they beta tested years back, but they credited it back a couple hours after I told em.)

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[mgrochmal]

You want a site to fix this in under 24 hours? Just tell them that you're blind and that their site won't let your blide-enabeled web-browser in. Dreams of ADA lawsuits start dancing in their heads. It works really well for government sites, and moderatly well for medium sized corporations.

Actually, Job Access For Windows (JAWS) is made for blind people to access common computer applications, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Outlook Express, Eudora, and so on. The problem doesn't come with the browser itself, but rather the coding habits of the page designer. Screen Reading programs cannot interpret Shockwave or Flash with much success (requires specific code in the document), many proprietary HTML tags that are specific to IE cause problems if the page is viewed with other browsers.

As for suing for compatibility, there is already a class-action lawsuit against AOL in the works (no link, heard it from someone who specializes in teaching blind people how to use computers). We specifically tell visually impaired users to not use America Online. JAWS has problems reading multiple windows, and the few times it changes emphasis, the user often has no audible indicator of what's going on. America ONline is well aware of the problem, and while the adaptive software developers try to keep up with the changes, accessibility online is something that is difficult to enforce, especially for companies who host outside the country.

Finally, there is an attitude amongst several developers that I have talked to that there are not enough bind people to justify making accomodations. "If they want to read it, they'll get someone to read it to them." Sadly, that's a quote from a website designer from a few months ago. Slapping lawsuits on people who don't comply won't solve the problem. If you want the Internet to be fully accessible, make some changes to how Internet content is created. Even if you just find a way to tell them, it is a start.

Not to Mention Fully Supported PNG in Mozilla

[Uggy]

IE 6 doesn't have full alpha layer for PNG yet... no word on if it ever will. 24 bit png with alpha layer (transparent/translucent) works just great in Mozilla, blending into background, without all the tricks and hacks that you have to do with IE. I can use a style sheet to change colors on the fly and don't have to to re-save all the damn graphics and screw with them to get the shadows, edges to come out right. For me that's IE's biggest drawback.

What do most people who design for IE do to avoid this silliness? Is there any 24 bit graphic format that supports an alpha layer in IE? No, really, I'd like to know.

Re:Not to Mention Fully Supported PNG in Mozilla

[Chester K]

What do most people who design for IE do to avoid this silliness? Is there any 24 bit graphic format that supports an alpha layer in IE? No, really, I'd like to know.

Yes. There is. PNG.

You just can't use it straight in an IMG tag, you need to instance a DirectX blending filter. It's not complicated at all, but granted, it is platform-specific.

Re:Not to Mention Fully Supported PNG in Mozilla

[Uggy]

Well that doesn't count *G*

Re:Promoting Mozilla

[Bedouin X]

Uhhh... first of all its a 10 MB download. Once you download it you just type:

regsvr32 mozctlx.dll

And voila. I'm sure that there is a place where you can download the DLL by itself (it's an 8k file). It is designed as a drop in replacement for the mshtml.dll. So you can give the the same name as your IE control in your app and it will work perfectly. The only caveat has to do with scripting the browser output I think.

IE comes with your OS

[alue]

Here's from an amateur analyst:

Mozilla's never going to win the war with IE because:

(1) Microsoft can produce code faster than the Mozilla team, because they're capable of paying their developers to go at it 40+ hrs a week, whereas OSS developers need to spend most of their time making a living by doing something else. So although IE may be inferior now, that may not necessarily be the case in the next release.

(2) Moreover IE will probably not be inferior in the next release, because Mozilla is open-source, and that means anybody--including Microsoft--can analyze the software and find a similar if not better way to implement the features Mozilla has already.

(3) Most importantly, IE comes with Windows. If most people use Windows, why would most people take the time to download and install Mozilla when a pretty good browser already comes pre-installed?

Besides, despite how well Mozilla performs, it's going to have a hard time staying abreast of IE, as long as IE remains a fundamental always-on component of the operating system.

Believe me: I don't like Windows/IE at all. I own two computers, and they both run Linux/Mozilla 24/7. There's no doubt that Mozilla's a great browser, at the moment better than its competition.. But I think until Mozilla becomes the default browser of something that most users believe they need to use (like AOL, for instance), it'll have a hard time going mainstream.

