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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.
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.
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.