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Future Directions Proposed For Mozilla
Ars-Fartsica writes "MozillaZine is now featuring a set of slides regarding future directions for Mozilla that were detailed at the recent Mozilla developers meeting. SVG and integration with programming languages are among the directions discussed."
Here's a direct link to the slideshow itself.
Type n, right-arrow, down-arrow, or space to advance a slide. Type p, left-arrow, or up-arrow to go back one slide. Type t to go the the first (title) slide.
Instructions taken from here
I guess you've never heard of Firefox (aka Phoenix)?
That's the idea behind Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, cut down stand alone products using the Mozilla/Gecko technology that do their job well.
It's likely that these will be promoted more in the future as they use up less system resources and are more user friendly.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
I agree, Mozilla is a bit bloated. However, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird are meant to tackle problems like that.
The design of Mozilla has been to make it easily embeddable so other developers can use its rendering technology and make their own interface and use a different widget set. Many projects already do, e.g. Galeon in GNOME and K-Meleon (using MFC) for Windows.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
There is Sodipodi for editing SVG.
It's ALT+Enter in Firefox.
Yeah. And why can't I change it? The CTRL-ENTER behavior of "Open a new tab, and append www..com to whatever I typed" is utterly useless.
I also want ctrl-mousewheel to make text bigger and smaller.
And why do I have to double click on Javascript pop-open window links to get them to open? It's bizarre.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What's your system configuration?
It does work.
I'm using Safari 1.2 and I haven't had any problems. The page does look better in FireFox, but it certanly works with Safari.
we come in peace / shoot to kill
opera can save sessions, and start-up with a default one of your choosing if i remember correctly...
Ctrl+Mousewheel works just fine in Firefox (for me anyway). If you have to click pop-up links twice, it's because the first one got blocked (see icon in bottom left corner). Unblock the site anv voila - no more double clicking. Cheers, Andre
...see if you can sort out the swing, awt, eclipse native widget fiasco.
J2EE seems strong at the backend. With a strong frontend, maybe MS has to react for a change.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
> Why did they think this was a good idea?
d gets.html
See http://www.ocallahan.org/mozilla/why-no-native-wi
Firefox Session Saver
"The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked."
Check again.
Webdraw
And a lot of Adobe products support it as well.
BTW Adobe does have a SVG plugin-in that works with mozilla-firefox
multizilla.mozdev.org
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Firefox has a plugin, it's called session saver. Try guessing 3 times what it does. (Or just install it if you run out of idead)
Any feature you are missing, check the plugins first. Chances are someone's already implemented it.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I find it ironic that the page does not work with Safari. What are you talking about? All I use is Safari and it works perfectly fine...
Preferences->Advanced->Scripts & Plugins->Move or resize existing windows
While your at it:
Happy(er) browsing.
I believe you're talking about Opera, then. It's been doing state-saving for years.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I always found the "users want a standard look across platforms" argument a little ridiculous.
That may have been a justification, but I think that the real reason for Mozilla to have non-native widgets is that it's a lot of work to maintain all the platform-specific codebases. There are already platform-specific issues, but in general someone can add a feature to Mozilla without knowing how to code for every platform under the sun.
I don't know exactly how this will work with native widgets, unless the Moz folks want to take a least-common-denominator approach.
Plus, I wonder if they can rely on sizes of various widgets. Remember that they're integrating widgets with chunks of their laid-out document, when placing, say, a Submit button on the window. With their own widgets, they know exactly how big everything is.
Another issue might be different code structures. For example, the Macintosh Toolbox uses an event loop. GTK uses callbacks. How does one reconcile differently structured widget APIs?
I believe that Netscape Navigator 4.x tried to do this with native widgets back in the day...but the widgets operated different from regular widgets on my classic Mac.
I agree that native widgets would be wonderful from a user standpoint, but there *are* issues with having an extremely cross-platform program with native widgets on each platform. Remember that the MSIE developers only have to worry about one platform...
May we never see th
It has already begun. I ran into this the other day by chance. Eeeeeerily similar to the Google toolbar. Coincidence? hehe, right.
It'll integrate with the page, it'll work, it's for an entirely different purpose than Flash.
Look, go to Macromedia's page. You have a little menu there in Flash. That's pretty bad design. I'm browsing, I right-click on a text link in the body, I can open it in a new window, a new tab, send the link to my email client, bookmark it, etc. I right-click on a menu item, I get "about flash player". You give the browser control, and that's no longer a problem. You stick to standards and the browser can treat items in your graphic just like HTML items that perform the same function.
