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Mozilla's Major New Roadmap
kerz writes "mozilla.org today released a new version of it's famed roadmap, this time with some pretty major changes. First and foremost, they plan on ditching the large Mozilla suite in favor of Phoenix and Minotaur. Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient. MozillaZine has the scoop..."
Nice to see a focus on keeping the engine and the codebase lean and mean. Good luck to em.
Good thing this was posted on April 2.
What's this 'Mozilla' everyone is talking about?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
1.Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the standalone Phoenix browser.
2.Develop further the standalone mail companion application to Phoenix already begun as Minotaur, but based on the new toolkit used by Phoenix (this variant has been codenamed Thunderbird).
3.Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.
4.Fix crucial Gecko layout architecture bugs, paving the way for a more maintainable, performant, and extensible future.
5.Continue the move away from an ownership model involving a large cloud of hackers with unlimited CVS access, to a model, more common in the open source world, of vigorously defended modules with strong leadership and clear delegation, a la NSPR, JavaScript, Gecko in recent major milestones, and Phoenix.
6. ???
7. Profit!
Ok, I admit to adding 6 and 7.
Trolling is a art,
it is about time they cut down the size of the package. Do we NEED chatzilla?
Wonder if this will help mozilla's memory footprint? Even for people like me who like to have the mail and browser open at the same time (hopefully they won't each take up X-ram)
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
Interested in AI? MACR
No more BLOATZILLA! All I need is a web browser not something that julian fries!
It's good to hear they are redefining their goals here. I think the majority of people would rather have a more stable Phoenix like browser.
Switching to this model will mean Pheonix is directly competing with Camino on Mac OS X, how could they possibly beat a Mac OS X native attempt?
Well, I just recently switched from Opera to Mozilla better java support). I have found it to be a bit more stable was well.
I hope the Pheonix version does as well.
This is a Good Thing, IMHO, as Mozilla itself was getting fat and bloated. Of the Mozilla step-children I like Pheonix the best and I'm glad to see that the Mozilla team has the self-honesty to realize the better way to go and ditch major portions of their established work.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
They're finally going to support Phoenix on OSX!
This is a big win for the Mac community imho. Camino is great, but there are barely enough developers to cover the front end, the main body of the Mozilla project being behind a cross platform Phoenix project is a Good Thing?.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I love Mozilla - it's my primary browser, gotta love pop-up-blocking! What I wish they would focus more energy on though is the mail client. I primarily use Netscape Messenger (netscape 4.79) for mail, and I know a lot of other people that do as well. The reason I can't/won't use Mozilla for mail yet is bugs. Basic bugs too - things I reported over 2 years ago, and they still aren't fixed yet. What kind of bugs am I talking about? For example, when you switch between IMAP mail servers, netscape messenger used to remember the last selected message from one mailbox to the other. Mozilla has never done this, but I keep getting updates that this bug is being worked on, or passed on to the next person. The other major bug I notice is that when I type in nicknames in the To and CC fields - 50% of the time, they get translated into the right email addresses, but other times they don't. My other major gripe about mozilla mail is the lack of an option to send just plain old plain text messages again. I don't want the headers of replies and forwards being turned into little graphics. I don't want symbols like ;) being turned into little smiley faces. I want to type in courier just like I can in Pine, or netscape messenger. I think more options with mozilla mail would make a lot of people happy...
I find it facinating that it at least appears that Mozilla is leading Netscape rather than the other way around. But I am left wondering how this will fit in with Netscape's future strategy. Will they continue with tradition and continue to release an all in one Internet suite, or will they begin to follow Mozila's path?
-- Kircle
Not so good at releasing software? Um, if Mozilla doesn't cut it, what is "good software" in your opinion?
sic transit gloria mundi
I thought you said, "the Mozilla forks" I wonder how that could have popped into my head?
1. Smaller
2. Faster
3. Less bloated
Less is more, in many, many things. Including software.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
The debian browser project, Webian Webian takes the expertise of the debian project with the kde project to create the ultimate web suite. It includes browser, Konqueror, and email client Kontact! Kafka, the fast wyswyg editor, Kopete the versitle chat suite and more! It's fast, It's free, It's the Webian web suite!
turn off the TV and log on to Slashdot and
there is that word again ! "Roadmap". !@#!@#
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
(Took me a minute to figure this out... Minotaur? Thunderbird? What?)
I already use Mozilla, and I'd love to see them toss out the suite thing, and create individual apps! Plus, anything that makes the engine quicker is good.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
How about a browser that doesn't noticably pause to think about it when you click on a menu item (or anything else for that matter) on a 650MHz/450MB machine?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Or perhaps this is just a way of disposing of the outstanding Mozilla bugs that no one is willing to fix? Just start a new product instead?
sPh
I'm glad the browser and mail client will be more separate. I always thought that was a big ineffiency to have one .exe that contains both of them (i know that shared libraries take some of that overhead but still).
Mozilla is the greatest piece of software ever.
I was wondering how they would justify taking 5 years before reaching 2.0. Now we know :)
Seriously though, good idea. I'd love to see the whole Mozilla project turned into a Gecko app and everything else be plugins! Now that'd be cool!
This is going to me instantly modded -1, flamebait, but I must say it!
Gecko sucks! Theres KHTML for X/OSX, MSHTML for win32, and the links engine for other systems. Gecko is far to bloated, unstable and the fonts are total crap! Just wrap phoenix around khtml already and be done with it!
This is lame. I *LIKE* the existing XPFE browser / application suite.
Phoenix is nice, the new standalone mail/news client will probably be nice as well, but I see no good reason for them to drop the application suite.
All this talk about how Mozilla is too big, too bloated, has too many features, etc., is a load of shit, IMHO. Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine. And if anything, there are still plenty of features that *should* be put into Mozilla, that the Mozilla.org folks refuse to implement, despite how many votes the RFE has, or how many people want it.
I say they should just keep developing Mozilla as it is, keep improving it, keep adding features, and let the people who want to work on Minotaur, Phoenix, whatever, do so.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Is this an attempt to battle the smaller, faster KHTML engine that Apple picked? Sounds like the Mozilla gang is a more miffed than previously believed.
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
I hope this is not a late April Fools'. I think this is the right direction to go since this way you can ease the maintainability of projects, make global structural choices in favor of specific effeciency and users can easily replace any component with a better alternative.
I think the idea of structurally integrated products is rotten from the start since it forces you to stick with the suite. Focusing on better interfaces for data extraction and program to program data exchange is a much more feasible way to achieve integration.
Props to the Mozilla team!
Mozilla originally took too much of its Netscape roots to heart. That is understandable, but its a very good thing that people were finally able to break from that past. Netscape Communicator was supposed to be all things.. Mozilla continued that track, but with a nicer rendering engine and snazzy features.
I don't personally I have a problem with the size of mozilla, but since I only use it for browsing, it will be really nice to get rid of the rest of this monolithic application.. but to have it available for when I want it.
The path it has set now reminds me of the KDE applications. The PIM/Mail suite has a great deal of functionality.. but you don't have to load it just to browse a web page. (Though many would argue that Konqueror also tries to be all things to all people..)
