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Mozilla Foundation Turns 1
antatack writes "It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic."
This is really an amazing feat for what is essentially a volunteer group within an organization that acts as a non-profit entity. I don't know the exact status of Mozilla but I think this is descript of the actual effort. It would be remarkable for a large company, publicly funded, to do this well.
Happy Birthday!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
>>Wonder how long until FireFox turns 1.0?
Actually, it should turn 1.0 by September. At least, that's what Mozilla has stated.
Happy Birthday Mozilla! Thanks for givin' us a stable browser! *Posting from Firefox 0.9.2*
That would be right if the first poster actually had posted more than random trollage. Quite a lot of people have stated they find it faster than IE and have then given concrete examples of things they find that are faster. Just saying "I think IE is faster" is a weak argument, saying it in a trollish fashion is even worse
Spyware avoidance. Standards compliance (as a web developer, it's easier to code a Moz/Firefox/standards-compliant page, then tinker for IE-compliance, than the reverse). Less vulnerable to browser hijacking (not just because of diversity, either). Tons of extensions beyond what's available in the browsers you named.
just one of the advantages is that mozilla (and opera) is multiplatform. no matter what computer you use (at work, home, school etc.) you can still have your browser.
SHE does throw dice.
Actually firefox is the faster one. It just doesn't start rendering the page when it gets it's first byte. IE does (ever seen IE activity when pictures come loooong after text? You see text place changing then). You can modify your Firefox to behave that way if you want to, but on older computers it will just take more time than to "wait and then render".
Some tweaks here
?SYNTAX ERROR
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
*whack*
Are you running Windows XP? Windows XP seems to do a very good job at prefetching applications that you use often. I've noticed a huge difference between it and Windows 2000 on load times of applications I use a lot. Of course having newer harddrives with more cache helps out big time also.
Reserved Word.
http://pagerankstatus.mozdev.org/ Google Pagerank status: Displays the Google Pagerank in your browser's status bar.
yeah, he's wrong. apart from the fact that IE5 for windows doesnt even resemble IE6 for windows. lets not go into the differences between platforms. Products by the name IE exist on multiple platforms. IE is not multiplatform. there is a difference
TIAEAE!
I started using Mozilla around release 0.5, and never had any performance problems... even on the 450Mhz P2 that I was using at the time.
I suspect that the people bitching about Mozilla performance either have 50 spyware processes running or are part of the Gentoo crowd that is seeing noticeable performance increases after recompiling GNOME for the 5th time.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
IE for Mac is a different, mostly compatible browser with the same name. No-one uses it, despite the fact it's bundled with the system, because it's old and slow and still breaks with a bunch of IE-compatible sites.
The old IE for *nix (Solaris and HP-UX, I think) was just a straight port of IE for Windows, I think using MainWin, but it isn't available any more.
It's come a long way since that.
Again, firefox has come a long way in this department as well. I'd say firefox is way more intuitive and much easier to grasp for the average user. Only drawback is the extensive use of the plug-in system.
Don't get me wrong, I love it. But seeing it from the average user it might be a make-or-break point. "Didn't I just download firefox?! What is this I have to get now and what is that strange box that I've never seen before?"
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
IE has a truely broken nonstandard rendering engine - writing HTML that works in both IE and complient browsers is hell.
There are also other things that are just plain missing in the IE rendering engine - it doesn't support alphablended PNGs even though they've been around (and supported in other browsers) for years. Oddly MacIE handles them fine. It also doesn't support some very useful CSS2 properties such as position:fixed. The lack of support is bad in itself, but the fact that MS will not fix it for years is even worse. If I have to support IE then I cannot use any cool new features that the W3C specify, even if the W3C originally specified them over 5 years ago.
The whole problem with IE having such a large majority of the market is that it holds back developemtn across the whole web - MS won't implement new features because there is little pressure to do so. For them it's just money down the drain since they won't gain any market share from the development. TBH I think that any profit-making organisation with such a large chunk of the market would be in (more or less) the same state of afairs and I would be much happier with a non-profit organisation such as the Mozilla Foundation in the driving seat since they are not worried (so much) about the bottom line.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
startup time is slow, much worse than IE + Windows desktop load time (to account for the preloaded parts of IE).
You're talking about Mozilla, not Firefox - they are two completely different products which use the same rendering engine. Mozilla is rather slow and bulky, Firefox is quite speedy and small. I would certainly estimate Firefox to be as fast, if not faster than IE.
html editing component (e.g. mail's compose window) has serious issues with long documents; IE's equivalent component is much faster, although not as nice IMHO.