I have bookmarked this story

[q-soe]

The sight of people defending AOL Time Warner against Microsoft is in my mind worthy of a bookmark for future reference... AOL Time Warner are a monopoly in a way Microsoft would love to be - they have absorbed media companies left right and center yet as long as they release or support free software they are considered acceptable? Hmm why is it im suspicious of their motives ?

These people control what you see and what you read - they make no bones about their desire to dominate the media world and for them to turn around and start lawsuits against a former ally and best buddy (MS) shows the level of loyalty and trust worthiness they should be afforded.

I use Mozilla on Linux - i like it - its not as stable nor as useable as IE5.5 but it is a damn good browser. Netscape is a bloated, buggy unuseable piece of crap on windows and from my experiments on linux as well. To defend AOL and beg for them to do something like this is a joke, they WILL not do anything unless they can gain a competitive advantage from it - this is the way they have built a business (and previous slashdot stories can attest to it)

Im bookmarking this so when they become 'evil' in the eyes of /. i can post links to this story - Just WHO do you guys think would have the cash to buy parts of a split up MS anyway ? Painting the worlds largest media monopoly as a small guy against microsoft's might makes me laugh and feel ill at the same time.

It might sound bad to some people but superior products win marketshare - IE was better than Netscape - IE won whilst netscape frittered away a lead and became a second rate product (yet mozilla is a first rate ? go figure)

And yes the majority of the real world (non open source) consider IE a very good product.

The Browser War is Dying

[bigsexyjoe]

It is official; Netcraft confirms: The Browser War is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered the Browser War community when IDC confirmed that the Browser War market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the Browser War has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Browser War is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict the Browser War's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Browser War faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Browser War because the Browser War is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Browser War. As many of us are already aware, the Browser War continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

The Browser War on AOL is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core warriors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time the Browser War on AOL warriorers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the Browser War is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

The Browser War.org leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of the Browser War. How many users of Galeon are there? Let's see. The number of the Browser War versus Galeon posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Galeon users. Chimera posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Galeon posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Chimera. A recent article put the Browser War on AOL at about 80 percent of the the Browser War market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 the Browser War on AOL users. This is consistent with the number of the Browser War on AOL usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of the Browser War, abysmal sales and so on, the Browser War is going out of business and will probably be taken over by cnn.com who sell another troubled war. Now cnn.com is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that the Browser War has steadily declined in market share. The Browser War is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Browser War is to survive at all it will be among war dilettante dabblers. The Browser War continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, The Browser War is dead.

Fact: The Browser War is dying

The # is the whole point!

[Steveftoth]

When I mean most I mean by number of pages on the WEB.

Of course you can generate pages that will workon one but not the other, that # is almost infinite. However, browsing around to web, and sending both browsers to the same pages will probably generate more rendering errors in Mozilla and less in IE.

Especially when you start to goto sites that are dynamic since many of these sites block Mozilla (and any non-netscape 4.7/IE client) (like capitalone.com, try paying your bill there with mozilla!)

The only way to kill the MS monopoly is to make sure that the gecko engine gets onto many many devices, even embedded. That's the one area that they don't own yet.

cnet

[brsmith4]

roll over to download.com and check out the responses to things like IE and MSN explorer. There are a lot of people that know about mozilla and are using it also. Download.com is like a semi-power user's site, so if these people know about mozilla, you can bet that others will know soon. It is poised to at least take netscape's place, maybe.

It IS the site's problem.

[dalangalma]

Crappy standards support or not, it's the site coder's responsibility to make sure the site works on at lease IE/Mozilla. If a site dosen't work on IE6 then you have deficient web site authors.

Re:It IS the site's problem.

[Random Feature]

Not necessarily. If it doesn't work on IE6 then the browser may be standards deficient.

On a personal site, to make a statement, I see no problem with coding TO THE STANDARDS that exist for interoperability. If a browser ignores those standards, it is the fault of the browser.

My site is valid and standards compliant. It does not display correctly on IE6. I, like many other people, explain on the front page that "if this site doesn't render correctly, your browser is not standards compliant." I am hardly a "deficient web site author". I simply chose to make a stand on complying with known, accepted standards rather than code sniffers and write 5 different versions of my site. There may be, no, there are, many crappy authors out there who have site problems because of ignorance. Some of us, however, are just principled and refuse to bow into pressure.