If you're using Flash in a way that doesn't seem wrong or clumsy now, then you probably shouldn't replace it with SVG. SVG just lets you use the good parts of vector graphics and animation without feeling guilty about it.
There is also Inkscape for editing SVG.
Opera can do this.
I'd be interested in a feature I saw suggested once -- a full, eternally (well, unless the user desires to remove it for privacy reasons) persistent tree-like history. The user could go back to any point in time and trace back and forward along browsing sessions.
May we never see th
You are aware of the Flash Click to View plugin? Great at keeping those flash ads at bay :)
For people using their browser at non-standard font settings (and they often have a valid reason for that : some sight problems, for instance), your website would be far more consistent with pictures in SVG, which sizes are put in 'ems' instead of pixels.
Just try to resize your fonts (assuming that the website has not fixed-widths fonts ) (ctrl + in Mozilla). Ho! Where are your nice bitmap logos and graphics ? There, in the background, crushed by all the text at worse, overwhelmed by all the text at best.
SVG could just allow the same resize as text. And I guess a lot of people would appreciate that... Whether the implementation would be possible or not, as previously noticed in the thread, is another problem I'm not skilled enough to discuss.
But if it is possible, then sure, let's do it.
Regards,
jdifool
Let's overcome our weakness.
Isn't it what K-Meleon (for Windows) and Camino (for Mac) are all about? I'm sure there's something similar for Linux too.
Gecko engine + native UI = stability + performance!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
That's interesting. I've often thought that some bad Acrobat and FireFox interaction is causing problems.
FireFox 0.8 has memory leaks. Load enough instances and tabs, and it will always crash. (This has been verified under Linux and Windows XP.)
When FireFox crashes, it also crashes Windows XP SP1! Windows XP SP1 doesn't show an error message, but the OS becomes unstable, and it is necessary to reboot.
This is shocking to me. The explanation seems to be that the features of Windows XP that most users see run well, but a little below the surface, Windows XP is not a finished operating system. I think a fundamental definition of an operating system is that a real operating system can handle bad behavior of a program without self-destructing. So, after all these years of development, Windows is more a sociological phenomenon than an operating system. It amazes me that Microsoft managers are unable or unwilling to take care of business.
When FireFox crashes under Linux, Linux remains completely stable. (I suppose you could have guessed that.)
I have copies of all the browsers, and in my opinion FireFox is by far the best. Browsers are windows on the world for an increasing number of people, so it is important that the world has an excellent one.
I think FireFox's memory management issues should be fixed before any other work is done. Of course, that is for the FireFox/Mozilla team to decide.
(Posted using FireFox, of course.)
SVG is much different from Flash. Flash is currently primarily used for two things: (1) to provide crummy interfaces (an ugly wart from designers coming from the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs came out and later the ".com era" when people thought that novelty was what made people keep coming back to websites). (2) To provide an efficient format for vector-based graphic animation.
SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:
1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.
2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions
3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.
As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.
May we never see th
Agreed, small chunks are better. Thats why breaking up the original suite was a good idea. But a framework is just a collection of small pieces. Firefox for instance may still just be shipped with what is essentially just a wrapper for the networking and the layout modules. In fact, frameworking like that would probably require factoring the existing code into even smaller discrete chunks. If people want to be able to run a thin client application that uses the mozilla framework, then it could run off and download the relevant XPIs (which you would keep very small) by itself as it needs to. As an example, at the moment MPlayer is undergoing a major redesign led by Arpi in the form of MPlayer G2. It too is much more of a framework than MPlayer is, but in terms of monolithicism and bloatedness, its better in every way.
Not to be too hard on a fella doing sterling development work on an important project, but it really isn't a great idea to break the user's expected browsing model. The slides look nice and clean, great for the presentation. But it would have been better to add some forward/backward buttons or some familiar, grokkable interface when posting these on the web.
Please, Moz developers, keep usability in mind all the time.
People frequently ask why Mozilla implements its own widget set rather than just using the widget set available on whatever platform it's running on. This document is an attempt to explain why. Transparency and Z-ordering
Consider this testcase. It's a text field behind an element full of "blah" text. The "blah" element is transparent, so you can see and even edit the text field with the "blah" text overlaid on top. This simply can't be done in with Gtk or Qt widgets (unless this has changed in a very recent version of these toolkits). In Win32 it can only be done in Win2000 or WinXP, and then it is tricky and inefficient. If you don't believe this, try implementing the same effect using your favourite platform toolkit, and email me if you succeed.