On Linux.. Mozilla and Phoenix are the way to go.. though on OS X, Safari is a really nice browser.
All they need to do is get rid of that XUL crap, and we'll be all set!
Why stop at MozillaExplorer and MozillaOutlook?
The Mozilla team really need to break Mozilla up into smaller, more focused parts. That is one area I will give Microsoft credit for - they made IE and Outlook seperate programs.
The ideal for Mozilla would be (IMHO) a browser, a mail client, a download client, an IM client, and a composer. Each should be replacable - I should be able to tie the browser into whatever download agent I want, have whatever email client I want be pulled up when I click on a mailto: link, etc.
I'd even go so far as to have a caching program that the browser and downloader could talk to (to unify the disk cache system), but then I already run Squid on my systems.
Of course, all the Moz bits could and should access the same DLLs (.so's) to keep the disk and memory footprint down.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Agreed that Mozilla is pretty nice as-is. Phoenix is nifty too, but I use Mozilla as my primary. And FWIW, I run Mozilla off-and-on on a 233MHz Pentium with 64MB RAM. Works fine, I must say, after GNOME or KDE finish loading.
...this doesn't mean another round of migration for my calendar, address book, task list, mail client, etc.
Especially when the system (Mozilla here) is completely customizable, and side projects are indeed developing quickly.
Why bloat is good, you may ask? The machines are reasonably fast these days, and users (ahem, let me say, just I) tend to spend significant time on the browser window, and mail window (and calendar, may be composer, etc). There is a common interface, one can upgrade everything at one shot (kinda like Redhat 8 and 9... you get everything updated). Makes life a little easier.
I would have complained had M$FT done the same thing. Why? because there would have been no choice then. With Mozilla, someone can customize and contribute a build that does exactly what a group of people need. Not so with the big company from Redmond.
Imagine being able to have a bunch of utilities (from mozdev.org) tightly integrated into one "application suite" (with options for people to run Phoenix, etc.) -- it is almost like having the cake and eating it too.
S
The RFEs you mention, will hopefully be things that are implementable as extensions to Phoenix - this will take some of the burden of feature enhancement requests off of the Mozilla.org folks and let others develop them independently.
That's not what it says. It does say one of its goals is :
Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.
Make risky changes to 1.5 and 1.6 Mozilla. That doesn't sound like ditching to me. The post and the Mozillazine blurb miss the jist of the document.
Phoenix... Minotaur... Thunderbird...
Looks like there's at least one person still playing Heroes of Might and Magic.
Wake me up when they announce that Gekko has become Basilisk. Oh, wait, I think that name's already taken.
see safari
That's what Camino, K-Meleon, and Galeon are for.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm not sure I understand, but
modulo shared libraries, dosent having two loaded GRE's increase the
memory bloat at the expense of disk bloat. Last I knew disk was much
cheaper than memory...
Phoenix extensions would seem to be the only way to go then..but why are phoenix extensions better than standard mozilla ones?
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
Ahh man! I am a big mozilla fan and am disgusted that this comes as news to me, I'm gonna get on IRC and do some bitchin. WTF is wrong with them? The big suite kicks ass, those motherfuckers are gettin lazier and lazier goddammit.
"I feel it is my duty to look at the porn that kids download before I delete it, to be sure what it is."--School Admin
These are not buzzwords. 'Strawman' is a common name for a typical logical fallacy -- quite CS and unbuzzwordly for me. For a great explanation of the difference between buzzwords and terms which serve a purpose look at this list, from tunes.org:
These are not buzzwords. Now, for comparison, here's a bunch of buzzwords:
The filesystem is the package manager
Seperate, single purpose tools that interoperate. Isn't that the UNIX philosophy?
I agree with you, but did you RTFA?
Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6.
(...)
the reasons for this new plan are:
1. Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism. (emphasis mine).
The idea is not to "drop" the suite, but to make it modular instead of hardwired.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Well, as long as the new browser has all the functionality of the old one, or anything it lacks in comparison can easily be "plugged in", I won't complain.
I think the main reason this whole thing bothers me, is because it appears to be yet another symptom of the freaking incredible egotism of certain people at Mozilla.org. Some people there seem to think that they are the only ones who know what is right or proper for Mozilla, and that nobody else's opinon matters.
In fact, I get the feeling that certain Mozilla.org individuals want to drop the current browser, not for purely technical reasons, but because it has too much contribution from the community at large, as opposed to the elitists at Mozilla.
Why do I say this, well look at this quote from the roadmap:
Another example of the high cost of app-suite integration is the inherently overloaded and complicated user interface (just one example out of too many: the File / New sub-menu). The target audience of the suite was never clear, and seemed to shift back and forth with prevailing business- and voluntary-contributor-driven winds.
and this quote from Hyatt's blog:
A common question is going to be, "I want to write code! Can I help?" The quick answer is, "If we need your help, we'll ask for it." The best way you can help is by building the products, testing them, making suggestions in newsgroups and mailing lists, and filing bugs.
Sounds like they're saying in essence "we don't need no stinkin' help from voluntary contributors, just let us build what *we* want to build, and you'll like it, whether you like it or not."
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Hm, I wonder to what extent this new roadmap is a reaction to Apple's decision to use khtml instead of mozilla as the basis for safari.
But the human mind is an interesting thing. I use Mozilla in Linux, and Opera in Windows (which I'm currently using). But because I'm seeing "Mozilla" in the title bar, my fingers seem to automatically be reaching for the mozilla shortcuts. ^L for address bar, middle-click to open a new tab, etc.
Interesting how a visual cue that I'm not even consciously aware of can have an effect on my behavious like that.
Last post!
I'm actually worried about this. Yeah, it seems weird and bloaty, but XUL can be insanely useful for quickly developing apps, especially internal web apps. Sometimes, the standard HTML form widgets just don't cut it. Plus, there's a heap of potentially cool new projects that have started using XUL which would be totally shafted if XUL disappeared.
Not that I think it will be dropped, but it would be a shame if it was.
I know there has been a lot of kvetching on /. about the integration of the browser, mail, etc thinking it is "bloated" and "slow". As long as they communicate well (and I do mean well), I don't really care if they are developed in a more modular fashion. That is not bad and is potentially very good.
What I'm most concerned about in the roadmap is the seeming focus on just the browser and the mail app. (Yes I realize the purpose of mozilla.org is not strictly to produce those apps but realistically, those apps are the main reason anyone cares about Mozilla) I use those heavily and anything that improves them is just ducky as far as I'm concerned. But just as important, and much more ignored IMO, are the address book and calendar. These are applications that almost everyone uses in some form. Obviously people choose other options (Outlook, etc) frequently but that's in part because the ones built into Mozilla are fairly bad. I use them because they are the only transparently cross platform option which is important to me. I use them all and if they were better I think many others might too.