The explosion of "blogs", which often use CSS to achieve layout, etc... may force this issue into the forefront. Everyday Joe's try to read them and can't, and are presented with a "your browser is broken" message.

Standards exist for a reason - to be followed. If a browser isnt' going to follow that, the producer should be called out publicly and they should fix it.

For a commerce site then I agree 100%. It should be accesssible by everyone regardless of compliance or standards. If your commerce site doesn't work with Mozilla, you are stupid. If it doesn't work with IE6, you are stupid. You are losing money, tainting your reputation and you should fix it.

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[zulux]

Personally, I can't afford to lose 5% of my business; it croggles me that online outfits will cheerfully accept even 10-20% "can't even get in the store"

Hopefully that mentality is going away with the fall of easy VC money. My own company is standards complient due lazyness - we don't want to waste time dealing with any gripes. We've found that doing it right the first time is actaully the lazy way - a we like being lazy. Give us more time to post to Slashdot!

Both Microsoft and Netscape lost the browser war

[g4dget]

Both Microsoft and Netscape were trying to ensnare users and server vendors into some proprietary trap. Microsoft wanted to force all Internet content to depend on Windows, and Netscape wanted to turn their browser into an OS-independent, but otherwise proprietary, platform. Both failed, and in the end, we all won. IE may have most of the market share and some proprietary hooks, but the vast majority of web sites use open, documented, standardized HTML and JavaScript that works on many browsers.

Both Microsoft's and Netscape's strategies failed. The winner ultimately was the end user, who now has a choice among several good browsers that are either bundled or entirely free.

AP

[emmons]

Since when does AOL own the Associated Press?

Re:AP

[Lysander Luddite]

The AP is a wired service. I know AOL doesn't own them, but they certainly have picked up the story in AOL's publications whereas it seems absent in my local papers.

Since AP is a wire service many, many people contribute to it. You can find some odd stories on there. In 1986 a friend of mine posted a story on it stating that the local rock scene was great and had the potential for breakout talent. The next week rep's from several labels were in town scouting out talent.

I'm not saying your statement is false. I'm saying that AP can be used or ignored by publications.

I think that's a bug in Windows

[jesser]

Typing \\BogusMachineName into the Windows Run box can hang the Run box for a good fraction of a minute, at least on Windows 98 and a large network.

I think you're confusing the browsers

[theolein]

Netscape7 is from AOL. Mozilla is from the Mozilla organisation.

Re:I think you're confusing the browsers

[q-soe]

No
im well aware of the difference - however Netscape 7 and Mozilla share code and thus are very similar - netscape is free and is held up as an open source champion at the same time it belongs to a monopoly which makes MS look like a kindergarten... I simply found that ironic.

Yep

[LPetrazickis]

It was over, but the US found a cheatcode.

Bad products?

[octogen]

Mozilla got a beautiful new GUI, skins, a few more functions, useless things like annoying "do you want to save this password?" messages which can't be turned off and such...

The final result is, that it is still very unstable (better than Netscape 4.7, of course) and relatively unreliable (often destroys its configuration files).

Why did Mozilla's developers spend all their time implementing useless things like skins instead of fixing the REAL problems? I think they could have done a much better job.

Another problem with Mozilla is, that it is extremly slow - especially in 8bit color mode (it renders everything with Steinberg dithering or something like that). Display complex websites can produce as much as 10 seconds full load on an SMP machine until the page gets displayed - while Netscape 4.7 displays the page instantly.

However, I will not use Internet Explorer instead - there are a lot of reasons why I do not like IE, including that it's rather insecure and that I do not like its chaotic User Interface.

Opera seems to be quite good, as long as websites are not too comlex (and I don't like these complex flash-javascript-dhtml pages, either). Reading/posting articles in Slashdot works fine.

Why can't Mozilla simply be faster and more stable?

Re:Bad products?

[DarkProphet]

I haven't noticed this at all. I'm using the Win32 Mozilla 1.0 binary release. As far as I can tell, Mozilla renders a bit faster than my copy of IE6. I've also not noticed any config files getting thrashed. Are you sure its the coding itself, and perhaps maybe not just that the binary you're running was built with incorrect compiler options or something?

Mozilla 4 the masses

[lamp77]

I don't understand why all of these articles that say things like

"not for the beginner"

or

"designed for the tech savvy"

what the hell? Start->progs->mozilla, your running.. is it somehow easier to type in www.lamesite.com into ie than mozilla?

