Slashdot Mirror
Review of Mozilla's 2002
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."
I gotta wear shades.
Long live the bayesian spam filtering!
Though i wish all those boneheads out there would start checking their sites in mozilla before they put them up. Maybe someday more people wil use Mozilla than explorer... ha ha ha...
is hands down the best OSX browser I've ever seen. Fast, light, at least as reliable as IE,moz,icab&omni, and most of all : extremely userfriendly. I don't give a rats ass about 90% of the features in IE or mozilla. I don't need no fsking integrated email client and security bollocks.
Chimera provides exactly the features I need, and none more, none less. big kudoos to the chimdevs. If you read this : u guys rock !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
January
The New Year brought a new browser for Mac OS X users, with the launch of the Chimera project. The browser utilises Cocoazilla to offer a Mozilla-based product with a native Cocoa front-end. Core developers include David Hyatt, who now likes Macs so much that he took a job with Apple.
February
February saw the release of 0.9.8, the first Mozilla milestone of the year, which introduced an OS-rendered Classic theme for Windows XP and Mac OS X, Address Book improvements and CSS support for Composer.
In Brussels, FOSDEM hosted the Mozilla Developers Meeting in Europe 2.0. Several talks and presentations were given, covering several different aspects of the Mozilla project. The event was so successful that another meeting is planned for FOSDEM 2003 in March.
March
As Spring approached, attention turned towards Mozilla 1.0. drivers@badspam.mozilla.org finalised the 1.0 development plan and the tree closed later in the month. The final pre-1.0 milestone, Mozilla 0.99, received so many downloads that the builds had to be mirrored on higher-capacity servers.
Also in March, AOL began beta-testing a version of the AOL 7.0 client that featured an embedded Gecko browser, Galeon 1.2.0 was released and another Mozilla Developer Day was held at Carnegie-Mellon University.
April
The release of Mozilla 1.0 became tantalizingly close when the 1.0 branch was cut and plans were devised for a series of release candidates. The first of these candidates was delivered later in April.
In a widely anticipated move, AOL subsidiary CompuServe released CompuServe 7.0, their first upgrade to use Gecko rather than Internet Explorer for Web browsing.
It wasn't all good news though: a well-publicised security flaw was discovered in Mozilla in April. The way the hole was reported led to an increased effort to highlight the existing mozilla.org security bug policy.
Meanwhile, the first files of a project known as mozilla/browser were checked into the tree.
May
The march to 1.0 continued with the launches of Release Candidate 2 and Release Candidate 3. However, mozilla.org wasn't the only organisation releasing previews; Netscape Communications Corporation unleashed a beta of their new Mozilla-based Netscape 7.0 browser to generally positive reviews.
June
June was dominated by the long-anticipated release of Mozilla 1.0. The culmination of four years of work, the milestone received several acres of press coverage. A party in San Francisco's DNA Lounge was held to celebrate, with several satellite parties taking place around the globe.
However, development didn't stop and Mozilla 1.1 Alpha was released just a few days later. The Mozilla-based Beonex Communicator 0.8 was also launched in June.
By the end of the month, some industry researchers were reporting that Mozilla 1.0 had already achieved a 0.4 percent market share.
July
Mozilla 1.1 Beta was released in July. The first milestone to include the new 'Almost Standards' mode, this release also featured significant improvements to the JavaScript Debugger and a new full-screen mode for Linux. Meanwhile, Chimera hit version 0.4 and a new stable version of Bugzilla was released.
August
There were releases galore in August: the final version of Mozilla 1.1 came out, adding a View Selection Source feature, separate icons for the different types of windows and an option to view HTML mail as plain text.
AOL were also in the mood for releases, launching both the shipping version of Netscape 7.0 and a new Gecko-based AOL client for Mac OS X.
September
September brought the release of both Mozilla 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.2 Alpha. New versions of Mozilla Calendar, Chimera and the IBM Web Browser for OS/2 were also made available.
In other news, the mozilla/browser project, now relaunched as Phoenix, started producing nightly builds and the team released their first milestone shortly after.
mozdev, the hosting site for third-party Mozilla projects, celebrated its second anniversary in September. mozdev also began hosting the online edition of Creating Applications with Mozilla, a new book which was launched on September 24th.
October
The Phoenix team were busy in October, releasing versions 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 in quick succession. Meanwhile, Mitchell Baker affirmed mozilla.org's commitment to the project.
Mozilla 1.2 Beta was also launched in October, bringing with it link prefetching and many filtering improvements. Meanwhile, the Windows K-Meleon browser had its first release for a year and the Galeon team unveiled Galeon 1.3.0. Almost a complete rewrite of the GTK browser, this development build was the first to be based on GNOME 2 and the Mozilla GTK 2 port.
Finally, October was also the month that Neil Deakin's 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot document started doing the rounds. It eventually ended up on both Slashdot and CNET News.com.
November
In November, it was announced that Phoenix would have to renamed. An appeal for a new name received an overwhelming response; so far, there have been over 1,200 posts to the official name suggestion thread.
