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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."
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.
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.
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!
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?
It goes like this:
x: here's a CD with mozilla
o: what does it do?
x: it's an internet browser, like IE, without the pop-up ads, and a mail client like outlook minus the viruses.
o: cool, i'll try it!
OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort. I bet that almost half of them are going to WANT to try it once they hear about pop-up blocking, and a good number of them will like tabbed browsing. They might even like type-ahead or gestures or google search in the location bar.
We are not talking about stuff like standards compatibility, personal data encryption, or being open-sourse that your average windows user could not care less about. Mozilla has cool features, and is reasonably easy to use. Sure, it's a little slow, but that is becoming less and less of a problem, as cpu speeds go up and mozilla gets more optimized/ less bloated (think phoenix).
Getting people to use linux is not as easy by a long shot: young peolpe who have plenty of free time and a desire to try things are instantly put off by the lack of games (and no, things like winex, don't cut it), while older people are VERY afraid to change their working enviroment (learning windows took them long enough, they sure as hell ain't changing now) no matter how much more stable/fast linux is. Plus, when trying to get people to use linux you probably have to help them back-up their files (think mp3), install linux and get it to a working shape, which takes a LOT of time, both yours and theirs.
Mozilla on the other hand takes 2 minutes to install, 5 minutes (with mailnews) to configure and one minute to tell people to middle/ ctrl click to open tabs.
So yes, i do believe that mozilla has an easier job than linux in getting to the end-users desktop.