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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."
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.
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.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
...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)!
Happy Trails,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
Posted by dave on Feb 11, 2004 2:55 PM
By Dave Whitinger
In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view.
On November 5th, 1999 I wrote an essay to the community titled The Battle That Could Lose Us The War. In that essay I described my mounting frustration over the losing battle we were fighting in the area of web browsers. My conclusion was that if Microsoft was able to dominate the web on the desktop, it would be a short matter of time before they could extend and dominate the web on the server. I knew that Mozilla was our last and only hope for winning this.
In the years since then, despite enormous and sundry pressures against them, the Mozilla project has moved forward at a remarkable pace. They somehow rebounded from each major setback even stronger. Milestones were passed, 1.0 came and went, and the layout engine Gecko started to pick up speed and became used in a variety of applications, including Galeon and Netscape 6 and 7. When AOL finally turned the developers loose, they responded by apparantly doubling their efforts and moving even faster and smarter. Whether you like Mozilla or not, their persistence is an inspiration to the entire Free Software community.
So much progress has been made, in fact, that today, more than four years since my gloomy outlook was keyed, with unspeakable pleasure I am now in a position to report that this tide has finally turned. The Gecko layout engine seems unbreakable and is reportedly more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. The Firefox browser is fast and stable, and supports the plugins out there that the users want and need, and, for the first time in several years, my wife is actually excited about her Linux desktop again. For the first time since Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, I am seeing people switching browsers in droves.
Furthermore, we now have the same browser as the Windows users. By making sure that my web pages look good in Firefox, I can be sure that it will look similarly in Firefox for Windows. Speaking of Windows, many of the Windows folks that I know, including those computer newbies that still think the "internet" is in their "Internet Explorer icon", have already made the switch to Firefox. Joe-User is excited about Firefox, and this means fast adoption of this browser in all computing circles.
Not only is Mozilla/Firefox a superior product, but it is built in the best traditions of quality software: simple, extensible and free (libre). The extensions support in Firefox is simply genius and will continue to create an entire industry of software products to enhance and customize the browser for individuals.
At the risk of fostering an attitude of complacency, I must say that the Mozilla project has breathed new life into the web, and as a side-effect, into the Linux desktop. The war is still far from over, but the tide of this crucial battle has most definitely turned. Things have never looked brighter for Linux (as a server, and a desktop), nor for the computing community as a whole, as a direct result of the tireless and outstanding work of the Mozilla developers. Well met!
"For the first time since Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, I am seeing people switching browsers in droves"
Droves you say?! is that future sight?! firefox comes up less than WEBTV in most of the webtrends reports I am seeing. I look at the statistics for a number of frequently used (100k visitors a day) sites and do not see firefox gaining users. (note - Ill happily eat my words if the statistics show a significant increase.) but still... droves?
Joe User does not give a fuck about standards... in fact - he is HAPPY to view websites that have broken table tags and still display in IE. Joe user wants to continue not thinking and have stuff given to him. for that reason alone, Internet Explorer will continue to be the most used windows browser, and until the tides turn on the desktop operating system situation, IE will stay in its comfy place.
Grudgingly, albeit, I must admit -- Netscape 7.1 is pretty snappy. Technically, it still doesn't offer a great deal of what IE does... but one wonders sometimes if Microsoft's browserworks elves have gotten a bit carried away, anyway -- as extraordinarily few websites ever actually *use* a great many of those bells and whistles. Anyone for an "IE Light"?
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?
Browsing using it is only a consequence.
IMHO it is a pity to break it in different pieces...
M.
--
http://incuso.altervista.org/
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?
Move on. 7.1 is the final version. Go get Mozilla or Firefox, where the updates keep coming.
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 :)
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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
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.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
Completely different product space. Trademarks are allowed for such things, and the Moz project is well on its way to having the trademark approved.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
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.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
Tabbed browsing is addictive, standards support is wonderful, but the feature that makes people go "oh, this is SO much better than Internet Explorer!" is the automatic popup blocking. I don't have to sell any of the other features to the people I recommend FireFox to; they discover them on their own.
My only current quibble is the new way FireFox handles download in 0.8... I liked that "launch" button dammit!
Having a good browser for Linux was the point here. The fact that the SAME browser works on windows is a good thing since it means that no mater which os you run, you are not stuck with MS standards on the web.
With the 0.8 release of Firefox, the OSS community has achieved, no, surpassed browser expectations that many have had.