No war is over!

[Air-conditioned cowh]

No war is over until good prevails. In history this can sometimes take a few hundred years but....

Interview with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen

[the_real_tigga]

MacCentral has a related Interview with Marc Andreessen here.

Catch Phrases for me were:
You know what WAP stands for; it's the sound a WAP cell phone makes when you throw it in the wastebasket.
and
My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once.

Enjoy the read.

Yeah, just explain that...

[leonbrooks]

...you can't read text, and pr0n sites are how you got that way...

History revised

[CaptainZapp]

Microsoft won the browser war because IE4 beat the hell out of any other browser that was available at the time. In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.

Actually the main reason why Microsoft won the browser war was not the incredible kick-ass quality of IE4, but the fact that they could bundle it with every new computer sold.

In addition their secret, but aparantly very drastic OEM contracts prohibited vendors to ship a competing product, let alone display it prominently on the desktop.

Granted, that Netscape 4.7 is a bloated heap of crap, but that was not the main reason why Microsoft managed to cut off Netscapes air supply.

Microsoft is a company, which very rarely won on the merrits of their technology...

#include "asbestos.h"

Mozilla lacks bloat?

[leonbrooks]

/ME picks up his jaw from the floor. Mozilla? Light? Is this some kind of antonym game?

Try Galeon or SkipStone - still Gecko, but much lighter - and be amazed.

As to W3C, she ain't what she used to be...

Re:Mozilla lacks bloat?

[moZer]

This is a widespread misconception - that Galeon is much much "lighter" than Mozilla. On my system (RH7.2, p3/866 512M) Mozilla uses 19M of RAM, and Galeon 17M immediatley after startup and loading www.gnome.org. All according to top. Startup time doesn't differ much either, rendering speed almost identical (as it should be). The only thing is that on slow machines (less than 500 MHz), menus and such - the chrome - on Mozilla is noticably slower than the GTK interface on Galeon. On my machine though, I can't tell the difference.

AND bear in mind that XUL is a very complex peice of software that brings something new to software development. It is not bloat. Also, it is nowhere nere as fast in Linux as in Windows, due to (i guess) more optimization in the Windows specific parts.

Re:Mozilla lacks bloat?

[Eil]

Take care to note that I never said Mozilla lacks bloat, just that Netscape only adds to the bloat. :P

Seriously, I'm pretty happy with Mozilla even given its size. With the bloat, Mozilla is much more than a web browser (XPCOM, etc al) and that's something I think I'm going to take advantage of some day.

They probably noticed MS rorting benefits...

[leonbrooks]

...and took that as `writing on the wall' - to wit, `your kingdom has been judged, and found wanting.' Since MS have fiddled their retirement plans, their lackeys have little to lose by being honest.

-I- chose IE

[mccalli]

Interesting that you were a Netscape 4 user. That's why I finally switched to IE - because of Netscape 4. I dabbled around IE 3, and switched over totally at IE 4.

Now, I'm also a Mozilla 1.0 user and that is my primary browser at work for personal usage. Standard reasons - no popups, controlled GIF animation, tabbed browsing etc. I also use it to test any pages I write (along with the W3D Validator).

Despite this, I would like to point out that not everyone is using IE because they were forced to. I'm using it because I like it, and vastly prefer it to the Netscape alternatives.

Cheers,
Ian

There is.

[jonasj]

Why isn't there a "Trust" button I can add to my Toolbar that just does this?

There is: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webac cess/pwrtwks.asp will give you an "Add to trusted zone" option in the Tools menu.

Despite what the page says, it works fine in IE 6.

Whats wrong with IE?

[Silverstrike]

Everyone says the IE breaks the standards and so on. Unfortunetly we're missing the fact that IE has become the standard, while someone out there said, "Ok....this is how HTML is supposed to work", Bill came along and said, "No....this is how HTML is going to work". Unfortunetly, like the Operating System, we can all be rebels and feel very special about being smart and using Linux and so on, but it won't change the fact that Bill will always market his HTML on the mindless masses, who drive the capitalistic economies of the world. thereby defining what would be referred to as a "standard".

Lazy?

[philhy]

You know, I remember when people (myself included) used to test web code with various browsers. I even had a friend load pages from AOL to see how they look. Nowadays, I guess people have just gotten lazy. Or maybe they need to clean their glasses.

