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."

Comments

A new paradigm of sorts

[erick99]

5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That's close to 200,000 downloads a day over the last month.

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

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[hfis]

I honestly fail to see how this is a 'new paradigm'. You didnt mention paradigms once in your post, just praised Mozilla.

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

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Doogie5526]

A good way to keep the downloads high is to release a 0.9 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 version within a week.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[MoonFog]

0.9.2 is only 0.9.1 with the patch for the shell:// vulnerability.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[erick99]

The whole concept of how Mozilla has come to be, and released high quality products, from within a framework that is radically different from the companies that otherwise do this in pure for-profit model.

Mozilla is not secretive and embraces it's end-users in a fashion that is almost antithetical to contemporary software companies. Mozilla is an exceptionally responsive entity (esp. regarding security issues it would seem). There is more but I will leave it at that. Perhaps other slash dot folks could amplify this point more eloquently than I am able.

It is simply an observation of mine and I understand that I am out on a limb. If you disagree, I do understnd.

Cheers!

Erick

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[frankthechicken]

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?

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Timesprout]

Actually I would disagree with you here. For a long time Mozilla was more about what developers wanted to do rather than catering to end user requirements. Most for profit companies are very responsive to the needs of their customers. Pissed off customers = lost revenue. I know plenty of companies who are interested in user feedback and work well with their customers. Microsoft are pretty much a singularity in that they dont really have to care because of their ubiquity but even they listen to their customers (just not all of them).

Also I think many people forget it has taken almost 5 years for the Mozilla project to release stable useable products that we can recommend to friends/family etc. Firefox gets a lot of attention here, and rightly so, its an excellent browser but it is a long way from the original Mozilla concepts, remember when gecko was going to take over the whole universe, remember the bloat and absymal stability/performance ? After 3 years of nothing many people felt the project was on the verge of death, would never produce anything of value and was based on seriously misguided assumptions.

I would actually give Mozilla more credit for recognising (albeit belatedly) that they were not going to take over the world, that developer cool is meaningless to end users and stripping the out the crap and focussing on Firefox and Thunderbird as standalone products. Its just a pity it took so long.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Slightly Askew]

Yes, and I was one of those who downloaded it. And it turned out to be buggy. And I uninstalled it. However, nobody collects stats on uninstallations, just downloads. I'm sure people will use those statistics to say how popular Firefox is. I'd rather see some statistics from popular websites that capture the type of browser accessing them.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[EtherMonkey]

And why should Mozilla be different than anyone else in this respect? In the FOSS "marketplace," downloads are essentially the only measure of success.

Even in the commercial market, companies report sales volume that includes pre-installed software installed by system OEM without adjusting for the significant fraction of users who replace, remove or just never use the "free" bundled product.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[It'sYerMam]

Well, this is /., and Mozilla is an open source project - what do you expect?
Admittedly, the birthday of a foundation isn't really "stuff that matters" but the following discussion generally is. Many here love the chance to natter about Mozilla, which is a brilliant example of how OSS can overcome the monopoly and churn out a brilliant piece of software.
Saying "F*** off" is not going to change anything. Next time, put forward a point.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[mikael]

or a long time Mozilla was more about what developers wanted to do rather than catering to end user requirements. Most for profit companies are very responsive to the needs of their customers. Pissed off customers = lost revenue.

But who does a web browser vender consider to be their most important customers? The home users surfing the web using a free browser, or the web page designers and corporations who will pay megabucks for the latest web page design and layout software training conferences, seminars and books?

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[acebone]

Nope - it's not buggy.

I've yet to encounter a single bug in my current Firefox installation.

To get there however, I had to create a whole new profile, because the old profile would cause bugs in the 0.9 (which I've subsequently updated to 0.9.2)

It even shows slews and slews of large pictures without failing now, which is very good for my ahem... studies !

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[Feztaa]

I'd rather see some statistics from popular websites that capture the type of browser accessing them.

Right, because nobody ever spoofs their user agent string. Nope, it's never been done...

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[LiterateWriter]

There is a link on Mozilla.org. Check out the 8 July 2004 update that is on the main page on the left column under "Latest News" (now there are 2 more updates above this one). (Notice that the main mozilla page now points to an annoying (cute for some people) page with the birthday announcement.)

-LW

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[frankthechicken]

You're right I missed those, though having what should be important information be placed in a news column rather than directly in the specific download section seems rather poor design.

I mean as you mentioned with each news item, the update information gets sent further and further away from the download link, creating a seperation of linked topics and information.

