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Ars Technica Reviews Mozilla
Aglassis writes "This Ars Technica review gives mozilla 1.0 an overall score of 7/10 (9 for Gecko and 6 for the browser). The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL. Overall they say that mozilla would make a good substitute for IE 6 but there is no major reason to switch over."
I like the tab feature with Galeon, Mozilla, and opera. That is one large feature they have over IE.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Poor understandnig of XUL or not, if it doesn't feel like a Windows application, then it just *doesnt* feel like a Windows application. I agree with the author's opinion on that. I am a happy mozilla user at home on my Linux box, but I am not about to switch IE to Mozilla on my windows machine here at work, theres really no reason aside from maybe curtailing javascript annoyances (popups, resizes, etc)
siri
...but there is no major reason to switch over.
Secirity Problems perhaps? Given the number os severe security issues that have been found in IE over the years, I would have thought this would have been a pretty major reason to switch!
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Mozilla actually fixes bugs, Microsoft don't.
Microsoft IE6 has a horrible bug where when you open a favorite from your toolbar, and it opens in the First browser window instead of the window you opened the favorite from!
Mozilla doesn't have that bug. It's an easy choice, I use IE5 or Mozilla, and avoid IE6 like the plauge.
I understand XUL and I think it's a terrible idea, much like Swing. Sure it's nice for programmers but users suffer a lesser experience due to XUL/Swing programs not fitting in the environment.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application
Well, can I be the first to say, "Thank God"?
I mean, isn't this a Good Thing (TM), at least according to Thomas Krul's theory?
Never confuse volume with power.
Unless you are a web designer who wants to make sure that his site looks correctly when viewed with a browser that adheres to STANDARDS, or unless you are a person who believes that the web should be easy to navigate and not overwhelmed with pop-up advertisements, or unless you believe that you should have the ability to modify the code to your browser for timely fixes to security flaws. Nope, no major reasons there....
I'd say there's several major reasons to switch.. the fact that you can block pop up advertising is a major reason. The fact that is has far superior cookie and password management is a major reason. The fact that it has a better email and usenet client (than OE) is a major reason.
No major reasons? According to who, Billy?
My sister also does not know anything about it. She still likes Mozilla after the brainwash I made.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
You're joking, right? XUL is an interface/component application based on XML allright. But that has nothing to with the cited usability problems. The Open Source community simply has to stop saying things like 'yeah the user interface is bad, but if you complain about it openly it shows that you don't really understand the XYZWhatever+ architecture!' Stop accepting things like they are, change the world (of software) now!
Mozilla 1.0 is 'getting there'.
Support for flash / shockwave is decent.
Frontpage-generated pages still distort often.
Java works great (better than IE).
At leasts it beats opera on stability and functionality, plus it's (banner)free.
With Linux, I guess it's your best choice, with Windows, frontpage makes the difference, not IE.
This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL Why is it a poor understanding for the reviewers ? This is one of the reasons that techies have a bad name the "I know best" attitude that pervades our industry. I like Mozilla, I use Mozilla, I like it because it works and because of the way its navigation works. BUT if you are used to Windows and not an old school Unix person then it is different to the rest of the windows applications you use so it is a valid comment. Now its not difficult to fix by having the Windows Theme be one of the default installed themes so Mozilla looks the same as the rest of Windows. Get off your high horse and think about why looking like everything else is good for the majority of users who don't want the power and control that Gecko and Mozilla offer, they just want a Browser that looks like the other applications they use. Minimise the "suprise" factor and maximise the uptake.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
XUL has nothing to do with it.
They like the engine. It's the default interface that 99% of users will be using that they have problems with, and I think that's a valid point.
XUL makes it possible to do a lot of cool interface things, and it is definitely a Good Thing For Mozilla, but it doesn't really matter when the default interface is slow and sucks.
Heck, most people never even change their startup page, much less program a new *interface*
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
While I like all of the typically mentioned benefits of Mozilla (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, runs on Linux, ...), the one "feature" I rarely see mentioned is the user support and bug tracking (bugzilla) of Mozilla. Everytime I find a bug or a missing capability, it's off to bugzilla. After a quick search, the bug entry can usually be found and with it, you can usually get a good idea of the status of the fix, workarounds, or what can be done to help track down the problem. And if the bug has not yet been reported, it is quite easy to add a usable bug report that you know will actually be considered. I have found the responsiveness of the Mozilla development community to be quite impressive when useful bug reports or feature requests are entered into Bugzilla.
-Jim Shepherd
Mozilla is working great for me as a kiosk application. The -chrome option makes it perfectly suited for this and doesn't require me to use any other software (to lock out certain keystrokes). Mozilla is THE cross-platform browser, and is making large strides to become the overall choice. As for the author's comment about there being no reason to switch, how about themes? Or being able to select from a group of stylesheets (accessibility anyone?).
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Basically, the author goes from "Here's all the cool stuff Gecko can do." to "...but it doesn't look like IE and some pages don't detect it properly."
Is that Mozilla's fault? Moz works better and behaves more reliably than any cross-platform GUI program I can think of.
More than that, its unique features (image permissions, javascript controls) barely rate a passing mention by the author. Those are killer features. I'd hate to use a browser that didn't have them.
I felt that the author - and most people writing browser comparisons right now - was too heavily biased by IE-related experiences; I thought he was writing more toward "This is what IE does and this is how Moz is different" rather than an actual browser review.
Try using IE and Moz over a 28.8kpbs internet connection and THEN tell me which you like better.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Promoting Frontpage as an advantage is similar to saying that Volkswagen would never sell in East Germany because they have the Trabant.
Frontpage is to web design what chocolate is to teapots.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Uh, why can't the problem just be that Mozilla's user interface is not very good? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why there are multiple Mozdev projects to build browsers without Mozilla's cumbersome interface, why Dave Hyatt and mpt have savaged the current interface.
Why can't some people accept the fact that Mozilla's UI needs a lot of work?
They say the interface was unflexible, non-standard, and yes, didn't look like the native interface.
At the very least you must concede that the interface IS non-standard and does NOT look like the native interface.
So, we conclude that:
> This was probably due to a poor understanding
> by the authors of XUL.
Explain?!?
They make a valid point. It's true regardless of the technologies involved. So you claim that they are wrong due to ignorance of XUL? I would claim that you were wrong due to ignorance of logic.
Justin Dubs
I don't like the interfce either. And I've GUI surfed since the X-Mosaic days. And WinXP has a tab-like feature for ANY app that has many windows open.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
No it isn't. Understanding XUL doesn't make the application feel any more like a Win app. They hit the nail on the head- the engine is great, but whats up with that wacky UI? I love moz, but clearly the beast is as much a technology demo as it is an end-user application.
A non-sarcastic, real question:
Does anyone using linux/bsd/whatever prefer the mozilla UI to galeon or skipstone?
I myself use galeon for 100% of my web browsing.
--sean
1- Damn it I use Linux :-)
:-)
2- Tabbed browsing fast and less memory utlization
3-Pop-up Blocking
4- Can be extendable with add-ons @ www.mozdev.org
5- There are no news for it like this
23 July 2002: There are currently 21 unpatched vulnerabilities ( From http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched)
6- Real helpful developers @ irc.mozilla.org
7- Has a HTML Editor built in
8- Its open source
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Overall they say that mozilla would make a good substitute for IE 6 but there is no major reason to switch over
The biggest reason to switch over for me is that I simply don't trust Microsoft. That being said, I'm sure there are readers of Slashdot who would have to admit that they use IE because mozilla and Netscape have problems generating certain pages. I'm not saying that's the fault of mozilla - there are a lot of IE-centric web designers out there who swear by Frontpage.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
ill give you a reason to switch! it's the ability to mount a windows partition from *nix and use the same browser with the same settings (bookmarks, cookies, emails) on both platforms.
no more rebooting to find that old email message you were looking for.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
1.) Tabbed Browsing
2.) No more popups
3.) Better Security
Reasons to still use IE on occasion:
1.) Poor support for common technologies (like the JRE: it runs but it don't run for long (2-3 hours and it goes down hard)).
2.) Poor support for common but non-standard features (Like layers). Even Qmailadmin doesn't work well with Mozilla.
3.) Idiot web designers that refuse to let you view their page/application unless you have one of their approved browsers (Like Webtrends).
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
This one feature alone was more than enough to get me to switch. Tabbed browsing is a very nice addition too.
I use mozilla at work on both my linux an windows boxes, why? because i can be more productive wit mozilla, tabbed browsing is the single most useful thing they've added to it, (yes i know that opera et al had it before, but opera doesn't render all the sites that I use properly, that and it's adware unless you pay ) I can't stand opening tens of browser windows in IE to look at a page of parts or a page of specs or to compare something, or even browse multiple stories on /. , when i can do the same thing with one browser window in moz. It's reasonably fast too and it doesn't seem to hog system resources like ie does. If i recall correctly there is a UI skin to make it look like IE if you really crave for that redmond look. Plus the obvious bonus of blocking popups, popunders, and window resizing as i see fit, with having some hideous little program to hack away at my system every time I open a new URL. Yes, i'm a convert to mozilla.. and there are starting to be many more (i see the %(netscape) figure on the browser statistics for my site creeping up a few percent in the last month (that's 30'000 less hits from ie), It's not perfect but it's definately on the right track.
This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Fucking idiot. A technology is not an excuse for a shitty GUI.
It's mozilla-based and takes the tab feature to the limit.
Here are a bunch of them:a ds/crit ical/default.asp
t p://www.openoffice.orgn .com/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downlo
Grab Mozila,
http://www.mozilla.org/
OpenOffice,
ht
Cygwin,
http://www.cygwi
and the ActiveState ports of Perl, Python, and TCL/Tk,
http://www.activestate.com/
And you have a really nice open source suite that can do most everything the M$ suite of crap can do.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
However, Mozilla for OS X is incredibly slow. I have a 933 mhz G4, I don't expect to have lag time on popup menus. Also, it seems to load pages more slowly than IE for OS X.
While you may agree or not to the fact that there's no major reason to switch to Mozilla (tabs are pretty sweet though, among other things), by switching to Mozilla you not only say no to M$ attempt at making the Web a Windows-only space (regarding HTML or EcmaScript, among other things), but you also change the statistics, you know, the log files every web site collects.
When Mozilla gets a substantial amount of browsers market, Web designers will hopefully make their pages standard-compliant, and we might one day get rid of those "designed for IE only" crap sites.
Well you may stick with IE but if you like stability, standards and support the open source movement then you know what to do.
Just my 2 c.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Using a browser other than IE is voting for an open, interoperable internet.
Well..obviously the author hasn't yet achieved the status of social interaction ... ie watching porn on the internet (read: pop-ups!!) ;-)
I have switched from Opera and IE^ ever since Mozilla 1.0 came out..I wil not go back..
and UI is no good if it crashes every half hour..
Mozilla no crashes..
IE6 crashes every half hour on win2kpro
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I have just started using Mozilla full time at home. I am starting to think it is the most signifigant app on the linux destop ever. Why? For the first time when surfing the web on linux, the browser has faded away and I am paying 100% focused on the content. In previous versions of Netscape, I was constantly distracted by ugly font or odd placement of things. Mozilla on the other hand renders everything great. I call it the most signifigant app so far because if web browsing "Has Arrived", and most people spend most of their time on the web, then the linux desktop is that much closed to "Arrival" as well. Its odd that the best complement I can give a browser is to say I don't even notice it!
The worst problem with the current internet landscape is the proliferation of "table-based" layouts.
But what does view source reveal?
<!-- CONTENT TABLE --><TABLE WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0">
<TR>
Look no further than the HTML header for the culprit:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0"><meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Now that they have recognized the problem, are they or their resident Microsoft weenie going to fix it? Probably not.
I thought there WAS a way to spoof the User Agent with one of the javascript settings. Is that not right?
If it isn't right, people who find this page on google like I did are going to be pissed.
Never confuse volume with power.
Overall they say that mozilla would make a good substitute for IE 6 but there is no major reason to switch over.
No major reason? Standards compliance isn't a major reason? I admit, IE complies with most standards, but I still have pages which render correctly in Mozilla and improperly in IE.
That's the nice thing about Mozilla...there are enough people working on it who care about things like this to make it work correctly.
Since 1.0 came out, I haven't started IE. No need. There are other reasons, too. Tabbed browsing? It's a great feature. One window, multiple pages. This alone is a feature I think would make IE much better. I can't say anything about the other features of Mozilla (Chatzilla, Mail, etc) because I've only ever used the browser.
I must admit that IE loads faster. But with its other problems, I'd rather wait a few seconds for a page rendered properly.
Jeremy Baumgartner
Consider that there will be no technical support for this software outside community-based support, such as you would find in the Software Colloquium or at Mozilla.org itself. In theory, Netscape Navigator is the finished, polished product, not Mozilla.
Supposedly this is the big reason why businesses should deploy Communicator rather than Mozilla however Netscape hasn't provided support for Navigator/Communicator in many years (probably since they stopped offering a license you could purchase). Since the EULA disclaims any and all responsibility anyway it's not like there's even a legal ass-covering reason to use Communicator over Mozilla.
Where I work we're happily deploying Mozilla 1.0 in place of old Communicator 4 installations. It's working great and since lack of support is par for the course anyway all we're missing out on is a lot of ads and AOL garbage.
Has anyone done this?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this...
/. community, the number of reported security bugs is going to go up as they find, fix and disclose the problems. Everybody laughs and points at all the holes, but the result is better software.
IE has had more than it's share of security problems, but who says Mozilla won't? Despite being closed source, IE's had a lot more eyes on it, for a lot longer. This may change over time, but Mozilla is a "1.0" release, and from a security perspective, it's usually better to go with a more mature application. As the continual release of vulnerabilities against both open source and closed source software demonstrates, being O.S. is no security panacea.
