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Ars Technica Interviews Scott Collins
SnoopTodd writes "Ars Technica has an interview with Scott Collins of Mozilla. 'That's the thing I learned to lust after as a programmer. It's not my ability to solve one problem, to plow this field, but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses. The ability to make something that touches not ten people, not a hundred people, not a thousand people but a hundred million people. I want Mozilla to be there again. IE is a browser with no soul. I want it to be Mozilla because I think that people who care deserve a browser with a soul.'"
It's really nice to see this sort of passion, and such an ambitious goal for an F/OSS project.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
In the article, he talks about how Netscape wouldn't have died if management had let them release netscape 5. I don't agree - netscape 4 sucked scissors, and IE was already coming in and showing netscape how a web browser was supposed to be done. Netscape 5 would have continued this trend because it was based off of the same crappy code. Today, however, the situation is reversed - IE sux scissors, and Mozilla is showing IE how it should be done.
...of PURE EVIL! If you look real close you can see a 666 under help/about.
Then again maybe IE sold it's soul to Milhouse for five bucks..
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
if it has "soul" or not. I want something that's better than IE, not because I don't want to use an MS product, but because I know it's mediocre. Why is it mediocre? Because it can be---the general public uses it anyway because it's right there on the desktop. I want IE to be innovative the way Mozilla and Opera have been. Why? because good, innovative products make for better competition.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I imagine a lot of developers at Microsoft would also like to feel that way, but corporate cutthroat agendas being what they are, they cannot really "do the right thing".
Whereas in open-source, free (as in speech) software, it's encouraged.
It's hard to see where it will end, this development-with-social-consciousness, but considering we've had the soulless variety for so long, I say we give it a shot.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
When it comes to "soul" no browser can compare to the "Sacred editor".
Stallman 3:16!
I don't need a "soul" in my browser; I need a good, standards-compliant and stable rendering engine in my browser.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a
Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.
Aww, c'mon, who is it? You don't want us to accidentally hire him, do you?
Collins is correct that whereas some people prefer the Konqueror-based Safari, others will prefer the Mozilla-based Firefox or Camino.
Of course, there are further options, such as Netscape 7.1 (Mozilla), Opera, etc.
Personally, I love Safari, other than the problem with a handful of sites, such as Citibank's online banking, that only work with Camino.
The next pasture is always greener
YMMV, but besides tabbed browsing, built-in address-line search, and pop-up blockers, the reason I've used Mozilla since 1.1 is because it does have soul and *isn't* wielded as a weapon by a repeated federal felon.
For all you cynics, yes, MS was completely justified in doing anything they wanted to compete, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with them.
I think he means that the people working on the program have soul, which could yield a great product.
stuff |
... into casual sex. I mean, casual sex is fine and all, but you want it to be GOOD. If you are used to lackluster casual sex... well.. so be it.
Hmmm.
i think he is confused. by soul he means tabs.
-ninjaneer
There is a guy here on slashdot, and his sig is
:P and Mozilla is coming back in a big way. Fast, clean, lots of new features (I'm not going to call it fresh), and lots of choice.
"The only thing a liberal has to do to become a conservative is to not change views for twenty years"
Or something similar. The point is, Netscape was crap by 4.7, and Internet Explorer was fresh, new, fast and hade the exact same pricetag.
But now, Internet Explorer is, well, you know how it is
I think this time, with Mozilla being in the hands of the OSS community, and not a corporation, it will stay on top of Internet Explorer for a long time to come (well at least I hope so).
--
The last digit of pi is four.
You must be new here or have never even tried Mozilla. All you are basing your opinion off of is reviews, comments, and maybe a couple pretty pictures.
You also do not have to reinstall a browser. In fact, good luck uninstalling IE. The point is that you can use both. Hell, with the ZIP file Mozilla release, you don't even have to install the browser. You can run it right from the directory!