Mozilla vs. IE

[__aavonx8281]

I think the 'browser wars' are far from over. I'm a windows user at work and after using Mozilla 1.0 at home I decided to try it at work. I was really impressed at how well it worked on Windows. Not only did it render cleanly, but it supported all sorts of Java and Flash that I thought would be lost. Add to that all the great features in Mozilla (blocking doubleclick.net images, pop-up ads, etc.) I decided to use it as my default browser. Several co-workers asked about it, and I've recommended they also use Mozilla as a default browser. Not only that, I've recommended it on to clients. I think compared side by side Mozilla is a better browser than IE, it lets people do more of what they want, more easily, on the web. I think Mozilla presents a pretty big threat to the IE market, even without the AOL adaptation of Mozilla. I'm not sure many people have seriously considered that Mozilla is simply a better browser and might gain a large share of the browsers out there simply on its own merits.

Re: Your sig

[Manitcor]

I don't know about the US but this is what they seem to do in Brittan (quoted from here)

In May, Great Britain's Home Office, deciding on the proper compensation for a man who served 11 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, ruled that he was entitled to about $1.1 million, but said he would have to reimburse the prison about $63,000 for 11 years' room and board. Said the outraged Michael O'Brien, 34, who had been freed by a Court of Appeal in 1999: "They don't charge guilty people for bed and board. They only charge innocent people." [BBC News, 5-23-02]

Personally I think they should come up with some way to make those imprisoned charged for thier stay (as long as they are really guilty), if not in whole at lease some part.

Rendering pages in Mozilla

[fat_mike]

Will somebody explain to me why Netscape 6 can render ESPN but mozilla can't do it correctly. If I scroll down to fast when I'm on slashdot the graphics get all screwy. It still doesn't render CNN correctly either.

Bad Idea

[cosmol]

remember debtors prison? Once you are in prison you have no means of making money so your debts get bigger and bigger. We phased those out in the dark ages.

Re:Bad Idea

[currand60]

Debtor's prison expected either you or your family to come up with money to pay your debts and buy your freedom. We're talking about poeple who, for example, get free room and board because they shot a president, molested children, and kill dozens of people in very violent ways.

I think we started going very wrong when prison became a learning institution instead of a disciplinary one.

Just getting started...

[jonadab]

The browser war has only just barely begun. When MS first
announced IE, nobody took them seriously. Netscape bumbled
the first battle, and fell back to regroup. But the war is
about to begin in earnest soon. You can see the signs, if
you pay attention... AOL is getting ready to fight with
all the (considerable) weapons at their disposal. Including...

* Bundling. They're testing both IE and Gecko technology
for their next release. I posit that they're deciding
whether it's time, and what the response will be if they
switch. They've lost their AOL-on-desktop deal with
MS, so they _want_ to switch, but what will the user
response be? They're waiting to see.

Why do I think they're trying to decide whether it's
time? Because you can watch them guaging user response,
as they do tests with the new technology, distribute
it among a smaller user base (Compu$erve), and so on.
They're watching to see how it is received. Netscape
6 was received poorly, and they waited. Netscape 7,
now in beta, already has better response than 6. Don't
think they won't notice.

When will it be time? IMO, soon. Mozilla's user
experience shaped up considerably over the winter;
something happened: people who tried 0.9.7 and
0.9.8 liked it enough not just to use it themselves,
but to recommend it. When 0.9.9 came out, mozilla.org
had to get mirrors and more bandwidth, to handle the
increased demand. Sure, these are all the lunatic
fringe, people who will try a new technology before
it's really popular. But here's my point: Netscape
6 was branched before all of this, and Netscape 7
comes after. There has been a fundamental shift,
meanwhile, in how it is received. AOL is watching
the response, and they're going to see that the
response that comes back from Netscape 7 will be
good. It will be time. That's my prediction.

* Media coverage. You know what a potent weapon this
is, and you know that this is Time Warner we're
talking about. This story on CNN is one of the first
exploratory feelers. Do people want to read about
another browser? Do people want to read about and
hear about alternatives? Well, some don't care, but
others do. All we're really waiting for here is a
slow news day. Sure, you cover something once and
nobody remembers it or cares. Cover it a few dozen
times and see what happens. They know what they're
doing.