The question now remains.. With IE the default on Windows, what compelling reason does Joe User have to go through the trouble switching to Firefox? I can think of a few: tabbed browsing, security, NTLM compatibility, popup blocking.
But what about Joe Users' activeX sites? Will Firefox work with sites that use activeX? Unfortunately not. Will Joe User see this as a failing of Firefox? Probably. So what can we do to address this issue? Any thoughts?
In dave's original 1999 article, he had written:
Meanwhile, over on MozillaZine's Firefox discussion board, Firefox developer "bengoodger" responds to criticism that Firefox is insensitive to the needs of its users:
In a subsequent message he explains further (emphasis mine):
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.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Because the only phrase that should follow "Best viewed with " is "any browser".
I must say that the Mozilla project has breathed new life into the web, and as a side-effect, into the Linux desktop.
Indeed. I was laughing the other day about how I am excited to go browse a webpage again. I was tinkering with the features of firefox, and was just loving it. I had used Mozilla on my Linux box at home, but to be using firefox at work on my Win2k machine is absolutely refreshing. Keep up the good work guys.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Firefox is an amazing product and personally I love it a lot and use it exclusively. But I dont think it will capture significant market share anytime soon. I think these proprietory plugins are what preventing users from switching to firefox(or mozilla). Joe user cannot download and install those plugins to get his job done. He is too lazy/scared to do that. Untill and unless there is an acceptable remedy for this proprietory craps, things are not going to change IMHO. I would love to be proven wrong though. But still kudos to mozilla project for coming up with such a wonderfull product.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
If 'programmers' adhered to well documented standards, and stopped trying to make eye candy by biting on the non-standard hooks in IE, then you'd find that the problem of choking would pretty much vanish.
It is a very clever strategy of microsoft to release a non-standard adhering browser, since as they currently control the vast majority on desktop machines, they puppet 'programmers' into doing their dirty work for them (keeping people on the MS platform).
The less tech-savvy of us will of course assume "this browser sucks, it can't render this page correctly", when it is the page itself that can't be rendered properly within standards guidelines.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
IIRC they have suspended further development of MSIE and will only release security patches.
This is a far cry from the days when hundreds of developers worked on making MSIE one of the fastest and smartest browsers out there.
You really have to wonder whether it was worthwhile for Microsoft. What would have changed if Netscape had continued to sell their browser? Fewer people using Windows? Hardly. A less powerful browser platform? Not really: the browser never could be the operating system.
Personally I thought the whole browser war was part of the same hype that caused Oracle to invest so much in web terminals, or whatever they called them.
The browser is just one more applet, fundamentally. Comes in all shapes and sizes, and so long as it respects the rules, no-one cares what logo it shows in the top corner. I come here for Slashdot, not for the browser.
So, since development on Mozilla and its cousins continues unabated, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft start to play catch-up. Will they, I wonder? What can they gain?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Way back when, Microsoft poured tons of money into IE to kill of Netscape, Netscape was simply too entrenched. "Bundling" helped but people would have downloaded Netscape if it was indeed a significantly better product.
Fast forward to today. The only looming threats are Opera and Firefox. The problem with all Open Source is that they have absolutely no marketing. It solely relies on word of mouth. 1 person tells another, who tells his friends, etc. and the usage theoretically increases exponentially (subject to gross errors of course). But even exponential growth is tiny if the current user base is small.
Until the Firefox usage rates increases to a threatening rate MS will sit on its shoddy browser and milk it for all its worth.
I'm sure MS knows FireFox is better, but why spend money to update their browser when the competition can't effectively communicate to a target market? A great product is no good if no one knows about it. Eventually the 'diffusion' of FireFox will increase enough to cause MS to grudgingly update. Then you will see a TRUE browser war.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Firefox takes away the master password from the personal security manager, so it's just as much of a personal liability as IE if your machine's compromised. This makes it a spectacularly bad idea for the office if you deal with sensitive websites, and for casual home user who may not know security well.
Firefox takes dozens of basic features like animated GIF removal away from the configuration panel -- instead you have to know what undocumented value to insert in a hidden configuration screen. Even Internet Explorer offers this option in a mouse-accessible location!
Why are the Firefox folks hiding features? Why not add an "advanced options" chevron for the things you think only 2% of users use? Removing 50 options from the mainstream configurator altogether means that you've disappointed a different 2% of your users with each new annoyance.
No! Instead put W3C logo at bottom that it complies to W3C standards completely... at bottom of slashdot..
http://validator.w3.org/
Wait a minute..
