4 Years Later, The Mozilla Tide Has Turned

dave writes "In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, in light of the excellent Firefox 0.8 release it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view."

Comments

The tides have changed.. Positive outlook

[eyeareque]

Yesterday I rebuilt my sisters windows 2000 machine. I installed gaim for her, and also ad aware then let her install whatever other apps she wanted.. The funny thing is, she called me later last night asking where she could download firebird because she hates internet explorer. I thought to myself, wow, how the tides have changed.

Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.

Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook

[AKAImBatman]

Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.

Amusingly enough, they don't always work in IE either. My mother and sister where having problems with not being able to type in the Rich Text Control. I showed them how to turn it off every time, but it was still very annoying. I finally gave them Firebird 0.7. No rich text controls, no pop up ads, no viruses, just pure web browsing bliss. They haven't looked back. :-)

Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook

[jgalun]

Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.

That would be a nice feature to have...but I believe that this is a Microsoft proprietary extension to the JavaScript DOM, not a standard. Which is not to say that the Mozilla team is incapable of reproducing it, just that they may have some qualms about it.

Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook

[TulioSerpio]

Look here, but ojo! its experimental Mozilla activeControl

Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook

[dfeist]

Maybe. But being technically correct is still important.

And by the way, I do care what is in virtually every product I buy. It's not enough that it "just works" - I know everything can fail, everything has its dangers. So I want to know where they are. I need to know what's in the product, and I hate it if everything is hidden to me and there are so many warning labels that I couldn't use the product if I really took care of all of them.

You may think everyone should be able to use products without understanding them. I want that everyone understands as much as possible of the technology behind them.

People should better understand _why_ not to put their cat into a microwave oven...

The tide is high, but are we rolling on....

[overbyj]

I agree that Mozilla has come a long way but unfortunately, as long as there is a very large computer company in the Pacific northwest that shall remain nameless continues to more tightly integrate their nameless browser into the OS, Mozilla stands little chance overall. Sure, I love Mozilla on Linux and OS X but there are sooooooo many people that respond " Mo...what?" when I mention it to them.

Kudos to the Mozilla team for Firefox. It is pretty sweet. Let's hope that the nameless company in the Pacific northwest loses it grip on the browser market. Not likely, but we can always hope.

Re:The tide is high, but are we rolling on....

[HairyCanary]

If the nameless software company in the Pacific Northwest keeps deleting features from their browser, and making it less and less standards compliant, then Mozilla WILL take off.

At my company, users are switching in droves today, as a direct result of the IE patch our helpdesk pushed out yesterday.

I remember...

[cozziewozzie]

...when Mozilla was the poster child for how NOT to run a project: hopelessly behind schedule, slow, bloated, leaking memory left and right. And there were people who kept saying that the Mozilla guys would get it working and that it would be a kickass browser.

Guess what? They were right after all. Congratulations to the Mozilla team and thanks for the excellent browser(s)!

The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel

[erick99]

Now that popups have become something of a nightmare for most users, I have found that most people I talk to are willing to try Mozilla just for the popup suppression. Once they are onboard with Mozilla they often comment that it is a faster browser and a better browser. It is almost comical to try to capture the expression when I tell them this "third party" browser is absolutely free and is continually updated - also for free.

Happy Trails,

Erick

Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel

[jsebrech]

What has firefox got that's not coming in the next service pack for IE?

Better standards support. IE would have to break backwards compatibility to fix this. They won't.

Better security track record. No known unfixed security flaws. This is a good reason to go from outlook (express) to thunderbird too, by the way. Don't be a worm victim. Switch.

Smaller download. Firefox 0.8 is less than 7 megs and getting smaller. I very much doubt IE's next service pack will fit in that category. If your choice is between firefox or IE's next service pack, and you're on modem, it makes sense to go for firefox. I have a modem-using friend who uses firebird 0.6 as a browser because she doesn't want to suffer the huge download to bring her basic installation up to the current service pack.

