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."

Comments

Re:Why would Mozilla be more secure?

[pmz]

...but Mozilla is a "1.0" release, and from a security perspective, it's usually better to go with a more mature application.

Yes, but Mozilla was leading up to 1.0 for years. It really is a mature application, as applications go, so most of the "gross" holes probably have been addressed. The remaining holes fall under the law of diminishing returns, where there are certainly some, but they will found less frequently as time passes. In this regard, Mozilla and IE are on equal footing.

Also, Mozilla gives quite a bit of flexibility concerning cookies and JavaScript, so I would believe that whole classes of bugs wouldn't be exploitable, simply because I allow cookies only to sites that have earned my trust, for example. Now, if per-site JavaScript control is incorporated into a later release of Mozilla, that will be the icing on the cake.

Re:its not a xul issue

[bigjocker]

The only other option is use something like wxWindows which tries to present a single API that is platform independent but will use native widgets, though this approach has it own problems

I believe this is the most logical option. If you are writing a GUI app then you should use as first option the OS native widgets. If you are writing a multi-os GUI app then use a wrapper for the GUI. Thats the magic about Object Oriented Programming.

Why leave the wxWindows option last? there are other projects like this one, even they could have done something like this instead of creating their own set of widgets and would be a lot easier and nicer.

I dream of the day when us Open Source developers start coding thinking on the user, and not thinking in "ooh, I can do this the easy way or I can do it the hard way, I'll do it the hard way so everyone knows I can".