There were several new releases in November, including Mozilla 1.2 and Chimera 0.6. Mail Newsgroups also continued its journey to world domination, gaining sophisticated Bayesian junk mail classification capabilities.
December
Changes were afoot in the final month of the year, as the Classic Mac OS Mozilla builds began their transition to port status. Meanwhile, Phoenix users got a double Christmas present: not only was Phoenix 0.5 released, a new default theme was also checked in.
As proof that everybody makes mistakes, mozilla.org announced that there was a DHTML problem in the Mozilla 1.2 builds which were released at the end of November. The bug was quickly fixed and a revised Mozilla 1.2.1 was uploaded a few days later. Back on the trunk, the first alpha build of Mozilla 1.3 was released, featuring a raft of new Mail Newsgroups enhancements.
Netscape broke new ground in December with the launch of Netscape 7.01, which included an integrated pop-up blocker. It wasn't all good news in Mountain View though: layoffs throughout AOL affected the browser producer but not as drastically as some press reports suggested.
End of year figures suggest that Mozilla-based browsers have a 1.7 percent market share and that Mozilla has now overtaken Opera as the third most popular browser. We hope and expect that Mozilla will build upon these successes in 2003, the project's fifth year. As always, MozillaZine will be there all the way to provide in-depth coverage of one of the planet's most exciting open source projects. We would like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year and hope to see a lot more of you in the coming twelve months.
Got a response? TalkBack!
for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap. I wrote a whole thing about phoenix's amazingness in my journal, so there's no reason to repeat it here. But it has made a significant positive impact on my daily routine.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Check out the zeppelin logo on Mozillazine www-pages!
A red star is painted on that zeppelin! RED STAR - why the hell? Communists in China and Russia are using red star -logos even today. So does this mean that Mozilla is the communist choice?
Mozilla is coming along nicely. I've recommended it as an alternative to IE to all my friends and family. No popups and tabbed browing has me hooked :)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I might as well nominate you for "Troll You Would Not Want To Get Stuck In an Elevator With (person)"
Using Mozilla, and I love it. There's only one small problem. I really miss being able to click my mouse wheel and move the mouse up and down to scroll through the page faster.
The zeppelin symbolizes Mozilla's bloat. The red star is merely Mozilla's logo.
The terrorists would most likely use other browsers
Try it, you will uninstall mozilla from konquerors built in xterm!
Autoscroll extension for Mozilla/Phoenix as reported by Mozillazine.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
I believe this will do the trick
But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.
This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.
And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.
This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
AMAZING! Still doesn't sort headers properly when you change mailboxes etc. etc. ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I like the sample demos that the 1.0 start page used to show for mozilla.
;)
Even more so, tabbed web browsing is great for testing various web applications.
Finally, I love the HTML composer... it's great for composing little slashdot messages
--------
Free your mind.
But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.
The main focus of the Mozilla project is and always will be software development. It's up to the Mozilla based distributions (Chimera, KMeleon, Phoenix, Netscape, Beonex, etc.) to worry about marketing and distribution.
The World is Yours.
It's so much easier to simply validate against the W3C standards instead of checking to see if your pages work in every browser. If a page validates and works in the earliest version of IE you're trying to support, it should work for almost all visitors you're targetting.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Especially the 1.3.X series of both browsers (using a 1.3 alpha build of Moz with 1.3.1 build of Galeon). You've made my GNOME 2 experience richer, and given me the best combination of tabbed browing and smart toolbar I could ask for.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Red,White and Blue stripes.
You had a point in there somewhere, or what?
I'm sorry, but sympathetic magic doesn't work.
KFG
In the last part of the article, it mentions that Mozilla based browsers have 1.7 % of the market share. I would advise web-sites that depens on internet sales not to discount this share. Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet. Percisely, the best target audience.
The IE crowd is filled with old grandmom who play solitare and who think that the Internet in on their "Hard-Drive" - you know, the "Hard Drive" that sits under their Packard-Bell monitor.
Microsoft can keep those users.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Which earliest version of IE? IE on Win 95, Win 98, Win Me, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP or IE on the Mac? All of these platforms represent significant portions of my company's client base.
How many of you were caught checking the mozilla.org homepage every day to see if the next release was out? I know I was. Now that I have Mozilla 1.2.1 though, I'm satisfied.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
you must be referring to this thing yuk. talk about your desperate last gaspers.
I could tell people "I use Mozilla" and most people would look at me like i was speaking greek (except the greeks, they'd look at me like i was speaking inuit).
Now I tell people i use Mozilla, and Some of them actually know what it is, or have heard of it. Not to mention that since there is a 1.X release out, i can confidently install it on a friends or clients machine without a lot of worry of weird crashes and bugs.
Once Mozillas spam filtering becomes easy and useful, I can see myself converting a LOT more people a lot more easily than i already have. So far i've converted about 25 diehard IE users... and i wonder how many they have converted.
To me, the most significant point in the article was Mitchell Baker's note supporting phoenix. In it, he lists one of the reasons for supporting phoenix as an experiment to see whether mozilla can succeed by building core browser functionality that others adapt.