Better extensibility. IE doesn't have a framework for easily and quickly developing extensions with just a zip tool and notepad. It won't have it till longhorn.

Better web development functionality. The javascript console, the dom inspector, the various bookmarklets, the less permissive engine (which points out errors in your code much more easily than IE), and the in general better standards support work to make gecko-based browsers much better choices for web developers. Though I admit that is a niche market.

Currently in most cases firefox is also faster (except on first load of the app, because it's not preloaded). But I suppose an IE service pack might fix this. I doubt it though.

Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel

[jsebrech]

I forgot to mention the reason why better standards support matters. It matters because a lot of cool webdesign techniques exist that create pages that show the content correctly in basic browser (like IE), but do all kinds of cool stuff in advanced browsers (like firefox). There exist no equivalent techniques for IE's proprietary stuff. So if you develop for standards you can do all the cool stuff while offering basic functionality for the other camp, but if you develop for IE, you're locking out the entire market.

As a result, standards-based sites often look prettier in firefox.

Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel

[_xeno_]

As an example of this I can point out my new site that creates a rather neat alpha-effect using a fixed background image. This works with Mozilla but not with IE. There's also a standards complaint Tetris-like game I've coded on the site, it works with Mozilla but not with IE.

And, because they're standards compliant, the alpha effect and the Tetris game both work in Opera too. But not in IE.

I could really care less about who wins.

[normal_guy]

Standards compliance and all that is great, but the thing that made me switch to Firefox is that Microsoft pulled out support of it's JVM. I'm sure it was a half-arsed implementation, and they probably left some things out - but it was FAST. Now that I'm waiting five seconds for applets to load anyway, I made the switch from Avant (IE-based tabbed browser) to Firefox.

Ironic that...

[addie]

For the grant application system I manage, I have to officially recommend using IE 5.0 or above to all users. And my response to Mac users who don't use IE? I have to tell them "we're working on it". But when I'm using/testing the system myself, I use nothing other than Mozilla Firebird.

When will the bigwhigs realize that open-source does not necessarily mean risky, dangerous, or taboo in some way?

Why is Firefox such a memory hog?

[MonkeyCookie]

On a related note, a freshly opened Galeon used 120M of RAM, while a freshly opened Firefox used 86M. I don't really know exactly what that means, but a lower RAM usage number is always a good thing to see.

Why on earth does a web browser like Firefox take up 86 MB of memory? That seems like an awful lot of memory for just a web browser. Is it GTK2 that is taking up all that space?

Wow... 4 years ago

[Xpilot]

I actually printed out that article, with the Star Wars references and all, and kept it in a nice thick binder :) I was a slashdot newbie then, and every story fascinated me. Whenever I read it, I think, "if only this article were seen in context today, with the success of Mozilla"... and today I see this. Great job :)

embedding into applications?

[ldspartan]

Has any work been done to allow the Moz renderer to be embedded into other applications the same way that IE can be? (under Win32, obviously). It seems that without that functionality, Moz will never be able to fully replace IE on the Windows desktop.

--
lds

Browser wars

[Tenfish]

Thw browser wars were overrated I think. There's more to the desktop experience than the browser.

Look at the kinds of games that are popular on the internet, for example. Flash, Shockwave, java, etc. These areas are still dominated by Microsoft, and I don't see much progress with Linux. A lot of people are still having trouble getting something like Flash working properly. I keep getting pages that say that I need to upgrade to Flash 6. I have Flash 6 installed on my Linux box, and it works well on most pages. But there are the corner cases that it fails on.

We don't need just the browser to work. We need everything to work. Does the Firefox browser have Java in it out of the box? Java was terribly difficult to get working under Mozilla, and like Flash, didn't work all the time.

Even something as simple as playing two sounds at once would hang the browser. We've got to fix these problems before Linux becomes big on the desktop, or the users will not have a good time.

