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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!
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?
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!
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
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
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
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.
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!!) ;-)
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.
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.
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'
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
Try going into Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> (Uncheck) Reuse windows for launching shortcuts
I believe the problem you are having is with IE's handling of shortcuts to URLs, which is all that Favorates actually are. If you have this option checked and hit a favorate, it will open the favorate in the last used window. This often turns out to be the first one you opened.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
Mozilla mail does support multiple SMTP servers. Its rather hard to find the option, but it is there.
See the "Advanced" button under both Account Settings and Outgoing Server (SMTP) under Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
there are a lot of IE-centric web designers out there who swear by Frontpage.
I think it's sacrilege to use the terms "Web Designer" and "FrontPage" in the same sentance.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
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
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
...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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
Panicware's "Pop-Up Stopper" is free and has been working just fine on my box for the past few months.
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.
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.
Why is dreamweaver not the answer? Mozilla does have a HTML editor although I haven't tried it. Search around the shareware sites. There are plenty to try.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.
I completely agree with this. The difference I see is that we praise Mozilla for closing all the gross holes and when they get to the point where they're just closing off small holes, we have a party. When *any* bug is found in I.E., we throw a good old fashioned slashdot anti-MS flamewar. We insult microsoft for being closed, we question the programmers' parentage, we completely go off.
It's a difference in perception. Mozilla and I.E. have security issues. Mozilla is closed source, so it's better, right? Right? Yes, mozilla is open source, but I've never even compiled it. Usually, I download the RPM. If i'm feeling really bored, I'll download the binary tar.gz. I don't open up the Moz code and try to fix the security holes.
So what does it matter that Mozilla is open source if you don't do anything with the source. Especially if you're talking about Moz on windows. What, are you going to compile it with MS Visual Studio? Or how about Borland C++ 3.51?
It comes down to this: Mozilla and I.E. are essentially in the same boat. I don't look at the source of either. I trust someone to fix the problems of both. Why are they treated differently? What good is having the option to look at the source code?
~Will
sig?
128 ram on a 1.6 Ghz LOL LOL
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?
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.
What good is having the option to look at the source code?
The source code is auditable by anyone who has the interest and initiative. This helps provide assurance that marketing departments and governments aren't looking over your shoulder, and it helps keep the people in charge of Mozilla modest.
The Mozilla programmers will have their pride served back to them on a platter if they are really sloppy. This makes it more likely that Mozilla is popular due to its merits, which is much better than being popular by default.
Closed source software, for the most part, is inherently sloppy. There is much less incentive to make it tidy and well organized for just the sake of it. Slop tends to stick in commercial software for a long time, simply because no one wants to pay for making it better. This is why mature open source software often feels much more sound than comparable closed source software.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I switched to galeon as well because I hate XUL. Its slow, inconsistent with the rest of the system and there arent even many mozilla themes that you can install (which kind of defeats the whole point of having a theming engine). I find Galeon is much smoother and a lot more responsive. In fact, combined with galeons other features (superior tab handling and session recovery) there really is no contest.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Actually fonts in Mozilla 1.1b on OSX 10.1.5 or greater look great. I agree with everything else you say though. It doesn't matter if M$ have achieved their advantage in an "unfair" way. The average person doesn't care. In fact I've spoken to many people who are actively looking forward to the day when Mozilla dies so they only have to worry about designing their pages for IE.
I use Mozilla on OS X for lots of reasons, but I have never understood why it has to be a single monolithic app. Why should I load up the e-mail client when I want to use the browser (or vice versa).
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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...
If your make the page nice for the other 5% then you are potentially increasing your customer base by 5%.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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.
Lol. Whats your problem with the Mozilla UI? Cuz (unlike Crazybrowser) you can CHANGE it. Hell, you can change anything in Moz. Another thing. I have almost never seen reasons on why Moz has a "crappy" UI. Aome people say it, but amlmost none of them can say why its crappy. I say its preconception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean i takes up like a good two inches at the top of my screen and I run at 1024x768.
You can collapse the toolbars by clicking in the space at the left edge of the bar.
- 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
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.
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]
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!
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".
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.
This would be true if the biggest security hole in IE is unfixable because to the vendor it's a feature. Mozilla has a EULA which will never impose DRM on you, will never give your right to do what you want to your own machine away, will never strip your legal rights to sue, etc. Microsoft software comes with Microsoft lawyers attached. Their legal clauses are a security hazard.
