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Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape, And Their Future At AOL
bluephone writes "I've been lucky enough to receive some interesting information from within the Netscape/AOLTW firewall, although in light of AOL's recent massive losses, poor outlook, and high profile execs resigning their positions, I'm not sure if these battle plans are still intact. As it stands, Netscape 7.x has one major release left for the forseeable future, but Gecko will soon overshadow everything, becoming the core platform for all of AOL's Internet content distribution. For all the details and much more, read it here."
Just parse it, and fix the errors. One thing that caught me off guard was you *can't* use & in an ancor tag. Example: is invalid. Where you would use &, instead use . Also always use ALT. I have few images, and most of the ones I have are non-repeating BG's of carfully created table cells (I've got my reasons) but it is important.
Oh, and I didn't put that ; at the end of my tag up there, Slashdot is messed.
Actually there are quite a few. Off the top of my head, try going here and here. These sites deliberately keep you out if you're using anything other than IE. I assume you've heard of these cars?
Do not read this
Glad to see you not succumbing entirely to the Borg. However, check out Bluefish sometime. It does a lot of what you mentioned with the other obvious side-effects (gpl, gtk1 and gtk2 ports, etc.) Dunno if there is work to port it to win32.
(this is my understanding of it, I could be wrong)
Mozilla is an Open Source browser, based on the Open Source rendering engine (platform/middleware) Gecko.
Thus Mozilla is the interface, while Gecko does the work.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Earthlink's new Webmail requires IE6's incarnation of javascript. As a result, it does not work in Netscape 4.7x (the most prominent *installed* NS userbase). It only sorta works in NS4.80 and Mozilla. -- This caused much screaming in the earthlink.complaints newsgroup, to no avail.
h tm -- beware the slashdot space.)
:)
I'm told by a Bank of America customer that BofA's site requires IE to manage your bank account. I've heard that this is the case also for some other banks (someone hereabouts mentioned CitiBank). Irony: banks requiring use of IE for "security reasons"!!
Verizon and SoCalEdison sites were evidently only tested with IE; account management doesn't work in any version of NS or Mozilla that I tried. (For a longer rant on the subject, see 7.15.02 entry on http://home.earthlink.net/~rividh/asylum/wartime.
One problem I've seen is that frequently complaints about a website are seen ONLY by the webmaster -- who may well ignore any complaints that he doesn't feel like addressing. Hence when it's a seriously big deal, I now copy any complaints to sales, investor relations, and any other prominently "this involves money" mailtos I can locate.
[rant] It's considered good marketing wisdom that a meatspace store must ensure that no more than 5% of potential customers cannot readily use the store. Yet these same companies don't see any problem with their online presence being inaccessable to anywhere from 20% to 80% of potential customers, depending on which browsers their site excludes. What's wrong with this picture?? [/rant]
(I wrote this yesterday, but a glitch ate it before it could get posted. Hope I remembered everything on the rebound.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Is Gecko actually a good thing?
Er, yes? Gecko is the best renderer out there by a LONG way. It's the de facto standard on Linux according to my site stats, and for good reason.
When Apple were looking for a browser core to use for Safari, they chose khtml over gecko, because it's cleaner.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I think that was a dumb mistake. OK, so they made that decision over a year ago, when Mozilla 1.0 wasn't yet out, and the code was much worse than it is now.
Nonetheless, there are a few things people should bear in mind about this:
Firstly, the idea that because Gecko was complex, it couldn't be used in a web browser, is a dumb one. Apple have put a lot of effort into bringing KHTML up to scratch, but Gecko was already there. So, if the Galeon, Epiphany, K-Meleon and Pheonix teams can make good browsers based on it, why can't Apple? Apple have way more resources than the Galeon team. Gecko is already one of the most advanced renders out there, they wouldn't even have needed to touch most of the code.
Secondly, KHTML is still way way immature compared to Gecko. It only recently got support for XML (basic support only). It's still catching up in terms of core standards compliance, and forget about stuff like XSLT, MathML, etc. That's not to bash KHTML, what's there is good, but in terms of usefulness in browsing the web, Gecko owns it. On my site, over 50% of the hits come from Gecko based browsers, something like 40% from IE and I think about 3-4% from Konqueror. KHTML and Gecko have been choices on Linux for a long time, yet most seem to use Gecko.
To be honest, I think they chose KHTML because it was hard to make Gecko efficiently use the unusual Mac rendering model. Web browsing was really showing up the fact that Macs are slow these days, in ways that can't be disguised using hardware acceleration, or windowing system tricks etc. KHTML could be more easily hacked to get raw speed, which is clearly more important to them than features or website compatability.
I use Mozilla, and its memory usage when I last looked (yesterday) was 81MB. In contrast Opera was sitting at 10MB, rendering pages faster and supporting CSS better (Moz still doesn't support CSS counters, so I can't number headings automatically, for example.)
But Opera still has sucky DOM support (i think) etc etc. 81mb sounds very large indeed, I've never seen Moz use even half that. Bear in mind accurately measuring memory usage is hard with standard OS tools, as they usually don't adequately distinguish between shared libs etc.