My overwhelming point is to try something before you make opinions on it. I can read reviews until my eyes bleed, but I usually like to try it out myself before making the final decision. The would encourage the same to you... ITS FREE!
Hmmm.
Joel Spolsky on joelonsoftware.com (he provides some excellent insights for programmers - highly recommended) wrote a great article titled 'Things You Should Never Do, Part 1' - using Netscape 5 as the case study.
0 00 69.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000
Now I know why al my programs failed to reach sentience.
#include
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
I agree that the average person doesn't care about a browser "with a soul."
However, I think that it's more because they take the path of least resistance -- look at all the crapware that gets downloaded and installed onto the average PC. It doesn't look like they're afraid of downloading and installing to me...
-ch
tabbed browsing
:/
better bookmarks
themes
find as you type
works identically on all 3 platforms
secure (and you never have to be paranoid about clicking on dodgy links)
popup-blocking
ad-blocking
a zillion extensions, some of which are extremely useful
nobody's denying that ie also lets you browse the internet
... not render correctly, but I haven't had an actual crash using mozilla. Is this limited to a specific OS? Do you have any reference URLS where mozilla crashes? 20% seems like a high number to me. I go to quite a few different sites a day, and have yet to see that happen one time. BTW, using moz 1.6 here on FC2.
IE is buggy to the point of being dangerous; inaccessible; and almost devoid of useful features.
It is also damaging the web for everyone by preventing designers from having to use open standards and by allowing them them to write buggy code.
Catch up? I would argue it is a means to push browser technology where Internet Explorer has stalled. Sure IE is getting pop up blocking. Mozilla/Firefox has had it for how long? Same for tabbed browsing.
As for being identical pieces of software, well that is to be expected. Two hammers made by different manufactures are both hammers when you get down to it.
Besides, if two pieces of software are going to take the same document and render it the "same" way to the user, then exactly how do you expect them to be worlds apart in difference?
One innovation that Firefox has on IE that I don't expect to change any time soon--open source.
When Mozilla came out, I switched back to it. I *like* Mozilla more than IE. With Mozilla I can right click and do a view image. I can open tabs on my browser. I can easily manage cookies and forms. I can block images from certain sites.
This guy puts it nice. 'IE has no soul.' Which of course is true. Others say maybe Netscape wouldn't have died if... Ladies and gentlemen, Redmond put the full weight of the Vole up against Netscape. IE was never more in their eyes than a 'reasonable alternative'. The campaign was fought with the ISPs and the OEMs and looking back, could anyone have withstood that? Maybe Netscape did screw up, but would it have made any difference back then?
But if IE has no soul, then the net doesn't have any soul either, and yes, it would be great to see this browser get some real market share again. Not only because IE sucks and has no soul, but also to prove there can be justice in the world.
I think it is time to remind everyone how things once were...
Do you remember some years ago, that the Mozilla project was held up as an example of an OSS failure? By the majority of people, even here on Slashdot?
It was taking too long to develop, was too bloated, Microsoft would always be one step ahead...
These days Mozilla is now one of the trophy projects of the OSS community. But it was that same community that derided it not so long ago. We should be thankful for the persistence and long term vision of the Mozilla team.
Based on some rather public statements I've seen, I have a feeling it was JWZ.
I don't have time to look up the reference, but I'll bet someone with a bit more time on their hands will.
He did leave rich, and he's doing something quite different now, so I don't think this disclosure will hurt him any.
Of course I have no way to know who's right in this debate, since I'm sure the old codebase was genuinely a problem, but he's definitely the guy on the other side.
D
I recently had to switch *back* to IE after an enjoyable hiatus on Firefox, and that's when i noticed just how over the hill IE is: ... etc etc.
- no tabbed browsing
- no native pop up control
- no caret browsing
- no form management
- no "block images from..." feature
I know that some (many) of these things are available as extras (for example with the google toolbar) but i was migrating back because i could no longer install software on my work internet machine(including the toolbar). It was like moving back to your childhood neighborhood and suddenly realizing how rose tinted your memories really are: all of a sudden i've got umpteen windows open (some pop ups, some i had to open to not lose the thread of what i was reading), everything's covered in ads, and i have to use the mouse to do everything. Basically: surfing sucks.