...and MSIE is still dominating the market. Firefox (sigh) is an excellent product, but very few are using it all the same. If anything, it's the success of Linux that is their core - if there hadn't been a real need to get a good browser on the Linux platform, I don't think they'd be anywhere near where they are today.
But, as long as the standards are winning, I really don't care what browser is winning. Personally I prefer Opera, but it's yet another of those browsers that are "not MSIE". And as long as there's many enough of us, hopefully Microsoft can't embrace and extend.
Though I fear what will happen once the DRM shit comes. "This page requires Internet Explorer 7.0 with Enhanced Content Security Pack(TM) running on a Trusted Computing System(TM). Please upgrade to take full advantage of our site."
I only hope Linux will push through and become at the very least a minority they can't ignore before that window of opportunity closes. Once shut out of the market, there's no easy way coming back in.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I dare to disagree. IE is the most used browser, that I agree with. But not the most well known or commonly known one. Non-techie people I talk to don't have a clue what IE is and only once I mention it's the thing they use to go on the internet ( Remember, talking to a non-techie here... To most of them the web IS the net. ) I'll get an "Oh yeah..." as reply. People don't use IE because it's well known, they simply use it because it is there.
Hate me!
"Best viewed with..." ads are evil, even if the browser you're supporting is great. People should be coding according to the standard because the web exists to present information, not tell you what you should be running. I prefer the any browser and W3 logos.
What you might want to do instead, is to have a 'tested with' list somewhere on your page, which lists the browsers you tested your page with. It shows that you take your work seriously, and mentions a lot of browsers people might want to try.
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.
Firstly, install Firefox and then go to, say, http://www.simsnow.com which has flash on the front page. In IE I would get a dialog saying "do you want to install this now". I click "Yes", I have flash. Instead I was taken off to download something, which I did and I installed it. I restarted Firebird - still not flash. What I ended up doing was copying the plug-ins from my old Firebird installation into Firefox's plug-ins directory and then it was fine.
Secondly, it has crashed twice today on Windows XP. Firebird crashed about once a day - and it wasn't page rendering. I would do this:
* Open the Browser
(blank page loads)
* I click on my "news and daily" folder link to goto Slashdot
* Firebird/fox hangs
Thirdly. The plug-in installer is totally cool - but its too hidden. As a seasoned computer user it still took me 5-10 minutes to figure out how to install the Google toolbar in Firefox - even though I'd done it before in Firebird.
Fouth - and this one is the sh*t one. Although it may be more "standard compliant", it is not as forgiving as IE in terms of bad HTML. I still get many sites that don't work in Mozilla - and because I know how HTML works and know the whole history behind W3C compatability standards I'll launch IE and look at the site with that. my mother would probably think the website was screwed. The sad fact of the matter is that there are a myriad of WYSIWYG HTML authoring tools that produde non-compliant HTML and to use the argument that they should fix their problems and Mozilla is god because it adheres to standards is horribly narrow-minded.
My comment perhpas paints a picture more bleak than the reality. Personally I love using Firebird/fox in general, especially for its rendering spped - but I'm quite sure my mother would find the "immersive internet experience" of IE more pleasurable.
Also this whole Mozilla/Netscape/Firebird thing is really confusing me - and perhaps others. Why doesn't the Mozilla team commit a bit more resource towards polish and user experience and produce a single primary browser with some more bells and whistles and sell/give that away. I believe that Netscape is supposed to be this, I think, but after my experiences with older versions of Netscape I really wouldn't install that.
This hits the nail on the head. Our local transit authority here has some IE specific BS in their fornt page. It won't even work in Safari, but it does work in Mozilla Firefox. I have not tried it with Konquerer yet, but my bet is it would not work there either. What's funny is I used IE and found a link for the schedule and trip planner page, copied it into Safari and it work just fine. Firefox is great. Is Camino as good?
Gorkman
I've been ignoring Mozilla since the Mozilla project started. IE for Windows was great for me, and I didn't like Navigator. Having moved to OSX last year and having Safari to use, I never even bothered with IE. Then the other day I responded to the /. story for Firefox, and gave it a shot.
I thought "Wow this is just like Safari without the metal." I mean, common it's a web browser. What I dont like is that the scroll bars are screwed up on Firefox if you load anything other than the default theme (Under OSX anyway). So with nothing to add over Safari, I probably won't be switching. But if I was using Windows at home, I'd love to have the tabbed browsing that IE doesn't provide. Then again, in windows I have a task bar...
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
With the tab-based browsing in Mozilla (along with other features), IE is painful to use IMHO. Along with Linux CDs, I also burn some Win-Mozilla CDs to give to people so they can break the M$ habit.