This is where OSS succeeds right now in mainstream implementations, as a base that a value-added integrator can then modify for clients to achieve a lower cost solution. It is hard for OSS to market directly to end-users. OSS is not close enough to end-users to know how to modify interface and other features to suit their needs. However, value-added integrators are.
With microsoft, value-added integrators face high licensing fees and the danger that microsoft will try to eat their lunch. In OSS, this is less an issue.
However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back? In the end, I suspect the interest for contribution to mozilla is with platform providers, e.g., AOL, who do not want access to their platforms controlled by their competitors. Note, a number of OSS projects have moved to corporate sponsorship congruent with this view, e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and even Apache.
So, mozilla might find its real success as a neutral technology that can be adapted across a number of platforms by value-added integrators. It will have to look for support to corporations whose interest is in having neutral access technologies for their platforms.
I'd recommend sticking with Opera 7, even though it's still in beta, if you want to try Opera. It's way more standards-compliant than previous versions. Opera 7 even has better CSS2 support than any other browser according to some.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
again
The browser is excellent. At work, I use both IE and Mozilla (mainly because Windows launches IE when I click on a URL link in Outlook and I haven't been able to find out how to change that). Mozilla does a better job rendering complex pages. Take a page with a big table that uses CSS to control the layout. Mozilla is able to display the table progressively (i.e. display the rows as the data arrives at the browser) while IE seems to need to wait for the entire table to arrive. IE also crashes trying to print out that page if the table is big enough to take more than 2 or 3 paper pages.
Mozilla also has tabbed browsing, a popup blocker, etc. etc. The only area I have noticed where Mozilla still lags is in some DHTML (JavaScript/DOM) stuff. For example, pages that implement animation using DHTML can be much slower than IE.
The Mozilla Mail/News client, on the other hand, has not been so successful, in my opinion. For example, the last time I tried to use it, it would do strange things when I tried to insert blank lines between quoted lines in a reply.
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it?
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
See users switch. Switch, users, switch! See RMS fume. Fume, RMS, fume.
If you have to brainstorm ways of getting users to switch to your very-slightly-different application, the game is already over and you lost.
No popups, no Javascript, no 0wN0RZing. When Mozilla gets better than IE 3.0, call me. And please shut up about the tabs. Hide task bar much?
Mozilla for Mac OS X is a nice browser and it gets better everyday, but I still think that in terms of speed it lags behind Internet Explorer. Chimera on the other hand is the fastest web browser I've ever used and it renders websites just about as well as IE. Its light, its fast, its cocoa, if you are using OS X you owe it to yourself to at least check out this amazing browser. I feel that its the most exciting thing happening on the OS X platform right now. Now all we need is for Chimera to reach a final version so Apple can bundle it with OS X and new Macs that are sold. Think about it: Apple's license with Microsoft has expired, so they don't even need to ship IE anymore, although I'm sure they will continue just because IE is the standard. Chimera is a cocoa product which is exactly what Apple has been emphasizing for its speed and usability. Whatever the case is, the future looks bright for this amazing browser!
Everything you say, but gulp them down ... NOW!
The bug was eventually fixed, but simply writing and testing it once wouldn't have worked.
Yeah, it's so much easier, but you're ignoring reality. Browsers have bugs, and if you don't test it in the browsers that are *actually* in common use, you're asking for trouble. Even if it works in an early version of IE, Microsoft (and even the Mozilla project) have broken things in later versions which worked in earlier versions."Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Except - of course - where IE acts retarded. For example, with CSS text sizing - without a doctype it's one size too big, and on IE5 it's too big with a doctype.
Paint Timeout is too high in the current stable versions. This is why Phoenix works so fast in rendering. Hopefully, the next stable version will have this fix. Here's the copy of Mozilla thread in newsgroup:
n etscape.public.mozi lla.performance
_ bug.cgi?id=1 80241
:: markus
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Great performance tuning pref setting
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 18:16:37 +0100
From: Markus Hübner
Organization: Another Netscape Collabra Server User
Newsgroups:
netscape.public.mozilla.win32,
References:
Olaf Dietsche wrote:
> Markus Hübner writes:
>
>
>>Jonathan Arnold wrote:
>>
>>>>>http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show
>>>>>is highly interesting!
>>>>
>>>>Can't wait for the pref additions to try it out, looks interesting.
>>>
>>>It's in Moztweak.
>>>
>>
>>cool - but it would be really needed to tune the default value.
>>the "standard mozilla user" doesn't have Moztweak nor does the typical
>>Netscape (Gecko embedded browser) user.
>
>
> Well, every user has an editor. You can put the following line
> into prefs.js or user.js:
>
> user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 500);
>
> I tested this with various values, but couldn't see any difference
> until I tried:
>
> user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
>
> This is in sync with:
>
>
> Regards, Olaf.
Thx for the pointer to mozillazine, Olaf!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine)."
u ncement
<br>
However, Chimera has been around for almost 10 years:
<br>
<i>
<pre>
From: John D. Kilburg (john@unlv.edu)
Subject: [comp.infosystems.www] Athena Web browser announcement
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Date: 1993-12-17 09:00:34 PST
Archive-Name: auto/comp.infosystems.www/Athena-Web-browser-anno
This is an announcement for Chimera. Chimera is a Web browser
which uses the Athena widgets instead of the Motif widgets.