Mozilla/Firefox isn't a better browser because it's open source or non-Microsoft, it's a better browser because it enhances the quality of your surfing experience.
#!/usr/bin/english
The average consumer has no concept of what security is or why they should care.
:-)
My parents are since they got an express mail by post from their ISP to immediately run an antivirus tool on their computer, written in a fairly agressive manner.
No, neither Mozilla nor Firefox have any major features that's a reason to switch from IE if you use Windows, but the features add up for me so the choice was simple. That's all *I* care for, not if my mom and dad should or shouldn't switch to Firefox. It's up to them... Often people do though, when I just tell them for their information aboute e.g. tabbed browsing and how much simpler it gets to browse when the pages aren't put among the other applications in the task bar.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I really hate it when people go on about how IE is the only browser that renders all sites properly. More like it is the only browser that webdesigners work their butts off tying to design webpages that render properly on it.
I get sick of trying to hack around the IE bugs and non-standards.
Sometimes on websites I like to put in a white PNG with stuff written in the alpha channel, so that only the BROKEN SUPPORT OF PNG IN INTERNET EXPLORER actually shows the message to all the IE users. It is about how their browser does not support the latest PNG technology. Because IE sux d00d! upgrade to firefox now!
what's that? oh wow IE doesn't support translucency in CSS backgrounds, oh too bad for you then. IE SUX d00d
<matrix>MS Longhorn: "What's the use of a browser with soul...if you can't even surf?" </matrix>
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
IE is buggy to the point of being dangerous; inaccessible; and almost devoid of useful features.
Really? And yet it works reliably for me (and hundreds of thousands of others) during marathon surfing sessions. With the exception of tabbing, I never find myself thinking "If only IE had this feature..."
You need to pull your head out of the dark place, and look around at this strange thing called reality.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Good ol' Slashdot. Where mentions of a "soul" bring countless references to the Simpsons and the episode where Bart sells his soul, but none (that I saw) referring to Faust (sold his soul), South Korea (Captial: Seoul), Dr. Scholl's (in-soles), New Orleans (soul food) or Marvin Gaye (soul music).
IE is, for what 98% of the world, the best browser out there.
Good Lord, a browser with a support of a 1998 standard (CSS2) that could be described with the phrase "sucks bigtime" is not, and could never be, defined as "the best browser out there". Not even for the 2% of the world.
Have you ever tried doing a page that rendered correctly on each browser without having to use techniques of the pre-2000 age? The fact that most sites renders acceptably on IE is due to the fact that there are many monkeys behind them; monkeys who do not know better than using tables for layout control.
And this should be the main reason why that pathetic excuse for a browser which is IE should be wiped out with acid from user's disk drives; the other reasons being its pathological lack of security and its shortcomings in user interface.
You can save space. Or you can save time. Don't ever count on saving both at once. -- First Law of Algorithmic Analisys
It's a sick twisted thing.
Malicious and cruel, it seeks to devour the web, and just cause mayhem.
In my minds eye, it looks something like a gremlin.
To Firebird's mogwai
*grin*
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I still have to cope with not being able to middle-click on a link when i'm using IE : It still gets me, after getting used of this in Firefox.
How about this thought:
If only IE didn't let my machine (and 'mom & pop's') get infected with spyware/adware/malware/hostageware by JUST CLICKING ON A LINK.
Remember, ~60% of spam comes from infected windows machines, and IE helps this problem along.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I must add that these people are so used to IE being wrapped around Windows that installing a new browser seems like a major effort. I feel comfortable using Windows, installing apps, etc, and yet I, too, was in this category for a while. But now I use Firefox and tell everyone I can; I even bought a shirt (very nice).
