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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."
I don't notice any speed difference, but my machines are all fairly high spec. What bugs me most about IE is the jerky scrolling, the Fox is much more even in its mouse-wheel scrolling.
Considering the amazing success of Mozilla, one can't help but wonder how long it will be before someone attempts to buy it.
So I'm curious, is that even possible? Could some big corporation just come along and buy Mozilla out?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
What did the Mozilla Foundation do that has made Mozilla such a huge success? Maybe more to the point, why haven't other OSS projects taken off like Mozilla? Any ideas on what can be done on other OSS projects to achieve similar success?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
According to the dictionary, a paradigm is One that serves as a pattern or model. or A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline. Can you please explain what you meant by 5.5 million download being a 'new' paradigm?
Cheers
It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper. The things they have learned about making an OSS application successful.
I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well. Better than most people realize. The skins, that type of idea is everywhere from cell phones, to just about everything. Everyone likes to customize.
Evolution or ID?
The cause of the crash would be the impact with the ground. It has nothing to do with IE of FF.
I have been reading a lot about FireFox (and Opera, to be fair) here on Slashdot lately. Everyone who uses one of these alternative browsers has nothing but good things to say about them, and if someone says something bad about one then they are either attacked as being MS sheep or assaulted by a series of suggestions on how to fix the situation.
My question is this: aside from the obvious security-through-diversity advantage, and the fact that the IE HTML engine is a bit on the slow side, what are the benefits of using FireFox or Opera over, say, Slimbrowser, Crazybrowser, or MyIE2? These IE-based browsers have tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, and a host of other features that they probably borrowed (read: stole) from the "geekier" browsers out there. I'm not saying that the 2 advantages I mentioned aren't enough, but if I'm running a firewall and antivirus program, and I don't notice the speed difference between them, why should I switch?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Oops, should have been a link in there.
A few months ago I got fed up of the bi-weekly exploits being discovered for IE, so I decided to give Mozilla 1.6 a try. It was awesome needless to say. I got my best friend switched over and he loves it too.
Recently I switched my mom over to use Mozilla 1.7 after discovering around 480+ spyware and trojan on her laptop.
I've tried FireFox 0.8 or 0.7 I cant remember but it was buggy and I liked the simpleness of Mozilla 1.6 better.
I still need to use IE6 for 2 things though, Windows update and Mcafee AV update both use ActiveX. Arg i hate ActiveX.
But with the lack of info on the Mozilla site, I wonder how many people know this, and download the entire 0.9.2 version, instead of just the patch.
Surely there should at least be a note mentioning the patch on the front page?
Now all it needs is an easy update feature. I realized I've gone around installing FireFox everywhere, but when that security vulnerability came out last week I had to go redownload it again everywhere and upgrade it to 0.9.2. Needs a one-clicky update thingy to make it so I don't have to walk my mom through downloading it and installing it over the phone.
I've frequently used Firefox (and the full-featured Mozilla) on a 64MB, 166MHz Pentium running Windows 98.
It's not the fastest thing ever, but it's completely usable. Perhaps it's a little slower than Internet Explorer on the same machine, but it's really not worth bothering about. Firefox is snappy, it doesn't get stuck in endless hourglass-waving pauses, and it starts pretty quickly too.
It feels considerably faster on that PC than Firefox does on my modern iBook, where it takes an age to start and even longer to display dialogue boxes and suchlike - it's why I've stuck with Safari. Maybe there is room for improvement on the Windows version of Firefox, but I'd rather the effort went into other platforms as well.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
OK, here's my issues performance related with Mozilla (I'm on quite an old version now, 1.5, so maybe some of these have been fixed):
.3 seconds. I suspect it might be using a garbage collector that has been badly tuned (?).
- startup time is slow, much worse than IE + Windows desktop load time (to account for the preloaded parts of IE).
- random pauses. Mozilla seems to occasionally stop responding for about
- 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.
Related problems:
- memory consumption is much higher than IE.
- some operations (e.g. moving a large volume of e-mail between mailboxes) seem to tie up all open Mozilla windows while they occur, which isn't very nice.
I'd submit these as RFEs on bugzilla, but my experience is that anything of bugzilla that isn't a showstopper bug just gets ignored for 2 years.
You can run Firefox from a USB stick, so you dont even have to install it on the machine you are working on.
I have been a pretty steadfast Microsoft user (WinXP, VS.NET, Office, etc.) but recently I have started using alternatives to some of their software: iTunes, Trillian, and now FireFox.
There are two reasons to this (except in the case of iTunes, that ones because I got an iPod recently)
1. Security is better (No activeX, no hijacking)
2. Customization (I can choose the way I want my software to look!)
It may seem shallow, but I switched to FireFox because it let me make a cool looking browser.
"Here's a spoiler: You're will die alone."-Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
How are the finance of the foundation doing ? What have they done with the money ? How many people have they kept employed via the foundation ? Who are the most generous corporate donators (so I can give them my business back) ? Inquiring minds want to know!
<em class="cheerleader"> Go Mozilla ! </em>
:wq
I heard something about Mozilla's incompatibility with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. What's the current state of the process? Will there be Mozilla packages for Debian in future? Does the discussion on this issue still go on?
Somebody please explain.
It is a truism that the mozilla webpage is horrendously out of date. Many project pages have not been updated for months and are far out of date. I'm just happy the latest version is on the webpage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mozilla & all its descendents is great, but more attention should be given to Konqueror, another great Open Source browser that deserves the support - or at least recognition - of the community (At last the Linux one).
It's all about having choice.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!