Currently it supports HTML but not HTML+ (this means no forms).
The NCSA HTML widget is used by Chimera to display HTML.
The current version is 0.9f. There are still a lot of things to be
done but it seems to work fairly well.
It works on Suns, DECstations, RS6Ks, Apollos, and
other machines. It works with X11R4 and R5. It doesn't
work on Linux boxes or SGIs but this should change in the next
few days.
You can grab the distribution at
ftp.cs.unlv.edu:/pub/chimera/c9f.tar.gz.
Send comments/suggestions/bug reports to bug-chimera@cs.unlv.edu.
-john"</i>
</pre>
So is this Mozilla based version a rewrite or a lift of the name?
Mozillazine had a blurb about it. Here's the full text:
This _has_ to be good for mainstream acceptance when such non-tech-oriented magazines like Playboy laud Mozilla so greatly. Maybe if other general living and style magazines adopt such a positive attitude, we'll see a surge in Mozilla adoption. Hey, maybe its wishful thinking but if nothing else, it's increasing awareness.
P.S. -- Consider this proof that I *DO* read the articles. :-P
It was a carefully considered decision. The delay is there to reduce paint redraws on complex pages. While the delay may need to be retuned, it was set for a reason.
I often need to research several topics at the same time. For example, when a customer calls I may need to open a new topic. I open several instances of Mozilla, each with several tabs on one topic.
However, when Mozilla crashes, all instances of Mozilla browser and all instances of Mozilla mail disappear.
It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting the computer.
This is not a troll post!
2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... at least of Mozilla's current form.
The reason? AOL Communicator! I downloaded a beta version from www.datakill.com and I think, it has a bright future.
The reasons:
Yes it's true. Finally they got rid of the sluggish XUL interface and still being multi-plattform.
Phoenix (or whatever the future name will be) has helped, but Phoenix' interface is still somewhat slow compared to native Windows apps. Phoenix' GUI toolkit is also not fully aware of Visual Styles (skins for WinXP) - the menus look ''old school'', while the other apps have flat/skinned menus.
AOL Communicator (thanks to wxWindows) uses native widgets everywhere.
Quote from the included copyright-notice.txt:
AOL Communicator uses the following libraries and modules:
wxWindows libraries Copyright (c) 1998 Julian Smart, Robert
Roebling. The wxWindows source code, available under the
wxWindows Library License, Version 3, can be found at
http://www.wxwindows.org.
While the beta version does only consist of an eMail app and the Instant Messenger (compatible with AIM and ICQ), AOL is also developing a browser component.
If you have a look into the file ''AOL Communicator\locale\cat\ac_help.mo'', you can find the following strings (BTW, ''Photon'' is the codename for the Communicator):
About Photon Browser
Photon Browser is not currently your default browser.
Would you like to make it your default browser?
Oh yes, I can't wait for the final release. I hope there will be an open source version of it (without the AOL specific stuff like AOL Mail or the Instant Messenger - called Mozilla 2.0 or something like that), to allow porting it to other platforms.
Oh, BTW... I did an experiment and it worked: You can move the mail folder from Mozilla's profile directory to AOL Communicator's profile directory. All your mails stay intact.
Honestly, I don't know why the Mozilla/Netscape developers waste their time in creating a new toolkit (the one that Phoenix uses), if they should better convince their bosses from AOL to open the source of the Communicator.
PS: Thanks for reading this post and (hopefully) not modding me down as ''Troll'' :)
" By the end of the month, some industry researchers were reporting that Mozilla 1.0 had already achieved a 0.4 percent market share."
Anyone knows what is the market share for Mozilla and/or phoenix now a days?
[alk]
From O'reilly's, "Creating Applications with Mozilla", Page 326:
"Currently, remote Mozilla applications are not prevalent because development focuses on making the client applications as stable and efficient as possible. Therefore, this area of Mozilla development is largely speculatative. This chapter argues that remote applications are worth looking at more closely."
The Mozilla developers are focused on making another VB instead of providing remote HTTP-friendly GUI apps. That is where the real need is. The developers are getting away from webbiness, but that *should* be the focus of a browser.
I don't get it.
Table-ized A.I.
I believe that much of the website design for Mozilla.org is/was done by Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. He has a fondness for early 20th century Soviet propaganda styles that suffuses much of his work.
Also, there is a "revolutionary" quality to much of the Mozilla work, which the red star also harkens to.
mahlen
But if your code validates, and doesn't appear correctly in somebody's browser, it is the *browers* fault, NOT yours.
If I buy a fast-blow fuse and put it in a current-restricted fusebox, it'll blow *every* time (IIR electronics correctly). Dees that mean that
1) I'm an idiot for putting the wrong fuse in
OR
2) The Manufacturer was a dimwit for not allowing the system to take the wrong fuse
hmmm?