Again, I think Mozilla needs to stress the fact that users can try it without FUD and, should they wish, go back. For this reason it is imperative that the next release have "upgrading" built-in for Windows users, which Mozilla says is coming "Upgrading will be fixed in a future release" (source), to ease the switch. It must be as easy as possible.
i don't know about you man. my motor cycle had a soul, and I felt like selling my soul when i sold it.
Yes, Mozilla has a lot of nice features. But you know what's keeping people from switching (at least in our organization)?
.ics file. Not friendly for users.
Calendar.
Netscape 4.x had a nice calendar that worked great with Netscape Calendar Server.
Mozilla Calendar (sunbird/whatever) just doesn't cut it. It fails to send calendar invites properly. When a user receives one, it opens it in a browser window, displaying the raw
We don't even use Exchange at all - and people still want to cling to Outlook because of its Calendaring features.
I cannot stress how important this actually is! We're not the only company that has users sticking to Outlook because of the calendar... I've dealt with quite a few others.
Users like to have their email & organizer functions in one.
None of them use Palm Desktop because it's still a seperate app.
The users that I *have* moved to Mozilla really like it. But the rest? They won't budge unless there's a fully functional calendar - one that lets you accept calendar invites, add them to the calendar, and send them with a few clicks.
Mozilla Calendar just isn't doing this right now and I don't understand why the team doesn't direct effort towards 'enterprise features' rather than Chatzilla.
To be nitpicky, I'm pretty sure it's next to impossible for a bunch of 0's and 1's to have emotions. But one can argue that a Firebird (the car, not the browser) or a Mustang is just steel and glass... but it is the designers the put the life into it. And you can tell -- those cars stand out from the crowd, just as Firefox does now.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Yeah, IE "works" for hundreds of thousands of people, that's why spyware sites occupy so many of the top 100 most hit sites on the web. The people using those computers generally have no desire to visit those sites, their hijacked computer does it automatically for them, that's really working now isn't it!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I wish people would just get away from using Microsoft as the enemy to overcome. It is possible to just produce and release great software and be successful without paying any attention to Microsoft.
A browser without a soul? Software does not have a soul! This is just silly talk. Look at how Sun and other companies keep spinning their wheels trying to out do Microsoft while great small companies like Panic Software can produce great software. And how do they do it? They find a need they can fill and they make a great product. They do not look at what Microsoft is offering and try to replicate and destroy their marketshare. There is so much software that could be written for so many other purposes which goes well beyond what Microsoft offers. Be creative and start building it.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Well I can only prove it insofar as my clients setups do not allow users to install software and yet they still get this crap, even the ones who use alternative email clients like Novell Groupwise. The only vector on those machines is IE and they still get hijacked six ways from sunday.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Firefox is better is that IE may well have a soul, but it often has ghosts (popups) and sometimes gets possesed (hijacked, "LET BILL GATES F*CK YOU!!!, YOUR OS SUCKS COCKS IN HELL!!!") where as firefox has a TABBED SOULS open and has a protection from evil 10'radius cast by a 7th level cleric of the church of stallman. That will give you at least +1 more on your save vs. a gnna shocksite.
Sure at first it was some bloated multi-class character under second edition rules and owned by AOL. But now they only level in one class at a time. Like einstein says, god doesn't play dice.... therefore we must make every effort to min-max firefox so that it can level up faster.
The bottom line is you'd never hear a D&D analogy praising IE, you'd only hear it for an OSS browser: THAT my freinds, is a soul. The soul isn't IN the browser you hobgoblins, it's in the community. And whether you are shaking you fist at corporate capitalism, or having a good time no other browser has a soul like firefox.
Three cheers for one of the best examples of OSS. Be damned all you karma-whoring-by-anti-slashdot-groupthinking bastards the groupthink is right on this one. There is a soul in OSS and IE is a frigid disgrace and the most shining example of (three years without update) monopoly stagnation.