Indeed if you click on the download link, there is no information about the update whatsoever. In my opinion, that is poor, especially when it can be so easily fixed.

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[jtmas83]

There was a patch?

Re:A new paradigm of sorts

[David Gerard]

Most of that was a severe case of Netscape. They wanted the Bazaar, then ran it like a Cathedral to a great extent. That a browser got out at all is amazing.

Re:now all you need

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy, we'll just remove half of the functionality from Gecko.

Re:now all you need

[PhilHibbs]

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.

Success story

[Kombat]

I don't really have much to say, other than "Congratulations." They've been a poster-boy for OSS, and proven that network collaboration really can result in a stable, useful, well-developed product. I wonder what new innovations we'll be praising for the 2nd, or even 5th anniversary.

Great job guys, and thanks for the browser. :)

Re:Success story

[Twyford]

Poster Boy? More like a Posterzilla to me :P

Buy out?

[SpooForBrains]

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?

Re:Buy out?

[suffe]

"Considering the amazing success of Linux*, one can't help but wondering how long it will be before someone attempts to buy it."

Did that version of the question manage to show just how strange a question just was asked in the parent post? How ever it managed to get moderated up to "+5, Interesting" is simply beyond me.

*YES, thats right. I just wrote Linux and not GNU/Linux

Re:Buy out?

[SpooForBrains]

Perhaps because several other people have wondered the same thing? And to take your version of the question, there are several companies and organisations that have produced various "flavours" based around the linux kernel, and some (well at least one) of them have indeed been bought. There are two version of Mozilla, governed by one central body, that therefore stand as products in their own right, and high profile ones at that. Given that I don't understand the vagueries of how the Mozilla organisation functions, and what the issues surrounding purchasing such a body could be (and apparently some other people don't either) my question is entirely valid.

Re:Buy out?

[ear1grey]

Could some big corporation just come along and buy Mozilla out?

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.

Re:Buy out?

[suffe]

Yes, this was my answer. Seems I wasn't loged in for some reason.

Model for other OSS projects?

[goldspider]

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?

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Malc]

Other OSS projects have taken off, and done far better than Mozilla. Just look at Apache or BIND.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[jsebrech]

I could name three things that come to mind that mozilla did in the past year, and are underrepresented among other OSS projects:

- Focus on performance, make it faster with every release (granted, the mozilla project has been doing this for years)
- Do not treat any platform in an inferior way, focus on providing quality products on all platforms, including windows and mac.
- Have a visual design policy and team, redesigning the apps for improved ease of use, look and feel. Make sure the apps can be used easily by more than geeks. Make sure there is a fitting design for every platform the app runs on.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[kyknos.org]

but compare comparable - mozilla with some other DESKTOP oss sw

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[ctr2sprt]

The biggest key to their popularity, I think, is their status as Netscape Navigator's heir. Netscape has big name recognition, so people looking specifically for that browser easily find Mozilla. It's a lot like the "six degrees of separation" thing (you can establish a connection to anyone in the world, for example Kevin Bacon, going through at most six intermediaries). Mozilla has a big enough user base now that almost everyone knows somebody who uses it. That really increases its popularity because word of mouth is so effective. Most OSS projects never reach the level where that works for them.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[frostman]

While all credit is due the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla developers, one of the reasons it's so much more successful than the average good OSS project is the type of software they make.

1) Web browsing.
Nearly everyone does it. Firefox runs on most platforms. It's better than the competition. It's not geeky unless you want it to be. And with IE stagnant, more and more people are interested in the alternatives, regardless of whether they're open source.

2) E-mail.
Thunderbird is great but it's not as much greater than the other mail clients as Firefox is greater than the other browsers. But it's coming along very nicely and could have enormous success - even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future.

Both of these programs fit common needs that are not as well-served by big software companies as one might expect.

If other projects want to achieve that level of success, they should take lessons from the Mozilla Foundation for sure -- but it's not a fair measure if the other projects aren't making standard consumer apps.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Ari_Haviv]

There is only one person in charge of firefox's UI. His name is Ben Goodger. He gets to say No

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Conor Turton]

I'd have to say OpenOffice is up there with Mozilla. When PC magazines start putting OpenOffice in their "Essential software" section EVERY MONTH as PC Format have been doing then you know its "got there". Deepburner and Mozilla are two recent Freeware/OSS apps that have been repeatedly appearing on PCFs cover disk.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[kyknos.org]

Yes I can agree with that.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[bgfay]

I wish that OpenOffice would start a "Firefox" project that would concentrate on a very fast, very tight project for word processing. OpenOffice is a great thing (free, does most everything anyone could ask of it) but it is a slug, a monster that eats memory and just kills older machines. If I could use OpenOffice on my home machine (which is pretty substantial) and then use a "firefox" version on my older machines (like the laptop I'm using now and most of the computers at our under-funded school), I would be all set.