Again, you're not talking about Firefox here - hell, you're not even talking about the browser.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal feasability of this, however, should it prove to be a possiblity, the code that has been released under the MPL would still be available under that license.
Suppose the incumbent owner could find a way to close the devlopment tree and start to create proprietary software from that point. The last publically available version of the code would still be covered by the license agreement under which it was released so it would very quickly become the starting point for a new open-source project and development would continue unabated.
Hence, commitment to the Mozilla platform (or it's open source competition), may be significantly safer than commiting to a browser with closed source, where development can stagnate or even stall completely. Should critical vulnerabilities emerge in such products you are entirely reliant on the investment of the owning company, and if their focus is elsewhere, patches may not be forthcoming.
boakes.org
Download time of Slashdot main page on Camino (Mozilla on Mac OS X): 4 seconds.
Download time of Slashdot main page on Explorer on the same system: 8 seconds.
This was done with caches cleared on ethernet connected to my university's backbone.
"and too much corporate influence."
Now that's a funny statement. In all the other Slashdot articles, people massively praise corporations for having UI designers, and claim that all open source user interfaces are unusable. So corporate == good.
And now suddenly corporate == bad? No wonder nobody ever listen to Slashdotters, it's because Slashdotters make a fool out of themselves by continuously giving contradicting statements!
When the Fox is slow to load some page or another, I will frequently try the same page in IE because I'm an impatient bastard. Almost invariably, IE loads the site as slowly as the Fox, telling me that it's a server issue & not the browser's fault.
Pages that use Java take a hundred years to load in Fox. Period. Maybe there are settings that I've neglected to tweak, but the Java environment seems to start loading at whatever point the page in question calls it, adding Java's start time to the time it would normally take the page to load. IE wins for speed hands down in this case, but if I'm doing something stupid and can fix it easily, I'd love to be corrected here.
Tabs. Right now, I have about a dozen tabs open. Can't live without 'em. However, if I try to quickly flip from tab to tab and reload or submit or follow a link or run a script, after the third or fourth page I try to load I notice a difference of up to a full second when loading or when I even try to switch to another tab. Should Fox be able to withstand this kind of abuse? Dunno. Should I be able to reconfigure the browser to fix this too? Dunno, but I'd like to think so.
Overall, I'm very happy with Firefox in the speed department (curse you, Java-reliant pages!), and can't imagine subjecting IE to the same treatment without getting hourly blue screens. It's not a perfect experience, but it sucks infinitely less than the Microsoft alternative IMHO.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
In case this hasn't been mentioned already, Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 is now available for download.
I'm sorry, but you're attributing too much intelligence to the average user. They will phone up the helpdesk again and again and again. Trust me - the other day we had somene phone up our support line (we support the server, not the workstations) because their workstation kept beeping at them. It turns out they had a folder sat right ontop of their keyboard.
And that's just the clueless users - it's absolutely amazing the calls we get from people who are supposed to be qualified. We have had network installation engineers (i.e. the people who are paid to set up all the machines on a network) asking what a default gateway is, how do they find it out, why can't they have identical subnets on all the interfaces on a router and "what's wrong with giving their workstation an address like 10.2.3.4 in a 10.0.0.0/8 subnet?". Then they phone back again the next week when they're on another site and ask *exactly* the same questions again. Not to mention the "qualified" MSCE network engineers who wouldn't know a RFC1918 network if it hit them in the face.
Happilly I am not in any way involved in support anymore.
web developers sure got lazy in the time since that was my occupation
Yes, I worry lots about a lot of these computing qualifications - I've spoken to supposidly "qualified" web developers (they've been on course, got certificates and all sorts) who, when you start talking about web design with them will interrupt you to ask what this HTML thing is you keep talking about. Yes, that's right - they've never heard of HTML, they do everything in MicroSoft FrontPants. And what's this validator thing you talk about. When I was working on a web-based project recently I was actually asked why I was "wasting my time" validating my HTML as I write it (yeah, I was pretty shocked by that one).
From my experience that only computing certificates worth anything are the Cisco ones - I trust people with no paper qualifications at all more than I trust people with MSCEs, etc.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
what's wrong with giving their workstation an address like 10.2.3.4 in a 10.0.0.0/8 subnet?
:)
Oops, sorry, I meant a 10.0.0.0/24 subnet. (404 Could not locate coffee error
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Here are a few things to clear up about the performance of Firefox. I confirmed this on an old 200MHz computer running Windows ME.
1. Boot time IS faster than IE!2. Browsing is smoother than IE, especially when opening a new window.
3. You can make it even faster by going to this tweak site