Slashdot Mirror
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 find the java plugin available as a link from the mozilla.org download page is _very_ unreliable.
:)
If you grab the latest jre1.4 from java.sun.com, install the RPM, tgz or whatever your preference, then link the file (path to jre)/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji140.so to your plugins directory, not only do you gain much reliability and speed, but also a handy per class progress bar
I am a software engineer, I work with computers all day in and day out, given enough time I could code my own GUI (done part of that for a commercial company already) and my own browser. Heck, I could make my own OS etc.
But I don't want to, I want to dubble click the installation icon when I install an app, answer some silly questions, and be done with it. I don't want any extra GUIs, I want it to look and feel 100% like the style guide for that platform. I don't want to see any code, I never want to touch any configuration text files, I care little of whatever XUL can do for me. I won't use up a single second on something like that, and I never should have to.
MaxVlast has got it right, and so has the majority of the web browsing population. They care about browsing, not software politics or technical merits.
Besides, if it was so darn easy to fix with XUL, couldn't the developers fix that from day one so an installation is 100% like the native system it runs on? The two browsers I use does this perfectly (a virtual pat on the back for those who can guess which ones I use;)).
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.
IMHO, the Mozilla developers made a very bad decision when they decided to create their own GUI toolkit from scratch rather than rely on the interface of each operating system Mozilla ran on. Sure, Mozilla's controls look the same on Mac OS X as they do on Windows and Linux and Be and OS/2 and OpenVMS... but who cares? I don't want it to look like a Windows application on my Mac. And having to reinvent the wheel and get all the buttons and scrollbars and pulldowns working right must have added at least a year or two to Mozilla's schedule, and they still need work.
Have you actually tried to create a application that can run on multiple platforms and present a GUI that matches the underling OS.
You have two basic options
1) use something like qt which just emulates the look and feel if the OS, this very close to what mozilla did, there are just no windows themes*
2) Write the GUI side of you application for each OS you wish it to run on. Which would at least double the amount of work required and also prevent to from being able to show a consistent interface across platforms. Not to touch upon the complexities of debugging issues.
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.
*There are actually as part of the mozdev project.
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.
IIRC, the discussions regarding creation of XUL went something like this:
- No one wants to work on the Communicator 5.0 codebase; it's all crufty spaghetti.
- NGLayout is really cool; let's work on that instead!
- There are very few people who want to work on the front-end stuff for {platform X where X not in ('Windows','Linux')}
- You know, we have to code all these widgets anyway for use in the browser window; the APIs are all too different to try to use native ones in the renderer.....
- Why don't we use the renderer widgets to build the chrome!
- Let's go with that, and rebrand Mozilla as an Application Development Platform instead of a browser!
IMHO, it was that change from native front ends to XUL, and all the tangents that that gave birth to (ChatZilla, anyone?), that caused the Mozilla project to take 4 years. Switching to NGLayout didn't hurt the timeline nearly as much as the XUL implementation.Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
- 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.
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?
"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]