* The ultimate weapon: version numbers. They've
pulled out the big 7.0 -- a step "ahead" of IE.
Version numbers don't matter? Well, not in terms
of actual quality they don't, but you just try to
convince end users that version numbers don't
matter. I tell you that Microsoft will be forced
to release IE 7 before they end of 2002, and will
face accusations in the IT community that it has
few improvements over IE 6. End users won't care
about these accusations, but it's a multi-front
war. To win, a browser has to win end users,
yes, but also IT people and web developers. IE
went nowhere, despite huge end-user adoption due
to bundling, until 5.0 came out and impressed the
IT crowd and the web developers. Until that,
the websites all still catered to NS4. All three
market segments matter. This puts Microsoft in
a tough position. IE6 already received lukewarm
praise from the IT people; it is barely better
than IE5.5, they say. But to keep end users
happy, IE7 _has_ to come out soon, because
Netscape is forcing their hand. That gives MS
precious little time to put together enough
improvements to avoid another lukewarm reception.
(They'll do it... this time. Even if they have
to buy their enhancements from NetCaptor. But
as I said the war is just beginning.)

What about printing web pages?

[nicestepauthor]

If there is anything that makes me unhappy with the popularity of IE it is that IE does a very poor job printing web pages. For the home user this is rarely a problem, but for corporate users this is a serious problem. When developing a corporate intranet I want to create reports on the web that a user can view or print out easily. IE fails miserably. Two examples:

1). When printing a table it will split a table row in the middle, printing the top half of the row on one page and the bottom half on the next page. Netscape never splits a row like this.

2). IE does the same thing with images. If you have an image near the bottom of a page it will get split across two pages, something Netscape doesn't do.

While Netscape is better than IE, it isn't enough better to compell people to switch.

Here is my printing wish list. If Microsoft was all that innovative they could have fixed this stuff long ago:

1). Give me a way to force a page feed when printing. This would have no effect when viewing pages online.

2). When printing a table, if the table runs over a page give me an option to repeat the table headings at the top of subsequent pages.

3). How about an option to designate sections of pages to be non-printable? In other words, you could print any page marked up this way and it would come out printer friendly.

4). How about an option to tell the printer to print the page landscape or portrait, so users could simply hit the Print button and get something that fit on the page the way the page designer intended?

The W3C created a much longer list of stuff to address printing web pages and as far as I can tell it has been ignored. I would be happy with the short list above. This list *might* be enough to give corporate users a reason to switch browsers.

Re:If you can't get into the site,

[Reziac]

Yeah, methinks all that too-easy VC money was indeed a major culprit... as you say, maybe now that *gasp* profit is a concern again, they'll stop blowing off ANY percentage of their potential clients.

Likewise, as you say it is indeed easier to just do it right the first time and not have to deal with any gripes!! Let's hear it for being lazy! :)

What about Mac?

[Tokerat]

I use a Mac (I really didn't make that clear with the Edit->Preferneces reference). I dont' get an option like that unless the Mac team decided to get it together. And even if they make one, will it work in IE for OS 9? doubt it, but that's now Apple's fault, and a whole 'nother story...

There is no war, there's just compatibility.

[Havokmon]

Now, to convert your entire userbase to Netscape will mean a significant portion of sites will no longer look correct or will cease to work entirely. Your customers don't understand browser compliance, they merely know that they could visit sites with AOL 7, but not AOL 8. Is the deluge of customer support phone calls and email really worth the hassle?

That (and the fact that IE just sucks) is the reason I replaced IE with Opera on the President's PC. She came to me the other day and said "You know, I never really realized how bad some of these sites are designed, that they only worked with IE."

So I showed her our site that I'm currently building, and the one LITTLE thing that doesn't match up between the browsers (IE/Opera/Mozilla).

I explained why that happens, what's happening with AOL, and how people with short attention spans will just go somewhere else.

Everything here is hunky-dory. As soon as companies realize web browsing is EXACTLY like window shopping in a Ferrari, we'll see some compliant websites. It's not that hard to do (of course, our site is PHP, written in VI - no 'tools' to muck things up.)

Standards, Standards, Standards

[wwi]

Rather than gripe about "90% web sites
only run on IE", we need to make websites
that are standards-compliant. If all
XML application containers (that's the new name for
browsers, BTW) are standards-compliant, then
there won't be all this workaround code.
I'm having enuf trouble keeping my sites
compatible with NN 4.7!

wimps!

