Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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
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
"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.
Is the reason it gets nowhere near the press Mozilla does that Opera is not open source?
Erm, yes. Opera isn't free beer or speech. Open source projects can't be bought by MS, can't be destroyed in the way MS did to Netscape.
Hence the article - the web browser is absolutely key to the desktop market, and this time we're wise to what a bad idea relying on a company (however well intentioned) to supply that key component is.
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.
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.
Short answer, Opera is closed source and payware. Nobody wants to see some small company in Norway get control over the browser market. We've been down that path and the result is a browser that is bug ridden and hasn't been updated in years. In case you don't know what I'm talking about its Internet Explorer. Who wants to see yet another commercial entity force its ever whim upon us just because they have a majority. With Mozilla if we don't like where the project is heading we just fork it. With Opera there is no out.
To borrow a phrase "The Future is Open". Nobody wants to root for something like Opera when a better Open Source alternative is out there. Opera is exactly what the IT world is heading away from where possible. Also you won't see a closed source browser like Opera riding on the coat tails of the Linux Desktop revolution, however slow that may be.
Lastly and to go back to my first statement Opera costs money. Its been ingrained in consumers heads since the 90's that browsers are Free. If Mozilla costs money you could bet that it never would have stood a chance and IT Press would not be rooting for it.
Frankly Opera just don't have much of a future for general Internet browsing.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Grandmother & family do not care about "open source" or otherwise - they just want stuff to work.
:)
Get them to use Mozilla, and explain open source later. Works well.
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.
yeah, but each time I'm with friends and they surf, and they get popups, I show them fire(bird-fox), and tabbed browsing.
I'm betting that Microsoft is getting customers faster than you're making friends.
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?
no, see, that's where the zealots are wrong.
Standards are being ignored and shoved to the wayside. Sure, make a website that conforms and blah blah blah, but does it matter? No, not really... People use IE. People will probably continue to use IE. If a website is "correct" and IE is "broken" because of ignoring standards and the webpage displays incorrectly the IE people are going to complain. The IE people will win, hands down.
It's unfortunate but it's true.
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.
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
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/
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
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.