Anyway , I see the browser, mail, address book and calendar as the four major applications that most users really need. The Mozilla browser (and I include Phoenix and Camino here) is great and is arguably the best on the market. But the other three apps have largely been ignored for some time. They have a basic level of capability but haven't been refined significantly in some time. I still have trouble sharing information with co-workers on different systems. I still cannot easily share data with the PDA of my choice. Mozilla could really make a lot of this stuff really transparent for users. I'd love to be able to not worry about OS for these four apps. Mozilla is better than halfway there but I'm not quite sure what this change in direction means.
I almost thought it was still the 1st.
*twitch*
Phoenix is a fabulous browser component. I like Mozilla, but I think that this is just what they need. They can start by skimming off each peice and the users can integrate each part of the suite at their own discretion. Mail programs can be built off of Mozilla's XUL interface, as can chat programs, etc. It's ideal for UNIX machines where libraries are most often shared. Phoenix is fast and stable. It's the future of the Mozilla browser, and I'm glad that they've made this decision. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just improve it. Mozilla is getting to be pretty good on its own, but still isn't nearly as practical as it *could* potentially be. Phoenix takes Mozilla and really strips down the crud; It even implements cool, new features along the way.
Don't forget size comparisons :)
... in the first place.
I know I'll loose points for this, but heck, even IE and OE/Outlook are seperate applications even though they mostly use the same core (MSHTML, Outlook uses the base OE libraries). Why can't Phoenix and Minotaur be like this? I love Phoenix. I use it almost exclusively at work, and pretty often at home. And, for the record, Mozilla is a dog on my home laptop, but Phoenix runs quite snappily. Modularity (more than just selecting components from the 'net install) is the way I think the Moz project should go, and I'm glad that they're heading down that path.
No, this isn't "disposing of the ...", nor is it the "death of Mozilla"...
Phoenix will become the Mozilla browser, Thunderbird will become the mail program. More effort will be made to optimize and clean up Gecko, the mozilla rendering engine, the most important part of the whole Mozilla project.
The big change is that they are focusing on separate applications, instead of one large, everything and the kitchen sink application suite.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I tried a test-build of Phoenix for OS X last winter; it was obviously much faster than Camino (then Chimera), and possibly as fast as Safari (which didn't exist at the time).
Of course, it was also buggy as hell, could hardly go more than a dozen pages without crashing... but the proof of concept was there; Phoenix for OS X would rock.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
main is NOT void.
So they are going to weight down Phoenix with the features they feel are "must have" from mozilla and the "new" mozilla will lose features. Why not just keep up the ultra lean Phoenix AND the feature rich mozilla? Maybe I am unusual but I have used almost every feature of Mozilla, be it grouped bookmarks, tabbed browsing, popup killing, LDAP support in the mail client, multiple POP accounts, different SMTP servers per account etc. It has taken years to get all these features into Mozilla, how long will it take to get them into the "new" mozilla? Will they ever make it in, or will it be fealt that they weigh down the new system too much?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yes, I did RTFA, thank you. And I will admit, I initially mis-read part of the above quote:
I originally interpreted this part:
Phoenix is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community
As saying "Phoenix is better because it doesn't have all the different, conflicting features wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community."
And that statement I would fundamentally disagree with. If anything, I think Mozilla is still lacking some really cool features: user customizable key-bindings (via a built in GUI, not by hand editing XUL code) , user-customizable context menu (again, not by hand editing the XUL), right-click editing of bookmarks from within the bookmark menu, etc. But the Mozilla.org staff seems determined to resist these types of features, describing them as "bloat."
As far as:
but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism.
I think that's great. And if the net result is that somebody can take Phoenix, and more easily add the types of features I described above, as a "plug-in", which can be optionally installed, then great.
What I don't get though, is how much better an extension mechanism Phoenix has, than Mozilla. People have managed to add all sorts of neat shit into Mozilla already, using whatever mechanisms are provided for doing so... don't believe me, just go browse around Mozdev for a while. Multizilla, Optimoz, Easysearch, etc. have extended Mozilla quite nicely already.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
This is completely freaking me out.
I can only wonder at how a radical re-design this is going to turn out to be, from both a developer's and end-user's standpoint. The Mozilla project has, by all accounts, been an incredible success, and has been adopted by some major entities, eg. Sun, HP, IBM, Red Hat. By making this radical a change this soon after 1.0, do we risk alienating users and developers? I mean, now that people have gotten used to Mozilla, we turn around and dump something hugely different in their laps?
My fear is that commercial entities, along with the pro-Mozilla-the suite camp, will continue development on Mozilla Classic (the 1.4 branch), while the Phoenix folks work on NGMozilla...a fork.
Hold onto your hats, folks.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
d00d...you are a riot
My $.02: add Mozilla's advanced prefs to Phoenix. (I'm sure that'll happen.) Use Phoenix's good looking default theme. Leave the 'Home' button in the top row of buttons, along with back, reload, etc. Otherwise, keep up the good work!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Step 1: Proclaim that Mozilla is a bloated mess.
Step 2: Find a name.
Step 3: Reach the 0.5 release, and develop a loyal following.
Step 4: Start to reach more users and get some name recognition.
Step 5: Come up with some sort of roadmap.
Step 6: Change the name due to legal issues.
Step 7: Declare 1.0 victory, and add yourself to the junkheap of other spinoff projects. Don't worry, though, there are more to join!
The middle mind speaks!
Now we know the new name for Phoenix... Mozilla!
So use Pine.
Don't laugh! I still use it as my email of choice. I used to use Netscape, but when I got DSL and my Linux machine fully running, I just stuck with Pine. (I tried Kmail for a while, and Opera mail). People laugh at me, but when I am at home, I can view attachments fine with it. When I am away from home, it is a bit harder. But I don't have to download my email either. I can download PuTTY wherever I am, ssh into my box, and read my mail in about a minute. I did this recently while traveling in France. I also use fetchmail to gather my various accounts into one on my machine at home. Even on dialup I can check my mail pretty quickly.
People can't believe that I still use Pine, but it is light, fast, and easy. Of course, if access to my home machine is cut off for some reason, I have to use my ISPs webmail, but I LOATHE webmail. I don't have a compelling reason to use a GUI mail client.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Often the folks that make Mozilla talk about meeting the needs of the integrators, the people for whom Mozilla is a platform on which applications are built. Presumably, these are the kinds of people that take advantage of the MPL to make commercial products. But, other than Netscape and AOL, who are these companies and individuals?
That is to say, for all the effort poured into Mozilla, has anyone besides AOL-Time Warner benefitted from it? What are real-world examples of the Mozilla code, under the MPL or otherwise, being used for commercial gain?
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
how about a XUL free (native widgets only) gtkmozembed for my galeon/epiphany?
I agree, it's good to see Mozilla out in front. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure what Netscape really does anymore. It seems it would make the most sense for Mozilla to focus on these sweet components. Then have Netscape bundle them together into a suite. It makes less sense for Mozilla to have a fairly large installation package. Some people complain about the bloat in mozilla- they should complain about the bloat in netscape, and praise the components put out by moz. Jason
Read the roadmap, second paragraph, last sentence. Follow the link: http://www.mozilla.org/university/HOF.html -- any additions? Mail staff@mozilla.org.