Mozilla does have a "Use Last Page Visited" as your start-up page option. Unfortunately, it doesn't do multiple tabs or multiple windows. I would think it would be an extension of this. Have you looked to see if it's been suggested in Bugzilla? If it hasn't, have you suggested it? Fortunately, Mozilla rarely crashes on me these days.
Look at Recall. Also, there are plans to include automatically saving the current tab session continuously with MultiZilla.
Have you ever held a job before, for longer than two weeks?
Youre not understanding the Playboy article: its promoting Mozillas qualities as a porn browser, not as a general use browser; just notice the features they highlight in the article and consider what kind of audience Playboy has. I guess we can assume you wont ever read in a general living, or style, magazine about how great Mozilla is when you want to jerk off to pictures of scantily dressed girls.
Oh, and heres a link to the Pornzilla project -- theyre the ones whove been putting pressure on the developers (and contributing some code too) to make Mozilla a wonderful browser for all the perverts out there.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Over five years ago, people were proclaiming that Linux "had failed" to make a dent in the server market.
Show me the quote. No one has EVER claimed that Linux "failed" in the server space. It has only ever been invisible or a success.
"It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting the computer. "
Galeon does across tabs. Now across multiple instances. I don't know.
It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.
HTML Validation only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.
CSS validation has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.
In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)
(I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)
Forgot to add to the previous comment - I mean as in "small" and "x-small", not other forms.
It continues the same old lie that validation guarantees rendering.
And "Gayest Troll"
First, I started using Mozilla when I did my first experiment with migrating to alternate OS's last July ( FreeBSD was the OS ), and I when I found there was a Windows version of it, I was hooked. Here are my list of pluses and minuses that stand out in my mind: 1. Tabbed Browsing - I do a lot of research on the web, mostly because I have yet to find a highly portable electronic reference that I can take with me anywhere on any computer I happen to be using. What I do is open a 1-2 Google windows, run my searches, and then examine the hits to see if any of them have what I am looking for. I am pretty sure this is how I 'accidently' found slashdot :). Having the resulting 8-12 web sites I am referencing in a tabbed interface is VERY convenient.
2. Privacy Control - The control over stored passwords, cookie storage, javascripts, popup windows, etc. replaces multiple applications I used to use for these features. These are nothing short of outstanding features IMHO.
3. Miscellaneous - I am discovering more cool features as I go along. 2-3 weeks ago I discovered image-blocking, which kills most ads except for the flash ones, but then again. I have not and do not plan on installing flash anyhow.
Minuses:
1. Data portability - I have a dual-boot workstaion at home (in addition to my servers ), and my work's laptop that I try to keep the bookmarks and email in sync so I can access the same information wherever I am at. Note: I am looking at researching a web interface for my qpopper server, that would help with the email sync.). So far this has been a total pain in Mozilla. First, I have yet to find any email import/export tools, and the "Manage Bookmarks" tool doesn't work the way I would like it to. What I mean is when I import bookmarks, I would like it to do a differential import. For example, say I have a bookmark folder called "java" on two computers. They start off in sync with the same too url's in the folder. If I add a url to the folder on computer A, export it, and then import it to computer B, I would expect computer B's corresponding folder to now have the original 2 url's plus the 3rd one I added to A. Instead, Mozilla (1.2.1 even ) will add a horizontal divider to the bookmark list, create a copy of the 'java' folder and the 3 url's I imported. I can fix this manually, but why should I have to? To be safe Mozilla could let me choose how it handles the import, to give user to get the desired results. I could copy bookmark files between them, but this could potentially erase bookmarks that I put on computer B that were not one computer A at the time I was importing bookmarks from computer A to computer B.
2.Support Forums - To tell you the truth, I can't tell if these even exist or not. I was looking for help on the email import problem and followed the Mozilla's web site link to it's newgroups forums. I shouldn't have wasted it my time. None of the forums looked to be end user support ( Q&A ) related, and when I posted to one that seemed to be the closest thing to this ( after searching it
to see if the question had already been asked ) I got flamed for posting in a developer-only group even though there was no indication that that is what it was for ( i.e. the word 'developer' or similiar were not in the newgroup name. What is worse yet is that not one of the flames said "YOu idiot, you should have know tech support questions get posted here !", so after all the time they spent flaming me, I still have no idea where I should have posted my question. How about they put up a nice web-based searchable and archivable set of Mozilla forums with each forums focus clearly identified by the title ( or the forum description text ). Sorry newgroup-lovers, nothing against newsgroups, but my experience with them has been nothing but negative.
3. Bookmark Sorting - Why can't I have all my Bookmarks sorted in alphanumeric order? Inside of bookmark manager I can do this, but once I leave the manager window my bookmarks go back to being unsorted. Maybe there is a big sign on the toolbar saying "click here to sort your bookmarks", but I am not seeing it.
4. Memory Hog ( Windows Version ) - This has been mentioned before, but I would like to note that it seems to have been fixed now that I am using version 1.1 on my work laptop, older version seem to get unresponsive after being open for extended periods of time and when I checked resources in use, it averaged about 32MB. I have not experienced any lagginess with the Linux versions, but then again that may be because Linux is such a zippy( fast ) OS anyhow.