Getting this right isn't optional. It's a requirement for a correct CSS implementation. Other HTML/CSS functionality
An HTML BUTTON element can contain arbitrary HTML. It's practially impossible to get that to work with any platform button widget. (Note that the HTML inside the button is part of the same document as the button itself.) Printing
On many platforms it's very difficult or impossible to get a native control to print. International languages
When you browse the Web you find content in every language that computers can handle. It is important for the browser to have strong support for uncommon languages. This means it is important for the browser to display form elements containing strange characters and scripts. Many platforms (e.g., older versions of Windows) do not provide good support for locales other than the locale that the operating system itself is installed for. Therefore their widgets aren't good enough for strong browser language support. Performance
On many platforms the per-widget memory and time cost is quite significant. This is OK for most GUI apps because you typically don't have more controls per window than fit on the screen. But in a browser, you sometimes see pages with hundreds or thousands of controls. (Think "a long comments page in Slashdot when you have moderation points".) This has to be fast and not consume too much memory. On some older Windows versions it's simply impossible to create 1000 edit boxes without crashing the system! Event handling
The DOM Events model defines ways for a page to intercept events such as keyboard or mouse input before they are dispatched to the control with focus. It would be very tricky and error-prone to implement this using platform-specific hacks. Arguments For Native Widgets
Here are some arguments for using native widgets, and how we answer them. Native look and feel are critical for usability
Agreed. We have started using platform-specific APIs to render our widgets as if they were native widgets, wherever we can. For GTK, WinXP and MacOSX we actually call theme APIs so that Mozilla picks up whatever theme is currently in force. It really looks like a native app. All of the above advantages are still retained because we're still not using actual native widgets. It also means we automatically "keep up" as the platform look changes, which has been a big problem for "cross platform" UI toolkits in the past.
We're still working on the "native feel" problem. Feel doesn't vary as much as look, it seems, so it's less of a problem, but we have a number of tweaks that vary the feel of our widgets across platform and we'll add more. Native look and feel are critical for accessibilty
We're building in support for platform accessibility APIs in GTK and Win32, so our widgets will be just as accessible as the native widgets. Too much work for developers
Yes, but it's worth it. Too slow, too much footprint
Yes, rolling our own widgets requires some extra code and may not be as well optimized as the platform widgets. But as noted
"Black Screens Of Death" are usually caused by faulty RAM.
I suggest you try some different RAM chips and try Firefox again.
Although, realistically, Black Screens Of Death should occur randomly, not just when using Firefox.
Also various video card drivers are known to screw up your memory and go down with a Black Screen Of Death
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
"Give up trying to be a "platform". Not gonna happen."
That was an early design decision. Create a platform for building network enabled applications then use it to build a browser, email client, etc... It would be counter productive to give up on that now.
It may not be a widespread platform, but Active State thought it was good enough to use for the Komodo integrated developmet environmet and OEone thought it was good enough to create their Homebase Desktop Suite with.
Later, Seeker
This thing is so useful that I wish to high heaven that it was part of the base Firefox distribution. It's like the difference between having the ability to disable animated GIFs and not, or having the ability to block popups or not.
I mean, I'm sure that it would drive Macromedia bonkers, but dammit, the user comes first, and Flash *is* heavily used by ads.
Oh, and if I can throw in another suggestion: Use Privoxy. Some folks may have used Junkbuster a while back and noticed that development has slowed down to nothing -- Privoxy is the continuation. And...it's wonderful. I've turned off all image blocking in my browser, because Privoxy does a better job than my manual blocks. It blocks on image sizes and locations, and when it blocks an image, inserts a bit of HTML that lets you click to view the image (an irritation with Junkbuster is that false positives were extremely aggravating). There's an easy-to-use web configuration interface on Privoxy that can be easily accessed whenever anything is blocked. I just love this program. Aside from Google's non-irritating-and-frequently-useful ads, between Firefox's features, Flash Click to View, and Privoxy, I can't remember the last time I had to see an ad.
May we never see th
Me too, that's why I use Konqueror.
Actually that feature was the reason why I used Konq years ago even when it was still named "kfm" and had no Javascript support and very bad HTML support...