The only thing I wish they'd do is ditch the Firefox name and keep it Mozilla. Or shall we call it "The browser formerly known as Mozilla"?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Even if a good number of Windows users come to realize uselessness of IE after all years and begin switching, the story is not over yet. There still are very many sites that are readable only with IE, and for these sites Windows/IE is the standard, regardless of w3c. Not to mention WMP9 and DRM, Microsoft has planted enough propriatery lock-ins to the Internet in the last several years so that it is impossible to get rid of IE (and Win) over night. I hope none of commercial mp3 download sites using IE/WMP will become a success, as they are endorsing this business strategy.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic. At least I can wish that the world is better place than what I think it is.
It only monitors what browser is being used for a subscribing site. As a metric, it's only useful to say that the percentages of browser use is accurate for the types of sites that subscribe to Webtrends as they don't have more than maybe 10% of the web servers out there covered.
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics. Be careful what you accept as facts and what context the facts are from.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
While web browsing is a major part of what people do with their operating system, somehow I think the battle for linux on joe-user's desktop lies in other areas. Major improvements in ease of use have taken place in gnome and kde, as well as in the os installers such as redhat and fedora. The key to getting joe user is first getting the install to be plopping in a cd and putting in some minimal and straight forward information and letting it go wild.
Konqueror has been showing my webpages well for quite some time now, and is my primary browser though I do use Firebird/FireFox on occasion.
Granted, web browsers are significant part of the application base of a functional os: in my honest opinion, mozilla itself hardly matters in the war of linux vs windows.
It has little to do with actual HTML. The vast majority of compatibility problems are javascript related, when people either ignore Mozilla/5 completely, or try to treat it like Netscape 4. Sometimes the "IE code" they're using would even work fine in Mozilla if they gave it the chance.
I personally don't get crashes with Firefox more than once a month, and usually not even that. And, I've never had a problem with the Flash installer finding my installation.
The Convicted Monopolist, having supposedly wiped out opposing browsers, have been utterly negligent with Incompetent Exploder for years now. It has fallen way behind in useful features, and it never made any attempt at standards compliance. As for the security holes..... I know they claimed the other day that it was now the most secure because they had fixed so many problems, but anyone who has ever done any software QA will know the utter incompetence of statements like that, in fact the number of bugs discovered is more likely to correlate with th elack of quality of the underlying code, much of which still remains, so it is almost certainly still very bad indeed. IE was another case of "decommoditising the protocols", as described in the infamous Halloween Memos, delibarately breaking standards compliance and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator of quality and interoperability.
The big problem is that ignorant or indolent web designers have churned out buggy code that works (sort of) in Inept Eradicator, but will fail in any standards-compliant browser, the closest to that ideal of standards compliance being Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror (not in any order, and apologies to any I missed). Some designers have apparently used that other utterly useless M$ product, Frontpage, which AFAIK has never had a good review in any magazine. Standards compliance is absolutely essential, that is why the Web grew so quickly, but now growth is jeapordised by the ill-defined non-standard set by the Monopolist and the fact that incompetents have chosen to work to it.
The way forward is of course to make sites which are fully standards-compliant (relatively easy, there are lots of better tools than Frontpage, some of them free, and a free validation service at w3c.org.) The trash that went before such as IE is best forgotten, otherwise we will forever be infested with bugs, security holes and Billisms. (A Billism is a feature which is illogical, unwanted and ineptly implemented, which forces itself upon you because Sir Bill presumes to know better than you what you want to do. Word is particularly full of Billisms.)
Mozilla and its relatives, not forgetting Netscape is an excellent base from which to move forward once more, without deviating into the closed, unstable and constantly changing world of Illegal Monopolies and their badly deficient producta. (Point to ponder - a monopoly is only necessary when a company can not succeed on the strenghts of its products, therefore th eneed to create one is in fact an admission of abject failure.) I use Mozilla at home, as do all my friends, and we are all quite keen to recommend it to others. It has also been getting favourable reports in the press. Long may it continue.
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.
This article was about Linux, and how the use of Moz will help it. It was not about Moz specifically, so get over it.
Time makes more converts than reason
Nobody would have started using IE if it didn't incorporate all the non-standard quirks of old versions of Netscape.
First of all, let's be clear -- Mozilla accepts all sorts of non-standard stuff. However, they don't accept non-standard stuff when it was invented by Microsoft, rather than Netscape.
