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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."

6 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Chimera by selderrr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 !

  2. I used IE by Apreche · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  3. You can! by friedegg · · Score: 5, Informative
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    Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
  4. Re:a year ago by PovRayMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    My greatest accomplishment was converting my Dad to Mozilla from Outlook and IE. To easily sum up the story here are a few key points.

    1.) He was able to import his Outlook stuff into Mozilla Mail no problem.
    2.) All he needed was a spelling checker plugin for the mail client (Got one from Mozdev) and it was 100% perfect for him.
    3.) Mozilla "Imported" his many hundreds of bookmarks which he definatly needed.
    4.) The built in popup blocker has worked wonders for him.
    5.) He has Mozilla sit in the system tray so he doesn't notice any load up delays.

    When I was converting my Dad to Mozilla I showed him how much better it is and he definatly agreed. He asked a few questions about how to make some things work and I got him up and running no sweat. Ever since he got klez because of Outlook (Partially his fault, yadda yadda yadda..) he believes that Mozilla Mail is greater since he now doesn't worry (for the most part) about mail viruses.

    So if you wanna convert someone, start with a family member.

  5. Re: Validation by dbaron · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...)

  6. Tired of IE users. by DeadSea · · Score: 5, Informative
    I got tired of folks visiting my website using IE. I use Mozilla when develop and I code to standards. There have been numerous cases when I've had to regress something because IE doesn't do it right. In any case, I did a popunder ad for Mozilla for those that are using IE.

    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.