Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla's Year In Review For 2003
An anonymous reader writes "Like last year, MozillaZine has published a review of Mozilla's world in 2003. Obviously, the year was dominated by AOL's decision to murder Netscape (though various acts of 'brand necrophilia' will ensure that the Netscape name lives on in one form or another). This, combined with Mozilla Firebird's and Mozilla Thunderbird's steady progress towards replacing the Mozilla suite, made 2003 very much a transitional year for the open source project. Other memories to tell your grandchildren include mozilla.org's fifth birthday, the new roadmap, the Firebird name debate and a new chapter being added to The Book of Mozilla."
when Mozilla will be able to run as fast as Internet Explorer?
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
help
it's +i
...I must say that I am looking forward to 2004! As time goes on, their products get better and better, and if being able to convince my cow orkers to use Mozilla is any indication, MS could learn a thing or two about what to put in a free browser. ;)
libertarianswag.com
The person simoniker class the whole episode as "Netscape murdered by AOL", the fact remains that the sooner Mozilla moves away from AOL and towards being a non-profit organisation that is user centric rather than buzz word centric the better. The unfortunate thing is that there is now a lack of developers but hopefully with the new political structure, more developers can be encouraged to help out with the same vigor and determination ones sees in other projects, for example, FreeBSD or the Linux kernel. Firebird is a nice browser and hopefully they will start using native widgets rather than the ugly GTK like widgets being used now. With that being said, one could quesiton whether Mozilla has a relevance outside developing a rendering engine. GNOME has standardised on Epiphany for the browser and Evolution for the eMail/Contact manager, so where does the Mozilla foundation fit in. In some ways, this will be good. If they can instead concerntrate on the guts and gore and let the various projects like kmeleon, Epiphany and Camino concerntrate on the native front end, hopefully development will pick up and some of those really old render bugs in Mozilla's bugzilla are fixed.
Erotic uses a feather; Pornography uses the whole chicken
As much as I like Mozilla, Mozilla does a miserable job rendering ./'s site. It worked great for a very long time, doing a better job than MSIE, but now what I get is digital peanut butter when I come to ./ with Mozilla. Sometimes, it just skips the articles and leaves a bunch of little buttons all over everywhere. Other times, everything gets rendered to the same line. Anyone else have the same problem?
I have not tried the new Firebird on /. yet, maybe that'll fix whatever's broke?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Switched completely to Linux a few months ago and Opera was the only killer app that I *HAD* to have through the switch. Mouse gestures, speed, well laid out keyboard shortcuts, etc. I'd go on but I'd be preaching to the choir.
;)
After reading a lot of Stallman's writings I decided to let go of even Opera and totally switch to Free software. I was very apprehensive because Opera was the second coming of Jesus as far as I was concerned.
Went to Mozilla.org, Decided against getting the full fledged mozilla because I remembered it being bloated as all hell, got Firebird instead. Downloaded a ton of plugins, fixed everything to where it felt right.
I'm a total convert. Firebird will kick oh so much ass by the time it hits 1.0. It's design is as simple as IE, which is the #1 reason people cite IE as their favorite browser. It's small, almost as fast as Opera, all the features that I loved in Opera are available through plugins, and all the features I didn't use aren't in Firebird because I didn't install them. I have since fallen in love with tabbed browsing. Used to think that browsing three or four sites at once was kinda stupid, but once I got used to tabs in Firebird I began to see myself doing the exact same thing.
The Mozilla project has come a VERY long ways since it first came to be. If you've tried Mozilla out earlier and were disappointed, get it now. Get Firebird. Get Thunderbird. Install plugins to your hearts content. You will be very well surprised.
And hey, you'll be using Free software so that's a huge plus, in my eyes.
Did the decision by AOL to 'murder' Netscape end up having a negative/positive/neutral affect on Mozilla or not? Was there a sharp loss of developers at all, or did it end up being more or less business as usual?
