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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."
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 ?
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!
Autoscroll extension for Mozilla/Phoenix as reported by Mozillazine.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
Well, lessee...
1) AOL Communicator is a pet project of a AOL VP who hates Netscape and wants the division to disappear. It's not clear to me how he thinks Gecko will get maintained after that.
2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.
The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens in the very near future...
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...)
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.