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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."
Go Go Mozilla!
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
This is why I stopped using Netscape: each version was much larger, much slower, and much less reliable.
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.
When was the last time Mozilla had a 90%+ market share.
I use Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird too - they're my favorites. But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
It's an uphill battle, I'm afraid. That said, I'll be downloading this new version ASAP.
The next service pack of Internet Explorer plans to have longer load times, more crashes, and open a few more exploits into a Windows system.
Modzilla keeps getting better all the time.
Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!
True.
Intelligence also has a small marketshare...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
The fastest speed up is not even 10%. That's about an extra 0.01 tits/second. Want more speedup than that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I just love it and tab-browsing but there is still room for improvement:
A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...
IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.
But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
It's a never ending circle - designers who don't know anything about web standards and have only ever used IE make sites that only work in IE - people try a new browser like Mozilla, and see that their favourite sites are "broken" in the new browser (when really it's because the sites were built to work around the non-compliant IE) - so they go back to IE... That said I've found Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering most pages well.
For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.
Admittedly, I get most of my site's hits from Slashdot, but I find a rather pleasant mix of Gecko, Mozilla, Opera, Apple Webkit, and occasionally someone using IE. Actually, I think Google surfs my site more than anyone. (I did tell "Slurp" to take a flying leap.) Of course it does flop over to nearly 80% IE from time to time, but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...
Personally I'm hooked on using Firefox, but I design my pages to look good in any light. ;-)
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".
After the news is released on Slashdot, it's now 40% slower to download. :D
My blog
Feeding the troll:
You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.
I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).
Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.
I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.
Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:
The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)
Best standards support
Getting faster by every release
Getting less resource hungry by every release
The most extendable browser around.
IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.
All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE.
Long Live (the current version of) IE
But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
Ya know, I find that a funny statement.
I manage a software development group, and we have to build for IE too. But we also have to make sure our software works with Mozilla. And for Opera, and Mac, and everything else. We support all "modern" browsers (basicly, verions >=5)
You see, we can't really dictate a browser, and we're not interested in getting locked into one vendor product. We want to remain flexible for the future, and we want to remain reliable when a new browser hits the market.
So we support all browsers.
Happily, this is a very minor expense. In fact, as project manager, I can say with confidence that it costs us well under 1/1000th of our development budget. The only difficulty is to get contractors and new employees to use web standards.
In the end, our maintenance costs are lower, and our user satisfaction is sky high. We never ever get complaints about browser compatibility.... not even once in over 4 years of high-volume operation.
Oh yeah, and our apps look and work damned good too.
So what's the deal? What is wrong with organizations that can't support regular browsers without undo expense and difficulty???
Sure. A performace improvement of 10% is probably totally unnoticable to the user. The real point that the article fails to make is that Mozilla has been getting *consistently* smaller and faster since the 1.0 release. Subjectivley, it's pretty obvious if you use an older release that it's slower. But if that isn't good enough, there are graphs on tinderbox which show the measured codesize, pageload time, new window time and various other metrics (no link, because it would be irresponsible of me to launch an accidental ddos attack on tinderbox) - if you're interested the address is pretty easy to guess/find. Looking at the btek pageload time, I see that in June 2002 pageload was around 1210ms, now it's around 860ms and still decreasing. That's an improvment of around 30%, without cutting any features or degrading the standards support. That means that Mozilla is now competative with so called "lightweight" browsers such as Opera (I don't have comparisons avaliable because such things are hard to do).
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.
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.
I made the mistake of installing the ActiveX plugin with mozilla at a friends place once. What a great plugin, you can make Mozilla just as susceptible to popups and adware as IE. Sheesh.
I guess that makes it.....
29% Better!
-L
Don't Panic.
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.
Heh. Sorry to break it to you, but Moz is not at fault here, it's XP. Now, investingating why it gets swapped out is still an interesting question, but XP does the swapping, not Moz. Which is demonstrates yet another reason i use linux. MUCH better memory management. The only time i remember Moz getting swapped out was when i left my computer compiling for 24 hours, and came back to it. Took about 2 seconds to pull it back. On a p3-700 with 512 MB RAM. just my two cents.
If a bank site doesn't work properly in anything other than IE, I usually send them an email linking to articles about serious security holes in IE, usually including the SSL certificate one, and tell them they should tune their site to run in all browsers, as some of us are too knowledgeable to want to use something as crappy as IE for online banking.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
Advanced users are users too!
> I used to change my user agent to say it was running IE on CP/M-86.....
... anything that's never been implemented in hardware)
I like to play fun games with my ua string, too. One of my favourite tricks
is to claim to be running my browser on an X11 GUI on PC-DOS 3.3, but claiming
MSIE on X11 is fun too (especially, MSIE on an X11 GUI on a Microsoft OS).
Other user-agent jokes I've seen include the following:
* Claim to be running a significantly future version, (e.g., claim MSIE 11.5
or Mozilla/7.0 or use a future Gecko build date, et cetera)
* Claim to be both MSIE and Gecko in the same user-agent string
* List Emacs as the operating system
* List Klingon, Quenya, or Sanskrit as the localization language
* Claim an utterly impossible browser/OS/hardware combo, like iCab on
OpenVMS on SPARC, or, even better, claim a combination that's not only
impossible but also ancient, like NCSA Mosaic on ITS on a PDP8.
* Claim a virtual machine architecture (e.g., the z-machine, glulx,
parrot, jvm,
as your hardware architecture.
* Make wrong and incompitible version claims (e.g., start with Mozilla/2.0
and then give a 2003 Gecko build date or claim to be MSIE 6.0)
* Claim to be running on Hurd, BeOS 6, or some other vaporware.
* "NoBrowserNeeded (My TCP/IP stack is connected directly to my brain.)"
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!