If Mozilla were to make a couple minor tweaks, they could easily be compatible with the majority of "non-standard" IE sites. However, they decided they were not going to be compatible with IE when they had a 50% marketshare, and apparenlty that's the decision they'll stick with even with a 1% marketshare. Their choice, but Mozilla Advocates shouldn't not be suprised because adoption is very slow.
(This is ignoring all the sites that don't want to work in Mozilla and actively sniff browser strings. That's basically a marketshare issue.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Wow, that article brings back memories. Anyhow, the fact that the population doesn't use or know about mozilla or firefox right now isn't a big deal. They'll continue to use IE because that's what they know. They even do this on the Mac (which is really sick, given IE's crappy state on the Mac).
When Linux starts to move in to more and more corporate desktops, people won't be able to rely on their IE habit anymore, and will be forced to use a Linux browser. This is when you'll start to see it in greater force.
And even further down the line, when Linux starts to invade the home desktop space also, we'll be glad the Mozilla project (and the KDE/KHTML project) has been around for so long. These things will come, it's only a matter of time.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm rather unimpressed by this about face. I thought the original artical back in 1999 was way off base.
The author seems to have taken the Shipping News to heart.
"imminent storm threatens village"
But what if there's no storm?
"village saved from deadly storm"
Only it's worse, because the deadly storm was entirely manufactured by a combination of personal insecurity, unrealistic expections, and a "complain until some one else fixes it" mentality.
It was obvious to me that the Mozilla developers were going to have to pay the price for a few years to get their house in order before their hard work became obvious from the external perspective.
Developers are supposed to know better than to run around complaining "the sky is falling" while the people involved are wrestling with really difficult structural problems. What's amazing is that the people involved stayed involved, while having to read this kind of crap in the first place.
It always saps my strength when management runs around saying "nothing is happening fast enough" when I've just spent a month of long hours excavating down to the bedrock.
Just what is this guy taking credit for?
"falling sky threatens village"
But what if sky doesn't fall?
"village saved from deadly sky"
It doesn't get much worse than that.
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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
>IE is the most used browser, that I agree with. But not the most well known or commonly known one.
If the users of IE can't even notice the name of the product in the title bar, how will they the name of browsers they don't even use?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
You idiots are turning an excellent browser into a weapon in your imaginary war. Why would you isolate it from Windows users with your shitty "us vs them" attitude? Firefox has nothing to do with the Linux "movement." It apparently works great regardless of the OS.
I'm afraid you've missed the point, AC. Linux isn't about linux.
No, really, I mean that.
That is, linux isn't about "the linux movement". I can see how the opinions of some super-zealot linux fanbois might have given you that impression, but they're a tiny minority.
But you're right about one thing: the fact that Mozilla works under linux -- or as you note, it "works great regardless of the OS" is the point.
Because linux isn't about linux. Linux's about the freedom to make up your own mind.
Let me explain by contrasting linux with MS-Windows. MS-Windows is about vendor lock-in, embraced standards that are extended to be proprietary and ad hoc, and above all making blanket decisions for all users that don't take into account individual variation among users.
Microsoft gives you XML that only Microsoft Word can read. Microsoft gives your disk formatters that can but won't format partitions lagrer than 32GB -- because Microsoft believes that partitions larger than 332GB should be NTFS. Microsoft's browser can't conceive of a situation where its proxy settings shouldn't apply to all programs -- so rather than have it's own proxy settings, it alters the settings for the overall network connection. And so forth.
Linux says to you, it's your computer, you can do whatever you want with it, if you're willing to take the time to figure out how, or -- if it can't yet be done -- figure out how to code it.
And Firefox is about that philosophy too. That's why Firefox runs regardless of OS: because your choice of OS shouldn't be dictated by your browser.
And that -- the browser dictating the OS, by means of embracing and extending the HTML markup language -- was what dave was complaining about in the first place.
The reason I use Firefox is two-fold: one, it's a better browser in most ways than IE (it's worse in others, especially Mozilla's doctrinaire insistence on not compensating for obviously incorrect mime types on mis-configured servers).
But the other reason I use Firefox is the same reason I use cygwin and Open Office and ScITE: Microsoft has put me in a corner one time to many, a corner where Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't llet me run my computer as I needed to.
And so I turned to linux-style tools. Cygwin, because Windows doesn't support command line tools or development well. mkfs (yes, a version of mkfs compiled for Windows!) in order to make a 60GB partition for my mp3s -- because, as I noted above, Windows could but would not write a partition bigger than 32GB, and I didn't want to and couldn't use NTFS for my mp3 partition.