Plus, has it occured to anyone that the rash of security "problems" from MS might be due to the fact that they really are getting serious about security over there.? Seems like a catch-22 to me... if they are doing the "right thing" as is defined by the
Yeah no reasons to switch over. And what reasons did windows users have to make them upgrade to XP, 2k, Mil, or XP from win98.
One of the negative points was that Mozilla does not look like a Windows app. I shall ignore the existence of the IE skin for now.
However, what I will mention is software such as QuickTime player, RealOne, MusicMatch Jukebox, and literally anything written in Java. None of these use the MFC toolkit (not the widgets, anyway) nor do they follow the theme of the widgets in WinXP.
Many people complain that Linux apps don't fit together because QT != GTK != Motif etc. However, it is commonplace in Windows apps for larger development outfits to use their own widget sets, and nobody bats an eyelid.
As a simple example, I use Mozilla with the excellent Orbit-Retro theme. My dad can't figure it out. So, I switch to the IE theme. The layout is identical, but the look/feel of the widgets is more 'windows like'. Suddenly he's right at home.
Perhaps the comment should have read 'doesn't look like any of the windows apps we're used to'
Until it will support more than one SMTP server, I wouldn't consider Mozilla better for e-mail. In fact, at the moment, it's pretty useless for me based on the lack of that support (since many SMTP servers typically won't forward mail originating from other ISPs).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The fact that it has a better email and usenet client (than OE) is a major reason.
You have to be joking. I'm a Mozilla advocate, but even I admit the mail client is a piece of trash.
The interface is inconsistent, and it doesn't make it obvious what is going on at any one time. There's nothing like the big 'Send/Recv' button in OE, and when you collect mail, you have no idea what's going on.
The folders are sloppily managed, and the news reader is certainly worse.
Sure, it doesn't automatically open attachments or spread viruses around.. but the user experience is more important than security to me! It's a program I have to use for hours every day!
mogorific carpentry experiments
From the review:
You will encounter bugs and will have more trouble installing plugins than with IE.
The people who wrote the review must a) be dumb or b) never have installed a plugin in Mozilla. I installed gesture support and EnigMail encryption for Mozilla Mail, and both were just a click on a web page, then restart Mozilla, done. What is the trouble here? How can it be made more easy?
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
What does this have to do with XUL?
#1 XUL is a terrible idea
#2 XUL makes sense to few people, mostly those people who want it to magically work
#3 Whoever wrote this obviously didn't understand the article because XUL cannot change that the author was complaining about.
I'm a big fan of Mozilla, use it everyday. I'm not going to pretend that its Windows "feel" is anything approaching the standard Windows UI. I happen to like that. A mass of people do not, for reasons contained in the article.
When I'm in "Windows world" (work), all of the applications have roughly the same look and feel to them, and Mozilla should too. Shortcut keys should work, fields and checkboxes should be the same, etc.
This is the same design genius that made the Mac OS so popular with so many of its users, and I've been a hundred Slashdot users cry at the Mac OS X for not preserving this. But now this is Windows and Mozilla this is OK?
Question: when will people here start reading the articles before commenting? Try it, it works wonders!
Then change the theme, stupid!
i d= 13436
http://mozilla.deskmod.com/?show=showskin&skin_
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Lets hope we don't have to hardwire ourselves into Windoze GUI anytime soon, one pop-up too many and it's daisy pushing time :o)
[JJ]
"Insert Dead Smart n Clever Sig Here So I Look Brainy"
I like Mozilla and use it every day. And I have to agree with the article that what really makes Mozilla great is Gecko. Mozilla has made a great standards compliant rendering engine. I've used Gecko for my own customized projects and it really is a great tool for anyone making customized browsers.
Until this nasty rendering bug gets fixed that causes it to sometimes malfunction with my favourite online newspaper and some other sites, I won't go near Mozilla again.
My fav feature is the zoom-in function for text sizes; there's so many idiot webmasters who think 8pt text is big enough that this grants my eyes another 20 years of functionality without contacts.
Jynx
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
For the longest time, 'critics' pointed fingers at mozilla group and said things to the effect of 'lookey here, open-source project is a no go..' Finally, the 'critics' are at least saying that mozilla group has "..reached their stated goal." that's a 10+ score in my book.
Just to translate the *cough*
Chimera is a cocoa app with Gecko rendering engine embeded. It feels far more Mac-like than IE. It's still at version 0.4, so some features are missing from the preferences, but it's stable and fast. So far they have no plans for doing an email client, news reader etc.
I just downloaded Moz 1.1 Beta just about an hour ago. It's even better.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
on OS X, where you don't have a full screen mode with a task bar at the bottom. Tabs on OS X add that task bar functionality that is lacking (the dock is nice and all, but I still prefer a task bar).
On Windows and Linux system, I find the tabs confusing. And I mainly use Mozilla in Windows. The problem is that I keep looking to the bottom of the screen for window managment out of habit, and end up closing windows with 4 or 5 tabs by accident.
The best thing about tabs overall, though, is the pop-behind function. If it weren't for that, I'd never use tabs in Mozilla for Windows.
he was a ignorent Windoze user, and you cant expect too much from that crowd...
windoze in the name of user friendly has effectivly dumbed down the computer to where it is not much more than a television with a mouse & keyboard...
My personnal pet peeve with mozilla is that in the mail I have found no way to disbale to preview pane like I could in Netscape 4.X. So I have it minimized. However everytime I close it and reopen it I the minimized preview pain is blurry and blocks out the status line so I have to maximize the preview pane then minimize it. If anyone knows how to fix this, or disable the preview pane let me know please!
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
Oh. Wait. Are we not doing that anymore?
and my number one reason i use mozilla over i.e. -- tabbed browsing. i can't even deal w/ i.e. any more. opening multiple windows for new pages seems so... vulgar.
I am sorry but yes there is it is called no popups ever again, well more like 3 every 6 months. I have used Mozilla as my main browser for over a year now and have never once felt that it could do the job. That being said there are a few pages it will not work with but this has more to do with weird MS pages and the likes so I just use IE on them. Like I said before it is my MAIN browser . There are many like it, but this one is mine. IMHO ,I just wish they would fix the downloader to display the curretn download at the top instead of the bottom.
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
The only version of mozilla I have seen would not rate a 3 out of 10. If it wasn't for the us v. Microsoft factor would anyone use Mozilla?
"Internet Explorer is the best browser currently available and is the standard by which all other browsers should be measured. The IE user interface *in Windows* (where IE has every advantage possible) is also the standard by which all other applications' GUIs should be measured."
First noted in this sentence, where the authors "touched up" on IE for the umpty-eleventeenth time like a runner trying to lead off first base:
Navigator does offer some compelling features and enhancements to previous Netscape code, some of which are alien to IE and some which aren't.
then, confirmed in all its Blue-Screened glory as if endorsed by His Billness himself:
"For people used to the customization options of IE windows, it's a step backwards in functionality"
Reads exactly like a Dr. GUI article from your latest issue of MSDN (coffee graphic included, $2300 please)
Translation: It is different from Windows, therefore inferior.
"The disregard for accessibility in the user interface is shocking given the amount of work that went into implementing web standards."
Shocking? I have a better word: exaggerated.
"As it stands, Navigator breaks many Windows User Interface (UI) standards."
Standards like mouse-freeze(tm), GPF(R) and Crashed Explorer(C)(R)(C)(TM).
WHAT standards? (Notice how these are never named? No, I really don't care either.)
Let me guess, Java breaks the standards too, right? As does WxWindows, Perl/Tk, GTK and everything else without a new colorful icon on our very expensive(tm) desktop.
"Rather than use the default "widgets" (menu bars, pop-up menus, drop downs and the like), Navigator comes complete with its own set of widgets. For some spectators,"
Read: Windows-only users
"this is yet another example of how cross-platform ideals don't always play out in practice: a Windows application should have Windows' look and feel."
Hint: Mozilla is not a Windows application. We have some lovely parting gifts, however.
Plugin management is not intuitive.
Uninstall and reinstall an OCX control which is installed (and registered) in two directories and being used in Windows 9x, then explain what is and is not intuitive.
Here is another glaring example of bias:
"Aside from the few aforementioned problems, Gecko's standards compliance and its ability to handle less-than-compliant pages well is laudable."
Laudable? Gecko's standards compliance is the finest expression of excellence yet seen in any browser ever written. It puts IE to crying, sobbing shame. Laudable is a left-handed compliment at best, and a cynical remark at worst.
The Mozilla project has been nothing less than a resounding success.
Wow, four pages to get to this. About time. Begrudging, however. A poor, biased incomplete review.
I'll give it a 2.
Overall they say that mozilla would make a good substitute for IE 6 but there is no major reason to switch over.
No reason to switch over? I've been using Mozilla 1.0 in Windows constantly since 1.0 was released. IE 6 just feels so DUMB compared to it. I shouldn't even have to mention tabbed browsing or the sidebar tabs and the great reference content that you can put there. As a web developer I find it indispensible. I can't speak for the average user, but I think that when this thing gets released as Netscape 7 with seamless support for all of the plugins Microsoft will be in for run for its money.
Bottom line, there are major reasons to switch over -- tabbed browsing, control of javascript (no popups), searching Google from the url bar. I can't say enough.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
The author says that navigator is the way to use gecko. What about galeon? I use galeon due to its non XUL use.
XUL is okay, but I like galeon's look a lot better. I think the author should have given that a look and rated it too. I'm sure that galeon would have gotten a higher ratting than 7.
Plus, that's the beauty of gecko. You don't like navigator, then replace it with your own home brew if it erks you enough. If you're not tech savy, switch to someone else's that they did.
One day, there will be hundreds of navigators all using gecko as their standards compliant rendering engine. Variety is the key.
Cheers,
Ian
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
me
It's all good.
I suppose controlling cookies and pop-up windows doesn't count? Afterall, every single one of us out here wants to be spied on, harassed, tagged and tracked, and then sold to the highest bidder. What could be more obvious?
Mozilla plays a significant part in my strategy to prevent such b.s. from happening to me. I repeat - it is NOT the only thing that I do to protect it. But Mozilla is a damn sight better for certain aspects of accomplishing this basic objective than Internet Exploiter.
As anyone who knows anything about the Internet should realize, you had better take your privacy seriously or someone will come along and steal it.
Apparently the jokers who wrote the review can't appreciate such subtleties.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146851
Has anyone out there studied whether IE acts as spyware, where it "phones home" browsing habits or search strings?
Ultimate control over who knows what could be an enormous advantage of Open Source browsers, such as Mozilla, and would make a much stronger argument against IE.
I suppose this could even be applied to Mozilla vs. Netscape, because it is always possible that Netscape could add spyware, too.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
As far as I can tell, with the exception of the skin, the UI for Mozilla is nearly identical to that of Netscape Navigator 4.7. Does that mean this reviewer always had problems with Netscape's UI? This has basically been the UI for years, and to date I have not had any complaints about it.
On top of that, his criticism that designing for multi-platforms, instead of optimizing for one platform, reeks of Microsoft FUD! Almost as if multi-platform software is a bad thing. I hate reviewers who ruin their own review with stupid comments like this one.
Beny,
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
It would have been nice if they actually gave examples of what they felt was wrong with the UI. Basically, all they said was that the colors and icon sizes didn't work. What does that mean? Since when do all Windows applications have the same interface? Anyone ever use Photoshop? No buttons, tabbed palettes, etc. Not very "Windows-like", whatever that means. If they want to say the UI is not up to snuff, they need to provide reasons. I use Mozilla every day. It has all the "default widgets", menu bar, drop-downs (bookmarks), etc. I really don't understand what the problem they had was. The UI is simple, concise, and not much different than any other browser on the market. So you can't rearrange the navigation buttons. So what! Mozilla keeps it simple.
I have to say I was very disappointed with this article's review of the interface. The rest was great. It is like that aspect of the article was an afterthought, just like they described the browser being a Mozilla afterthought.
I aggree with the 7, but for different reasons.
But if mozilla Got a 7 what did IE get, a 4-5?
I rate IE as follows.
Javascript debugging 5 (7 for the debugger -2 for the anoyances)
HTML rendering 5-6
User interface 3 (it crashed too much and is anoying as hell etc...)
Usability 6 (proxy bypass, zones and other things are great, and much missed when i switched to mozilla), the inability to override nasties drops the score down from 8 to 6
Security 2 ( they do fix bugs otherwise it'd have to be a 0)
Plugins &co 4 (OLE embeding is a mojor anoyance!)
overall 4.7 (try harder)
So mozilla 7 (getting there)
IE 4.7 (try harder)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I have deployed Mozilla on win2k platforms in a small firm I work for (along with OpenOffice.org). They all love the tabbed browsing, the popup blocker, the stability, etc.
However, the big culprit is the e-mail client. It chokes on badly formatted mails, is slow and lacks tons of options. For instance, it doesn't put the attachment list when you print the mail and also you can't tell it to delete e-mails from the server after n days, a handy feature when ppl want to share a mailbox. The address book is crappy too.
For home use, I't's perfect... But when you get 400 mails/day, Mozilla isn't the right thing to use.
Does anyone know of a robust and safe e-mail client on windoze? The Bat! seems nice, despite its crappy name...
Cheers,
-max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
domain\username refers to your user account in the domain. username@domain might work if authenticating against Win2K, but I've never tried (our NT servers are NT4SP6a).
However, if they don't allow basic authentication, you may be out of luck.