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
The development team focused mainly on minor technical and legalistic issues like the naming of firebird, code clean up etc.
But they failed completely to incoperate the rising new mark-up technologies like XML-Signature or WebCGM.
If this development continues this year, Mozilla might lose it's technical lead to IE or Opera. And open source software might be again only the second winner.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Uhm. It's a convenience store.
Yakov, is that you?
Hi, I used to use Mozilla on RedHat Linux simply because it was the best avaliable browser and it was slow. I recently tested the Firebird both on Linux and Windows and the experience was just as fast as IE. I see Mozilla as the browser you use "outside Windows", period. (it used to be Opera for me because of the performance issues until Firebird). So 5 stars to the Mozilla team! If only there was a way to get explorer plugins to work with Mozilla on Unix...
infamous installer mistake. You know, the one that would remove all of your files.
7-11 is in fact, a cryptic reference to Chapter 7 (Liquidation) and Chapter 11 (Reorganisation) -- two of the more popular bankruptcy protection paths.
With the release of Firebird Mozilla is as fast as any other browser on Windows or Linux and the rendering is cool but sadly (as we already know) it won't take over.
Mozilla will be a thousand times more useful if it could offer an IE-compatibility mode (Javascript model, plugins) which works on Unix platforms. That way people can actually have a reason to use Mozilla (IE works just fine on Windows)
Surprisingly missing from the everything2 reference was the fact 7-eleven is a Japanese owned company "IYG Holding Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ito-Yokado Co., Ltd. and Seven-Eleven Japan Co., Ltd., has owned a majority interest in 7-Eleven since 1991" from here
But everything2 sucks for facts, purely rumour and urban gossip.
I love Mozilla, but wish it used the Mac's global contextual menus like other browsers. Not have them means that I can't access my 3rd party stuff like my spell checker and extended clipboards.
... And hardcore porn.
Really, it will be much better.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Undead Netscape = Mozilla
It says 7:28 for me, and the story was posted at 7:27. I didn't browse at -1 yet, but it looks like a first post.
OK, I'll eat my words. It was second post, but I still think your math is wrong (and your timezone, and I think you're a troll). It's 9:43 now, you've got 13:28 on the SP? WTF?
Those "technologies" you listed are mostly irrelevent, and Mozilla has improved by leaps and bounds in many areas. CSS support has improved, speed has improved a great deal, Firebird has become a main focus, Thunderbird is taking off, etc.
WTF? HIBT?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'm at GMT +1. I can hardly be blamed for time zones, can I?
I thought it was funny to write happy new year that late. I finished sending my best wishes sometime around 1h30 last night (local time). (Sending an SMS at newyears eve is almost impossible here)
The task which must be accomplished is to get site developers to code to standards
Not to mention tools that code to standards. For all those of us that don't want to write HTML tags (even if we know how), that is the main issue. Because most sites I see that render incorrectly, I kinda doubt there's any real "web developer" behind that wrote the code. Think more code monkey with a WYSIWYG (on IE) HTML editor...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
as seen at http://www.damowmow.com/playground/book.txt
II. MOZILLA
- http://web.archive.org/web/19981206020253/http://w ww.gate.net/~shipbrk/graphics/mozilla.jpg
CAPUT III
And the beast shall be made *legion*. Its numbers shall be increased
a *thousand thousand* fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto
a great *storm* shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon
shall *tremble*.
- from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)
background: maroon; color: white; about:mozilla version: n6.x
CAPUT VII
And so at last the beast *fell* and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all
was not lost, for from the ash rose a *great bird*. The bird gazed
down upon the unbelievers and cast *fire* and *thunder* upon them.
For the beast had been *reborn* with its strength *renewed*, and the
followers of *Mammon* cowered in horror.
- from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
background: maroon; color: white; about:mozilla version: m1.5
An enormous sigh of relief resounds throughout all of Mozillaland.