Open Office and SciTE because it's clear that MS-Windows is going to keep restricting me. While I'm not ready to move to linux yet, I am making sure that my transition will be easy: Open Office and SciTE both run under both MS-Windows and linux, so I won;t have to learn news apps when I transition.
So Firefox's philosophy works hand-in-hand with linux's philosophy, and Firefox supports linux by giving it a browser that doesn't care what OS you're using. And that's the point.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Actually that is not true, Mozilla incorperates the W3C standards, and it tried to also incorperate as many of the non-standards as it can. BUT, it will not incorperate any IE standards that breaks W3C or in some way is incompatible with rendering a standard website correctly.
No more Flash ads.
What I did get was a popup dialog everytime there was Flash content bothering me because there isn't a web designer on the Earth who knows how to check for Flash capability before trying to serve it. And IE has no way to turn off the bloody dialogs that I can find.
Gods, just put the red X up and move on, IE! I don't care!!!
--- Ban humanity.
No one mentionned this ?
Ad-blocking with Mozilla is GREAT. See http://adblock.mozdev.org/
It even works with Slashdot ads....
Animoog.org
Actually, on my personal site, I have something like 'View with any XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 compliant browser' and somewhere down the line 'strongly not recommended: Microsoft Internet Explorer, all versions', because it consistently break my layouts.
Then again, that is why I have the <!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="main-ie.css" /><![endif]--> at the head part to 'fix' up most of the idiotic errors IE makes...
Only if people would actually follow that advice.
Please direct all bug reports to
From the FAQ on konqueror.org:
-- snip --
Why does ever page with flash crash konqueror?
This is a result of a clashing symbol in both the flash plugin and the XFree86 libGLU (OpenGL utility lib). Upon closing an embedded flash view, the wrong function is called which heavily corrupts memory and leads to either immediately or delayed crashes, lockups and worse.
The only solution that is currently known is either to install Qt without OpenGL support or to not use the Flash plugin. You can't combine both until this symbol clash is somehow solved. Unfortunately we cannot do much about this issue, unless Macromedia is willing to help.
Another reason for Konqueror to crash on every page using a Netscape plugin is the use of gcc3. Plugins can't work with gcc3 because they are linked to gcc2's libstdc++, which is incompatible with gcc3's libstdc++.
-- end snip --
This looks recent: no gcc3 in 1999. Perhaps you have Qt compiled without OpenGL support: either way, it's definitely not working for everyone until either Qt or Macromedia renames their symbol. Personally, I'm betting that'll be about the time that hell freezes over.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I've been using firebird for a few months now and I find it very lacking in features. Users like me need a history feature that we can control. This similar to IE shit isn't good enough.
Say I'm working at home from 8-10 in the evening, then the wife goes to bed, it's porn time baby! Off to the hun I go and have my way with the ladies. I NEED firebird/firefox to help me out here. I don't want to loose the tracks I've made doing my research, but I sure as hell don't want my wife knowing about my addiction to midgets.
If the guys at Mozilla can't fix this feature, they are going to fall flat on their face. Now if they could put in a hidden history for porn time, that would be even better.
What I dont like is that the scroll bars are screwed up on Firefox if you load anything other than the default theme (Under OSX anyway).
Several of the bindings for Firefox changed between the 0.7 and 0.8 versions, so older themes that have not yet been updated for Firefox 0.8 will have problems; one of those problems manifests itself by making your scrollbars disappear. Once the themes are fixed, this problem won't exist (it's not specific to OSX).
Also, as for Firefox vs. Safari, I have a Powerbook, but I prefer Firefox on it. While it handles tabs similar to Safari, I can't browse anymore without find-as-you-type, a feature that only Moz/Firefox has (to the best of my knowledge). My only complaint about it is that NSITheme isn't fully implemented on OSX, so you don't get native-looking widgets (unlike on WinXP).
try here
You don't embed firefox, you embed gecko. (the rendering engine for mozilla, firefox, camino, etc..)
IE has filled its purpose: it killed Netscape, and ended that threat. It's usefulness has expired.
Microsoft should dump it, then embrace and extend Mozilla. That would give them a better browser at less expense. And anytime Windows gets blasted by some new internet-related exploit, Microsoft can say, "It's not our app. It's not our fault." Even if the real problem is in the OS.
They could add ActiveX abilities for a fraction of the development costs they are sinking into IE. They could create whatever plugins they wish. Like a Windows Update plugin.