Good luck,
Alex
First of all, the pages load faster. And second, it have got tabs! I just love tabbed browsing. This feature alone is enough to switch from IE.
but I love Galeon for all its worth! If Mozilla ripped off galeon in relation to everything, it would improve it no end!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
My one complaint about Mozilla, and Netscape 6, the absolute dirth of useable plugins for popular things like Shockwave, Flash, and Quicktime. Additionally, there does not appear to be any effort being put forth to rectify this situation. This gives me little hope of ever seeing extensions for things like DjVu, a supremely excellent format for distributing scanned documents across the web. (Ya gotta appreciate a format that gives better reproduction than PDF at 20% to 30% of the file size.)
Personally, I think that the broad use of Shockwave, Flash, and Quicktime warrant the ability of the browser to handle those formats natively. Don't write them into the browser kernel but, DO provide separate, replaceable, upgradeable extensions that ship with the browser distribution.
Give Mozilla the ability to handle the most commonly used file formats and I'll be able to convert everybody I know over to it.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Mozilla should have far less security problems by design.
IE falls over on the security front becasuse it's be designed sooooooo badly all that OLE and systems intergration stuff makes the browser an easy target.
To make IE secure Microsoft will have to vastly improve security and sandboxing of OLE and user spaces. (what's that DRM os there making at the moment?).
Unix alreasy does this which makes a unix system more secure by design regardless of bugs.
Since Mozilla doesn't intergrate with the system in such an intimate way as IE there are going to be far less security flaws. and even fewer when run on a unix box.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You have a point. However, someone, other than a marketing department, has to determine the value of a new feature. Did we really need to add support for blinking text?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
There are a few utilities on the web that use various techniques for blocking pop-ups, from Javascript filtering to just watching for them and closing them. Here's an article with a few links to some.
If you install CrazyBrowser:
http://www.crazybrowser.com
Once you install CrazyBrowser, you'll never go back to Mozilla and it's crappy interface. CrazyBrowser is just about perfect. And it's free-as-in-beer.
on windows, i'm STILL using netscape 4.7 with zonealarm (is there something like zonealarm for linux?) which disables most popup ads and banners. so i dont really need that feature on mozilla about disabling popup ads. one thing i really dont like about mozilla is that it's still not responsive (although they've made a huge improvement).loading time is not the worst, it's little things like typing in the location, or the open location bar (cntr+shift+l) doesnt show up right away when i press it. in netscape 4.7, the shortcut (cntr+o) shows up right away when i press it. could it have been because of the skinning that the app is so slow? IE is of course a pretty good browser if they folks dont have weekly security leaks discovered every week. I surf a lot of porn, so i hardly use that browser since those webmasters are pretty sneaky people including malicious code on their sites.
on linux it's pretty much the same thing. i prefer to use konqueror, although mozilla does display pages the way the right way and done better than konqueror and of course netscape 4.7. but i still use mozilla the least on there. 4.7 is still the fastest and I use it very often when konqueror doesnt display something correctly. still no reason to apt-get remove netscape yet....
my blog
The Mozilla project's aim was not to create a browser for every platform in existence, it was first and foremost to create the best rendering they possibly could, and they did an excellent job. The rendering engine can be embedded in ANYTHING, on nearly ANY OS.
The Browser they created is meant to be a cross platform... platform, it's nearly identical on ever platform it runs on.
Now it's up to others to use Ghecko to create the most amazing browsers for their platforms of choice. So far there are some pretty good ones already, Galeon for Linux, Kameleon(sp?) for Windows, Chimera for OSX, etc. And the Mozilla browser is still very good if you don't mind having a browser that doesn't match your OS. Plus it's incredibly configurable/themable, so it's perfect for kiosks and embedded devices.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
"The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application."
Wow, talk about inserting your own opinion as fact. That's not just reading between the lines, but reading between the atoms of the lines. And it becomes painfully obvious after you actually read the entire article. Ignore the fan-boys interpretation and read what is otherwise a fair and balanced review.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I use Mozilla myself, and I try to get others to use Mozilla. I think it's great, and can only get better.
However, you and others are right in pointing out that a barrier to entry is the fact that the program doesn't follow the "standard" Windows user interface. When it's not what people are used to, they can't immediately begin using it; it doesn't "feel" as much as if it were "part of the system".
Still, the solution you propose of using the Windows XUL theme would, I believe, only make things worse. How? Because then, the browser would still only have most of the appearance of a "normal" Windows application (it still looks a little different), and it still wouldn't act the same. For example, the little "grab" area on the very left side of the toolbars don't work the same way. Having the interface look mostly the same as other apps, but function differently, would only confused people more.
Besides, the real question should be whether having the browser interface be "non-standard" is a significant barrier to using the application, not just whether it is different. And while I think the Mozilla 1.0 default interface is worse than it could be, I don't think it's too significant a difference. Other applications have very different interfaces, yet they are learned. For example, WinAmp is one of the most popular and widely used digital audio players, yet its interface is very different from the standard Windows interface. In fact, Winamp alone is probably the reason Microsoft made Windows Media Player skinnable.
Granted, people learned Winamp because, for a time, it was the only MP3 player available, or significantly better than other offerings, so the entry barrier of having to learn a new interface was less important. So perhaps the UI difference is more significant for Mozilla since Mozilla's features aren't too far advanced over those of Internet Explorer (on the surface, anyway, as far as the average user would think). So, because it presents fewer other reasons to switch, the different UI becomes more significant as a reason not to switch.
The solution, I think, is not to changed the default Mozilla UI to a Windows-like one, which would confuse things even more, but instead to create something "similar, but different" - something closer to the default Windows interface, but obviously different so people wouldn't expect it to behave exactly the same. I would nominate Lo-Fi, because it takes on the Windows UI colors, and it's simple and to-the-point in its working, but it still isn't quite right. Beginners should still have text labels on all the toolbar buttons, and the Lo-Fi icons in Mozilla Mail are a little abstract and confusing.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of the currently available XUL themes for Mozilla are good for people new to Mozilla, especially people who are used to Internet Explorer and the standard Windows UI.
I don't like them.
They are almost as bad as MDI.
Two level window/document management sucks.
While I'd like to avoid it, can you suggest a substitute?
Users often ask me for a simple way to make a few web pages. Dreamweaver is obviously not the answer. What else can I give to the typical user but Frontpage?
"Inflexible" is the word they use, and it's not a bad choice. Mozilla isn't just a non-Windows API style, it's also a break whatever other OS you like. Sure, the authors may be in the dark about some of the customization options, but they're not just Windows ignoramuses (ignorami? :-]) who can't get used to anything else.
I'm with the people who're saying this is a common open source development theme -- both the problem and the dismissive response. UI is a crucial side of development, it requires more meaningful collaboration than "you slap on the interface for your part, and I'll slap it on for mine." Mozilla's above that level, and I personally like and use it, but I can definitely see where my father wouldn't switch from what he already knows without some reassuringly familiar looks and feels.
At the OS level, adoption of any OS as a desktop is affected by the elegance of UI across apps. Windows has enough problems with this kind of stuff just because of different teams within the MS mother ship. (The "styles" people and the "numbered outline" people working on Word seem to be warring camps, don't they? And how about those windows where there are three buttons -- Okay, Cancel, and the X button, all of which just close the window? Sloppy crap like that just pains you to see.)
Projects like Mozilla say there's even further to go for the open source world, though, and dismissing a considered review as ignorant is just not going to get you there.
(Why they start the review by saying it won't be just another 'should I switch from IE' review, and end it by saying you probably don't need to switch from IE... now that's another question.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Honestly, if you were running a company outside the U.S., would you trust Microsoft with your data? Especially with Microsoft's willingness to do anything to keep the U.S. government from breaking them up! Can you say, "corporate espionage"? You know corporate espionage is something that really does goes on. There are documentaries all about corporate espionage that the U.S., Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, UK, etc. governments all engage in.
It's a dangerous world out there for businesses, especially considering Microsoft's complete lack of respect and honesty when dealing with their business partners and customers.
Microsoft software is a liability and should be avoided whenever possible.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Not any more...
.Net more popular.
I just helped my dad install the JRE on a new XP desktop and we had to get it from java.sun.com because Microshit isn't distributing the update patch for IE from their servers or Microsoft update anymore. They probably claim it's because of the lawsuit but the realitity is that this will hurt java badly and only make
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Do webdesigners a favor and get rid of that piece of junk. Netscape 4 is fast because it doesn't support any standards that were created in the past 5 years.
Its CSS support is almost non-existant (unless you stick to 100% basics), but the alternative (completely tabled pages) is even worse.
Switch to IE, Mozilla or *ANYTHING* that doesn't have tables disappearing mysteriously just because you add a CSS attribute to one of its cells, or that can actually correctly use images in style sheets without picking the wrong path.
Are there anybody who has used Opera as their browser, but have now changed to Mozilla? I've used Opera for many years and only use IE on rare pages that do not work with Opera. I have downloaded Mozilla many times and tried it but it always seems so "odd" compared to Opera. Opera has tabs (i love them), i dont get popup windows with it (when i came across a page that doesnt seem to work, i temporarily allow popup windows - no big deal), it's fast, crashes rarely (i like the way it remembers open windows after a crash), i can zoom pages easily (+ and - keys), q-a-z-x nav keys are great for "left-hand-only-browsing" *cough* :P
so, are there any Opera lovers that have changed to Mozilla, and why?
What about netscape? Under the hood, it's mozilla. Ok, it doesn't have the neat options everyone's raving about (I sure wish I could make it whack those X-10 popups), but the rendering engine IIRC is the same that mozilla uses. Isn't that what a browser is for? To render html, right?
Am I missing something here? We are the loyal opposition, so why aren't we using NS 6 at the office instead of IE?
For the record, I use NS 6.2.3 at the office on a win2k box, and 4.77 at home on my SuSE 7.2 box. NS 6 seems to work very well, but honestly I am content running 4.77 as my primary browser (I email stuff to myself at home so I can bookmark them in 4.77). I'd consider switching to 6 at home if the bookmarks worked better and imported right in NS 6 or mozilla, though.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
I wish I had a better reason for running Mozilla.
I've been using it exclusively for a couple months now and LOVE it. Some features I can not imagine living without anymore include:
1. Ability to block images from servers. I have Mozilla set up to prompt me before accepting an image. I can say "Yes" load it or "No" block it. I see very very few banner ads now. If I come across one, I right click on it and choose "Block images from this server"
2. Tabbed interface. Instead of opening new browser windows, I have several web pages open on different tabs within one browser window. In IE you can right click on a link and choose "Open in new window." In Mozilla, you can choose "Open in new window," or "Open in new tab."
3. DOM Inspector. Document Object Model (DOM) Inspector is a tool that can be used to debug and edit the live DOM (Document structure/HTML/XML tags) of any web document or XUL application.
4. Integrated JavaScript Console and Debugger.
5. Integrated Java Console.
6. Blocking of Pop-up (or under) windows. No more pop up advertisements, surveys, etc.!
7. Blocking of automatic redirects, window resizing, and a mess of other things by scripts on web pages.
8. Cookie management. You can block cookies on a site by site basis, view cookies, remove cookies already on your system (and block them from being set again), and more.
9. Themes. Download or create or own browser themse to give your browser a different look and feel.
10. Fully customizable sidebars. They're similar to bookmarks, but include things like the DOM Inspector, Search results, News feeds, and more.
It's not supposed to look like a windows app. Mozilla is supposed to be OS independent. It's an internet platform with a consistent user interface across multiple platforms. If you don't like that, stick to windows, IE and its exploits.
This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
How ridiculous. Why should the authors have to understand XUL to comment on the usability of the user interface?
MozApps shows the power of XUL.
Oh, it doesn't feel like Windows due to a "poor understanding of XUL"??? Don't believe it.
It's the machine that should adapt to the user, not the user who should adapt to a new technical concept that puts technological advance and ease of implementing/porting in favor of GUI standardization, even though it'S good-looking (and Mozilla is).
Each OS has its interface standards, so does Windows. If you don't comply with them, you gotta have reasons that result in improvements for the user. This skinning / widget drawing technology obviously does not, since I can't use my standard skinning applications (e.g. WindowBlinds which can replace the WIndows windows with a neat Aqua interface) any more.
I can accept a non-standard user interface in highly specialized applications that use e.g. Java/Swing for economic reasons (portability), but not in a standard-everyday-use application like a web browser...
I agree that it's getting there, though. People stop criticizing me for using it when I show them the image & popup blocking. :)
As someone who's tracking many Mozilla bugs, I can tell you that Mozilla has more than 20 open security issues. Search for "security", "buffer overflow", etc. on bugzilla and see.
Though one thing that Mozilla has in its favor is a highly diverse distribution -- there have been so many versions that many bugs would be hard to exploit for any significant portion of the population. IE doesn't have this "feature".
IE layout engine is NOT faster than Mozilla's layout engine. IE does not look better. It has a better email client if you like viruses that do thousands or millions of dollars in damages. Some people say IE appears to use less resources because it is integrated with the operating system. Don't forget that mozilla is more than just a browser. That is why it uses more resources than the MS browser. It's like comparing:
(a)the resources used by an application AND the platform it runs on
(b)the resources used by just a native application.
Not a fair comparison.
Panicware's "Pop-Up Stopper" is free and has been working just fine on my box for the past few months.
I have tried to compile mozilla many times without success. :(
Either it doesn't compiler at all or it dies (segfaults) when I try to start it. Mozilla is one of the few applications I am unable to compile. I use a LFS (LinuxFromScratch) system so I have compiled everything else myself.