In conclusion, I could have included a list of things I would like to have added to the browser, but the topic is 'experience', and there you have it. Where I disgressed by saying "fix this, add that" was me just clarifying why I thought the problem was a problem. So please, no "off topic" flames.
Also, this is my second post on slashdot...ever. Hopefully you find this post informative. I expect that by my sixth post to have graduated to " In Russia, Mozilla Browses You!", but I am not quite there yet. Peace.
I can't afford a sig!
In my experience, I have removed serious structural errors from web pages, in pages that I wrote as well as in pages that other wrote, far more easily by validating the HTML instead of trying to check in different browsers. After validating, you can always go the extra mile and check the page in other browsers, but usually you don't even need to.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yikes, the post was in nice paragraphs in the editor, it came out as a stream of text and space characters. Next time I will use preview...so much for my second slashdot post. I will be more carefule next time.
I can't afford a sig!
I used IE for the longest time, but switched to Mozilla after a while mainly because of the increasing number of annoying popups. The tabbed browsing (and multiple tab bookmarks) got me hooked as well. However, Mozilla is just so slow. I can reduce startup time by keeping it in memory using the quick startup feature, but it is just not as responsive and snappy as IE (The mouse freezes momentarily when switching tabs sometimes, the back button loads pages slower, menus are ever so slightly slower). So, I've tried to go back to IE w/ a 3rd party popup blocker, but guess what? I can't. After using Mozilla for a few months, I just can't go back to IE. I miss the tabs and other features, and I just like the look and feel of Mozilla more. So, now I'm using Phoenix, which solves the startup time problem, but it is still as unsnappy as IE. Plus, now I need to find a good email/news client (any suggestions on that, btw?).
It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation
Don't you mean just *before*?
Otherwise you get:
set State = Fucked
Table-ized A.I.
I didn't say validating a page will guarantee it will look exactly the way you intended it to on all browsers. I said it would help ensure that it works. If your page breaks when the font size changes by one size, you've got bigger problems than invalid HTML!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Happy new year.
After every operation, like loading a web page, but before it crashes.
Does that mean that they should have just ignored Mozilla? Quite to the contrary. Instead of the several thousand dollars I would have spent on books over that period, I only spent a few hundred--on books I couldn't easily get on another web site. When I did need to order from them, I'd drag myself over to my Windows laptop after looking long and hard elsewhere. And I still don't trust their web site and avoid it when I can.
From this I found a few interesting things. The first, which is encouraging, is that it seem to be working. The percentage of people who visit my site using Mozilla started rising sharply. I went from about 1% to almost 5%. The second thing, which is curious, is that a lot less people are actually using IE than you might think. My server logs show that about 80% of my visitors use IE, but only about 40% get the popunder. My conclusion is that there are a lot of browsers out there that fake the user agent, or many people have found a way to disable popunders in IE. (have javascript disabled, or some such).
If you want the code to do the popunder so you can advertise mozilla on your site, its easy to grab the Javascript from my home page, just view source.
If there is a number at all, I'd say IE usage is probably in the low 80s, with the rest split among Mozilla, embedded browsers, and a few other players. No serious business can design only for IE, and no serious business has to anyway.
Mozilla doesn't often crash, as you say. It crashes (for me) only when there are a lot of instances of Mozilla running with a lot of tabs and I am typing rapidly or choosing menu operations rapidly. The crash problem seems to be caused by a buffer of operations being overrun.
The crashing may be associated with the known problems of Windows XP when the OS is operating close to the limits of installed memory, and it beginning to use virtual memory.
Gartner has since removed their report from the web. ;-)
;-) )
Note that I DO remember people saying "linux is dead on the server" - People seem to confuse "only just getting started" with "dead" a lot.
Linux is my Desktop OS. Linux is already used on the Desktops of Engineers, Doctors, Lawyers, Scientists and Developers. And my Home desktop, and loads of my friends+family. Linux is only just getting started on the "Home Desktop", it is has already entered the "Managed Desktop" space in Organisations worldwide.
I am real, as a far as I can tell. I have multiple copies of multiple versions of source and binaries of lots of linux distros. I have the requisite technical knowledge to cope with the core system.
Therefore, Linux CANNOT be "Dead on the desktop" - since even if everyone else in the world stopped using linux tomorrow, I could keep it going and I would, at least until HURD-L4 was ready
True - but many people would consider that "broken" - after all, it's not much good if noone except IE users can read the content!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Very interesting. It's good to see that something is being done.
Screenshots (remove any spaces from URL)
http://chimera.mozdev.org/screenshots.html
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Note that I DO remember people saying "linux is dead on the server" - People seem to confuse "only just getting started" with "dead" a lot.
I can't even find an instance of someone saying that on Usenet by searching via Google. If some lamer never even said it on Usenet, I think it's safe to say that it wasn't something that was said very much.
Feel free to see if you can find someone saying it.
Netscape 7.01, which is based on Mozilla technology, is actually a very nice browser.