AHA!
So **THAT'S** why the Phoenix 0.6 release is almost three freaking months late.
Hee-hee! Phoenix just went from "Gee, I hope they didn't give up on it" to "Holy crap, you mean it's now the STANDARD?!?!" in about three attoseconds.
Great job, guys! Now let's get to work on putting all those "prefs.js" hacks in as standard options on the config dialogs.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
You are a fucking troll, aren't you?
Oooh the fastest browser? MAYBE THATS BECAUSE THE MOTHERFUCKERS EMBEDDED IT, thereby monopolizing the market and making things like netscape and mozilla rarer and harder to find..Furthermore, IE sucks, idiot.
Thanks for your idiot troll time.
"I feel it is my duty to look at the porn that kids download before I delete it, to be sure what it is."--School Admin
- What's wrong with XPFE? Personally I like the idea of installing XUL applications through the chrome. And I hope that standalone Phoenix will be nice with standalone Minotaur.
- How about old code of Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail? Garbage?
- So, 1.4 is the last stable release we are going to have for awhile, perhaps for a couple of years, right?
- Wasn't it better to fix crucial Gecko bugs before doing any crucial architecture changes?
- I guess, no central leadership, strong sub-project leader, we should expect that after 1.7 Phoenix's Gecko will be diferent than Minotaur's one. And thus if you bookmark component in Gecko might work very-very different than same thing in Minotaur. No need to mention addressbooks in Mail and Calendar.
From one point, it's a good move. Components are always good. Independent components written on standartized framwork and standard protocols are even better. Small good things doing well small important tasks is a well known Unix way. However, from another point, I don't like the way how it is going to be done by their project managers. I think there are too risky changes at the same time. There is inproper sequence of changes. And the project managers underestimate many other factors.Although, I hope they will succeed, despite such risk factors. I wish them to succeed.
Less is more !
I have not seen anything in Mozilla for a "grid" widget (kind of mini-spreadsheet in which you can change the cell contents). It has a "ListBox" widget, but it does not seem to allow direct editing of content.
Call them all the names you want, but it seems only MS and Windows products seem to offer decent grid widgets. Java's grids sucked eggs or had "unnatural" conventions from users' perspectives. (Perhaps their convention impressions are shaped by Windows, but that is the reality of the work force, for good or bad.)
Table-ized A.I.
"Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM[...]"
72MB of RAM actually.
"What I don't get though, is how much better an extension mechanism Phoenix has, than Mozilla."
Mozilla and Phoenix have the same extension mechanism, but Phoenix has the ability to uninstall the addons. Mozilla does not.
If you added a bad component to Mozilla or something that you didn't really want, then you had to go through a lot of hacking just to get it to go away.
Quite a few OS makers. Typically just maintaining their platform's port of Mozilla (Sun, HP, IBM), but, e.g., Red Hat pay Chris Blizzard to do a lot of work on the Linux version and oversee the nightly RPMs.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Ok, good start, I suppose. But, most of those look like they are (a) repackaging of raw Mozilla (e.g. into several Linux distributions) or (b) rebranding or rewrapping of the Mozilla browser (e.g. IBM's products). The other projets, Komodo and OEOne, which appear to use it as the basis for a real product, are better examples of how Mozilla is paying off.
I suppose I'm sort of underwhelmed here. Yes, lots of big names on that list, but again mostly rebranding or repackaging. I'd like to have seen more examples of taking the Mozilla techs as a cross-platform toolkit and building something really remarkable with it.
I'll give an example. How about a Mozilla-based app that leverages Mozilla's cross-platform nature to build a P2P app with search and chat features. Make use of the NNTP components to provide sharing directly from binary newsgroups into your own collection and from there to connected P2P clients. Also provide primitive email handling to send P2P-collected files to friends via email. The whole idea of the Mozilla platform lends itself to building an app that uses all those bits in novel ways, and gives you cross-platformness as a bonus. (Yes, this is a RIAA/MPAA nightmare app, but probably no worse than what they're already facing.)
Certainly LimeWire uses Java to do similar things, but Mozilla has a number of the same techs reimplemented that Java has so one would think that Mozilla could do the same kind of thing.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Phoenix is OK, but I rather prefer the current Mozilla browser showing how darn good my Duron 800Mhz@840Mhz is.
What I think is going:
- Mozilla sidebar. Oh.. i've liked this from the start. The Phoenix one sucks.
- Modern theme. Classic looks so crap on a LH 3683 OS.
- MailNews. Whats wrong with MailNews?. Stop offending my p0w3rful box.
- Being able to show that Netscape is just a clone. Umm.. not exactly true. as NS 7.1 has gone a bit futher away from Mozilla 1.0.1. I believe that it's going to be a Nightmare for NS introducing a new browser with less commonality. I think that Phoenix will be introduced as a seperate product at first, and when the modern theme gets ported (probably by NS), we might see a switch.
I'll miss you XPFE!
MultiZilla can save your tabs in a session and automatically restore them when you start your browser. Helps a lot if QuickTime brings the whole browser down :)
NOTE: Don't try it with the 1.4 alpha, yet. It mangles your bookmarks.
http://multizilla.mozdev.org How the hell this ended up as Google I don't know.
Interesting.
;)
Not so long after this article about Minotaur came out on Slashdot, along with a bunch of comments talking about how cool it would be if Mozilla were to move away from the monolithic-bloat model towards the lean-mean-module approach, the Mozilla team says "hey, let's do that!"
They must read Slashdot! Well, of course they do, but they must actually take it/us seriously.
hey, anyone wanna hire me?
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
anyone else thinking, "if i wanted to be using phoenix, i'd be using goddamn phoenix"?
hot foreign sheep.
Mozilla for all it failing is starting to get real recognition as a product in the market, it is being seen a real alternative to IE and now just as it starting to get traction it gets KIA.
I find it hard to believe that that a Phoenix based browser is going to reach a level of stability and adoption, any time soon.
(Someone has to say this)
This smack of developers looking at the technology and saying you know I could do better (yeah I'm guilt here as well). You know lets rebuild this and provide no migration path for existing applications and users. There must be a better way to do this with less risk and disruption.
Remember it's not always the product with the most technical merit that wins it the wins just look at IE.
Otherwise Microsoft is going to be very happy they will not have to worry about Mozilla any more.
Wow, this was so hilarious. You are a true comedian. Someone asking what Mozilla was. You're right, it deserved +5 moderation. I am laughing out loud as I type this. ...
Wow, someone saw the word "wormholes" and, as I correctly guessed would happen, rushed in to make the obligatory, generic wormhole "joke."
And added in a Zelda reference for added whoring. This, too, obviously deserved people's mod points for a +5. I am laughing so hard right now as I type this.
You sound like the bigger troll.
/. - does it matter?
What you write may be true, but the first troll has a point.
Hm, I wonder if I'm a troll now? Then again, this is
And, finally, we have the obligatory Godzilla reference someone rushed in. Not funny, not clever, and yet modded to +5 Funny. I am so rolling on the floor laughing over a Japanese Web Browser that tramples over Windows processes.