Why does mozilla get all the press?

[ToadMan8]

It's a good browser with stability, speed and some cool features. So is Opera. It's cross platform. So is Opera.

Opera may be a bit behind on OS X but it was independantly tested as being the world's fastest rendering browser. It sticks to interdational standards like superglue and your fingers.

Is the reason it gets nowhere near the press Mozilla does that Opera is not open source? What are your thoughts on this one?

The company released it's IPO intensions a few days ago (Initial Public Offering; it's "going public" or starting to sell shares of stock to make shareholders the owners). I personally am very excited. I think it's a margainally better product than Moz and that makes it best in the world, IMHO.

Alternate universes?

[orthogonal]

dave writes "In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, in light of the excellent Firefox 0.8 release it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view."

In dave's original 1999 article, he had written:

"Attention: This is the battle that could cost us the war. If we come together and push all of our might toward a Free Web Browser for Linux, we have a good chance of winning this battle. If we fail, we will lose the war. This is the issue that Microsoft wants us to overlook."

Meanwhile, over on MozillaZine's Firefox discussion board, Firefox developer "bengoodger" responds to criticism that Firefox is insensitive to the needs of its users:

I'm not quite sure how many times I need to explain this, maybe I should stick it in a FAQ or something, but Firefox is not a community driven project. While it gets a lot of benefit from testing, ideas, patches, etc, the prerogative for deciding what will and will not go into the product has always been held by the development group. This is not a new thing, this was in fact the reason this project was created.

In a subsequent message he explains further (emphasis mine):

Aside from the work that Pierre has done improving Bookmarks and digging around in the toolkit, patches from individual contributors and the infrasturcture (sic) work Brian has been doing on an ongoing basis, Firefox is basically just me at the moment.

So are we all in this together, or is the community just sitting on its collective ass, waiting for bengoodger to vanquish Microsoft all by himself? (I realize it's not so black and white, especially given Mozilla's extensible structure, but still I found the contrast of opinions revelatory.)

Easy to solve

[EvilStein]

I just tell them that it's a special version of Netscape 7, without the AOL logos.

People immediately recognize "Netscape," even to this day.. which is a good thing.

Re:Disagree

[symbolic]

The more Microsoft continues to integrate, the more it sets its customers up for even greater degrees of security risk. As vuruses and and other maladies continue to plague the Windows OS, people will begin to see the light - bigger and more bloated is not always better, no matter how tightly "integrated" it is.

Re:One thing against it...

[gfxguy]

I had a similar thing happen at work... they revamped the internal website (it's quite large, for a large company). They kept spamming us advertising the rollout of their great new website.

When it finally came out, they had hooks on the main page that kicked you out if you weren't running IE. I went medieval on their asses! I really let them have it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. One of the things I pointed out was how stupid it was since I could stop the page from loading all the way (just hit esc before it could execute the java code) and still click on links and they'd work just fine. So then I bookmarked the links, and everything worked just fine.

They took out the offending code within one day, so I can actually visit the main page again.

Re:droves you say!?

[back_pages]

You may have a point, but practically anybody that I ever talk to about web browsers switches to Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox. People complain about the internet all the time - I just say, "Well, I don't have that problem."

Mozilla will win ground on 3 representative features: No popups, different security issues, and tabbed browsing.

The popups affects everyone using IE. Impress upon people that popups are the result of Microsoft screwing people over and not caring - it's not even a half truth. It's an obnoxious misfeature that irritates end users but gives Microsoft friends in business. It should have never been implemented. While Microsoft serves their own interests and contemplates their cash flow, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.

Internet Explorer has about ninety billion security flaws. Even if you have all the patches, you'll still want to disable ActiveX. You still don't have a convenient way of blocking images from particular servers (spam related, annoying, inappropriate). I'm not going to pretend that Mozilla is flawless on the security front, but it does represent a distinct minority of security problems. Bad people attack IE, Microsoft is slow to fix IE, Microsoft designed IE with a million other security issues. While Microsoft drags their feet and does everything possible to make money, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.

