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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."
...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
I set it up to block the advertizing (adblock and flachkill) and it runs blasingly fast, also i need less time to klick away windows noone want.
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
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...
> ...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.
Are you just pulling this stuff out of your arse, or what? Neither of these are new (WebCGM has been around since '99), both are fairly irrelevant, and WebCGM is a binary format in any case.
Given the *cough* rapid pace of MSIE development *cough* these days, if Mozilla stood stockstill for the next two years, it wouldn't lose any ground to IE (which still doesn't support all of DOM Level 2), and Opera is also still playing catch-up, although it's farther along than MSIE.
It would be nice if they'd start including SVG support in the standard releases, though. Especially since the Adobe SVG plugin for Moz/NS is broken and appears likely to stay that way for some time.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> Mozilla will be a thousand times more useful if it could offer an IE-compatibility mode (Javascript model, plugins) which works on Unix platforms.
NoooOOOOoooOOooOoooOOO!!!!
Then Microsoft wins and standards don't mean anything. The task which must be accomplished is to get site developers to code to standards, in which case 90% of the compatibility issues disappear (and the Web becomes about 75% safer due to the disappearance of ActiveWreX crap).
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.
Really, it will be much better.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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
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
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...
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.
I will bite the Trolls bait:
What the !@#$ are you talking about. One of the reasons the original Netscape code was dropped in favor of starting over was that the original code was a total mess. I should hope Mozilla would not fall into that trap again. Cleaning up code and fixing bugs should be of a higher priority than implementing obscure features only a handfull of people know about. Clean and well working code make it easier to implement new features while also making it easier for new developers to contibute to the project. As soon as those obscure features mentioned above really become desired by a substantial subset of developers/users, I am sure someone will come along and implement it (especially if the current code is laid out well).
I miss the Karma Whores.
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 !