Are there any guides/readmes on how to compile the beast? (I have seen the one on Mozilla.org but it doesn't work for me)
Until Mozilla 1.0 i was never trully satisfied with my browsers/mail/news client and I would find my self everyfew months trying out a whole new set of them. I like the netscape stile mail and news clients that what I first started using so its what I am used to. So the UI of those may just be own personal preference. But the Browser rocks my world. My wife and I loved Opera's tabbed browser but the ad was annoying and we didn't want to pay money for what functionally we already had for free(i.e IE). But IE always had me nervous with all the security problems. Especially since we do ALOT of online transactions. But the came Mozilla 1.0. Oh I love thee. My wife (who hates anything new) was all over it. We havn't used anything since. Good Job, Mozilla team.
It's all Politics
What is that supposed to mean? It sure looks like the rest of the Mozilla "Platform" to me!
and it doesn't make it obvious what is going on at any one time
Hahaha, LOfuckingL! WTF you talking about man? How is OE better in this regard? OE has absolutely the WORST user interface for a mail client I HAVE EVER SEEN! It's counter intuitive to the extreme. I use Ximian's Evolution(because it matches my desktop), which is designed directly after OE, and I have to say I much, much, MUCH prefer the Mozilla mail client.
There's nothing like the big 'Send/Recv' button in OE
WTF? Ok, how about the "Get Messages" button? I think that's much more logical than Send/Recv. "What if I don't want to send anything?", I can just hear users saying.
The folders are sloppily managed
How's that? They're displayed in the same manner as every other email client in existence.
and the news reader is certainly worse
WTF? It handles news nearly identical to how it handles mail, how is it worse?
Sure, it doesn't automatically open attachments or spread viruses around..
You're damn right it doesn't
but the user experience is more important than security to me!
WTF? How is a user experience good when you end up spreading viruses all over the place and losing data?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
When AbiSource built their word processor, they did most of it cross-platform. You can look, and see that the majority of the source is in the 'xp' directores. But there's a lot of platform-specific code, too. Even though AbiWord is written with a cross-platform GUI layer, when you actually compile AbiWord, it converts the cross-platform widgets into native widgets. Therefore, you can run AbiWord on Windows, GTK, even BeOS, and it will use *native* widgets. Not emulated widgets, native ones. It looks like the platform you're using, because it is.
I understand that the Moz guys want cross-platformability. But XUL is bloated and slow. The Moz team should know full well that the only reason anyone uses Galeon, or KMeleon, is because Moz is too slow! So why can't they follow the Abi example, and have XUL widgets convert to native at compile-time? They can still use XUL for unsupported platforms, but have native GTK or Win32 widgets for the two most common.
The Mozilla team made a great browser, really. But I think it's fair to say, probably a good half of their prospective users, if not more, would use it except for XUL. They should do something about it.
I use myself as an average user and gauge whether or not things here on slashdot have their place in a common windows workplace.
So far so good, I'm enjoying the "non-windows" feel as a refreshing change.
Now before I submit my proposal to replace IE with 50-100 PC's of Mozilla, I'd have to get AI ROBOFORM to work with it. So many internal sites have common passwords that it makes navigation incredibly simple.
I know there's no autosave for mozilla yet, but it doesn't seem to work at all.
Standard NT4.0 128 meg ram, 1ghz processor.
Maybe some Slashdotters can give me a hand?
And yes I've installed the adapter.
Thank you
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Last night I discovered Mozilla's cookie management features. I think that alone is enough reason to switch over. Not to mention the better speed, standards compliance, tabbed browsing and other stuff.
On Macs IE has two major problems. 1) It crashes randomly. No other program in OS X crashes like this, for me anyway. 2) IE will frequently download a page, but not display most of it. In order to see the page you've download one must click on the page and press command all. The page will the appear. I have switched to Mozilla for this reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application.
File this one under "mindshare".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
should an application have one interface which works the same way on all platforms thus reducing learning curve if you have to use different machines at a different office/school/house, or using the native methods on each platform to reduce the learning curve when the application is introduced to a user for the first time. I think the former is a more valuable, long term investment.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Mozilla is open source. I'm not yet willing to drop Windows and start using linux, but I'd like to wean myself off proprietary software as much as possible.
Of course then there's reason number 2. Slashdot's Big Fucking Ads.
well, since I'm a linux user, I don't really care mozilla doesn't feel like a window application :-)
I have never used Mozilla but I am a big fan of Opera.
It hasn't crashed for me in about 18 months (along with Forte Agent, probably the only pieces of software I use that haven't).
As for functionality, Opera has a couple of shortcomings (full DOM support, password manager), but I seriously doubt Mozilla can compete with a full MDI interface, mouse gestures etc.
I also understand that Mozilla is a huge resource hog. I have ~30 windows open and Opera is using ~21MB including the cache.
Of course, Mozilla is free but considering how much browsing I do, I'm happy to pay the $39.
Dave, http://www.deep-trance.com
And besides, that's not the point is it? You can never have 100% trust in ANYTHING, but your chances of being safe with Mozilla are much greater than your chances of being safe with Microsoft, which is nearly 0%, as they have proven time and time again.
Everything always boils down to probability, and with Microsoft you PROBABLY WILL get burned sometime or another.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Does anyone else share these concerns? Oddly I've never seen this mentioned before.
Well, there is one other thing preventing me from using it at work. Our intranet requires NT Authentication which I believe is proprietary and IE only.
Random is the New Order.
am i one of the only ones that likes the fact that regardless of whether i'm in windows or linux, mozilla looks and acts the same? except for the wonderful font rendering in linux ;), when the browsers open full screen i'm in mozilla; i forget which operating system i'm in.
:)
maybe i'm just browsing the internet too much
and by the way, the ars technica people and eveyone else that doesn't like the classic or modern themes in mozilla 1.0 needs to give pinball a shot. much nicer, smaller icons. very clean. just use the get new themes option.
Actually, cookie management in IE 6 is the one advantage IE has over Mozilla. There is no way to tell Mozilla "only accept cookies from this one site and reject all others" without having a long list of "block cookie" sites. Then you have to add every new site to the list.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I would love to enable such a feature.
Because they obviously didn't review mozilla.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Oh yeah, his observations are invalid because he doesn't know about XUL. You know what? Not many people know or care about XUL. What they want is a browser that looks consistent with the rest of their applications on their particular OS. Your comment is invalid.
Does that gives Mozilla a 6/10 for marketing?
Frankly I wish these standards were enforced, because it's a real pain in the ass to have to develop separate code so that my site works with both browser types. Call me lazy but it's alot of duplicated effort that is unnecessary and time-consuming.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If you are a web designer you should go to bugzilla and vote
0 8
for bug 47108 at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471
This bug request a icon which indicate
if the page displayed adheres to the standards or not.
Knud
No, I do not have the time to personally check out the Mozilla code, but a lot of business would.
At developer rates? When they can have IE (supported by MS?) for free?
Everything always boils down to probability, and with Microsoft you PROBABLY WILL get burned sometime or another.
I'd call *this* FUD.
Unless the security issues keep you awake at night (and they don't for me) then you could always just download CrazyBrowser.
It's 698k, has a tabbed interface, can kill most unrequested pop-ups and has a number of other nifty features included. It uses the IE rendering engine (hence the comment about security) but that does mean that you can access pretty much every site on the internet.
If you're on a modem, this has the advantage as well of being a lot more paletable than the 9.8 meg needed for Mozilla.
It's free (as in beer) too.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
... and this browser sucks big-time, seen from the usability-perspective. GUI Fonts look more than crappy since Anti-Aliasing seems to be shut off. Buttons react like windows active desktop ones (underlined or boxed when mouse over).
Popup menus (hit "print" or "back" to see) look like Windows garbage.
I'm not using Gecko. I'm using a browser, and unless this application is meant for web users (and not 'rendering engine users'), it will have to go with what I'm used to and with what I want because I spend like 1500 bucks more on a Powerbook (in comparison to a Wintel machine).
The Ars guys complain about the Mozilla UI's lack of polish compared to IE. I tend to agree with them. This is an unfair comparison, however. Mozilla is intended primarily for technically inclined people; Netscape 7 is for everyone else. I'm sure the next Netscape version will be much more polished than Mozilla in terms of UI, and thus will garner more favorable reviews. (I will continue to use Mozilla and Galeon. I like the not-so-polished iterface.) I don't blame Ars though. The Ars guys needed to compare Mozilla to something, and IE is the market leader (for now).
even though techies DO have a bad name for the "we know best" attitude i would argue that the people reviewing mozilla are also assuming that anything they use will have no learning curve. they expect every new piece of software to behave exactly like every other piece of software they have used to date.
many people complain that linux desktop (for example) is very confusing and convoluted. not so, if u'v never used windows. case in point, our company accountant was given a linux installation and doing all the work just fine. mozilla for browsing, openoffice for spreadsheets / docs, and as of yet, no problems getting things working. personally, i am used to the mozilla interface, so frankly, i would give IE a bad rating (if i was as narrow minded as the reviewers) because i honestly am confused by its interface. really the only difference is where certain menu items are and where tabs are placed. instead of bitching that u occasionally get confused, get USED to it. perhaps then you will actually be able to use the application. it can't take more than a week to get used to any application.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
This is complete nonsense. The claim that its due to Sun's lawsuit is well founded and factual. Sun has continously screwed themselves over when it comes to Java on Windows. They've forced MS to stop distributing Java with their operating system and force you to use their subpar, crap, Windows JRE.
I'd really appreciate if you got your facts straight.
scott
I use both. Mozilla is much better than OE.
Mozilla mail is absolutely intuitive and easy
to use. I still haven't figured out to make
OE stop doing those stupid favors for me.
Being unable to autosuggest a being typed
in email address in OE is killer for me.
Dump OE and go to Mozilla mail now!!!!
I don't now why but i would bet that you just loved the new XP interface when it came out. And yes Mozilla is natural and fluent to use. its the same interface wathever if i switch from my SGI ,MAC, Or PC. this is what i call standardized. and explorer won't even render the pages the same under macos or windows
if they want mozilla to look like IE they can, just dl the IE skin and it will look like IE, the user want be able to tell the difference. i have tested that at work and nobody seems to notice.
Who controls the information, controls the world...
Though it's not perfect in feel, the look it pretty darn close. I find it much more comfortable to work in the IE skin on Windows and I barely _notice_ that I'm not browsing using IE (at least in Windows 2k... when I'm in XP, alas, I notice, but barely).
Then again, platform emulation will just never be perfect with XUL, it's such a kludgey tool. I HATE non-native widgets thrown all over the place on my platform of choice.
The issue is, WHY is something very similar to this skin the default for Mozilla on Windows?
Please tell me where you took this class so that I can be sure not to go.
IE6 is really not so bad when you have the right DTD (AND that DTD is the first thing in the document), but Mozilla and Opera are consistently ahead in CSS support, and older versions of IE are supporting an incomplete XSL draft.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
there is a quick launch feature in mozilla (windows only) that loads mozilla when windows boots. when quick launch is running, mozilla window displays faster than IE starts.
If your make the page nice for the other 5% then you are potentially increasing your customer base by 5%.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
"The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application."
Wait...since when is that a negative point? I've always thought Mozilla felt fairly platform independent, which since I'm still burdened with shame for using Wintel (oh forgive me Steve Jobs), helps me assauge some guilt.
I mean, MS could learn from these guys, how much would we pay for "Windows that doesn't feel like Windows?"
-MB-
well not really
Its designed as a basis for other developers to develop browsers/news/mail apps/bundles for end uses.
Think AOLs new Compuserve browser, Galeon for Linux, K-Meleon(sp?) for Windows, Chimera (MacOSX), customised/specialised browsers for intranets, corporate networks/employees, Universities, etc, etc.
They're the end-user products - one could say Moz is a the equilivent of OEM browser that cloners build retail browsers off, with their own badge on the front & some customisations.
google search for "pinstripe mozilla"
you will be impressed
I wouldn't call the sun jre "subpar". At that time, the ms "java" did have some improvements over the sun jre (mainly it had a JIT so it was faster), but it added some incompatible extensions plus it lacked some required (by the jvm definition) functionality (JNI, rmi). This was clearly not in sun's interest, so they sued ms and won - which didn't do any good either, since windows users just won't get a jre installed per default (or only a very outdated and incompatible one, compared to current sun's jre for the most part the ms jvm is just utter crap). .NET strategy, they don't. IMHO, MS should be FORCED to supply the sun jre to its customers - even though this might not be in ms interests, I'm actually wondering why this wasn't considered as a penalty in the ms anti-trust cases?
But AFAIK nobody would prevent ms to supply the "real" jre to its customers - but, since this is a potential competitor of c# and their
mczak
Real simple: The mail client. I've got three e-mail accounts (personal, mailing list and business) that I need to juggle and I just don't have the time to figure out how I'd go about it in OE. In Mozilla I add the incoming servers and log-in names and I'm done.
On top of that, my business e-mail account all but requires me to use mail filters to manage incoming mail, and after having used OE's filters exetensively I'd have to say that Mozilla's are easier to configure and manage. It's the little touches like being able to create a new folder in the filter editor that's really nice. And when you delete the folder in question, Mozilla gives me the option of automatically deleting the related filters as well (something OE doesn't do).
Oh, and I find myself hitting Ctrl+T in IE all the time whenever I have to use it. I've been so pampered by tabs it's not even funny.
Yeah, but that's the point, if you don't like it you have no call to use it, so don't. Doesn't make it a bad thing since obviously quite a few of us find it indespensible.
No Comment.
The reason the current MS JVM sucks is because they've stopped development for nearly three years now. For its time, as you mentioned, it was superior to SUN's offering for Windows. I don't think MS would have let this slip if they weren't forced to do so. Now, the only thing they're doing is maintaining it for security reasons. Of course this is due to the lawsuit.