Well there is one problem though: it has a bad habit of expiring "cookies" in only a few days. Whenever I save settings for online message boards under Netscape 7.01 it would stop saving that cookie after at most 4-5 days; does anyone know how to stamp out that problem? =(
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
[Oh, so they are making a feature-poor VB?] Yeah, they are. And if anyone bitches about Mozilla as a web browser, some slashdotter steps up and says "It's not really a web browser! It's actually a feature-poor VB!^W^Wcross-platform dev framework!"
The Emacs Syndrome has crept into the Mozilla circle it seems.
Again the hubris of creating YA toolkit, except this one doesn't have documentation, an IDE, or any industry support. And it's from AOL to boot.
I wonder if anybody thought about all this, or it just sort of went this way on its own. Clone Delphi and (the best of) VB if you want a client/server kit. (Alghough I have kicked around ideas for a remote version of such tools. I just don't have the budget to pay East Indians to build it.)
Table-ized A.I.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
In other words, friendly_fire, you've linked to one of your own pro-MS posts at the NYT?
This is just as I've suspected all along -- you're nothing more than a ringer, trying to make pro-OSS people look bad by association.
Back on topic: I think Moz rocks, the only time I use MSIE anymore is to see what's broken in it that I have to do workarounds for after creating standards-compliant pages. Pretty ironic considering that MS was first to market with a CSS implementation back in '96, and now there's huge chunks of the CSS-2 spec they don't even implement that make CSS really powerful.
For example, say you want to make all text inputs and textareas have a background colour of light yellow, but you want submit and reset buttons to be silver-grey. Using attribute selectors in Mozilla (see the CSS-2 spec), you can accomplish this with 2 lines of CSS only, with no additions to your markup required:In MSIE, you have to do this with class selectors and then assign class attributes to all your input and textarea tags.
And yes, tabbed browsing is da bomb -- it's completely changed how I use the Web (for the better).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
>a lot less people are actually using IE than you ...
>might think. My server logs show that about 80% of
>my visitors use IE, but only about 40% get the
>popunder. My conclusion is that there are a lot of
>browsers out there that fake the user agent,
Opera 7.0 is set by default to identify itself as MSIE 6.0. This can be switched back to identify as Opera (or even Mozilla) but most users won't bother.
-- This
I'm doing something similar on my webpage: a simple Javascript that will display a friendly warning message to IE users:
/ ">Netscape,</a> ');
var strBrowser = navigator.userAgent;
if (strBrowser.indexOf("MSIE")> 0) {
document.write("<p><strong>");
document.write("Warning: you appear to be viewing this page with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which has numerous bugs and ");
document.write('<a href="http://www.nwnetworks.com/iesc.html"> security holes.</a>');
document.write(" It is recommended that you upgrade to a more secure browser, ");
document.write('such as <a href="http://www.mozilla.org">Mozilla,</a> ; ');
document.write('<a href="http://home.netscape.com/computing/download
document.write('or <a href="http://www.opera.com">Opera.</a>');
document.write("</strong></p>");
}
> If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.
Then you run into porting issues. You wind up either (a) having to port your interface code or (b) not porting to platforms that you otherwise could. Since Gecko parses XUL directly, all you have to do is compile Gecko for your target platform and -- ta-daaa! -- you've got the GUI. In addition, XUL makes it dead easy for non-C++ types to write interface enhancements. XUL has the potential to do for GUI application development what HTML did for document creation.
(Which is quite possibly the very reason why so many C++ developers slag it so much...?)
Since one of the stated goals of Mozilla is to provide a browser that behaves the same way on as many platforms as possible, XUL seems to me a very good thing. It's already fairly mature, and just because you see a widget behave in a certain fashion doesn't mean that's the only behaviour it can have. If you don't like any of the available themes, learn XUL and write a better one.
If you think XUL is too slow, dig into the Mozilla source and figure out how to make it run faster.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
" And your boss is going to care... why, exactly? If you write perfect code that doesn't display properly in any version of IE, do you think they're going to accept the excuse that "It's IE's fault, it's buggy?" No, they're going to tell you to fix it so that it looks right in IE. I agree with you -- it is the browser's fault that it doesn't render things properly, but the people in charge don't care about that. They just want it to look right for their customers. Be realistic."
Realistically has that attitude ever solved a problem? Treat the symptom, not the illiness.
Realistically have the individuals who've adopted such an attitude ever had to clean up the resulting mess? Realistically will they ever have to face the music? Realistically what effect does all the above have on humanity getting the most out of its technological progress? Or having progress for that matter?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
When Mozilla gets better than IE 3.0, call me.
Call you what ?
Lame?
Mozilla passed IE6 by months ago.
Try using "em" units to specify font size. It's worked for me so far -- looks the same on all browsers: IE6, IE5, IE5.5, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera.
We didn't really get much out of that anti-trust suit, but the ability for vendors to bundle non-MS stuff is important here.
Get companies like HP, Dell, E-Machines, etc, to pre-install Mozilla, alongside all of the products they bundle and have to pay for. Maybe even make Mozilla the default browser. Have them bundle Java and OpenOffice while they're at it.