They could turn OSS into a Microsoft winnning strategy. They don't make any money on IE, anyway. It's just a resource drain for them. They could think seriously about doing the same with Apache and other OSS projects that don't threaten a revenue stream. The more involved they are in these projects, the more they could steer them to the best effect for their own purposes.
One solution is to download and install the User Agent Switcher Extension. You can then have FireBird/Fox/Mozilla send the IE 6.0 User Agent string.
Another extension that was a requisite for me to move from IE to FireBird/Fox was the GoogleBar, which emulates the Google Toolbar for IE. (They also have ones to mimic MSN and Yahoo! toolbar, IIRC.)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I'm using Firefox right now as a matter of fact, but I don't know where they're going with their icon designs...
the new logo appears to be a gigantic fox humping the earth
I wonder if that's the old IE 2 earth icon he's humping?
It most definitely WAS worthwhile for MS for reasons I will explain below.
I hasten to disagree and hope to enlighten you my friend. In 1995 when Netscape released 3.0 Gold, it included both javascript and full support for Java. This made the browser into a full-blown (although I must admit it was also crude and slow given the hardware available in that day) OS-agnostic application platform. This was Andreesen's stated intention at the time for taking a move that predated the current marketing uproar over "Web Services" by some eight+ years. Needless to say, this was an idea about which Microsoft was somewhat less than ambivalent.
True, but the browser could have
If you truly buy into the logic you espouse about the browser being, "
Best wishes,
'wands
utter rubbish
I disagree. First, as pointed out by an AC, a lot of IEs memory is hidden by it's integration - the same achilles heal that can potentially crash the whole OS with a browser failure.
Second, "slow, tedious to use and access..." are all simply opinions (wrong, but then that's just my opinion).
I personally did use IE when I was forced to switch from SGI to MS Windows. I didn't use Mozilla until it was good enough. Now, IMO, it's better. I guess it depends on how you use it.
Sites that don't work are practically non-existent, and often there are simple work arounds for viewing them. Now, "work arounds" are annoying, and not an excuse to switch browsers, but like I said - at least for me, sites that don't work are few and far between, and getting fewer all the time.
But again, it depends on how you use it. If your bank doesn't support w3c standards, and it's a site you visit often, then you are stuck. Frankly, as a paying customer, I'd complain.
There are a lot of compelling reasons to use Mozilla besides "it's not MS".
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
"It's amazing that IE still has such a large market share, its major security problems notwithstanding."
Not really. If you think about it from the perspective of an average computer user, and not a geek it is simple. You click on internet and what opens? IE. Do you care or even know about security holes? Probably not. Do you even know that Mozilla exists? Probably not. Really, the normal user has no incentive to go looking for another browser. Sure they may be annoyed by pop-up ads, but chances are they don't know that Mozilla can block these and they may just do a google search resulting in the installation of a 3rd party IE pop-up blocker. It's not really amazing that IE has a large market share, it's common sense.
SIGFAULT
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.
"Does this path have a heart is the only question." --Carlos Castaneda
is all the emphasis the IE users are putting on the Google tool bar as IE's way to block popups. I am a fairly new user, having decided to try a different browser after the last IE security problem, but from what I have seen FireFox offers much more. The following short list are some of the features I find important:
1. Customizable. Firefox offers some basic functionality. If you want more functionality, you can add-on an extension. You are not stuck with having a bloated executable containiing functionality you will never use.
2. Tabbed browsing. Having web pages appear in different tabs within the same window ROCKS. I just hated IE forcing you to open a new window if you did not want to leave a site. I just have to learn to quit closing the damn window when I am done with a site.
3. Fast. I have not timed anything, but Firefox seems much faster than IE.
4. Secure. The open nature of the source code permits far more eyes to search for, and hopefully find security weaknesses. Having >1000 people review code is far better than the dozen or so MS had review IE source. Also, the script kiddies is not targeting their mischeivious efforts toward Firefox since Firefox is NOT the browser with the largest installed base.
Taken together, the value Firefox offers is far exceeds pop-up blocking. But if you examine at how Microsofties view the world, there is a tendancy to claim they inovated what is obvious, and disregard the rest.
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
For all the handwringing and then the grousing about the name change, if /. is any indication, it seems to be going over pretty well.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I could no longer live with the serious and unpatched security flaws in IE. I thought the URL spoofing flaw was terrible. Then it was followed up with a file extension spoofing flaw. This basically meant that I couldn't trust IE to correctly show me what site I was visiting or what kind of file I was opening!
