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Mozilla Project Turns 5
GreyWolf3000 writes "As this notice in tinderbox shows, Mozilla turns five years old today. A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use. The trunk is feature frozen for the upcoming alpha release for 1.4. Can't wait to see what's in store next!" Read on for another odometer reading -- Mozilla's 200,000th bug report, perhaps just as auspicious a landmark.
zzxc writes "The 200,000th bug has been filed in Mozilla's bugzilla, MozillaZine reports. It was filed at 5:11pm EDT. (21:11GMT) The bug, which is already 'verified invalid,' is 'MailNews crashes after extremely long 'joke of the day' html spam mail.' This comes on the 5 year anniversery of the release of Netscape's source code, also reported by MozillaZine. Bug 100000 was opened on 9/16/01 after three years of development, while bug 200000 comes in less than 19 months from the previous milestone."
0.6 is meant to be released RSN, they're going to announce the new name shortly, in fact.
Just have some patience, and hopefully it'll be worth it!
Lets see who have I converted...
;-). I did turn a few people online to Phoenix and Mozilla with some luck though. I guess it's easier to convert those you personally know... so go celebrate 5 years and convert some more people over!
My Dad. Hated popups. Instead of giving him a popup blocker for IE I just installed Mozilla for him and switched his Outlook to Mozilla Mail/News. It did a fine job of importing his contact list. He got nimda through an email which infected his machine when he was using Outlook, so I explained to him that with MozMail he'd be ok. After several months use he loves it. No more bad popups for him while browsing, and email has been just fine.
That's my only personal success story, maybe if I got out more often
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Check out my blackbox styles
Mozilla's successes have almost all been side effects. An open bug database is one of the most revolutionary development practices that I have ever seen. Because of Bugzilla, Mozilla has far more useful features than it otherwise would have. If users hadn't been able to get through to developers I doubt that Mozilla would have popup and image blocking.
Mozilla's release schedule with nightly builds has also been a huge sucess. Mozilla has more people testing very recent versions than any other peice of software I know. Mozilla is now the most stable browser I have ever used, and I don't doubt that the nightly builds (and some talented developers) are the reason.
Hopefully now that Mozilla is very popular it will attract enough outside developers so that Netscape's original dream of no cost development to win the browser war. There are still some hurdles for developers though. Mozilla is a complicated project with a significant learning curve. It relies on some specific technologies such as XUL and XCOM which don't yet have large numbers of developers.
As said by jesus_x@mozillanews.org in that story... (reposted as AC)
"Look, this got way too much coverage. I'm the originator of the bug and the sink. The r= and sr= were removed until someone fixes the patches so this builds only in Mozilla. about:kitchensink will not work in ANY Mozilla distribution yet. Nor will it unles it's fixed.
As for IE sucking a log on this, well, it's 100% valid XHTML and CSS with decent DOM use, so I'm not surprised IE won't view it."
http://www.apple.com/safari
Where's the non-Mac version?
Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom.
That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.
Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware.
The banner is only "huge" if you're running at 640x480... And it's not scumware, either; the browser reports no information about your computer to Opera. You can also customize what types of banners are shown; in fact, I have a friend who paid for Opera and actually keeps the banner on because he frequently sees banners for products he's interested in.
It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.
I can't say about Safari, since I can't use it, but Opera 7 is still the fastest browser I've used, and 6 is only marginally slower. "Capable" is a relative term, but I've yet to see another browser that has features such as integrated mouse gestures (gotta have a plugin for Mozilla), a quick-preference menu (pressing F12 brings up a list of the most handy preferences), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).
It also has better user-defined CSS support than other browsers I've seen. It even comes with a number of pre-defined CSS layouts that do interesting things such as emulate text-only browsers, outline structural elements on a page, remove tables, hide only non-linking images, and so forth. Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe one of the Mozilla offshoots can do this, but I haven't seen any other browser).
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Computer Science is Applied Philosopy...
I couldn't agree more. As a software engineer with ~15 years experience... and a BA in Philosophy.
Indeed, I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.
(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.
-pyrrho
The solution should be a selectable option of:
A: Display the blank page
B: Blank page with your URL set as a link
C: No connection page but still has your URL in the location bar.
D: Some fancy page you would like; in particular a search engin with the URL in the search field. This should be customized so you can say the web form variable X will contain the URL or better yet be able break it down to some componets as well.
just a thought
I run a small computer consulting business and every machine that goes out the door has Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.
:)
Every costomer I visit gets an introduction to Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.
Every support call I get about an "email" virus gets the "it's not an email virus is't an outlook virus" lecture. try Mozilla.
About 1/3 of the people I talk to blow me off for one reason or another. Ya know familar with IE+LookOut. Don't like change. Hit a website/use software that needs IE+LookOut.
But the next 1/3 (approx) at least use Mozilla or OOo on a semi regular basis with MSoffice and IE+Lookout.
The last 1/3 uses either Mozilla or OOo as their primary tools.
I have found that Home/small office users are the most convertable, for easy reasons. If it is a larger office they have funny, industry specific software that needs IE+LookOut or have dropped big $$$ for several copies of MSoffice and don't want to abandon the "investment".
So for all you evangelists out there your best bet for conversion are SOHO/Home users. Get em before they are brought into the fold.
OK so not exactly earth shattering statistics, but at least helpful, I hope. If anyone has further info pls post back.
Doin' my part to restore balance to the force.
The guys at KDE have written their own browser with no company backing them...
Indeed. When you think about it, they've actually gone the opposite direction of Mozilla in that sense. Mozilla was initiated by a company, and picked up by the open source community. Konqueror was initiated by the open source community, and picked up by a company. :)
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
I think that as an organization and community the mozilla.org deserves the credit - they were able to see themselves through the dot com bust, the economic recession and ofcourse the increasing share of IE , to go on. They had the spirit and tenor to go on.
-people care about the application;
-the application is held to a high standard;
-there will soon be 200,000 things anout which we do not have to worry.
Konqueror is a much better example of open source at work, and it matured much faster than Mozilla.
Really? Konqueror supports more of the standards and the existing web than Mozilla does and they did it in a shorter period of time? Got measures?
How old is Konqueror. I see posts about KHTML from dev newsgroups going back to at least 1998.
--Asa
The long time in between releases of Internet explorer has me a bit concerned for Mozilla. It just seems odd that they haven't even come out with 6.5 yet, let alone 7.0. I have heard rumors and the like, but I don't but a lot of faith in those. What I fear is Redmond is sitting back, and watching every move the Mozilla community makes. Then the popular stuff, they are putting into their browser. I would be shocked if that haven't added tabs to the development code yet. On my XP machine I.E. is my primary browser, and I do like how it runs on Windows since it really does run most websites best. I agree many are poorly coded, but there isn't much I can do about that. On my Powerbook though I use Camino and Safari.