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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."
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?
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Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
I am using Firebird and see no probs with /.
Just for the record, Firebird is the browser I use 99% of the time and there is not many sites that it cannot handle.
Generally, if a site 'requires' IE, switching the agent in Firebird (via the Agent Switcher plug-in) does the job (tricking the site into believing you are using IE and serving the content). Firebird then renders the page correctly.
When this does not work, then I use IE (which is the remaining 1% percent of the time that I don't use Firebird), very rare though...
will work for Karma
> hopefully they will start using native widgets rather than the ugly GTK like widgets being used now.
Then you lose cross-platform consistency and the ability to use themes with custom widgets. I like being able to use the same standards-compliant browser that looks and behaves the same on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Check out themes.mozdev.org, or -- if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then you can learn XUL and build your own.
I like the browser/email combo, use Moz 1.5, and hope they'll continue to develop it. I'm not terribly interested in replacing one app with 4 (browser, email, HTML editor, IRC).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I agree entirely. Opera used to be the only browser I could cope with and I wanted something open source. I was not impressed with mozilla (after spending 2 hours compiling it), but firebird really sets the bar for browsers now and has done everything right that mozilla has done wrong.
I'm not saying that Mozilla is a bad browser, I suppose it's a matter of taste.
W3 validator
'nuff said.
(you may need to try a few times if the validator keeps reporting a 403)
Enable quickstart to have Mozilla in memory at all times and ready to go. This is what IE does, so there's not much point comparing until you level the playing field.
Startup's instantaneous with quickstart. Even moreso than IE, which appears on-screen quickly but actually takes a moment to finish displaying and let you use your bookmarks/URL bar.
If you want REALLY fast, use Firebird and put this in the URI bar:
about:config
Look/filter for "turbo" and set it to true. The developers didn't include this feature in the options UI, but I find it doesn't take much memory at all and makes Firebird very snappy.
Tabbed browsing *rocks*. I have about 10 tabs open in Mozilla all the time. The sites I'm reading regularily, plus some articles, man pages etc. I'm currently reading.
I couldn't imagine having distinct windows open for all of these. I cannot understand why people stick to MSIE. It's almost impossible to persuade my co-workers to switch to another browser.
Mozilla usally runs for *weeks* on my home workstation (Linux) without restarts. It's not slow at all. At work (Win XP) Mozilla gets really slow after a day of usage. It's better to restart it from time to time, and to reboot the XP every couple of days.
Get the TabBrowser extensions. Everything you could ever think of that you'd want tabs to do, these do it. And then some.
I also highly recommend the PrefBar add-on.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why should Ctrl-N open a new tab? That would be really poor design, mainly because every single application ive ever used a keyboard shortcut to open a new window in has it mapped to Ctrl-N. Just because it has tabs doesnt mean you have to use them for everything. I often have a couple of windows open with multiple tabs in each one.
Ctrl-T opens a new tab by the way. Ctrl-click opens a link in a new background tab, Ctrl-Shift-click opens it in a foreground tab.
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.
This feature is available in Mozilla Firebird 0.7 (and probably earlier versions too): Tools > Options > Advanced > Browsing > Open links in the background. Mozilla 1.5 has it as well (and again, earlier versions had this too): Edit > Preferences > Navigator > Tabbed browsing > Load links in the background.
Even better, a click of the middle mouse button will do this in one click as opposed to two clicks needed in Opera.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
Currently, Firebird (And the Mozilla classic theme) use the native widget painting code where possible. On Windows, they use the theming API when available, otherwise the default is to look like the old/standard Win32 widget set. On Unix, they use Gtk's widget painting code, so it looks somewhat like a Gtk application. Unfortunately, it's not complete, menus don't look native, for example. On MacOS X, they do now use Carbon's widget painting API IIRC. They also use a skin tailored for the Mac to make Firebird obey the MacOS X UI guidelines better.
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