Thank you, crackhead moderators, for providing such poor and unoriginal humor a forum for display! Good day now.
It would have been +5, but main is [b]not[/b] void.
the map leads to "fixed bugs" land.
I think it would be great if this results in a leaner and meaner Mozilla, and if Mozilla finally gets working interprocess communication. Even better if Mozilla finally gets a clue about being able to run on different X displays and not complaining gratuitously that some profile is "in use". But it's a long road towards that, and I'm not sure that a lot of the cruft that is made redundant by this change will actually get removed.
This Mozilla roadmap is good. I've switched from IE as my default browser and have used Phoenix and Mozilla. I liked Phoenix (0.6) a lot but it seemed to crash more often then I wanted. I've been using Mozilla 1.3 for a while now and like it.
Since I still use IE for some things, I was just curious, is Microsoft even working on an IE 7.0? If so, what will it be like? Since they've won the browser wars, do they even care about IE anymore? They seem pretty bogged down upgrading their next revs of Office and Windows Server, their major cash cows. Still, is there a next rev of IE in the works? What are its feature sets? Seems like Mozilla and Opera are doing all of the innovation.
Yes, but if less is more, then just think how much more "more" would be.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
The above mentioned "sacked poster" has been picked up by the Daily Mirror, whose 'news' staff has doubled in the recent days.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
They lost me on the changes to XUL, what exactly is happening to XUL? I loving coding XUL!
Yeah! Real cool! This deserved to be +5 Funny, and I am rolling on the floor laughing as I type this! Please continue this kind of humor in the future! It pleases me much!
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'll spare the lecture on the opensource aspect to this and get right to the point.
Mozilla has like 3% of the browser market. What's the worst thing that can happen? It drops to 2%?
It bloody obvious to anyone that those morons at AOL want nothing to do with Netscape beyond keeping it as an option. Show me a AOL beta that uses Gecko and I'll show you some Duke Nukem beta footage. In short if Netscape has to base its browser on Phoenix, so be it. They weren't going anywhere with Netscape 7 anyway. Maybe people will stop hating Netscape if they were to slim down a bit and break up the suite.
It's about time for some bold moves for Mozilla. It certainly has nowhere to go but up.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine
:).
I beg to differ. On my other system, a 433 with 256MB of RAM, Mozilla is a pig. Pure and simple. It takes close to 30 seconds to load sometimes, and page rendering makes me feel like I'm back on 14.4 dialup. Contrast this with Opera, which loads in a second or 2, and renders pages as soon as they're downloaded (in fairness, I won't mention how fast IE is, because they cheat and preload most of the browser when the system boots
Now that I have an 1800XP, you're right, Moz is pretty zippy. But it's pretty sad that I'd need almost 2ghz of effective performance just to render some html.
I won't even talk about how long Moz takes to load on the Redhat box (p2-266, 256 RAM). Let's just say Galeon beats it by an order of Magnitude. Same renderer too, so just what's causing the delay? Oh yeah. Bloat.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If you want something graphical, light, pretty and full of useful stuff use kmail (not the parent poster, but to others i recommend it).
Liberty.
" Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine.
Why shouldnt p100 64mb's be able to browse the web?
I don't see whats so intensive about mild webpages. Most webpages are what, 500k at most including all images? How hard is it to render some simple SGML?
For the record, I'm typing this on an amd tbred 1800+ (1.5ghz), underclocked to 1.1ghz since I'm stuck on 64megs of crappy pc100. I can run mozilla with antialiased fonts with two transparent Eterms and a wm with transparent menus -- while running cpuburns read/write memory test -- and still scroll down in mozilla smoothly.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I've been using pine since August of '97. I get crap from people all of the time, but I've had no other reason to move. A decent amount of spam is filtered at the server level using SpamCop as a RBL. I rarely get attachments, if I do, I save it then ftp it over. Same client and same email anywhere I go. I can PGP sign/encrypt any email within a couple of keystrokes, and I don't have to worry about it opening images from spam that act as trackers, though pine comes with basic html rendering. I don't need anything else.
...you could but half of the time you'll be rendered incorrectly at your destination. Think Picasso.
-AC
Secondly, they have plans to change the milestone cycle to allow for more time to fix the Gecko layout engine to be smaller and more efficient.
Why is Gecko allowed to undergo fairly hefty changes? Easy. Apple's release of Safari brought attention to KHTML. Heck, Mac rumor sites had all but crowned Chimera (now Camino), based on Gecko, into the OS as the default browser. Then wham, out of left field, here's Safari.
Why did such a large company go away from what the open source community considered the gold standard, Mozilla and its technologies? KHTML was a smaller codebase than Gecko, and easier for a new project to make completely their own. That's right, there was a better open source alternative out there most people had never really thought about.
People started talking about KHTML, Safari, Mozilla, and Gecko. Apple managed to shine a new light on what had been seen as acceptable without question because of, get this, a lack of competition (!) in the open source browser community. Until the little man came on the scene, Mozilla and its Gecko brethren had a near monopoly on the "not-IE" browser market.
So the next time someone wants to know what Apple's given the open source community after taking BSD for the core of its new OS, you'll know what to tell them. Not only has Apple open sourced Darwin and checked their improvements back into KHTML, they've also provided a competitive peer for Mozilla and other open source projects.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
...Except that in less you can scroll back up the file too.
-AC
The 2 biggest shortcomings of Mozilla is the lack of use of STL and the over-prevalent zeal in making everything a component. By using STL instead of home-brew containers, Mozilla code (though not necessarily the binary) can become more compact. By only making external modules components, Mozilla can become more compact. It seems to me the way to make Mozilla more compact is to use STL and to make less things components.
for a few minutes. Then they pulled the story... See:
http://robert.accettura.com
"keeping the engine and codebase lean" is hardly the case here. What they're trying to do, amigo, is actually trim the fat for what appears to be the very first time. Luckily, the Phoenix project has been working hard at this very thing for a long time now - Mozilla won't be started from scratch again.
As a side note, smooth scrolling after middle-clicking empty space works just fine on Phoenix, whereas it never has worked in Mozilla. Nice.
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
Is nice to see Mozilla breaking in separate aplications, just like Open Office. :-)
Maybe they should include thread support in 2004 and in 2005 fix all the UI bugs
BTW, Phoenix rulz!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
But no one is working on the project now
XUL ... another total waste of my time and money.
Thanks for this lovely announcement:
mozilla == dead tech
Expect calls for donations and CVS and web site shutdowns over then next 18 months.
What can I say? It was the worst software I had ever run in my life. It was extremely slow and buggy. Nothing, even the simplest options, seemed to work properly. After about two minutes, it crashed the computer and actually screwed up the entire account. I had to log in through a different account, remove the messed up account, and do over three hours of work to recover the computer to the point where it worked properly again, as it even refused to start up properly after the installation of Mozilla.
