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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/
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.
http://pagerankstatus.mozdev.org/ Google Pagerank status: Displays the Google Pagerank in your browser's status bar.
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
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
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