Firefox and Jesus save, the rest of you take full damage from the fireball!
Once when I was visiting San Jose I invited myself to go out to dinner with the mozilla developers. I ended up riding to dinner with Scott. It was a memorable experience. I had never taken a corner at 60 MPH in a parking lot before :-) It made me want to go and buy a Saab.
I had a great time that night. There were some realy nice people working at Netscape.
I guess we differ on our opinions of what is necessary.
;)
Let me put this in context: ten years ago cell phones weren't "necessary". They aren't really "necessary" today either, but i'm not going back to my land-line only existence.
I think easy configuration, BEST configuration out of the box, and 100% perfect rendering on ALL pages being most important.
1) You had to install the Google toolbar to get pop up blocking and toolbar access to Google, two features that Firefox has "out of the box" (the google toolbar also includes form management, btw). You're comparing IE + Google toolbar with Firefox, which isn't a fair comparison (Firefox has a great number of extensions, shall we start comparing those?)
2) IE doesn't have "100% perfect rendering on ALL pages" - there even used to be pages that would cause IE to crash. Having said that, more web designers will make the effort to code around IE's problems (that's what 95%-plus market share does for you), so i guess the point is moot...
3) In terms of "BEST configuration out of the box", i trust that you have at least changed your browser's default security settings? Or are you surfing from behind a firewall? I trust that you have at least applied the security patches for IE (do you Windows Update?)
All of this is quickly heading for some stupid religious "my browser can beat up your browser" flamewar, so let's just leave it at this: whether or not you use Firefox, just the fact that it's out there testing new ideas in browsing ergonomy is good for all of us (yes yes, you included) because at least the discussion is moving forwards.
Oh, and btw: my browser CAN beat up your browser
#!/usr/bin/english
but the ability to build a plow that every farmer uses.
This attitude is really a hallmark of doing development for free and open source software.
Just as in openly-published science, there's a motivating fame that drives programmers to produce what they think is really the best and what they appreciate most is the acknowledgement of their capable peers.
Note to self and to world:
Public commendation for FOSS developers encourages talented developers to persevere. that is important if they aren't getting any money for what they do and because they will inevitably put up with that omnipresent segment of consumers that expects their every whim and expectation to be met with much bowing and scraping and solutions to be delivered on a silver platter.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Calendaring is the biggest organizational problem that I have to deal with at work.
Calendaring is also the feature that time-crunched execs with multiple assistants cannot live without, and about which they will not compromise. They aren't welded to Outlook as an email client. Email is a highly standardized medium. They're equally comfortable using Yahoo! mail as Outlook for their mail.
But the calendaring server landscape is populated by standards-oblivious applications that don't talk to each other. Some times the same vendor's own servers and clients don't get along well. MS Entourage is the equivalent of "POP calendaring," whereas Outlook is "IMAP calendaring." Entourage works fine if you always, only do your calendaring from one machine. Doesn't work AT ALL as soon as you walk to another machine. God help you if your laptop crashes, or is stolen, and you didn't have a recent back up of your monolithic, 2GB binary database that Entourage uses to store your mail.
At my company more than one exec is sick and tired of the daily regimen necessary to protect their Windows machines against viruses, worms, and security vulnerabilities. Calendaring via Outlook+Exchange is the single largest obstacle to those execs abandoning Windows entirely.
I figure software should operate in the same way the Taoist ideal of government worked. I shouldnt know it's even there. I dont want to be passionate about a web browser, I just want it to display my pages, so I can focus on content, not how cool the browser is. IE does that, and I have no problem with it.
YMMV.
Welcome to the reason OSS desktops and applications typically suck. Lack of creative vision and grasping of abstract concepts like the "soul" of an application.
Soul refers to interface, usability, standards, and all that. Get into a little right-brain thinking here, people.
C'mon Mr. Hamerly, if you're the one then step forward, receive the gold-plated bathroom tissue statuette, and defend yourself in your acceptance speech!
=S