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
The ability to catch the difference between the source code and the compiled binary is much greater with Mozilla than with IE. The ability to discern back doors is much better as well. The point isn't whether you, personally are going to do it. The point is whether some professor teaching CS428 security audits is going to assign it for the class project. For IE, such a class project will come under their 'shared source' initiative complete with lots of legal restrictions including NDAs. For Mozilla, there is no restriction and finding a back door is going to be a major feather in these people's resumes as well as a career booster for the professor.
So which code is going to get reviewed more often and more openly?
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.
I have to disagree, I thought that this was a good article.. however calling (mozilla) Navigator "reasonably functional, completely inflexible" is way off base IMHO. Mozilla has to be one of the most flexible browsers in existance, and certainly way more flexible than Internet Explorer.
I'm too lazy to link to it, but on themes.mozdev.org there is a skin that will make mozilla look exactly like Internet Explorer to the common user. Obviously the prefs and some of the other screens (bookmarks for example) will look a little different, but uses are going to spend 99% of their time in the main browser window anyway (stop, reload, forward, back, address bar, etc). Those widgets and buttons are all pretty universal now to computer users, a lot of people know how to operate a web browser.
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.
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.
OS X is really cool all around. Very fast as a web server, even here on a cable modem.
As far as RAM issues I believe the limit has been going up, but I'm not exactly sure. Still, 512MB is enough to do plenty of at-home stuff, even for a power user. I know the cap-off is at least 1GB, probably more, but again I dont' remember. 64-Bit is (supposedly) slated to be a part of the G5 series but that's pretty much all speculation at this point. Motorola, Apple, and IBM are very hush hush about their future processor plans. I'm sure they're not sitting idly by, at least not Apple...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
[My main problem] 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?
Edit->Preferences->Advanced->System
If you uncheck some types, Mozilla kindly gives them back to the application that had them before.
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.
Talk about huge generalizations! Closed source software is not "inherently sloppy".
That's why I said "for the most part", which I strongly feel is accurate, and I made sure to mention only "mature" open source software. Of course, there are excellent commercial projects out there, as you've pointed out, and I am certainly not slamming all of them. I surely would hate to use a improperly-done compiler, for example, or see the NYSE crash every ten minutes.
However, commercial software, for the most part, really is sloppy (even many of the really expensive "industrial-strength" packages). I've used many software applications, operating systems, and tools, and have been in and/or seen several software development projects, where the software is just sloppy. It is a fact that much of the software industry employs little or no standards, employee turnover is high, rigorous analysis is not performed, and quality control is an afterthought.
This is why the Department of Defense has set strict standards, and the Software Engineering Institute has published its CMMs. There are other initiatives, too, which attempt to grasp the problems of software engineering. However, industry-wide acknowledgement of these things is sparse, and adoption of their ideas has been slow.
The most fundamental cause is the failure to recognize that good software is difficult and expensive. There really aren't any magic IDEs or widgets that solve these basic issues. It's just a fact that leaves many project managers and programmers in denial.
This is where open source software gains some credibility. Much of it is written by people who aren't bound by schedules nor budgets. The expensive part of the equation just doesn't manifest itself. The difficulty is handled by the projects taking as long as they need to do something. Few commercial projects would have lasted as long as it took Mozilla to get to 1.0, the first real deliverable in several years. It is more likely that a commercial project will be forced to release early or to do more within a inadequate budget (thus, leading to poor quality).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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."
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.
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.
Why is dreamweaver not the answer?
Too much time and effort to learn for the typical user. I'm using Mozilla now, but I haven't tried Composer yet. I'll give it a try.
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.
Just because you don't use the source doesn't mean nobody does. The world has millions upon millions of people who know who to program, nearly all of whom can look at mozilla's source and tell you what it's doing.
One thing I've noticed is that when I save an image (say, a Dilbert or a political cartoon) Mozilla downloads it again, even though it's in the cache; MSIE just saves it from the cache. Mozilla treats images as if they were marked max-age=0 -- what's up with that? Same with printing a page -- reloads it first, every time. This simply sucks, and if it's a setting I've munged I'd love to be able to fix it. But that still doesn't explain the overall slowness of the beast. Maybe they slowed Mozilla on purpose to make Netscape look better.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Of course there is ambiguity. It's just the other way around then - there can be menu options in the main bar that affect just the one window instead of the whole app.
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.
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.
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 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