Download the GTK2+XFT Mozilla builds from mozilla.org - they should be prominently listed in the download directories that you got the GTK1 1.5 and 1.6 builds from.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Well, they forgot a doctype and "/head" . That clears up most of the 6 errors. Then there's also an alt tag missing from the image (why THAT'S required, I really don't know..) There may have been two other errors, I don't remember...
Still doesn't make the Gecko engine any less standards compliant. Just means whoever wrote that page made between 4 and 6 mistakes. (The webstandards page often marks 1 error as multiple errors, as some errors put code out of context... like putting the BODY inside the HEADER...)
This is a known issue, and the developers are quite well aware of the fact that Mozilla is not very efficient in this department. Firefox 1.0 will not have this problem; Firefox 0.9 will probably have modifications to reduce its effects somewhat.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
This is the installerless version, btw, so just uncompress it to /opt, and either symlink /opt/firefox/firefox in /usr/bin, or better yet, find a firefox launch script that works around the stupid profiles.
Don't forget Sodipodi, which is free.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I recently installed the Xft/Gtk2-enabled Mozilla build from this site, it works well with Debian (at least once you have found out that having some non-world-readable TTF fonts crashes Mozilla/Xft...). Probably mozilla.org lists them somewhere too.
Just try to resize your font [snip] Where are your nice bitmap logos and graphics ?
looks fine in opera (which scales images with text). mozilla has been playing catch up since april 1999:
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4821
- p
Ok. As I was reading this, I figured I'd do a test.
( logged in),deadheadfred.net] and I am seeing some slowdown on my debian gnu/linux box with 1 gig of ram, swap disabled.
;)
Now,
I've got 20 different Firefox 0.8 Browsers opened, with 8 tabs in each [my.yahoo.com(logged in),drudgereport.com,delphiforums,com(logged in),maximum-suzuki.com(logged in),googlenews.com,reviewjournal.com,slashdot.org
Now, it isn't crashing, although it is a bit slow. But goddsdamnnit, I've got 160 different webpages loaded!
BTW, I also have 13 Konqueror browsers open, with 8 tabbed windows in each as well. (normal activity for me) as well as Gqview with a slideshow running, 2 instances of Gkrellm, one shell console doing nothing, 1 kuickshow window opened, Kmail running, and 3 XMMS instances running.
So, in comparison, firefox does use more CPU/RAM then Konqueror does with the same pages/tabs opened, IMO, but I'd like to see 160 (or really 264 including Konqueror) I.E. browsers opened, and still have a functioning machine.
I do still show 232 meg of RAM free in Gkrellm, Free shows 234 meg of RAM.
firefox is using 38% of CPU according to top, and 18.3% of memory,
X is using 55% of cpu, and 18.8% of memory
Athlon XP 2500+
The same system, with only 1 Firefox browser opened, [I closed all the other firefox windows while still entering this information](with 8 tabs still) and everything else still running..
firefox=
1% of cpu,
18% of memory, only when I'm actively typing.
free RAM according to Gkrellm=241 meg, according to Free 246.788.
Interesting, I still haven't gotten my RAM back. (five minutes later, I've been letting my system idle, swap is disabled) although firefox cpu usage has dropped to below 1%.
jaz
YMMV
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
I'm surprised at that. I've used Mozilla for many years on MacOS, Windows NT and Windows 2000. As far as I remember, I have never ever had any OS crashes due to Mozilla. Could it be the combination of Mozilla and something else you installed? Or is XP really that bad?
my point was browser-independant.
But I just explained how Mozilla handled it, which is, indeed, quite bad... :(
Despite the fact that Opera surely zooms images, they remain bitmaps, and thus, they are badly deformed when you go through 2 or 3 zooming.
This is, in my mind, what SVG is really supposed to adress (of course, this is not about pictures or real photographies, just for graphics, buttons, logos and the like...) : non-deformed images.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
try the beta of OmniWeb 5. it allows arbitrary window sets to be saved and, optionally, opened upon application launch.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to red, gold & green)
This a major feature that Mozilla need. There are plenty of photographers/artists that use the web. And millions of users using art/photo forums online (photo.net, deviantart.com, dpreview.com, etc).
A proper colour management support for PNG and JPEG (and other formats, even in HTML?) would be very helpful for us.
I'm a little confused by the purpose of this post (not surprising as Coffee #1 is still kicking in). You jump from the subject "Acrobat crashes FireFox" to "FireFox has memory leaks" to "XP is unfinished, boo MS".