Sounds of rejoicing are heard from all corners of the Earth. "They
have conquered the beast!" the voices cry.
And the dimensions remain constant 'till the end of days.
- from The Book Of Mozilla, 7:24
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20847
CAPUT XII
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling *cloud* of
*vengeance.* The house of the unbelievers shall be *razed* and they
shall be *scorched* to the earth. Their tags shall *blink* until the
end of *days.*
- from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
background: #800000; color: #FFFFFF; about:mozilla version: n3.x, n4.x
CAPUT XXVII
14 And the Lizard spake, saying, Windows shall I support, and
Macintosh, and the divers flavours of Unix; yea, even unto the
latest effluvium from the Gates of Hell shall I spread my seed:
this it pleaseth me to do.
15 But OS/2 shall I ignore, for in sooth nobody useth it.
16 Then was the land filled with the sound of much wailing and
gnashing of teeth, for millions of people used OS/2 and knew that
it was good. Yet the Lizard did harden his heart against them, and
said, Nay, there is no demand for it.
17 And the Blue One did create an Explorer of the Web, yet updated it
slowly, and documented it poorly, and it was filled with a plague
of locusts.
18 And those that followed the Lizard became enamoured of Frames, and
wrote pages which could not be read by the Lizard's brethren, for
the lemmings were lazy, saying only: Verily, thy browser doth
suck. Thou may'st obtain the Lizard's hence.
19 Then it came to pass that the Blue One made a pact with the
Lizard, that the Lizard should work its artifice for the sake of
the Ancient Sorcerer. And a reference to the Lizard's wares was
placed atop the Sorcerer's desk, that he might obtain it whenever
he desired.
20 But the number of the work the Lizard gave unto the Sorcerer was
Two, and the Greek sigil Beta was affixed to the number, yet all
the rest of the Lizard's minions were given the number Three.
21 And lo, the Lizard's work was itself filled with locusts, and
verily did it consume the Sorcerer's disk space whenever it was
used, and it did mightily crash his system full oft.
22 And the Lizard named several of the locusts, and regarding one the
Lizard said, The tag worketh not. Whereupon the users
hearing this were sore amazed, and said they one unto another,
Verily, that is no bug, but a feature to be highly praised while
it lasteth.
- from The Book of Mozilla, 27:14 - 22 (King Kong Authorised Version)
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206020253/http://w ww.gate.net/~shipbrk/mozilla.html
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My New Year's Resolution is to switch completely off MS products. After a month, MS still has not come up with a patch to fix the IE "double page scroll" bug (introduced in a critical security patch). Not being able to scroll down a page made reading /. a real pain in the ass.
Yeah, I could replace the offending file myself, or use the PgUp/Dn keys, but really, a security patch for IE that breaks IE is too much.
I've been using Mozilla Firebird about half the time, and IE the other half since it's just easier to keep using it after I've opened it to get to sites reqiring IE.
But to hell with those sites. To hell with Microsoft. I'll be spending the rest of my holidays purging the last remnants of MS from my desktops and my laptop. I'd been straddling the fence for years... thanks Bill, you've made up my mind for me.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I'm in the same boat. I was a dedicated Opera user and decided to switch to firebird.
Firebird is awesome, but there are still a lot of things that Opera did better.
Most of them are minor, but they're things I used regularly and I miss greatly.
For instance.
1. When you browse forward and back the keyboard doesn't have the focus on a page, so if you use the page up/down keys you get nothing. If you hit control F to search the page, it pops up but doesn't search the page.
2. I liked Opera's save session ability. Mozilla has this and it works pretty well, but not quite as well as Opera. For instance, I like having the ability to force my groups of pages load up in a new tabbed browser. Mozilla throws them into the current browser.
3. I really really miss the ability to save the pages I was on when I close the browser and also to load those same pages up in the event the browser crashes. Mozilla *almost* has this setting. It has visit the last page on startup, but I want to visit the last tabbed group on startup.