At that point, I vowed never to use that piece of garbage application again... and I haven't. Mozilla is trash. Hey, when a program runs like it's on a 286 with 256k of RAM, when it's actually on a Pentium IV with 512 megs of RAM, you know the program is a piece of SHIT.
The efforts of all those who have worked on making this garbage into a horrifying reality were spent for nothing. They should be ashamed of themselves. I only pity the time they wasted doing this that could have been spent doing something PRODUCTIVE, like sweeping the streets.
I just wish that the syntax for XUL would stop moving. I am trying to learn it now, on my own, and everything that I can find is only relavent to mox 1.0 (or pre). Every point release seems to change it, and I can't find any good documentation on it.
Put identity in the browser.
Well, phoenix's add-on mechanism has versioning and an uninstaller is in the works. Which is a giant leap ahead of Mozilla's....
It's the 21st century for crying out loud!
I think that mozilla had become a monster - a friendly one, perhaps (just look at the endearing pointy toothed grin on that red monster), but a monster all the same. And that kind of "lets pile everything together into a heap" integration is a pain for users who want to be able to pick and choose. There are lots of examples - both in the windows world and in the unix/linux... worlds.
In the windows world this is to be expected - one company wants to build one product - make you buy a new one every time any of the components changes. Given that most windows users are going to put about as much thought into selecting the products they buy/use as they do when they drive to macdonalds and have to choose between a "large" and "super size" fries, thats not unreasonable. (I'm not saying they're stupid - just that they're not putting any intellectual effort into their computing systems.)
But in the unix world, this grates on me Both KDE and Gnome seem to want to build bigger and burlier integrated thing-a-ma-bobs. Consider, for example, the rise of the desktop managers vs window managers. Or evolution - quite a nice mail client, an address book, a calendar and who knows what else - and I always managed to click on the wrong button and lose things. Or open office - nice spreadsheet - absolutely crappy word processor - but they come as a unit.
I would like to see XUL continued, and the roadmap looked like it was not being dropped - I think it offers lots of potential.
I'd also like to say in response to the person who asked "why chatzilla" that chatzilla might not be a requirement for most users - but it was probably a very good thing for mozilla - as chat has different requirements (in user interaction, display and in performance) than a browser does. As such, it has probably helped to shape the way mozilla has developed. Then too, I'm kind of tired of everyone saying that MIRC is IRC as though the only things allowed to exist on the network are windows applications.
Why shouldnt p100 64mb's be able to browse the web?
They should... using the software that ran on them when they were in their prime. Try surfing the web with Netscape Navigator 3.0, it will probably run just fine on that p100 / 64 MB box.... just don't complain about pages that don't render properly, not being able to use Java/Flash/Shockwave/plugin-x, not having support for MathML, SVG, PNG, etc., not having tabbed browsing, etc., etc., etc....
The point is, the web has changed, the software for browsing it has changed, and at some point, the hardware needs to change...
But, if most of the sites you surf are plain vanilla HMTL and you can have a happy surfing experience with Navigator 3.0, by all means... keep running the P100....
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I also like the newer Phoenix nightlies (using 3-9-3 at work now) but I have one big complaint, and this showed up in Mozilla 1.3, too: I frequently click and drag a link to another tab, but the recent Phoenix nightlies and Mozilla 1.3 seem to frequently not pick up the link and I have to try two or three times to drag the link and it's driving me nuts.
Does this have anything to do with mouse gestures? Can I fix it? Lately I seem to have better luck if I drag the link to the right before dragging it up to the tab; this is why I suspect it may have something to do with gestures even though I've never tried or even read about gestures.
The Phoenix nightlies are MUCH slicker looking than both Phoenix 0.5 and Mozilla 1.3. Very nice. And I love having the home button back where it belongs (as opposed to where Mozilla has it): in line with the back, forward, stop and reload buttons.
their vision on this platform thing is off the target.
they mozilla is actual bloated.
But they still deny that mozilla is slow as evident on the
traffics in mozilla performance news group.
I think you're misreading them.. mostly at least.
To your first quote I think they're saying that when it comes to UI design you need somebody in charge.. keeping things from moving back and forth pointlessly or getting schizo. They're moving to a decision structure more like other large opensource projects. You can still make changes, they'll just have to be approved and tweaked before making it into main builds.
To your second quote.. to many cooks spoil the soup. They don't need sudden floods of inexperienced help that will quickly get bored and quit. That does horrible things to a codebase. If you really want to help then jump in and work on something you're interested in. If it holds up to the standards of the project and will be useful to others I'm sure they'd consider adding it to the trunk. Right now might not be a good time for scratching itches though. This big a transition will take some experienced Moz developers and they won't want to start adding features in the middle of such a transition. Familiarize yourself with what they are doing, test for bugs, submit bug reports, submit bug patches.. then they'll ask for your help coding.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
what happens to the "Composer"
there was no mention of it
I would love to see some work on it, and to see it move away from an html Editor to a XML and XUL Editor....kinda turn it into a VB style IDE
that would be sweet....any one know whats up with it?
how do these changes affect Compser?
also I am worried about them doing away with Super Review. There _needs_ to be control over the trunk..
doesn't matter how they do it....as long as there is Very tight control over the trunk.
thats all I have to say
But other than that Pheonix is GREAT.....
(and this takes care of the name change problem...:) )
--meh--
If you are hopelessly addicted to Moz Xft (anti-aliased fonts) like me, you will want to check out a build of Phoenix with Xft. It makes me pee with excitement.
This, to me, is major bad news. Mozilla has reached a great deal of maturity, and to drop the stand alone browser in favor of phoenix, a not-so-mature project, is ridiculous. Mozilla is the result of years of work, and it shows. And, now they want to take it all away and go back to the days of painful bug testing, milestones and re-initiating the goal of just having a release that doesn't crash all the time? I'm using 1.2.1 on a PIII 500 mhz, and it's not bloated and quite a work of art. Again, I don't think this is a good idea at all.
.. is to make the damn thing modular instead of one freakin huge app that loads all at the start. single binaries are nice, but like ms office (sorry to make the comparison) a lot can be gained by splitting it up and having interoperablility maintained, like load times and perceived responsiveness. Just my 2 cents.
today is spelling optional day.
I've been thinking of making a Mozilla-based window manager such that chrome, panels, the root (background) window, etc can be defined with XUL, HTML, XML, CSS, etc. That'd let you manipulate your desktop as easily as you can manipulate Mozilla. You could use CSS or XSL to tweak the look and feel of your desktop.
Is that more the kind of project you had in mind?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A lot of people talk about Phoenix being so snappy compared to Moz, and using less memory. Now I don't know if this is a accurate measure of anything, and I KNOW it isn't directly comparable to IE, but in Task Manager, on this XP box, Phoenix currently has a Mem Usage of 35816 K. Is that supposed to be GOOD /lightweight?? I'm seriously wondering. It takes more memory than anything else on my machine right now. (FB: I have 5 tabs open).
Random is the New Order.
Yes, something that's not within the scope of the original project. Mozilla is a lot of things, but it isn't a window manager or desktop. Your idea would be neat and, admittedly, would appeal to propellerheads like myself.