I really don't see why they'd be forced to supply Java to their customers. If they build an alternate technology (C#) and start using that theres really no reason to have Java installed by default. Sure it would be benefitial to the user, I wonder if Sun is preventing this from happening? I don't think they'd like that, but I don't know. Worth looking into I suppose.
scott
I'm an IE 5.5sp2 user. Our shop is mostly win2k at this point but we're slowly migrating towards linux. I'd like to use Mozilla, instead of IE. The tabs and no pop ups are very cool. However there is one main problem for me. I've tried a number of different skins, and finally settled on the IE one, although some of the others like orbit looked nice. But in IE I can move the toolbars around and resize them, as far as I can tell I can't do that in Mozilla unless I want to learn a custom programmming language. On my IE I have all tools in a single narrow bar across the top, and I've removed all the buttons I never use. Mozilla on the other hand is a screen space PIG, I mean i takes up like a good two inches at the top of my screen and I run at 1024x768. Some of my users are still at 640x480, no way can we switch over, they wouldn't be able to see the websites. I looked at tiny mozilla, and while that was a little smaller (and alot uglier) its not enough. Does anyone out there know a solution to this?
Sorry, you're right, I didn't read the article. I always think badly of people who don't read the articles, and here I went and posted without reading it myself - that'll learn me!
And your point is extremely valid - with IE it's very easy to change around the interface and customize it. Heck, right-clicking on the toolbar gives you a context menu with options for customization. Once you've learned the concept of "right-click for a context menu", how much more easy can it get? I mean, it's the first thing I tried when I first used Mozilla. Then I remembered the old days of Netscape Navigator and looked for the Preferences option under the Edit menu.
It shouldn't be too difficult to at least kludge this feature in by providing for a context menu when a user right-clicks on one of the toolbars, even if the menu only has one option ("customize toolbars"). Clicking on the "customize toolbars" option would bring the user straight to the "Themes" section of the Preferences dialog. That would go one big step towards making Mozilla a little more usable for new users.
Providing for themes to have built-in options like "text or no text on buttons" and "small or large icons" would be even better. You could load your favorite Mozilla XUL theme, and the author would have provided for the interface to be able to have text on the buttons or not, and perhaps two sets of icons (big and small), and these two options would be set in the Themes pane of the Preferences dialog.
This would be a lot more work, but it'd be more usable, I would think. Unfortunately it would rely on Themes designers providing for these capabilities - if a theme didn't offer these capabilities, the Themes pane of the Preferences dialog would gray out the options...
Here's hoping something like this is considered for Mozilla 2.0 (or 1.5 or something)...
One of the things that the author of this article harps on is that the creators of web content don't use tables as the W3C intends them to. The W3C needs to ask the question "Why do they do that?" The answer is pretty simple: because it's the best tool for the job. ["best" in this context being an amalgam of "easiest to use" and "produces the intended effect"]
In order to resolve this discrepancy, the W3C should do one of two things. Either provide a tool that is "better" than Tables (remember: "better" includes "easy to use"), or create a tag parallel with Tables (perhaps "Layout") that is identical to Table, but gives the rendering engine a better idea as to what the designer's intent was.
This is definitely something that the community would have to get used to, but it is also something that the community could use. In time, theoretically the Table and Layout tags could evolve to better suit their purpose.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Java was just an example; the same goes for things like Quicktime/Flash etc. They have commonly been a PITA to get working.
I prefer galeon to mozilla in linux because mozilla's controls not only look different, they are slower than native controls on my 4-year-old machine. The same should apply on a Windoze counterpart.
I don't know about you, but I just prefer the way IE handles things. Maybe it's because I'm used to it, but web pages in IE just look a lot more polished than Mozilla.
Either way, there are much better applications that do things like kill popup ads or annoying javascript. My personal favorite is the Proxomitron. Granted, it's just a complex find/replace local proxy server that only runs on windows, but I'm sure there are similar programs for your operating system of choice.
has been that when i install it it takes over all the images on my computer and makes mozilla the default loader for them. .jpegs, .gifs, everything, as far as i can tell. any ideas on how to disable this?
As it stands, Navigator breaks many Windows User Interface (UI) standards. Rather than use the default "widgets" (menu bars, pop-up menus, drop downs and the like), Navigator comes complete with its own set of widgets. For some spectators, this is yet another example of how cross-platform ideals don't always play out in practice: a Windows application should have Windows' look and feel.
... :(
I knew there was something wrong with open source! And now it has become so clear to me: we are not using the Windows widgets!
Let's stop what we're doing and include the Microsoft widgets (Clippy is really the feature I am missing in Mozilla).
Also, I cannot experience the nice adventures my friends have with IE while hitting some button,
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
One thing people forget is the easy shortcuts to increase/decrease font size. True, there is a similar toolbar button in IE but it does not override hardcoded font sizes; Ctrl + and - do so, and make some pages legible.
I paid $3000 for my Mac system (Extra video card for dual head display, + other things). That was in 1997. It's right here, still runnng the latest apps today.
Macs dont' go obsolete as fast as your x86/video card/RAM special hyped-up latest thing of the week.
Oh, and our OS doesnt' suck (well, neither does yours if you use a *NIX...)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
is there a reason why there haven't been a mass of trolls and crap-floods? There had better be a damn good excuse!
Cherish my balls.
Why do I get the feeling that the reviewer is not a WWW developer and only spent about a day with Mozilla? They fail to mention some major features that make Mozilla the de facto WWW browser.
Fantastic Mozilla features not mentioned include:
And why the fsck are they complaining that it doesn't follow Windows look and feel? It looks just like the Netscape I've used since like '93. Don't tell me that the UI's too tough to figure out! With the IE theme enabled, Mozilla looks exactly like IE!
For UI's, whats need is -- like the author says, transparency. Complete transparency would be best.
:".
That's why most UI's are crap. MacOS's has the right idea with the universal file menu, as that saves alot of screen space -- but they should take it one step further. The universal file menu should hide away unless you move your mouse to the top of the screen. Better yet, it should "pop up" whenver you "Apple" click the mouse: why make the user go to the menu, when the menu can come to the user?
In that regard, MS has the right idea with making the start bar hide-away (as an option). Again, we want to see what we're doing, not joe-genuis' idea of a "cool UI".
On to Mozilla. Absolutely terrible use of screen space. File menu, buttons, search bar (i.e., UltraBar), and address box should all be on ONE LINE. They should also be hide-away. Or better yet, pop-up. Again, why make the user go to the UI when the UI can come to the user? Better yet would be both hide away and pop up.
IE's interface isn't much better -- still crap. You can get it down to one line (as I have): (1) File menu; (2) Buttons (moderate amount); (3) UltraBar; (4) Address bar. This might not be possible on everyone's computer, but I work at 1600x1200, so it damn well better be possible on mine. Even so, its still clunky and could be hide-away, or pop-up; i.e., pressing "Ctrl + right click" would bring up the file menu, buttons, search bar, and ultra-bar. Or maybe a "middle click" would. Btw, that feature where u hold down the scroll wheel and drag the screen -- useless: screen's scroll by too fast. The scroll wheel, however, when set to scroll one page at a time, is good.
So, what's my criteria for the ideal browser UI? Well, I think its obvious from what I've said. It is also my criteria for the ideal UI period. We shouldn't see it unless we want to. It should be hide-away when the mouse isn't moved to the sides of the screen, or pop-up, or both. So, does any browser succeed in doing that? Well, I was about to say Lynx, but not even Lynx does it. Lynx is the text-base equivalent of Mozilla, where all the UI is basically many line. If you look, you'll notice that not one, not two, but thre entire lines are taken up by the UI; four, if you include the header. Don't get me wrong, Lynx is a great browser for efficiency, but its UI is clearly crap. Four lines taken up by UI? Two of which ("press space for next page" and "My Lynx Page (p1 of 2)", could have been placed on the same line, one aligned left, the other right? One of which was largely unnecessary due to the obviousness of what it said? What crap.
Why not use an interface like Vi's? The UI only apears when you press "Shift +
That said -- that basically all UI's to date are not transparent enough -- the engine behind Mozilla, Gecko, is great. Just needs a better UI. Does not need a "haxr633Rt" UI which looks techy and complicated. Does not need a sickeningly sweet pretty (read Aqua) UI. Needs a UI which you don't see when you don't want to see it. Or at least which provides that option to users with moderate skill.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
These people should be taken out behind the barn and shot for the good of humanity. GUIs are not just about look. They are *primarily* about *feel*. The mechanism of the GUI. The semantics of it. GUIs do things differently. Mozilla might try to "look" like a Windoze application. But it feels, heck, it _smells_ like an X app. Even Windoze owners can tell the difference.
Mozilla is not ment as the end user product. Mozilla is a set of technologies. All that waits is someone to wrap gecko in a windows gui. Hopefully it will be as good as galeon.
Get a free ipod.
XUL is just a part of the whole Mozilla project. That's the beauty of it all. Now we can have a great rendering engine, Gecko, and interface with it however we want. If you don't like the XUL interface, use Skipstone, Galeon, K-Meleon, or any number of other projects in the works. Just be glad these other apps are even an option. If you're concerned that XUL doesn't work and look like a native app, then, by all means, use one of these other apps and you can still have a great, fast, secure, stable, free browser, but it sure is silly to throw the whole project away based on your opinion of one part of the project that isn't even necessary.
not about Mozilla per se, but what on _earth_ was this reviewer smoking when he chastised web developers for using tables for layout?? name ANY respectable site that DOESN'T use tables for layout!
name any other method period that provides the same ability for layout on a web page!
tables ARE a layout element. the 'table' tag does NOT indicate tabular data as per a content descriptor, this is job of things like XML. HTML is a layout language, by it's very inclusion in the language the nature of the table tag is to be a layout element.
unbelievable.
that must have been the single most ignorant comment i've read all year.
</rant>
They must not have been using tabbed browsing!
Here we go again... Beating the tired STANDARDS drum...
Repeat after me...
- IE has 95% market share.
- However IE does it is the de-facto standard.
- If a page works in IE but not in Mozilla/Galeon/other browser of miniscule market share, then why would a regular end user ever want to switch?
- Users don't care about standards, they just want to get their job done.
You can talk all you want about all the so-called "standards" that Moz/Galeon/Gecko adhere to (and arrogantly dismiss the myriad de-facto standards), but at the end of the day, if the user experience is less than for competing browser or if regular (non-slashdot) users can't get their work done, then standards don't matter.-Steve, who thinks Galeon is the world's best browser
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
- Tabbed Browsing. Don't know how I lived without it.
- Fine grained cookie blocking/control
- Image (read ad) blocking
- Free as in beer and speech
- Cross platform. Some folks use more than Windows ya know?
- Popup blocking. 'Nuff said.
- Skinnable. Don't like the look? Change it.
- Security. Lack of integration with other MS products is a good thing.
- Fast. In my experience Mozilla (Gecko) is faster than IE most of the time on Windows. And rarely is is slower. Plus did I mention it's cross-platform?
And that's just off the top of my head. While any one might not be enough all of them together are pretty compelling.I thought the review wasn't especially well done and there was some functionality the reviewer obviously didn't explore thoroughly. (tabbed browsing comes to mind) I can't for the life of me figure out what he means by IE being more "polished". He rightly points out that installing plugins is more of a pain than it should be but most of the rest of navigator is no worse than IE from a "polish" standpoint. Not that I can see anyway. I suppose there is some wiggle room for personal preferences but the differences aren't huge.
That feature alone is worth switching over. It has been months since I saw an X10 ad. Life is better.
I am sure everyone is aware of the other cool features like Tabs and add-ons like bannerblind.
All your favorite sites in one place!
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
You can have static, fixed, relative or absolute positioning, you can easily place items whereever you want to on the page. IMHO it's MUCH easier than tables but it's very different. Just learn it.
The fact that it's class based with inheritance makes it even better.
I use Yahoo Bookmarks. Love it. Only on IE though. Mozilla has
Bookie project. I once tried to contribute
but found it hard to get up to speed.
jpenguin AT the google email service
To paraphrase Richard Stallman: Why can't we talk about freedom? Why don't any of these reviews make any effort to explain mozilla's licensing and why users should care about it? (Mozilla has a license that allows multiple companies to make competing implementations, and that gives users rights instead of making draconian restrictions. This is an important different that ordinary users can appreciate.)
I can understand why reviewers would feel they should mainly focus on features and the user interface. But to overlook these huge licensing issues completely, to not factor them into the final rating at all, is to ignore a huge glaring difference between mozilla and the competition.
--Bruce F.
First Let me set the record straight - Mozilla is an Application Object Model. Navigator is the webbrowser built on the mozilla application frame work, same with the mail, irc, composer, etc components. Do these apps built on mozilla feel or look like like native apps on windows NO could they YES. Will someone make a browser based on the mozilla framework that feels native in windogs? I don't care! I know there is one project under way to make a native Mac mozilla based browser - http://chimera.mozdev.org . Mozilla follows the W3 standards and allows these standards to be implemented. Imagine if all the auto makers had different standards for fueling your car! Does it render incorrect, badly flawed html generated by Frontpage - NO not all the time - but that is the fault of front page not mozilla, frontpage does NOT generate correct html. Please don't confuse a false standard forced one you by a monopilist corporation as THE standard. I hope that the electric company in your area does not decide to start generating DC voltage and demand that you only buy your new appliances from authorzed dealers or your power will be cut- and by the way they demand free access to your house so that they can verify what appliance your using.
Mozilla is not a native windows app. If you don't use MS tools you can not make native windows apps, unless you are a criminal and have stolen their source code so that you can know exactly how it works.
