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

IE still has an advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

It is fairly standard compliant, all right. But unfortunately, 90% of the web pages are not. They are targeting the "de facto" standard which is IE 6.x...

Too bad.

My 2 problems with Mozilla

[GonzoDave]

Mozilla-Uses around 40 MB of RAM in processes.
IE-Uses around 15MB of RAM in process

Mozilla-Poorly designed history, slow, tedious to use and access, often completely fails to include sites
IE-Easy to use, responsive and intuitive history

I feel that sometimes the Open Source community has a blind spot, in that it's seemingly incapable of admitting a Microsoft product might be better in a certain aspect. Because of this, these features never get fixed. To do so would be to admit Microsoft might have done something right. It's reminiscent of creationism in it's lack of reason

Re:I remember...

[Ilgaz]

Oh yes, AOL execs phoned them everyday to make browser suck.

You geeks have no clue what would happen if Netscape branded Firefox shipped with AIM, free offline Webmail etc

Its a mozilla story, many fanatics, posting as AC.

They can't even take critism let alone coding a browser.

I'm enjoying it too.

[the web]

Lately projects have been getting finished, work completed left and right. Boy that's gonna come to an end soon. I'll be back to slacking in no time!

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

[garcia]

amazingly enough I have just installed Firefox .8 (supposedly something that is going to make Microsoft look out according to Forbes)...

Looks poor to me:

Doesn't render Slashdot correctly (as the sidebars are actually overlapping the text in the main section)

The toolbars don't drag so I have two toolbars instead of one (I have a 21" CRT, I have plenty of room for the menu and the URL bars)

It seems to load pages slower than IE.

And when I type it appears that the cursor is actually over the piece of text instead of ahead of it which makes for an annoying black on white bar while you're typing.

I'll stick to IE.

Re:Firefox on OS X

[ratsnapple tea]

I thought "Wow this is just like Safari without the metal."

That was my first thought too. The Firefox guys ripped the whole interface off Safari and still managed to get everything wrong, sometimes subtly wrong, sometimes blatantly wrong, but always wrong. Case in point: The rounded toolbar buttons that look great in Safari but look like utter shit in Firefox, especially when you start dragging them around and realize even that small degree of beauty is only skin deep. Or how about the ugly-ass preferences window that lacks even a cache control option? Hint to the developers: making a browser easy to use doesn't have to involve crippling its functionality.

That's what's so frustrating--the Mozilla project shows so much promise, but there's just so much shameless copying going on and not enough innovation in terms of UI features or anything else, and there's no sign that the developers will ever be made aware of how to deliver a polished, aesthetically pleasing product.

Yeah, I realize how I sound saying all this, but God help me if it's not how I really feel. Fucking hell.

yours

Re:good FUCK people!! Get a clue!!

[badmammajamma]

Opera is better and it works on Linux, FreeBSD, and your damn cell phone too.