Drop me a line if you make it.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
"not being able to use Java/Flash/Shockwave/plugin-x, "
I assure you I've never complained about missing out on those.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Sure performance can be a bit rocky and one crash wipes the whole thing out - but I have been using this suite for years and I don't think I want to see it change this way.
I don't really like mozilla, but I'd definitely use their mail program if it were separate, especially if it will apply filters to imap mail since outlook refuses to run filters on imap mail.
You're one of the good ones.
Oooh the fastest browser? MAYBE THATS BECAUSE THE MOTHERFUCKERS EMBEDDED IT, thereby monopolizing the market and making things like netscape and mozilla rarer and harder to find.
Perhaps, but it's still the fastest.
Fuck yeah. Give them all Bibles that explode when they touch them. That'll solve all our problems over there real quick.
Sadly? Apparently you havn't been going to the correct marketing dept meetings. The thing that apparently sets the marketing dept aside from the rest of us is that they usually have something called an entertainment budget.
good marketing dept meetings involve a lot of alcohol, free food, and honestly - no matter how bad the actual content of the meeting is, anybody can get through it drunk.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This is a great move on the part of the developers. Whenever a giant program like mozilla is split into leaner pieces, an angel gets his wings.
Personally, i have been one of those people who kept screaming why is it so bloated. To the end were last week i got feed up when i found mozilla eating up almost 25% of my memory and went out to console and said umerge mozilla followed by emerge phoenix.
The fact here is mozilla IS bloated. But some people like this bloat, which is why the modularized appraoch is an entirely approprate course. It allows for the potential to include some parts of the mozilla suite and exclude others. And is generally a step in the right direction
Inevitably, having one hudge suite for mozzilla is not the best course. Its going to fit for some, but for others its just going to be a resource hog. Following the lessons that phoenix has put out, a much leaner, yet still functional interface can be devloped. This coupled with more modular design fixes some fundamental problems that mozilla has been encountering.
personally, i like being able to view a website, then move off and read my mail (in kmail not mozilla) and then play a few mp3s and not run top a little while later and find mozilla eating memory like its the last supper. Modular design coupled with the new phoenix direction will greatly improve the versitility, and the end user usability of mozilla.
Under Preferences>Fonts>Appearance try setting "Monospace" to "adobe-courier-...". Seems to work for me over here in Debian-land.
Waaay off topic, but courier makes my ass hurt. I feel that the one true programming font is lucidatypewriter. Long live lucidatypewriter. All hail lucidatypewriter!
As it was realised that the post was a joke, the people responsible for sacking the original poster have been sacked.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
It's a matter of good or better. Phoenix and Mozilla both use the same interface. Phoenix just does a better job of it. Mozilla isn't bad, but Phoenix is definitely better. It's just Mozilla, Take 2. You look at Phoenix, what it's growing into, etc., and you see that it's very akin to monolithic v. modular kernels. If you like having one large program, that's fine, but you can do it by starting with a leaner application and adding to it.
> all wormholes only lead to the boss's office...
> or to the marketing department meeting.
So basically, that wormhole will lead to two Ferengies in the delta quandrant? Greed is good.
The basic no frills standalone HTML editor the world needs is vi.
And if people would stay away from Frontpage and the like, the world would be a better place too.
Who cares, I've got 2.5Ghz and 1GB ram under the hood - will I really notice the difference?
Also once Mozilla's up it stays up at least all day. So it take 10 seconds to start, so what, I don't restart it every hour.
Like using emacs in the days of old - it's big and slow to load, but once it's there it stays there so the slow to load isn't an issue.
Just a thought.
yeah, but your features would require only little bit of dev time, to separate some libs, and put in application defaults for browser, mail, etc. What, a couple of weeks(?), tops.
h tml
:-)
Instead they want to rewrite the damn thing.....again. It took them ~5 years to get here, losing mindshare all the way.
Why cant mozilla be refactored? Instead of thrown out? http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.
Rewrite again and mozilla is as good as dead as a mainstream browser. Winamp also is pulling this crap too, maybe they share the same idiot management.
If you cant keep the technical lead over microsoft, you are doomed. Take a step back in features, and delay 6 months or a year and watch IE7 crush whatever feeble beachhead they made in the browser wars.
My doomsday scenario, sure.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
All this talk about how Mozilla is too big, too bloated, has too many features, etc., is a load of shit, IMHO. Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine.
A big memory footprint (read "bloat") is precisely the reason that I do not use Mozilla everyday (aside from JavaScript debugging, for which Venkman is invaluable). Mozilla is an excellent browser, and fast once open. I only have 128mb of ram, and it's 30+ second startup time and 21mb of ram just to start up is just crazy. It is memory-efficient when you open new tabs/Venkman, but it doesn't release all it's memory when you've stopped using things. I got it quickly up to 26mb of ram, and the sucker wouldn't go down again. This is unacceptable.
(Granted I'm still using 1.1, but I stopped caring at that point.)
Phoenix, although I've not used it yet--will download right now!, seems like just what I need. Small footprint, fast, and pluggable interface.
Good luck to the Mozilla team! :' )
You obviously didn't look at the architecture diagram on the mozilla roadmap page, did you.
Yes, the roadmap was linked to by the mozillazine article.
Ignorant comments are probably responsible for more wasted time than spam email.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
If you want the new release following this new roadmap to be called Mozilla 2.0 rather than 1.5 vote for the bug here
4 54
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200
Mr. Smoove
People can't believe that I still use Pine, but it is light, fast, and easy.
Then I think you're in very bad company. I've been using Pine for 2+ years now and no one ever laughed at me.
On second thoughts, are you using Pine efficiently :) (no?, is that why they laught at you :P)
Just as the roadmap talks about embedding Minotaur into Phoenix, the way forward for the calendar could be as an embedded extension for Minotaur.
Some people like a standalone mail/news client that isn't your jack-of-all-trades Outlook/Evolution replacement. That's going to be Minotaur.
But Minotaur could also be an Outlook replacement for those who are looking for that sort of solution. Allow the calendar to be installed as an extension (like Phoenix's extensions) and you've got three of the main features of a PIM (mail, address book, calendar). Develop some sort of stickynote-style scratchpad extension and you've mostly got the whole thing.
Evolution at the moment is only available for Linux and friends, and it seems as if there are no plans for a Windows port any time soon. This would provide a lever for those on Windows to abandon MS Office entirely. I mean, OpenOffice.org replaces much of the rest of MS Office bar Outlook; a Minotaur that can be extended to be that Outlook replacement would finish the job.
Not to mention having a further competitor to Evolution on Unix and Linux, particularly once Kontact gets going.
Going the extension route makes far more sense than adding the Calendar to the monolithic Mozilla suite, slowing everybody down.
And anyway, does a stand-alone calendar really make sense? A stand-alone Composer perhaps. But a calendar naturally fits into a PIM environment - surely this is the way forward?
Thexder.
I know this always gets brought up - but wouldn't it be useful for OOo to a similar thing?