Mozilla presents tabbed browsing, among other features, that are simply better than what IE offers. Type ahead links, one key to search for text, Google built into the button bar, a spiffy download manager in Firebird 0.8, and 2 clicks to block images are fantastic additions to your web browser.

So really, you'd be a complete fool to use IE. Maybe Mozilla isn't your cup of tea, but you'd be a fool to use IE. Maybe you are required to use IE for a few specific sites, but you'd be a fool to therefore use IE for all your web browsing. Maybe you can't install Mozilla on your lab/work computer, but you can install Firebird on a USB Flash Drive ($20 or less) and take a better browser with you everywhere.

So maybe they aren't switching in droves, but a person would have to be a complete fool to use IE exclusively. When the word really gets out about that, the results will be hardly surprising. Like they say, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". Internet Explorer is no longer a leader.

Other Browsing Fronts in the War?

[buckhead_buddy]

The browser battles may have fought to a stand still but there are some other issues that still bug me. The biggest is the Intellectual Property battle.

Web pages are copyrightable code and content. There have been features around for years to take this bundle and automatically put it into something else (a PDF file, a archive folder, etc.). What hasn't been addressed are the legal implications of doing that.

If I go to a sight that says it's pages are protected (for example) what happens if I send the page in an HTML email to my boss. It may even make a differnence if the pages claimed to be copyrighted, gpl'ed, or click-through-licensed.

Where Microsoft can win this game is by making everything on Windows locked down tight in Longhorn. They then make sure that every author can set their price per page on the Microsoft web: "Downloading a page out of Internet Explorer isn't allowed unless you pay $0.001 cents per byte." (or some such nonsense).

Why would anyone use a non-free browser in this manner? They wouldn't unless they were forced to. Microsoft can do this by convincing every blogger and Parent Teacher Association that they're losing money by not exclusively using Microsoft technologies. For the insurgents who write out of some (un-American!) sense other than profit, they can probably stir up enough noise and uncertainty in the court rooms (whether they do the suing or a puppet) that makes people just feel like the "web" was the equivalent of some sort of sixties commune. Groovy and completely unsustainable.

The fact that free software has a pair of good tools (apache and firefox) is still barely into this game.

What else can be done? Legally I don't know. I'm not a lawyer.

But for the coders and writers and web users of today, get them using standards and free software and realize they're using it is a very good thing.

Second, maybe get something like source forge set up for people to GPL web sites. I'm not talking people's blogs here, but major site redesigns that have become standard compliant and how they did it. Heck, get volunteers to do site redesigns if the code becomes GPL and open to all. People need to realize that not only is it important to redesign their sites to be standards compliant, but it's also cheap to do so. The site probably won't convince the CitiBanks of the world to do anything special, but it will hopefully show and convince the community colleges and small businesses and non-profit organizations that this is really a do-able thing.

Greed is still a strong factor. If Microsoft ever does release a secure OS, then there will be a lot of people who succumb to greed. But if their whole stream of server, database, & browser is already Microsoft proprietary they'll certainly not see any advantage to going open and standards compliant at that point.

But that shouldn't take away from the great progress that Mozilla has made. It's been a fantastic thing to watch.

All Hail Web Standards

[Ngineer]

It's been a long time coming, but part of the reason Firefox is so exciting is that web designers are finally starting to come around to the value of web standards (namely XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript). ESPN.com was one of the first of the really huge sites to commit to these standards, and the trend is accelerating. See Jeffrey Zeldman's excellent book Designing with Web Standards to get a handle on these developments. And if you haven't already seen it, here's a cool article about how to get /. into full standards compliance.

There are still plenty of sites that are built to work only with IE for Windows, but now that the alternatives are so good and the advantages increasingly obvious, this is changing.