4. This one really bugs me. Maybe it's just a bug because it doesn't happen everytime, but when you jump forward and back through pages, sometimes the page doesn't go back to where you were scrolled, it goes back to the top of the page. Ugh! Makes it a pain to search ebay because you go to an item and then go back and you're at the top of the page, you hit page down or control F but the page doesn't have focus! argh!
I think those are my top 4 pet peeves. As a developer there are a couple of css issues (margins and borders) that I don't like, but those are minor and generally workable.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Opera had a super useful function that is missing in Mozilla. You could right click a link and "open link in background page." I would always browse my news site and start popping interesting links up in background tabs while I finished reading the article I was on.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have a Win2k box at my folks place which has Firebird and Thunderbird set up, and while I was staying with them over Christmas my Dad was telling me how stupid the name was. He's an academic with a linguistics background but completely computer illiterate (for example he double clicks everything). The (in his opinion) silly name gave him less confidence in the software.
I think the name's daft too but found myself defending it to my Dad. It's probably a silly corporate thing...
I'm using Mozilla 1.0 on Debian stable at home. It works much better than Windoze 2000 on the superior hardware I use at work. At home, when I just HAVE to see some nasty Flashed up junk, I pull out Netscape 4.7, which works just fine. At work, I don't bother because I want to keep my job. The last thing I need is to have the kind of problems IE gives you with Gator and other infections. I've got two apps to replace, then me and the company I work for will say good bye to Microsoft on the desktop. One good database can replace both of those aps and I predict it will take less than a year to provide it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A nice thing about Mozilla (the suite) is that with one not-unreasonable download, I can convert a foreign computer (want to check email at a friend's place, etc.) to a reasonable communications station (email, IRC, web) with an interface I like, including tabbed browsing. Primarily, this means "on a Windows machine," since most Linux or FreeBSD machines will probably already be equipped with both Mozilla and Xchat. (OK, two, downloads if I want ssh -- putty rocks.)
For the last few years, I've used Chatzilla on and off, usually finding after an hour or so that I missed Xchat, which so far is to me the most impressive IRC client around (and from which Chatzilla seems to intelligently take many cues). Recently though, esp. with Mozilla 1.7a, I notice that I start chatzilla and *don't* need to switch to Xchat. The one exception is DCC, but since I've used DCC rarely, it's not a biggie.
So I find that as of this month, my primary IRC client has been Chatzilla. Thanks, Mozilla / Chatzilla developers!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
SVG development is still going nowhere, while Calendar development has just stopped. No need to mention that nobody in Mozilla development team understands the importance of MNG and XForms. In Bugzilla you can even find their comments saying that "HTML forms work, what the reason for Xforms?"!
So, Mozilla becomes the best web browser accoridng to requirements of mid-90s. However, development teams of other browsers (read: IE and Opera, not sure about Apple) are more informed about web-browser requirements of mid-00s. No need to predict who will be a winner.
I love Mozilla (both Suite and Firebird) and I love XUL, and that's why it's so sad to see that my favorite browser is a big loser.
Less is more !
1) The keyboard focus bug in Moz REALLY annoys me. I hate having to click on the tab window to get focus back all the time.
2 & 3) Automatically restoring the last tabgroup session on startup is a must-have.
4) Opera (as of 7.23) sort of has this go-to-top bug too, but it only happens when you're scrolled to the very bottom of the page when you go back/forward.
One more pet peeve I'd add is that Moz mouse gestures STILL doesn't handle the right mouse button correctly. You have to recompile Mozilla with a custom patch in order to get rid of the context-menu interference problem. I'm addicted to the mouse-rocker (that works in Opera) for back/forward navigation.
--
Power to the Peaceful
You must have a very primitive web reading style, then. When dealing with complex, non-linear documents, I've found that most people will (over time) learn to read in a top-down fashion ala an opprotunistic path walking approach. The user will read the main (seed) page, and open any interesting links as they go along in separate windows (or separate tabs). When they've completed reading the page, they'll start reading all the child tabs they've created -- repeat until done.