Your subject line is right on target: Acrobat crashes FireFox on XP. Acrobat also crashes Mozilla on XP. Acrobat does not play well with Outlook. Unpatched Acrobat can deadlock an XP machine running Office XP.
The common problem here is Acrobat. It has become a titantically bloated program (first load of the day takes nearly as long as a boot of XP Pro...) and an unpatched version 6 is flakier than a box of Wheaties.
NB, my statements here apply to Acrobat 6.0The reason SVG isn't included in the default build is nothing to do with "politics" unless you have a very broad definition of the term, it's not in because it's not complete.
Netscape/Mozilla have been burned before when they included half-assed support for a standard. It's bad for a ton of reasons. People don't know what features they can use and what they can't, if mistakes are made they get frozen into the defacto standard and so on. So, until Mozillas SVG support matches a W3C standard, it won't be switched on.
The main problem is that SVG is really huge and complicated. I think last time I checked they were aiming for "SVG Static" which is a cut down version (no animation for instance). Because that's also a recognised standard they could switch it on at that point.
I don't know how Konquerors SVG support matches against Mozillas, but I'd be surprised if they'd implemented the whole thing (with the required KHTML/DOM integration). If they haven't done the whole thing then I'd not suggest they switch it on, it's that simple.
MNG support was dropped because MNG is another huge, (bloated?) spec. It's not just GIF-with-PNG you know. If anything it competes with Flash. The code for it was huge and it the person who owned the relevant module didn't care about it, so it got dropped. Now, whether you agree with this decision or not is somewhat irrelevant, you aren't the maintainer of that part of Mozilla (feel free to fork the beast). You have to question though - if MNG had been 100x simpler it'd probably still be in there today. As it is, nobody uses MNG at all.
Many features are excellent. Except...
Roughly once an hour clicking back would simply take my machine (windows XP portable) out. Not even the blue screen of death but a black screen.
I had a simmilar problem with my XP notebook with Firefox. Turns out the problem was a combination of:
Sun's JVM and my ATI video driver (which is a forcefit as Compaq never put out an XP driver for the model laptop I have).
The fix was a laugher... I switched video mode to 24 bit color.
Firebird works fine.
-- $G
To be a bit more specific, SVG encompasses so much that a fully compliant implementation must support not only the massive spec, but also ECMA Script, SMIL, MathML, etc.
Mozilla already supports Javascript. SMIL isn't needed unless you want to do Flash-like animations. It only needs to render 2D images to satisfy most people.
The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked.
Plenty of people have already mentioned completely free packages such as Sodipodi and Inkscape.
Complex 2d graphics in non binary form? Honestly, I don't know.
I presume you mean rendered into a binary form as opposed to the source being stored in a binary format instead of XML? How can you not? It can be scaled to any resolution, you can zoom in without losing quality, it will be a fraction of the size for many large images (eg architectural drawings or circuit diagrams), etc.
Having the ability to render 2D images in this way is great, as anyone that has used an Acorn and embedded a Draw document in a web page will testify. And we've been able to do that since the mid-90s! Once we are able to embed SVG into web pages then we will also see less need for PDF imho.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
That could have been valid, if the name had actually changed. Microsoft has two slightly different messenger programs, one suited for corporate users without hotmail support but with exchange server support, and another the other way around for home users.
However, she hates Internet Explorer with a passion. It crashes all the time and lets in viruses. It can not be patched since the patch from Microsoft that would block such nonsence will not install correctly even with a freshly wiped/reinstalled from CD system. So I advised her to install Netscape 4.78 which she liked.
Recently she had to wipe/reinstall windows ( Windows insta llations have an expected live of about 3-6 months before they need to be redone I find. ) She did it herself, but installed the latest Netscape instead of the old 4.78.
Now I had advised her to install 4.78 because it was the last known version of Netscape that I'd tried that didn't suck. Every later version has been way too buggy to use - as bad or worse than Internet Explorer. But I was amazed when she fired this latest version up and it just came up in a flash, and worked beautifully. It seemed to download pages much faster than other browsers too.
Having written off Netscape as having turned permanently to crap ever since gecko/AOL, I was amazed to see it working so well. I had tried many versions of Netscape hoping it would improve only to be dissapointed, but now it seems they've finally gotten their act together.
So I downloaded Mozilla 1.6 and installed it on my Linux partition.