I would like to point out that the windows UI is not consistant- the UI of win95 IS different than XP is different than win3.1 and the doc format is differnet across versions of MSOffice as well and the file systems are different/incompatable as well. This list is VERY VERY long.
With the mozilla AOM - xul, rdf, css, xml - programs may be implemented accross the internet without regard for platfrom. This is the write once deploy everwhere application developement platform that the software industry has been looking for,or atleast another slab at it . It is designed to be extended. It is a new thing and will only get better as it matures. Mozilla may be extended with xpt components anolaguse to VB components. Should joe user care? NO! Programmers should. People should choose their apps based on what they need/like/want.
As time goes by apps will be written for mozilla and people will use mozilla becuase of the apps available - not Just because of the navigator browser.
Has the reviewer never heard of "themes"? If you use the Classic theme, Mozilla looks and behaves *exactly* like any other Windows app. Currently I'm using the Internet Explorer theme (yes, how ironic) and the look and behavior of the widgets are almost identical to the real IE.
1. Extremely Slow on extremely large sites, unresponsive (looks like program hangs) (large tables, source code, large amount thumbnails)
2. One busy tab can hang Mozilla.
3. Image place holders should allow you to scroll a page while its loading. Scroll bar freezes.
4. Spell Checker crashes. (to be fair, its a beta spellchecker)
5. Crashs on multiple tabs loading.
6. Little Bloated, Would like things seperated, Mozilla browser crashs, email crashs with it, downloads crash.
7. Personal bar doesnt wrap, should have a drop down menu at the end. (imho)
8. Downloading, Mozilla copies the file, after it downloads, and hangs until copied.. (not to mention if it crashs, you loose your download,very annoying, might switch to a download program to bypass problem) Why cant it just save to the directory you select? Why copy, and need 2x the space...
They fixed the context menus on the personal bar when I submitted a bug report, All I can is WOW. These guys are on the ball about fixing it. But I see a trend to blame the website authors and mark bugs as "Evangelism" or "WontFix", or push off till next year. I do believe thou, some of the developers are off on a break, so thats why the push off till next year.
Remember, I am not a developer. I just read the news, report and follow the bug reports. I truely like Mozilla, themes, tabs, email/news client that is very nice. I would consider my self as a poweruser, I do tend to push mozilla harder than the average folks.
-
Do you use DirectVNC?
Since they got rid of Windows Home Pages (as opposed to global Home Pages. That, plus MDI, was great for me-I have a bunch of pages I usually have up, and being able to get back to the starting point without searching through all my bookmarks was great. Opera people tell me no one understood it. Do other Opera users concur?
In MSIE, when you are done with a browser window you can close it by selecting Close from the File menu. Close is always the last item on the menu.
In Mozilla, this same gesture make the entire application quit, causing dozens of apparently unrelated windows to suddenly vanish.
Hundreds of testers were surprised and dismayed that their entire working set of windows was lost when they renamed a bookmark and then tried to close the bookmark editor.
All were basically told to piss up a rope because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
"One of the beautiful things about open-source products such as this, though,
.. Why should the web browser pretend
.. we all know its not "Windows XP's". 2nd.. How in the world can you prefer the taskbar grouping
..period. Is that not control?
.. etc .. etc ...
is that you can freely modify the source code and make your own build of the software to
suit your specific needs. While many Ars readers do this, the average power-user will not,
so we will skip over the build process and focus on the pre-compiled program itself."
Right off the bat you know he's just saying this out of courtesy, to say that he mentioned
one of the strenghts of OSS, and not get flamed.
In the other hand..Hopefully he undertands that being able to look at the code
and modify it to suit your needs is not the only benefit of an OSS project like this.
"Mozilla could have handled many of these problems in much the same way Opera does:
by spoofing the browser identity string to impersonate another browser.
This functionality isn't present in Mozilla, even though it would solve many of the incompatibilities between
Mozilla and the rest of the internet."
You mean incompatiblities between lazy web designers and the web standards?
to be something else and bend the standards and allow those designers to continue with the non-compliant code?
"I much prefer Windows XP's taskbar grouping, but many people see tabbed browsing as a godsend."
Ok, first of all
over tabbed browsing? Tabbed browsing is way more efficient than having to move you mouse all the way to the bottom
, click and wait for the task list to show up, and then remember which was the window you wanted.
"Unfortunately, you cannot tell it to open all new windows in new tabs, regardless of how they are generated,
so you will end up with more than one Navigator window on your screen from time to time."
CTRL + click !
"A good UI is functional, adaptable and transparent. Navigator is reasonably functional,
completely inflexible, and sticks out like a sore thumb."
reasonably functional - eh... way more functional than your normal browser out there.
completely inflexible - hmm, no?
sticks out like a sore thumb - this is actually arguable. Although I have become acustomed to the interface, I wish it was faster.
"Most of Navigator's looks are defined with "skins" and skin developers have quite a bit of control
over how the browser looks."
You are contradicting yourself! see previous point.
"Much like IE, however, it will remember per-session cookies even after you leave a page.
It will hold that cookie until you close that particular browser window.
If you often use a site that uses such cookies, make sure you log out of it - Navigator will not do it for you."
Out of curiousity.. What browser deletes a cookie when you leave a site? Most cookies used for one time log-in purposes
on websites will stay for the duration of the browsing session or until they expire. Why would the browser delete it!?
"Some users may like the skinning features, and be fine with having limited control over
where browser elements are placed and what they look like."
If you don't like a skin, dont use it
"There is no feature compelling enough to prompt a switch from IE 6, aside from personal taste"
Personal taste? hahahah
- IE has 100 times more security holes
- pop-ups blocking
- tabbed browsing
- Web standards compliant (Gecko)
- Awsome community support
- Very useful plug-ins support: ie: Mouse Gestures
- Mozilla actually prints pages on paper better than IE.
- etc
I switched long ago, and not only because of personal taste! plzzz
Although he makes some valuable points, you could tell right from the start, he was always defending IE. Now, thats personal taste(interest?)
[alk]
Access to Netscape's webmail, from within the same Mail application as your popmail.
This may not matter to you, and in fact it doesn't matter to me either. But for someone who chooses to rely on theirname@netscape.net for email, the NS-branded versions of Mozilla give them a much better email client than using Netscape.com's webmail.
This is a major detractor to most cross-platform toolkits. Apps in Windows should look like Windows apps, Apps in MacOS should look like MacOS apps, Apps in KDE should look like KDE apps, etc. It helps the user immesurably, and makes learning applications more follow the power law of practice.
If you don't like Mozilla's look and feel, you can use the Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine) and a minimal windoze interface.
That's is called Kmeleon Most people wouldn't notice differences between IE6 and Kmeleon, so Ars Tecnica will rate Kmeleon higher than Mozilla.
If just Kmeleon worked ok with all kinds of SSL... :(
sure, there's another project ('Chimera') to create a Mac OS X-friendly version of Mozilla
They need to change their name. Chimera is a web browser developed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. UNLV has a right to the name, they were first!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I reviewed IE6 today. I can tell you there is no major reason to switch over.
The poster lists one feature he likes better - which really has little, if anything, to do with the story - and gets a +4 Informative?
Well, I suppose he didn't really want to descend to the level required for a +5 interesting and say, "Micro$oft Sucks".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is an important point. Sacrificing perceived performance on today's machines for easier use and design on all future machines is something people just can't handle.
But everywhere is moving to this approach. Don't believe we? Check out Glade. Write your interface in an XML file, then load it via libglade. Wowy. spiffy, it also makes i18n and l10n easier since the interface is (tada) more flexible and easier to change.
Laying out things in Win32 API calls is slow, buggy, and hard. Using a visual form designer in Visual Studio for MFC or VB apps seems fun, but do people bark about it being slow? No. Because it's not that slow at all, and you win so much more from it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Hundreds of testers were surprised and dismayed that their entire working set of windows was lost when they renamed a bookmark and then tried to close the bookmark editor.
Including me..
I deleted it off my system that day, I have better things to do than spend 5 minutes getting back to where I was just because some dweeb bunch of GUI weiners think they have an 'improvement'.
If Microsoft 'wins', this sort of attitude will be part of the reason why.
PS. Opera does not do this, getting pissed with Mozilla was why I tried Opera, and I'll need a bloody good reason to try anything else.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Say it until it don't hurt any more, byteboyz ... computer GUI interface options are always B-A-d
ALL web browsers suck.
Here's what I want, and for whatever reason, can't have. It's great that CPUs are almost up to several ghz now, yet something as fundamental to the Internet as a web browser is *still* going through growing pains. It's like the web is going to be stuck in the late 90's IE/Netscape 4 lala land... forever.
My wish list:
Dedication - I don't need my web browser to check my mail, get on IRC, do the laundry, or clean my dishes. I want it to browse the web, and browse it well.
Consistancy - Maybe I'm the only one who can't stand how most browsers lack even the simplest consistancy across platforms. IE for Windows has all sorts of widgets that IE for Mac does not... and vice versa. The same is true for Mozilla, albeit in more of a "behind-the-scenes" sort of way. CSS is a cross-platform nightmare.
Tabbed browsing - Sure, some have it.
SpellCheck - In text entry forms such as this one. See above.
Pop-up supression - Moz rocks at this.
Crash-Proofing - I'm probably asking too much to have a browser that doesn't crash. With that said, how about adding some functionality to aid in crash recovery, such as automatically re-loading the sites and pages you were looking at before the crash took place? Automatically. History logs don't count.
OS Integration - IE/Windows. Yeah. Their integration sucks. (rant) Am I the only one who feels that Internet Explorer and Outlook (Express) on Windows should NOT be tied into that platform as much as they are? Especially at a default setting. Hell, if OE was dumbed down by stripping it of what the Microsoft programmers probably thought was "smart design," I'm sure 90% of the exploits targeted towards it would vanish. Then again the same would be true for Office, like Word macros. But anyway...
finally...
HTML - Design a web page. Then watch as different browsers maul your design. They'll use different fonts, different spacing... in short, HTML sucks. And most browsers implementation of CSS as well. I say throw the whole thing out and start from scratch. PDF or something.
[...] but there is no major reason to switch over.
Ha! Here are 8 reasons to start with. 16 more if you're using IE 5.5.
What does this mean? Folks who have never used anything besides windows before, have no problem using, say, gedit on my linux box...as another user said in a comment, which got a +5 I might add, the user isn't interested in how the product is designed, or what GUI is used, as long as it presents information - he agreed with Ar's statement. My sister, who was my test subject, didn't know that gedit was written using gtk, she didn't care! She merely typed up a quick text document...
If mozilla for windows (I've never used it, but do use Galeon on the linux box) has buttons, scroll bars, uses the wheel on the wheel mouse, and if cut-and-paste works, who cares!!
How does Ars feel about Java apps, using the Ice GUI (or something similar, forget what it's called, it's the light GUI)?? I have zero problem using anything which was made using Swing, and again, although my sister doesn't know what Swing is, she can still use LimeWire.
Is anyone going to tell me that winamp/xmms or some version of the quicktime movie player, along with some dvd players, etc., which are supposed to look like components in a stereo rack, are any better?? But, even these are usable, once you figure out where the frell to click.
Now, older linux versions of netscape, or xman perhaps - those, while having GUIs, are enough to bugger someone...
I also disagree with the notion that IE is more polished - I always feel as if I've lost of my computer while using IE, and not only because of pop-ups. Maybe I'm just a control freak.
XUL/XPCOM
Using XUL and XPCOM, plus a bit of Javascript (which has been enhanced as well), and some back-end server glue logic - one can relatively easily create cross platform applications that look and work the same on any platform Mozilla is on.
Seriously - it is possible to use simple XUL to create the UI, open it up in Mozilla and it pops open in a separate window (or you can fire up Mozilla to simply show the XUL, instead of the whole browser) - minimize Mozilla, and the app looks like a regular application - with the right skin you couldn't tell it WASN'T a native app for the system.
But the real power comes when you want to use another platform the browser is on - the app looks and acts the same!
All of this is handled with simple XUL text files. XUL is derived from XML - simple tags, etc to design GUIs - if you can write HTML, you can create full GUIs, and with XPCOM and Javascript - link them to back-end servers for data manipulation. Three-tier application programming is simple, and cross-platform.
If you browse around the Mozilla site, you can find XUL applications that do all kinds of things - the most ambitious (that I can tell is mostly XUL/XPCOM, at least) is an RPG engine/game system.
True, Java already allows you to do most of this - however, the creation of the GUI (using Swing) is one of the more difficult parts, unless you use a tool like Forte to create the front end - and you still have to worry and work the rest of the layers (middle and DB comm, which while not too difficult, still can be a minor pain). The problem with Forte is it is so resource hungry - with XUL all you need is Mozilla (to see how it looks) and a text editor (to create the XUL). A lot of the development project are concentrating on using Java servlets on the back-end for the communication, business-logic, and DB handling (with JDBC) - Mozilla, XUL, and XPCOM on the front end for GUI.
This is a real strength - I am hoping it will lead to interesting developments...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Sometimes you can blame the tool and not the user, and this is one of those cases. Not only does it not "feel" like a Windows application, it doesn't "feel" like an application native to any particular OS. Whether or not the authors understand XUL is pretty irrelevant, but I'm sure they have at least a basic understanding and are still willing to unforgive the horrible interface of mozilla.
The fact that several of the sub projects under the mozilla domain are dedicated to either making a new browser to use the gecko rendering engine or to making new UI's that work with the existing mozilla framework is a pretty good idea that most people don't like the UI of mozilla as it stands.
My god you are a bunch of losers. How hard is it to figure that exit at the bottom of the menu exits the entire application and close further up means close the immediate window. I hope you marry a woman who insists in the toilet seat being down all the time, "Because that is how it should be." In fact don't travel because you might find yourself in a country with cars that drive on the "wrong" side of the road and with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. You fucks would probably not buy a Ferarri in England because it's steering wheel is where you wife should sit. Losers.