Galeon, a Gecko based browser (ie. a UI for Gecko) was (mostly) rewritten when switching to GTK2. That's not "dying", is it?
Gecko is the most important part of Mozilla, and it's doing just fine. The Mozilla UI is being replaced, and the Mozilla suite is being, optionally, separated into separate apps.
This is not dying, this is moving forward. This is not fixing bugs by rewriting, this is nothing more than replacing a UI with a better one, not even close to the same thing.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If I would find a free ir open source project capable of doing all of the following:
- Allowing easy creaton of webpages BUT also the ability to insert raw HTML and change (on the fly) the HTML and have it refleted on the WYSIWYG editor.
- Allow to change the appearance and "feel" of all the webpages on a single instruction, even if that means to alter lots of CSS and other files.
- Allow to custumize said appearance on a page by page level, but also be able to apply some characteristics to a big group of pages (like shared borders).
- Distinguish between the physical and logical layout of a web site, and be able to change each individually and have that changes propagated to all the other pages affected by it. And have true support for the logical layout (navigation bars and the like).
- Allow the interaction of several people on the same project (with logs, todo-lists, etc.)
When a tool that can do these tasks is available (or even in beta stage of development) I will switch (gladly, because FP has some serious drawbacks too). But until then, there is no real choice for me, and FP is a good enough tool for the job.PS: Of course most of these tasks can be made explicitly with several different open-source tools... I know how to do them. But that is no good if you end-up wasting 30 minutes to do something that "just works" in FP.
I would love to use Pine, but both it and MUTT don't seem to handle unread pointers in the same way the other clients (i.e. Mozilla, OE, Kmail) do, so my read/unread pointers on my IMAP server don't get tracked correctly. Maybe it's a setup issue.
I would use them for the bulk of my mail if it weren't for this limitation, but since I like to use the GUI mail clients sometimes, neither of these works.
This looks pretty cool. I've always thought that the internals of Mozilla were quite hideous; anything that makes them less so can only be good. The most exciting thing for me is the further development of the GRE. At the moment, to get an HTML rendering engine in your own code, you have to use desktop-biased KHTML or GTK HTML rendering code; being able to link with libgecko.so and render pages simply would be a huge boost to the development of web applications.
One thing that's always confused me a little about Mozilla, however, is the divide between the XUL and native widget approach. I can't see why you can't have the best of both worlds: use XUL, but render it to native widgets. This would allow abstraction into a XUL library which programs that wanted cross platform widgets could use. This seems like it would combine the coolness of XUL with the speed of native widgets. Is there a problem with this approach? Why hasn't it been done?
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favourite artist is Picasso.
Apple chose KHTML because it was easier to own, if necessary, than Gecko -- that's true. But that fact doesn't make KHTML the better open source anything.
Two points:
1.) I believe the post's author meant that KHTML was better for Apple in this situation and wasn't trying to propose that KHTML is always better than Gecko, which is the interpretation you use in your reply. KHTML was better than Gecko for Apple's needs, almost by defn at this point. Gecko renders, in general, web pages and web page standards more exactly, and would be better by that benchmark, and some other that you list, etc. It's all situational.
The original post just says, "Look, you don't always use Gecko! There is an alternative! And Apple thought it was better!" And because of this, Gecko is getting "better" from the lessons it's now learned from current contrasts in comparisons (comparisions given new weight and credibility thanks to Safari) with KHTML.
2.) Since we're talking Gecko & KHTML, there's really nothing about the MPL that makes Gecko horribly much more difficult to "own" than KHTML. So when you tie any of this thread to Apple not "checking back in" all of its "tine", this isn't an arguement for Gecko. Heck, what's Netscape doing (they've had a spellchecker for quite a while, even with the Mozilla foundation, for example)? And Netscape is why we have Gecko in the first place.
You're right about KHTML being the better open source alternative for Apple. I would have made the same decision, were I in the Safari team's shoes a year ago, operating under the constraint of secrecy, having to hire a team who didn't know either KHTML or Gecko, and had to learn one or the other from scratch.
(Of course, I wouldn't want to work under those constraints, if I had the choice.)
I apologize if I misread the original post. Lately there has been a lot of "Apple picked KHTML, so Gecko must be deficient in all situations" talk -- but we agree that's fallacious.
Your second point misconstrues mine about Apple being prepared to carry its tine of a fork. My point is that Apple management wanted to develop in secret, which decision inherently risks a fork.
Netscape has not done that. Almost all of its MPL'ed changes, certainly all to the core Gecko code (not necessarily all of UI changes under xpfe -- but most of those, too) go into cvs.mozilla.org early and often. They don't hide behind a firewall in a commercial source tree for a year, while the open source they're based on diverges.
MPL vs. LGPL had nothing to do with the point I was making. Anyone willing to publish diffs or distribute them along with programs can perpetrate a fork of code provided under either license.
Stingray!
* Troy has entered #DaftRetroReferences *
This document states that when 1.4 is released, it will be the new "stable" branch in the same way that 1.0 is now. This means a fixed API. Why not call this the 2.0 release?
So you should stay under last stable release you like most and that's all !!! What is magnificent with your way of thinking is, because you like where you are, you say everybody should stay on the same place, happy or not. You know a lot of picky thing don't you ? But read before comment is not your thing : make modular component of mozilla is just the goal, and lose a bit of the unused code.
Unfortunately, K-Meleon is seeing almost no visible progress, and what little there is is veeeerrry slow in coming.
It may be a useful development platform, but it was _supposed_ to be a web browser, and it has suffered because of that. Spinning the XUL "development platform" off into it's own project and "freeing" Mozilla from XUL would probably be the best thing the Mozilla team could do, IMO. The phrase, "It's the browser, stupid" just didn't seem to sink in to whoever thought XUL in Mozilla was a good idea. *shrug*
I like the concept and promise of the XUL-based approach, but I've been very seriously underwhelmed with every aspect of Phoenix, and I've made a real effort to try it on two recent occasions.
I really don't see why everyone thinks Phoenix is so great - I tend to use older, slower computers (my primary box is a 600 MHz P3, my secondary a 300 MHZ P3), and Mozilla/Netscape is just fine. Phoenixreally seems like a fast, grossly incomplete pile of bugs. Sure I want speed, but I value stability far more, which is the main reason I have a strong preference for Netscape 7 over Mozilla - it's just *way* more stable and reliable, at least on Windows, which is all I use for on the desktop anymore. (There are actually two big reasons I stick with NS over Moz: General stability/reliability and the only NS-only feature I care about: The sidebar, which is well worth having even if you only use it for bookmarks as I do - all other tabs are a PITA from what I can tell, but it *greatly* eases bookmarks management, which has always been a strong point of Netscape over IE.)
Here's one more person hoping we're not all forced to go to Phoenix - I'm just not really interested in making that trip, especially since I love the NS mail tool and use composer nearly every day along with HTMLDOC as a sophisticated two-birds-with-one-stone tool for generating all kinds of documents. (If it only had a toolbar to insert HTMLDOC markup comments in the code, it'd be darn near perfect...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last