I have been using Konqueror as my main browser ever since Netscape began to suck. I like it alot, and upgraded to the latest version at work. But I happened to have a really old version of KDE installed at home on my linux partition with a really old version of Konqueror. I have been meaning to slog through the very time consuming process of downloading/installing the latest version of KDE over a 56K modem, but I've been putting off upgrading KDE when the only feature of the latest KDE that I actually want/need is the latest Konqueror with it's smart popup blocking. And I would be upgrading all of KDE just for the updated browser since I wouldn't want to mess around with sorting through all the dependencies. Yuck!
So to get a decent browser I installed Mozilla 1.6 It was really easy. I didn't have to download a ton of other stuff to get it. Just one item. It runs perfectly, and I love it. It is better than Netscape too since it allows you to use only pictures for the buttons which are MUCH smaller than either text or text and pictures. ( One of my main peeves about netscape is that it forces you to sacrifice 2.5 inches at the top of the screen to garish buttons.
I haven't used the email or news ( still use knode and kmail ) Those really should be seperate programs from the browser. I wouldn't have downloaded them if I wasn't forced to since I am satisfied with knode and kmail for now.
I haven't tried firefox yet. I see the file is about half the size of mozilla 1.6. Maybe that means it's sans-other-programs-like-news/mail.
Eat at Joe's.
Is Mozilla "finished"?
Nope, never will be. There will always be new features to implement, and bugs to fix.
Have the startup speed problems been solved?
Firefox starts up faster than IE can open a new window. The only browser that is really fast is Lynx, but that one comes with a huge cost in the usability section.
When comparing to IE, any Mozilla version I ever used, even Netscape 4, has been way faster to start up than IE, because Mozilla and Netscape don't come with a f**king OS built in.
Is Mozilla as robust as they would like it to be?
Old Mozilla is probably never going to be. Too much crap. And firefox is still too new to be completely stable, but it looks like it is on the right way.
Firstclass support for SVG (e.g., including support for arbitrary HTML inside SVG) requires changes in various parts of the code base. SVG is not something that you can plug modularly into the engine.
Don't get confused about what deCOMtaminating SVG means. It just means that internally SVG will be more efficient. You can still manipulate SVG content from Javascript, via the DOM and other interfaces. Your charting engine will still work.
Actually, you're exactly right.
Microsoft will not be using SVG. They'll be using what their original docs call "WVG". (But after that leak they backpedalled saying "it's really NOTHING to do with SVG, honest"). Now I think they're just calling it part of Avalon.
It provides similar functionality to SVG, it's just different.
> I see they're going to implement native widgets
> (as an option)
Where do you see that? "Native widget integration" means using platform theme apis, when available (eg WinXP) to _paint_ the widgets (basically paint a native widget into a bitmap and then paint that into the right places, applying the right z-index, opacity, etc to it as needed).
> Firefox 1.0 will not have this problem
They're going to multithread the layout engine? First I hear of it. What makes you think this is true?
It has been a known issue that some versions of ATI's drivers cause crashes in gecko engine browsers. The other option would be to upgrade the video drivers.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Pornzilla
It's funny because it's true!
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Oh, I recall it quite well.
(strong)
//end of list
I also recall that Netscape 2 locked up routinely, say, every 30 minutes or so, and it usually took down the entire machine when it did so.
I also recall that Netscape 2 obeyed HTML standards to the following extent:
(html)
(head)
(title)
(body)
(p)
(i)
(b)
(em)
(the various list tags)
Use anything besides those tags, and not only would it not render properly in Netscape 2, it would often take down the browser as well. Which puts you right back where you started.
It's a damn good thing it only took 3 seconds to load, because you HAD TO DO IT SO MUCH.
Good f*cking riddance, Netscape 2. You are NOT missed.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
And Mozilla's HTML and CSS1 support are topnotch, except for a couple of bugs in either (and that was from a few years ago, I'm sure it's better now). It leads the pack in CSS2, and CSS3 isn't even done yet. Quit whining about non-existent politics and just be a little more patient.
This is only my observation, but I think it has to do with taking interfaces that are wrapped up as XPCOM components and making them into normal, unencumbered C++ classes. They do this to interfaces that really have no business being reusable XPCOM components but were implemented that way for whatever reason. The resulting code is faster and smaller, so it's generally a good thing. It has nothing to do with making Mozilla completely native to each platform as far as I know.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
(Toolkit designers: please please PLEASE give us a way to render a widget into a pixmap. That alone would solve a lot of problems.
Ask and ye shall receive.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...