It's a bit crap in mozilla 1,
but the 1.1 change log says that there's been a lot of work put into Venkman
The review should really have been against 1.1
Mozilla/Netscape have a bad 1.0 build history, possibly because freezing prevents a lot of fixes going in that make it to the 1.1 builds. e.g. Venkman
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
hey, now
what about kmeleon?
it may not have had an update since last october, and I may never have tried it, but it's gecko with native windows widgets and even designed to look and act like IE.
I am sure that they could use some help...
That kind of project (though perhaps with some more attentive/dedicated people behind it) is the one we need to have a stronger opponent to IE. And no, Opera just doesn't cut it for mainstream audiences; banners==bad
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I'm sitting at home *right now* rolling around naked in my Microsoft share certificates! Mmmmm... feel those dirty corporate ethics! Bill, *please* issue some more stock options in your pyramid scheme so we can take down the economy!
Get a grip. I was using "open source" software when you were still in grade school, sonny. Ever compiled a gopher server? And the whole "Bill Parish" thing is so 1999... MS has actually come out publicly in favor of taxing on stock option compensation.
Now that Mozilla has finally become stable, I recently begun to use it as a full-time replacement from MSIE. The only reason I switched from Netscape 4 to MSIE years ago was simple:
.htt) files. I suspect, like most problems i've experienced with Windows, resulted from some third-party application (I suspect a font manager, I have hundreds upon hundreds of fonts for publishing/graphics apps) making a terrible mess in the registry.
DHTML and CSS was high on my interest list, and was becoming more commonly used on the sites I visited, and MSIE's support for these standards (not to mention their own non-standard implementations) was far ahead of Netscape's. IE has some attractive features, and has maintained to keep itself not nearly as bloated and branded like Netscape had become.
Time and time again, my biggest grudge with IE was the tight shell integration with the OS. Recently i've been having problems with font sizes in the explorer shell/IE when displaying HTML (or folder
After many attempts of trying to correct the slight annoyance, I came to a better solution: Fuck IE, start using Mozilla. I loved the slickness it had, and I didn't feel like commiting myself to the hours upon hours involved in doing a fresh install of Win2K and getting everything back to the way it was.
Now, the only thing I miss in Mozilla is the "suction cup" feature (activated by clicking the mouse wheel in IE). I've quickly gotten over it, and i'm sure someone will come up with an implementation soon (Mozilla already developed native support for wheel scroll features, and 4 and 5 button mice like the intellimouse explorer).
I'm enjoying Mozilla, and everything works the way it's supposed to. Now, I only use IE for Windows Update.
I'm posting this at work, where I run Mozilla on FreeBSD. I find the Microsoft-only future increasingly scary, so I really really hope that Mozilla (and the open source UI community in general, really) starts paying attention to the results of their free user testing.
If they don't though, in two years time you and the other two remaining Mozilla users can at least console each other with your obviously superior intelligence.
obviously superior intelligence
You said it.
My point was that there are people who will never be happy with anything unless it is exactly as they want it. Am I saying that creating consistant useability is bad? Hell no. I am a web designer and would be a fool to think that in my line of work. The idea of removing a browser and swearing it off because one incredibly small detail is just laughable. Mozilla's browsing experience is so much better than IE's just for the tabbed browsing and javascript killing. Further, as a web designer I like it better because of more useful source viewing, very nice javascript console, and more useful property listings for things such as images. To dump it because of one feature seems stupid to me.
For the record I use mozilla on windows 2000pro.
You're right, no computer interface has ever been truly 'intuitive' according to the full definition of that word.
However, one of the most important aspects of UI design is consistency. Consistency means learning the UI conventions of the platform and then being able to apply that knowledge to every app you run, without learning a bunch of new conventions.
Good applications are consistent with the platform they are running on, bad applications are inconsistent. Mozilla is more inconsistent than other browsers.
As a UI designer yourself, I'm surprised that you need to be told this.
With all the talk in this review and on this discussion about how Mozilla doesn't act like a Windows app, why doesn't someone start a project to embed Gecko in a fully native Win32 shell? You can even code it in C# and .Net with all the trimmings. Galeon did this for the Gnome platform, why shouldn't the massive legions of Windows developers do the same?
Yes, I know about being able to use Gecko as the IE renderer, but still... why not make a fully compatible app? I suspect a lot of people would use it, and it would very likely take some of the preassure of the Mozilla project. This is what Mozilla was built for! So, do one of these complainers around here today want to take up the challenge?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You know, I just don't get these "doesn't work like a Windows app" comments. Maybe I'm just incredibly dense, I don't know. As far as I'm concerned Mozilla is plenty close enough to Windows standards to work.
:) In terms of ease of use, Mozilla's interface is a direct copy of IE when compared to Notes.
:)
Besides, I think the whole "gotta look like Windows or else no one can learn to use it" is overblown. I work for a company that made a conscious decision to provide the bare minimum in training when we migrated 24,000 users from 15 different email platforms to Notes. No joke. These people were using everything from PROFS to MS Mail to Exchange to HP OpenMail to you name it.
Initially, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when we first announced that we were not providing more than a quick reference card and an online quick help. Strangely enough, the Help Desk didn't get many calls. Neither did the email support staff or the LAN admins. And we didn't lose mail. Actually, usage picked way, way up once people didn't have to search through 15 different imported addressbooks to find someone's email address.
And if there's an app that doesn't fit the Windows mold, Notes is it!
The main Mozilla menu bar says File Edit View.... to Help just like most current Windows apps. Most of the submenus are equivalent to Windows apps.
Right clicking almost anywhere on an open window gets you an appropriate submenu. Pause the mouse over any button and you get a quick help textbox. Status bar at the bottom with updates. Network connection to show online status. Lock icon to indicate encrypted state.
As for mail; I went from Netscape 3.x to Netscape 4.x to OE. I moved off of OE over two years ago to the Mozilla mail client. Heck, when I first switched I was using Mozilla Mail and ignored Mozilla Navigator for about a year while it matured.
Does the user interface need some polish? Yes. For example, the Addressbook UI could use some work. The help could use some examples to better explain how to do certain operations. There are other things that I've run into that aren't perfect, but nothing major.
Do I think it deserves a higher rating than 6/10? Yes. Personally, I'd put it between 8 and 9 out of 10. That's primarily because I love the tabbed browsing and far, far better built in security controls. I regard both of these as UI issues. But that's just me. Maybe you like rebuilding your PC after virii attacks?
Breaking their promise, it looks like Moz 1.1 won't be any better when it comes to speed of rendering, etc. in DHTML. I'll wait until they get this right before upgrading or even using Moz.
Most people know text zoom and it is indeed a very handy feature...
But when using Bookmarklets in Mozilla, you can have all sorts of handy functions just one mouse-click away on your personal toolbar!
The most usefull bookmarklet in my opinion is 'zoom image in. As I work with a big resolution for graphical work, lot's of things tend to get renderd rather small when browsing. It's understandable, but still an anoyance. So when I discovered Image zoom I was, as you can imagine, absolutely delighted!
And since Mozilla 1.1b, Mozilla has REALLY speeded up and is wonderfull to use.
And as for Mozilla's GUI;
If you want integration you should use Galeon on Linux and K-Meleon on Windows. They are actually intended for end-user usage, Mozilla is just for test purposes!
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
All were basically told to piss up a rope [mozilla.org] because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
Mod parent up... I just went through the bugzilla link and this is a great example of how some developers (not all, mind you) are totally clueless about usability.
Maybe there's not a lot of compelling reasons to switch today. But let's revisit this in 12 months. Mozilla 1.0 isn't the IE killer, but it won't be until this project has had time to respond to user demands that we'll begin to see the differences between the OS process and MS's.
That's why I'm happy to use it on my Macintosh!
if this app doesn't work the same as one other app (IE), but does work like every other program ever (since like macpaint) then it sucks. Because the way that IE works is right...
If a menu took a single second to load, Mozilla would not be usuable for me.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
http://uabar.mozdev.org
In fact not. I hate it. I use a Mac and am quite pleased with Mac OS X. I use a NeXT and am even more pleased with NEXTSTEP. Very slick.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
C isn't the hottest language for compile-time processing. The preprocessor is a third-party that completely disregards C syntax and correctness. Sure it can "inline" some commonly used routines, but it does so at the expense of type safety.
;-)
C also lacks any facilities for generic programming and thus loses out on many possible compile-time optimization types: functors, type traits, etc.
Sorry folks, but I just couldn't resist. C-zealots, who think that it is the one and true language, really sadden me. Wanting to compile your UIs ahead of time is silly to me, but at least has a foothold in logic with regard to "raw speed" issues. Writing them in C just strikes me as a supreme waste of time; there are better compilative languages out there do work with UIs than C.
Here's a hint: if you see void*, you're looking at a runtime, can't be well-optimized chunk of code. Every time through the path of execution, that pointer's got to be dereferenced even though its target may never change. Every function pointer call has more overhead than a raw function call or a (perhaps inlined) functor call.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Unless you're kernel hacking (or equivalent), C is one great big premature optimization. Write it the easy way, and only after a problem presents itself, rewrite it in C (or a more flexible compilative language).
But that's okay. For some reason, many C coders seem to think that since it was difficult, since it is the original language of UNIX, since they have a collective big-dick complex about programming languages, it takes away from their intense need to get a date and a life.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
You said "Micro$oft Sucks"!
I guess the statute of limitations is up... Microsoft's GUI standards they ripped off from Apple are now "Windows GUI standards." How quaint.
When you're dealing with millions of users and millions of pages, transitions take time. The move away from tabular layouts is a good idea. New sites should try to minimize their use of tabular layouts -- better yet, use a simple layout that maximizes content area. But the move away from tables as a whole will take time.
A 1.3% market share browser doesn't call the shots. A 1.3% market share browser doesn't make standards.
As for upsdell.com:
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Don't believe me? Try running a profiler on Mozilla sometime and report back the hotspots.
You're pushing the app, the burden is on you. I can't be bothered. All I know is that what I see in front of me with Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1 If the benchmarks don't reflect that then there's something wrong with the benchmark.
But that would mean that they pulled XUL performance stats out of their asses.
Or they used Moz. Athlon 900, 640MB RAM, XP or Red Hat Linux 7.3, it feels slow. Same with many other PCs of a similar spec, even on other PCs where people tell me Moz feels fast (I guess I have have higher standards). I've not done a benchmark because I haven't needed too. This many people wouldn't be saying these things if the app had been fixed.
Does XUL intrinsically look exactly like native widgets? No.
Look is irrelevant. Look and feel. But that's true.
Does the classic theme look very much like native widgets. Absolutely.
Does look on is own matter as much as look and feel? Not quite. Does Moz look and feel like a Native app on Windows, Linux, or OSX? No.
Does the modern theme look like native widgets? No.
Agreed.
Was it planned to look "native"? No!
Yes, this is a bad default.
Modern theme looks the same no matter what platform you are on. If you want consistency of browser UI when using multiple operating systems (as I do), then use Modern.
That's great for all (both?) of you that web browse across multiple platforms regularly. Poor for the vast majority of users that just wanted a web browser on their platform.
I can hear it now. "But it's not as fast as compiled UIs." "It uses more memory." In a couple of years, advances in the rendering engine and the XUL processor (think 'compiler') will narrow the gap so far as to make the gap imperceptible.
Cool. So you admit it currently feels slow? When/if these advances happen, I might like Moz when I use it and even disregard my opinion that Mozilla was supposed to be like this before 1.0. But I can't afford to wait two years. On Linux, Konqueror, on Windows, IE or Opera.
nuff said.
Is consistant useability bad? Yes (see below); will someone please show me a platform with consistant useability -- I've yet to find one anywhere. My classic example is back from the command-line days. Our group decided to standardize on the command-line user interface for all our applications, and we couldn't even agree on what pressing the "Enter" key should do: These were IBM Mainframe applications, and if you did nothing for five minutes you timed out and were logged off the system, so some folks wanted "Enter" to do nothing, to just keep the session alive. Some wanted to make things easier on the users and have default selections for all prompts, with "Enter" selecting the default. Others were building script engines for their applications, and sometimes the scripts would get out of sync with the command prompts; in those cases the system would hit the end of the script and start supplying "Enter"s (Well, CRs, but you get the idea), so those guys wanted "Enter" to back you up to the previous prompt, with "Enter" at the first prompt terminating the program.
I conclude that "consistant useability" is indeed bad; each application should go with what's best for its circumstances. And each application should allow complete user customization, so if the user wants to impose their own "consistant useability" they can. This lack of complete customization is my greatest disappointment in Open Source software. Yes, I have the source and can add it myself, but why should I have to re-write each and every damn application? Why can't this be the going-in philosophy? My first editor (circa 1972) had a code for every command, and you could assign any code to any keystroke combination -- a completely user-configurable UI. I've never seen another application like it, and naturally they went out of business long ago. (Please don't mention emacs, as I know it offers the same ability; the problem with emacs is once you've learned how to modify it, you've gotten used to the default commands and lost the desire to modify it -- if you pick up emacs with the idea of making it do what you want, you're wasting your time)
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Main reason I haven't switched:)
too lazy to put a link
of course if you had the tool bar you wouldn't need me to:)
> Unless you are a web designer who wants to make sure that his site looks correctly when viewed with a browser that adheres to STANDARDS
:)
Standards are defined by commitees, but are only truly made standards in the real world.
Witness the totally inaccurate OSI model...
Witness all of the unused HTTP methods...
etc etc...