Yes, a patch was finally issued for the URL flaw, but the fix was criticized by people like Russ Cooper for not going far enough.
I am finding Firefox on Windows XP to be excellent so far. It was a minor pain to reinstall support for Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, etc. but my QuickTime and Acrobat plugins just continued to work. What pleases me most is that web pages are loading noticeably faster in Firefox. I have heard this claim made my many new browsers over the years but this is the first time I have ever actually perceived a difference.
I also like that downloads seem to start immediately in the background as soon as a link is clicked on. With IE, when I click on a download nothing starts transferring until I browse to a location to save the file, choose a filename (perhaps) and then click OK. In Firefox, I am sometimes surprised to find that my download is completed by the time I have finished choosing a location for the file!
It is not advisable to completely abandon IE on Windows, however. Firefox won't work for grabbing updates from windowsupdate.com.
What are those sites? Help the developers improve Mozilla, and help the websites support more browsers... If we don't know which sites cause problems, they can't be fixed, right?
At first i wasnt that impressed by mozilla but lately it is getting near perfection. Granted the mozilla suite is a bit bloaty but FireFox makes most other browsers look really stupid. If i use other browsers who lack tabbed browsing i feel disabled. I have become used to it and its features.
I can honestly think of one single thing i lack or despice in Mozilla. Maybe on windows where it runs slow but on linux its a blast even on my 200mhz old IBM. On windows i think part of the problem is that you already have a browser idling in the background refusing to be uninstalled.
Mozilla is now Good Enough (tm) for me.
HTTP/1.1 400
(a) Use IE
(b) Use FireFox but ban the Web site (perhaps not plausible, especially if it's work related)
I would choose (c) Use FireFox with the User Agent Switcher. Yes, a short term solution, as you put it, but, dammit, the user just wants to have the site work with the browser they'd like to use. Yes, your idea is best for the long run, but my grandpa doesn't care about the long run - he just wants the "Internet to work."
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Microsoft's IE still supports the original keywords of course, but that's because Microsoft pretty much came out at the beginning and said they'd challenge the patent in court if need be, and Netscape backed down (or at least didn't sue.) Opera et al though had more to fear from a lawsuit and adopted the "!"s instead.
You're right, if it wasn't for the built in extentions to IIS and Apache to translate HEAD to HE!D, etc, on the fly for non-Netscape browsers, we'd all be stuck with Netscape and IE.
Racists should be sent back to where they came from
I find it humorous that I have to download mozilla to a new NT4 install in order to browse M$'s web-page to get the new IE for NT4, so that I can get the needed service packs and such. Great opportunity to show client the power of Mozilla, usefullness of OSS, and the lack of backward compatability of M$ software.
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
Nope. I'm not wrong.
From RFC 1738, sec. 3.3:
An HTTP URL takes the form:
http://<host>:<port>/<path>?<searchpart&g t;
and
No user name or password is allowed.
Pretty clear on the point, I'd say.
I'm getting real sick and tired of having to edit esoteric scripts in every damned OSS application I want to run, which are in half a dozen different locations on a hard drive.
This is no Open SOurce Phenomenon, there are lot's of neat things in Windows XP you can only achieve by editing the registry by hand.
In theory I'd like to have transparent options, too, but maybe there are just too many of them to squeeze them all into a menu. So it's just bad luck the option you want is missing.
OTOH, maybe there is a positive side to it, users are made to understand what is going on to some extent.
css/edge
This site showcases some amazing stuff, all done with standard HTML and CSS. No Javascript, no (specific browser)-only code. That doesn't mean it works in all browsers, as the different versions of IE have varying bugs and/or missing implementations. This site is flat-out proof that the internet doesn't need the majority of proprietary code that sites use. The fact of the matter is that in most cases, the author used the easy way (auto-generated proprietary code) as opposed to the right way.
Demo and Demo-IE are a good example. IE does get it mostly right, but not quite. On the complexspiral pages, you can see again that IE doesn't do the background image the way it's supposed to.
This is a great site. It's 100% standards-compliant (i.e. it follows the rules set up to ensure proper operation of the web), does some neat visual stuff, and points out IE's flaws all at once.
I'm curious: is this a deliberate omission, or just an oversight?
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
This has been updated. See RFC 2396, sec. 3.2.2
Note that the password portion is not recommended. From the same section:
Sage advice, I'd say.
BTW, The RFC Index Search Engine at rfc-editor.org returns links to obsoleted and updated RFCs. It's probably a good idea to check for updates prior to providing advice.
Ron