The most important audience is new users. All the computers at my school have both IE and Netscape, and most of the students and teachers just open whichever one they're familiar with.
If I leave a Netscape or Mozilla window open on a shared computer, my friends continue using that window to open some other page. When the window is eventually closed, my friends will always open IE to start surfing. They don't think there's a big difference between the two, but they'll always click on the IE logo.
I suspect that if a new user were presented with Mozilla first, they wouldn't bother to download IE . Microsoft is well aware of that, which is what started the whole Windows/IE bundling thing.
Try to get computing magazines and games to bundle Mozilla.
The one thing annoying about Mozilla is that it's terribly slow on my older machines (400mhz and less), but any new computer is more than capable of running Mozilla as fast or faster than IE.
It's no wonder I still use IE.
This bug has gone unfixed http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48037
100,000 bugs have passed in it's time!!!
Another Opensource project failing because developers ignore user interface issues over features for the minority.
Youre not understanding the Playboy article: its promoting Mozillas qualities as a porn browser, not as a general use browser ...maybe it's not general use, but it sure is a general *audience* with everything from rednecks to PHBs to horny teens. And once installed, you'll start using it for other browsing too.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
n/t
I used IE for years, and a few monthes ago someone finaly convinced me to try another browser (IE 6 had been crashing a ton for me). After using Phoenix, I don't think I will ever be able to turn back. It's highly unfinished and is missing a lot of stuff right now. But not once in 3-4 monthes has it crashed. That's with browsing at least 1-2 hours every day if not 4-5 hours. Not a single crash. (Running build 0.4) Now I recomend at least giving it a try, if for nothing else but the stability.
ah..well.. you use some funky terms. virtual memory means all memory space addressable to the kernel, which is physical ram + swap space. swap space is not virtual memory, all memory is. it's always using virtual memory.
Good product, but bad support just like commercial counterparts.
There are so many tiny 3yr old+ bugs in there now. These are mostly minor things which are really annoying - focus locking problems, missing accelerator keys, things that are always pushed 2 releases after the current one. Things that make a program 'polished' instead of just 'works'
It may take someone to spend 1-2 days to fix one, but nobody wants to do it. Not fun? But I thought we had at least SOME paid employees of AOL working here.
You'd think someone in charge would want to clear out a few of these problems quickly, but maybe we don't have any project managers volunteering there.
Are all big projects doomed to become things we love to hate?
I Nominate Cowboy Neal for the Gayest Troll.
I like mozilla - I'm using it right now. Tabbed browsing is what sells it for me. But you cant get away from using IE all the time - there are some sites that I have visited that just dont come out right in Mozilla. Now Iknow this is because he site author has used MS-specific stuff, but it means that for now at least its impossible not to keep a copy of IE around for those sites.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
It probably is not a good idea to be extremely demanding about the language used in Slashdot posts. I was typing very fast. Anyhow, I think that everyone knew what I meant: Windows XP seems to have problems when RAM begins is full and the OS begins using hard disk swap space.
i know, it was an anal post, the main reason i mentioned it is because *alot* of people seem to think that virtual memory == swap.
I'd take an Apple/Unix customer any day over a Dell user - Dell people are concerned with cost, Apple/Unix people are concerned with value.
I certainly would take an IE/MS user over a Linux user most days, simply because Linux users ARE NOT concerned with 'value', unless that value is measured in how much stuff is Free and free. Linux users (not saying Unix, but Linux) are far more concerned with money/cost/price than anyone else I've ever met.
P.S. Those Apple people who can't burn or even watch VCDs are concerned with value for money?
creation science book
You don't mention which version of Windows you are on but this may help:
In IE go to Tools -> Internet Options... -> Programs and make sure that "Internet Explorer should check whether it is the default browser" is unchecked.
In Mozilla go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> System and make sure that http and HTML documents are selected.
If you are using Windows 2000 (possibly with service packs) go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Set Program Access and Defaults and make sure Use my current browser is set.
The fact you could not find a forum to post your question is is not so surprising (there is a whole debtate on the "Mozilla is not for the end users" speech).
;). I used to hang out in the #mozillazine irc channel myself when I had the time and before my University blocked irc...
Personally over the years I've found that mozillazine is the most helpful place to go for non developers. There tend to be enough people there who are friendly to both tech and non-techs (thus you end up with a group of people who know the answers and are willing to tell you them
Concerning the memory hog alegations under Windows I feel your pain. For whatever reason Mozilla always seems to be swapped out of memory when left idle for a few minutes which doesn't help it's responsiveness. Hopefully the phoenix (it's still beta but coming along nicely) will help to solve the memory issues.
taskbar... whats that?
btw.. ported IE 3.0 lately?
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
Here
And Here
My favourite is personally: This beautiful piece of art.
Well, you got 2 replies [1 + this 1], & 4 mods. I meta-moderated 1of the informative-moderations, & felt that it was fair. So, you have 6 people who saw this, & probably more. Rest assured, your thoughts made a difference--at least to me.
testing out my trending skills
The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an
"airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers
while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference --
one can see only a very few things at once.
-- Fred Brooks
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...