[hawk]

>I've timed mozilla and it's definitely faster to
>start (3 seconds click-to-render of my.yahoo.com
>homepage vs IE's ~10 seconds) and it feels faster
>than IE in rendering.

blah, blah, blah. Try a *real* browser, like lynx. WHa'ts "rendering time"?

>It's possible that the javascript doesn't run as
>fast,

Javascript??? Does that mean your coffee is doing the typing or something like that?

"

hawk, desparately wanting to know why "EXTERNAL:http:xterm -e lynx %s &:TRUE" no longer successfully launches an external instance under FreeBSDb

Re: Your sig

[commodoresloat]

One can argue that there are a a few of people who don't belong in prision, either due to stupid laws or malicous prosecution. These people are fortunalty rare.

Actually these people are far from rare - they constitute more than half the (U.S.) prison population, incarcerated for nonviolent offenses (most often for violating "stupid" laws against possessing and ingesting certain substances). Read this or other documents like it before making ridiculous claims about the efficacy of the U.S. prison system.

Re: Your sig

[zulux]

Read this [sentencingproject.org] or other documents like it before making ridiculous claims about the efficacy of the U.S. prison system.


Who was making claims?

I'm fully away that a bunch of low level pot heads and crack whores are stuck in jail. While I think we are ill served by our "War on Drugs," - I'm not too happy with the kind of people who can't keep the bong out of their mouths when the cops show up.

If half the pot heads took their heads out of the purple haze and voted they might make a diferance. Instead, the they mimble obscure Noam quotes and take delight in pissing off the working classes. Hell, they so pissy, that we can't even use the weed for it's medicle uses because it has gotten such a bad reputation by being associated with the Microbus crowd.

Anyways,
I think both of us would agree that the pot heads should get treatment and a job medicating claucoma and cancer patients.

Re: Your sig

[zulux]

I'm glad I'm European.


I'm glad your European; Somebody has to keep reminding us that metric is cool, guns are evil, and football is played with a round ball.

Re: Your sig

[commodoresloat]

I'm not too happy with the kind of people who can't keep the bong out of their mouths when the cops show up.

I'm not too happy with a lot of idiots in the world, but I don't think they should be incarcerated for that.

If half the pot heads took their heads out of the purple haze and voted they might make a diferance. Instead, the they mimble obscure Noam quotes and take delight in pissing off the working classes. Hell, they so pissy, that we can't even use the weed for it's medicle uses because it has gotten such a bad reputation by being associated with the Microbus crowd.

"mimble obscure Noam quotes"? And you're blaming the "Microbus" crowd for the federal assault on state laws permitting medical use of marijuana, even though it is that very crowd that put those measures on state ballots and funded those campaigns? I'm not going to disagree that there are a lot of apathetic potheads out there, but you can't blame the legalization crowd for the failure of legalization when without them there would be no push for it in the first place.

Re: Your sig

[zulux]

Actually there a *bunch* of us nasty capialist pig types that think that legalization of soft drugs makes perfect sense, but what throws some us off is that the pot-heads want legalization are the same types that don't want personal responsibility, want to take our 2nd ammendment righs away, want to tax us into poverty.

We don't like them on a personal level, and were nasy enough to let them rot in jail. We know it wont happen to us, so it not considered a pressing issue.

If there was some sort of deal where we could legalize pot and get rid of welfare for anybody that decided to use the now-legal pot, then it'd be done in an instant.

It's alsoan image problem - it's hard to take people seriously when their argument is "dude, like, make the good weed legal" or "Sop 'opressin me, lay off my pipe". Right or wrong, that's the image amung the working classes.

I don't know the answer, and quite frankly, what motivates me more about druge legalisation is the tax savings. Perhaps thats a good argument to put forward.

IE6

[Sri Lumpa]

I'm using Moz1.0 and i don't understand in what way it is broken in IE6, so if you could post a screenshot taken from IE6 for (my) comparison purpose.

Maybe Mandrake mucked up Mozilla a bit?

[leonbrooks]

Galeon is noticeably faster to load and run than Mozilla (8s to blank window, another 3 to load wife's plain web page over modem vs 16 and 3, loading Google takes 4 vs 5 secs) under Mandrake 8.2 on a P2-233 with 196MB RAM.