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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....
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
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!
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
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
Using a browser other than IE is voting for an open, interoperable internet.
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.
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'
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
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.
*sigh*
.c files and waiting for the recompile. Your program UI can be as simple as editing a web page!
Repeat a lie enough and it will become truth I guess.
The real skinny on XUL: It is not as slow as people make it out to be. It is not the reason for Mozilla having any speed problems. It *is* compiled into native instructions when your browser is up and running. This functionality made it into the tree some time ago. Too many people were howling about the slowness of XUL two years ago to notice apparently.
Don't believe me? Try running a profiler on Mozilla sometime and report back the hotspots. What's that? Even though the source is available and people have access to profilers, not one of the XUL naysayers here even tried? But that would mean that they pulled XUL performance stats out of their asses. (To be fair, a couple of years ago, XUL had some major redrawing and rendering issues -- not the case today. Maybe it's just a case of stale info that desperately needs to be thrown away) In addition, projects like Galeon are not faster because of native widgets (although it may have been the case a couple of years ago). IF you look at feature-to-feature, Mozilla does more than Galeon. Just look at the JavaScript engines, the DOM handling (the DOM debugger, the DOM inspector,
etc.), the fact that Galeon only runs on one platform(!), etc. Galeon is not Mozilla + native widgets. Galeon is Mozilla-- + native widgets.
Does XUL intrinsically look exactly like native widgets? No. Does the classic theme look very much like native widgets. Absolutely. Does the modern theme look like native widgets? No. Was it planned to look "native"? No! 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. If you want something more akin to a native feel, use classic. If you absolutely want native widgets, use Galeon, K-Meleon, or Chimera. That's what these projects are there for!
As a side note, XUL is rendered by Gecko. You can't say that one is slow while the other is fast. They are different limbs of the same beast.
As was pointed out on the Mozilla performance newsgroup, there is no magic "native" flag that makes video cards paint faster. Whether a widget is linked from a shared library, compiled from C, or read from an XML file (and later translated to machine instructions), they all paint to the same canvas: the system graphics library. If MFC has some innate advantage here, I'm sure that the folks who write Qt and WxWindows would love to hear about it as well as they would no longer be "native" either.
The reason that Mozilla developers can handle the large number of platforms that Mozilla runs on is because of XUL. The code is amazing in its cross-platform purity. Fix a mail client bug here and it's fixed everywhere. Fix a UI bug there and its fixed everywhere. Contrast this with fixing a UI bug in the Windows code and it must be fixed in Mac (OS 9- and OS 10+), X (Xlib, GTK+ and Qt ports), BeOS, OS/2, OpenVMS(!), Amiga, etc.
I'm not saying that XUL didn't take a long time. I'm not saying that it saved a whole lot of development time until recently. What I am asserting is that all new bugfixes and enhancements can now happen much faster (and have been for the last year or so) than would be possible with native libraries and widgets. And it's not like Mozilla isn't modular and reusable; how do you think Galeon and K-Meleon were able to be released so quickly? They whipped up a barebones UI up on the infrastructure written by Mozilla developers. If you like Galeon, K-Meleon, and Chimera, it probably has more to do with liking barebones UIs than an inherent deficiency in Mozilla's UI. That said, if that's your preference, more power to you. Just don't shit on someone else's meal when your food comes from the same kitchen.
What the Mozilla developers have done is akin to shunning assembly language for C. Back in the day, C was slow and bloated as compared to hand-crafted assembly. Then people noticed that they wrote more and with fewer bugs with C. Then the compilers got better. Then assembly didn't make much sense except in small niches. Imagine! Writing your UI in a simple text file and handling UI events in a simple scripting language. Don't like the UI colors? Just edit CSS files instead of editing
But 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. It's assembly versus C all over again. Which side do you want to be on? Personally, I think life is too short for recompiles.
If you want to get down and dirty, recompiling at every step, write an operating system or help out on the Gecko renderer and XUL processor. For everything else, there's XUL, scripting, and CSS.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
"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]