Because of it's usage, IE *is* the standard.
> or unless you are a person who believes that the web should be easy to navigate and not overwhelmed with pop-up advertisements,
A half-assed solution to a half-assed problem.
> or unless you believe that you should have the ability to modify the code to your browser for timely fixes to security flaws.
Oh I love guys like you-
Have you *ever* modified the code of some app you use to fix a security hole?
C'mon- really... have you?
I'm guessing no.
You wait for one of the developers to fix the problem like 99.8% of all OSS users.
> Nope, no major reasons there...."
Hey you said it-
Jut for the record- I use Mozilla *because* of it's interface- but I guess I'm kind of a weirdo like that
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Read my original post: I never said that Mozilla was insecure. But the undeniable fact is that it is a substantially less mature and tested product than IE. IE is currently in use by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, and has been for years. Given how long it took to get out the door, Mozilla certainly has had more use than a lot of 1.0 programs, but it is an infant compared to IE if you measure "user hours".
I was calling the original poster on the fact that there is little or no evidence that Mozilla is more or less secure than IE. There are more vulnerabilities posted for IE, but it's a much more widely used and tested program. There's a much bigger incentive to find security problems in IE, since so many people use it. How can anyone say that one is more secure than the other?
There's no proof that open source development approaches inherently result in inherently more secure software... as has been shown recently, the number of general Linux vulnerabilities discovered has been keeping pace with those in Windows. That's not to say that it can't, but the evidence is thin for arguing either side.
what is aol's share of the browser market?
Actually the problem seems to be that IE is inconsistant. Most apps have Exit as the last item but IE since it's not an "App" but rather part of the OS according to MS dosen't even have an exit. You can't exit IE without exiting windows all together.
Any other app that opens multiple windows works just like Mozilla and the Mozilla functionality is perfectally consistant in that respect - Close will close the current window and Exit will exit the entire app.
The problem is with MS trying to redefine the browser as part of the OS and creating confusion in the minds of the users.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
has a better mail client, uses less resources
...
are you serious? it uses less resources because it virtually starts up when windows does. its constantly running in the background, therefore it doesnt appear to take as much to run. its another part of the crap "integration" of all that bloat-ware that comes with windows. about the only advantage you get out of that is that when IE crashes, there is a good chance that it will take the OS with it, and its reboot time. but i forgot, we live in an age where we accept that our OS will need a reboot 3-4 times a day.
this is the same problem with that awful piece of software, Windows Explorer. it is quite possibly the worst program i have ever used in my entire life, and it is responsible for more OS crashes on my win98se box than any other program. and its the fucking file viewer!!! and the best bit is, because it is integrated with the OS, when it dies, its virtually gaurenteed to take the OS with it. the amount of times i have deleted a large folder, which has taken a few seconds to delete, and then hang it and then my OS hang, is beyond ridiculous.
oh yeah, and outlook express is terrible. the full outlook is actually quite good, but who wants to shell out big bucks when you can get a equivalent mail client with all the shit taken out with mozilla for nothing. now if only i could work out how to get my emails to default to fixed width when i type
I agree with the reviewer that it can be annoying when you have to adapt to different interfaces to use different products. So why then does he think it would be a good thing if Mozilla had different interfaces for different platforms? Making it work the same on all platforms *is* an instance of reducing the number of things to learn, for those people who use more than one platform. It's like this guy has never used anything other than Windows.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Your complaint about the gui is not the one the article was making. The article was making the complaint that the gui sucks purely because it isn't exactly like other windows programs. It described a product that *worked*, but not like the reviewer would have liked it to. You describe a product that doesn't even work at all, and that the gui sucks because it has bugs that make it non-functional. It sounds like you are using an older version than the reviewer, or that something else is broken about your installation of it. Your complaint is much more valid than the one raised in the article, but since it is entirely different from the one in the article, don't try to use it to support the one made in the article, (which was simply that it is a sin to be different than Windows).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Two major improvements above IE: 1) Tabbed Browsing, very comfortable 2) Better ability to customize Java Script, i.e. no more nasty pop-ups without third-party software like webwasher & co. (just use IE, and you'll see that pop-ups are the pestilence of the www today...)
There are other systems where people would be just as pissed if the last item on the menu *failed* to remove the whole app like they expect. What your whole argument boils down to is, "Mozilla must conform to whatever is already common practice in Windows, regardless of what this may do to people on other platforms. Those other platforms don't matter." This is precisely the attitude that makes it inevitable that MS wins always, no matter what the relative merits of the products may be.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It's amazing how much IE looks like windows, even after MS changes the look and feel of windows! It's almost like they are writting their own standards or something.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
The Mozilla review was like a movie review. Jaded reviewer nit-picking on little details that most movie-goers/browser users haven't a clue about. I've just been using Mozilla since the 1.0 release posted on /. First crack at most buttons got me what I wanted. Big pluses were:
a) same browser on _all_ my systems Linux/Windows
b) no third party program to kill popups.
The details on look, feel, rendering, etc. are only noticed by the real pros (read minority). Everyone else sees something that gets the job done. And Mozilla gets the job done. I'm sold.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I was apparently also incorrect about AbiWord. I went to the AbiWord download page and only saw (apparently) a partial list. With regard to OS 9 being dead, there are many people who have pre-G3 Macs who can't upgrade to OS X. Apple may want to sell new boxes and tell developers to focus on OS X (which I think is generally a good thing), but I must remind you that more people today run OS 9 and earlier than BeOS. Why should BeOS get priority?
So all UI code should be compiled eh? What if XUL were compiled? Would you still have objection to it? I ask because recent Mozilla builds (including 1.0) have a file called XUL.mfasl. To quote the release notes Is this what you had in mind or does it have to be C? By the way, sorry for the insults.
Your points about being consistent with the underlying GUI are well founded, but I think it would be easier to edit the CSS files involved than to write the native interface. Galeon has a fair amount of support and I think that makes the difference. If someone (not me -- I don't care enough about it) were to take some time with the CSS files that determine the appearance of XUL widgets, I think the classic theme could be whipped into shape. But then, we are again talking about a CSS file for each and every platform.
It's a good thing that Mozilla is free software or else someone who thought it was important wouldn't have the means to help out in this area. I mean personally, I'd rather see SVG support in the default builds than native-looking widgets. To each his own.
Then again, Mozilla could be released as native widget versions. But then why would anyone use Galeon, K-Meleon, or Chimera. Aren't those native widget ports of Mozilla? Isn't that what you asked for: a default build of XUL with popular platforms having a native widget option? Where's the problem?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
XUL and Java aren't emulated. Emulation is a different animal entirely -- but I digress.
Also, you should try K-Meleon on a Windows box. Quite zippy -- even though its UI is read from a text UI description file. But that's different from reading an XML description file, right? The thing in K-Meleon only reads from the text file. The actual UI renderer is compiled...just like the XUL engine...err...ummm...
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Can't afford to wait "two years" for Mozilla? Try Galeon or K-Meleon. Native widgets and uses the same rendering engine as Mozilla. Isn't that what you asked for? In fact, they're all free/libre software. If you really wanted to do so, you could just download the Galeon source and make it say that it's Mozilla so the picture would be complete.
Anything you want man. Although I have to warn you that Opera has more rendering problems with today's web pages than Mozilla, and Konqueror has scripting problems especially with regard to the DOM. Your choice.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
AOL browser is hacked version of IE.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
The Mail client interface is mediocre, but it supports SSL *and* message filtering on IMAP servers (a combination that's not too common). Why M$ only implements message filtering on POP3 with OE is beyond me... some say to filter IMAP folders goes against the advantage of using IMAP in the first place. However, some ISPs require you use IMAP and SSL. So, unless you setup server side stuff (like procmail), you have to filter your spam manually.
A nice feature missing from OE: if running it on a network, Mozilla/Netscape profiles can be stored on the server without having to dealing with Windows' roaming profiles (kill me now) or editing the registry (not that big a deal, but more work than clicking on a directory).
Also, Mozilla is less buggy and more secure than OE/IE.
It's always nice when a quality cross-platform product is released...
As apposed to going to Account, add account, and doing exactly the same thing in OE? What's better about Mozillas way of handling it? I have my Outlook Express very easily pulling mail from a number of accounts, keeping them all nicely seperate, but viewable at the same time.
IE is un secure. Anyone with a web page can run arbitrary code on your computer..
Shit, you people got me all excited. I downloaded this mess (using it right now, btw) and imagine my surprise when it installed Netscape Communicator - Wow. Talk about anti-climactic.
Man alive. This thing sucks. Forget about viewing the CPU price list at sharkyextreme. Nothing appears. Forget about any site using active-x.
It renders porn okay I guess, but how do you market this as the ultimate browser for fisting pictures?
oh and one more thing... all the features that I miss are in IE and all the features that I like are in IE.. innovation?
Stop accepting things like they are, change the world (of software) now!
Can you be a little more specific? How wold you like your browser to look and act, besides like IE? The "cited usability problems" were that the thing did not act like IE. Here's what some constructive criticism looks like:
IE user interface problems noted under win2k:
"Favorites" can't have characters in their names that mess with old DOS conventions.
ftp, http, local files are remembered and treated sepearatly. This artificial division makes swithching between the different "zones" difficult to do and makes the history file much less useful.
User settings are poorly organized vary from version to version. Typically kept under multiple menue items and burried in a forrest of tabs in nonsensical dialogs, IE's user settings are both harder to find and less empowering when located.
Abomnible on off control of scripting, no image control. Adverts are impossible to turn off.
Fav icon suffers from typical M$ bugs. Often loads wrong image, takes forever to display. Gives user information away without asking.
ftp site browsing sucks. The psuedo Apple triangle file tree browsing is much much better than IE's stupid attempt to make ftp sites look like local folders. Confusion is not integration, Micro$oft. ftp site non response locks up entire interface. Talk about pathetic.
Those are some things off the top of my head. I rarely use IE at work, but sometimes I have to. When I do, I notice that kind of crap. If all of these problems were to be fixed, you would have something much closer to Mozilla. That's what the open source folks did - they changed the software they had available and made some new stuff bassed on user wants and best practices. This was done while M$ was bussy catching up to Netscape 4, and adding new hooks to their other software that no one wanted, and works wretchedly today. What kind of input do you think M$ got for IE? It took advice from content pushers and advert makers. Pthththt!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not sure how many of you checked out the ARS forum for the review but I came across this comment by one of the authors(Kurt) of this article. Direct quote, "I don't particularly like banner blocking features, which is why I didn't mention them at all."
I don't think it helps the credibility of a reviewer when he openly admits to "not liking" a feature and thus refusing to mention it at all.
This review was thorougly tainted and seemed more like a, "In Defense of IE", piece rather than an objective unbiased look at Mozilla.
"Unlike most of you, I am not a nut." - Homer J. Simpson
SUPER EASY SIMPLE SOLUTION:
- Close this window
- Close whole program
or- Close [current Gecko app]
- Close Mozilla
No more ambiguity! Let's stop splitting hairs over the meaning of "close" "exit" and "quit". As far as users are concerned, they mean the same thing. Users are not steeped in the history of GUI engineering methodology. For some people, Win XP is their very first OS. These are not just gray-haired old-timers or luddites, but young, bright children just coming into the tech world. For many people in the upcoming generation, Mozilla 1.x will be their very first browsing experience. They have no frame of reference to know how "close" and "exit" were used in apps in Win 3.1 and Win 9x.So ditch the one-word menu labels already. Saving a few bytes in an 11 MB browser shouldn't warrant all this fuss. IMHO, other goals shouldn't be advanced at the expense of clear communication.
I have been a happy user of both IE 6 and Mozilla, but I perfer Mozilla. I like the tabs and I like the fact that I can render web pages without downloading expensive (download-time wise) pictures.
My only two suggestions would be to allow the blocked pictures to be viewed with-in the web page on the occasion that I choose to view them, and that there exist a better way of identifying where and how many pictures there should be on a page where I have blocked them.
Youre not being overly constructive yourself. No one in this entire thread was talking how everything should be like IE!!! And of course this is Slashdot where you get modded up for MS bashing, no matter what the discussion thread was about or how stupid your behavior is... - cheap karma
Someone please mod the twitter troll down. He has no point regarding the post he complains about. What really happens often on Slashdot is: someone posts a troll/flamebait at +2 because of high carma and the next thing is that a clueless moderator simply mods the worthless post further up because it was so highly rated to begin with.
I'm not so arrogant that I would deny others the ability to have their menu's look however they wish. But in a windows environment this 'feature' makes it too easy to loose shitloads of references+work.
If this was standard behaviour on -all- applications in Windows it would not be an issue, but it breaks the 'consistency' of the Windows UI. I use lots of different OS's, but I tend to be in a different 'groove' for each one. Mozilla interrupted that groove, there are two good alternatives, I did this consumer thing and chose a product that better fitted my needs. So there.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
sorry I missed your post the other day... hopefully you'll find this.
And furthermore... Ctrl-J brings up a list box with an alphabetically sorted list of all the links on a page. You can then type the first letter of your chosen link, scroll down a little if it's not the first one, and hit enter. Keeps keyboard navigation functional even on multi-column pages or pages with a ton of links.
Ctrl-G toggles between using the color & font definitions on the page and your own personalized colors & fonts. G by itself toggles graphic loading & display.
W and S select the previous & next heading block. Lovely for navigating Slash post lists, which use an H4 for each post subject. I wish Google & K5 would use heading tags on their result/post lists.
You use FreeBSD? Then you should already be intimately familiar with that attitude.
I'm using a K6-300, 128mb of RAM, and Moz seems to work fine for me, speed-wise. The reloading of graphic images to save them is lame, but I don't do it THAT often. :)