Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller

ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."

Comments

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[vocaro]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Because it doesn't have the same kernel.

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch. By throwing out the cruft that had been building up since Netscape 1.0, the Mozilla team was able to build a better browser...eventually. (Check out this BBC article for a nice pre-history of Mozilla.)

Mozilla in the wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.

Re:Help me out

[Anonymous Coward]

Each firefox release is based on Mozilla. Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 will be based on Mozilla 1.7.

Mozilla will then make Firefox it's primary browser after 1.0, and Thunderbird it's primary mail reader after 1.0. The Mozilla browser you know will still exist as "Mozilla Suite".

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[kundor]

You realize that many alternate-browsers spoof IE headers so that they don't get rejected by MS-powered websites? Konqueror and Opera may even do it by default.

Building for Both - Lacks features

[GAVollink]

There are three ways to build web pages.

1. Code to Any Browser.
2. Code to Internet Explorer.
3. Code to The Mozilla Engine.

4. Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's CSS/EDGE. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.

   In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).

   So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.

   Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.

   Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch.

Actually, that's a bit of myth. It was really Netscape's management who dictated the rewrite, in order to accomodate the Gecko rendering engine (which was still called NGLayout or Raptor back then). Most of the Netscape/Mozilla developers (less than six months into the project, there were not many non-Netscape contributors) at the time were against the change, not because they didn't like the idea of a smaller, faster and more standards-complaint rendering engine, but because they were given a ludicrous six-month timeframe to achieve parity with Netscape Communicator 4.5.

that's KHTML

[tepples]

The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[mabinogi]

You do realise that 15% of 1.2 million hits is still 180,000 hits?

15% non IE is obviously not a majority, but it's not insignificant either. Only dealing with IE would piss off 1 in every 7 visitors to your site.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[The Snowman]

I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.

I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.