:)
This way, they get all the information and supporting information easily. You can also have a single browser window which contains a logical grouping of related information (like a set of tabs relating to a project you're working on) to use as a reference.
Of course, if you still don't understand why people use tabs, you also won't understand why I (and others) use multiple monitors
From my fortune file: "The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstations is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once."
-- Fred Brooks
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Slashdot tells about Mozilla-related matters all the time. Sometimes it seems that everything from new releases to developers' thoughts. In the meanwhile, nothing is told about the other great browser Opera.
I really hope that this year brings more Opera news to Slashdot. It is a widely used browser that is available for many open source operating systems. Being closed source isn't always only a bad thing and other proprietary products are already widely covered here.
Mozilla is a great browser and it has had great success. Slashdot admins, please tell also about Opera every once in a while. Opera Software is a nice player in the market and it respects open standards -- unlike the big corporations that only care about stockholders.
And on the other hand, Safari is covered quite well, even though it's AFAIK less popular than Opera. Why is that? Opera even has a better rendering engine.
hapo
I just want to mention that Mozilla and Firebird are ready to do some deadly-serious ad-blocking, out of the box with no plugins. You can block picture ads with a right mouse-click, and Mozilla's popup blocking is legendary by now.
The one addition I have to put into every Mozilla profile I set up is a bookmarklet which zaps plugins to eliminate those annoying Flash ads.
Why doesn't "block images from this server" also block Flash from that server? Huh? Why not?
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
The existing form semantics in HTML was developed before anyone had any serious experience with implementing forms. XForms, althogh it's surely useful for general use outside HTML, is hugely overcomplicated for the majority of web browsing.
Personally all that I want is to be able to say things like:
Having to either do server-side checks or write custom client code for these sorts of things over and over again is annoying and complicated, and prone to error. XForms can fix this but it's hugely overdoing it.
You might like to try enabling Light mode in your user preferences. It removes a lot of the unnecessary graphics and doesn't seem to use nested tables for layout, but retains all the real content.
Light mode looks just fine in the latest Mozilla browsers (both Seamonkey and Firebird). It also loads faster.
-- killing of off Netscape. about 80% of Mozilla work was done by Netscape employees, ESPECIALLY the oft-neglected things in Open Sourced Software like doc writing and QA.
-- Safari replacing Mozilla as the "most important alternative browser" for web developers. This is mostly because starting with OSX Panther, Safari will get rolled to millions of home desktops.
Anyone else experience this?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
The gestures seem a bit different but I must have gotten use to them as I don't fail too often.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Galeon seems to have the features you want, and plenty of others that aren't in Mozilla or Firebird. I do sometimes lose the focus, but it might have to do with my window manager instead of the browser itself.
Good point. Plugins are not images, and it's hard to treat plugins as images when the browser doesn't include that plugin by default.
I think Mozilla should allow blocking of all non-text data from specified servers. Even better, the user should be able to specify different levels:
1) Block this server entirely
2) Allow only unformatted text
3) Allow only text
4) Block specific things:
4a) Block images
4b) Block plugins
4c) Block scripts / java
As a footnote, I think Mozilla mail (and its descendants) should block all non-text from all servers, unless specified by the user. Images in e-mails are a big security risk.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
I must have something setup incorrectly.
That sounds like exactly what I need. While I'd prefer to have those options available when I right click a link, I could learn (and maybe even like) the new setup no problem.
For some reason though none of those keyboard click combos are working for me in Moz 1.6.
I'll have to try it on my laptop and see how it does. I'm wondering if my mouse software is jumping in and messing things up. Shame since I use the same mouse on my laptop. heh.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
my pet peeves about opera... you gotta press the right mouse key to activate mouse gestures, whereas in mozilla it's the right key... makes a big difference if you're a laptop user...