Maybe I'm just getting ahead of the project here. I know that 2.0 is striving for faster startup times and the like. Maybe instead of a separate project, OO.o could focus most of their efforts on streamlining the thing.

Firefox and Thunderbird are THE open source answers for browsing and email. That's two of the necessary apps. OpenOffice plugs many of the other holes, but it needs work. Firefox is already there.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Ramion]

I guess It also helped that they(netscape) got bought by AOL. AOL has pumped alot of money into mozilla as far as I know. They payed the salary for many of the developers in the start.
That most have helped alot to get mozilla to where its today.

Or am I totally wrong on this?

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[djeaux]

The biggest key to their popularity, I think, is their status as Netscape Navigator's heir.

This is an astute observation & frankly I'm surprised that this comment hasn't gotten more positive moderator attention.

Some of us (e.g., myself included) began using Netscape for browsing & email back when there really wasn't a MSIE to consider. And the first few MSIE releases were just plain cheesy. By the time the MSIE/OE combination became "competitive" (through whatever means), I had an awful lot of email archived in Netscape. So I stuck through "old Netscape" & made the arduous migration to NS 6 & 7.

The only -- repeat only -- reason that MSIE achieved "market dominance" was that it was bundled with a shipload of new PCs. We all know the shenanigans Microsoft engaged in to ensure that MSIE/OE would be the first (and in many cases only) browser-email package neophyte users ever saw. Installing Netscape was the first step towards being a "real" computer user that many folks ever took.

So there is name recognition for Netscape among a lot of users. Mozilla has been able to play off that name association. "It ain't Microsoft" is actually something that may help promote a product these days.

All that said, the icing on the cake is that Mozilla continues to advance, while MSIE is essentially in a "release security patches" holding pattern awaiting whatever horrors are in store when Longhorn is released.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FireFury03]

I think the appearance of Firefox helped a lot - Mozilla itself is reasonably bulky and slow, but Firefox is as fast as (faster than?) IE. Firefox also does what most end users (especially the non-techy ones) want out of the box - no messing around tweaking it to work how you like. But that is not to say you can't tweak it and those cwho feel competent enough will tweak away, setting up the button bars how they like, theming it, etc.

Another thing that has undoubtedly helped is the regular IE security holes which have been hitting the mainstream press and probably also MS's apethy at fixing them and adding enhancements - on the odd occasion I'm forced to sit infront of a Windows machine and use IE, I wonder how on earth anyone can put up with the lack of features such as tabbed browsing and I'm stunned by the shear number of popups that even an un-spywared machine gets through IE - no wonder Windows users don't pay any attention to popup errors, they get so much crap popping up anyway.

Various support departments have now started recommending Firefox - the support guys here now recommend it to our customers, and where we used to get a "no, we have to use IE" response, the customers now more often than not say "oh that's a good idea, I'll try it" and end up very happy.

Also, a browser is something reasonably high profile that the average user wants - I'm sure a lot of people have a browser open practically all the time. Once someone's tried it at home then chances are they will install it at work too (assuming they don't work in a company who has a restrictive "you must use the most insecure software we can find" policy). All the coworkers will see it and install it on their workstations and home machines.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Queuetue]

even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future.

I hope you are wrong about this, although I suspect you are correct.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[duffbeer703]

Other OSS desktop projects have too much ideological and egotistical overhead and too much corporate influence.

Try naming some Mozilla developers... I bet you can't.

The Mozilla people have an extreme loyalty to their product. Their focus seems to be developing superior applications, period.

Other popular Open-Source projects are too focused on trying to unseat Windows or too bogged down in bureaucratic infighting.

The keys to making a successful product are:

- Make the best product that you can
- Tell your audience about it

That why Apple has always been successful at selling workstations. They build a premium, high-quality product and evangelize it.

Think about projects like GNU Hurd and FreeBSD. Each of these projects started out with the potential for greatness, but never met that potential. GNU Hurd gets no attention because its leadership is too focused on idealogical matters and vanity. FreeBSD created a political process around it that created a perception that new developers weren't welcome.

With Mozilla, you never hear about political bullshit. The leadership of the project is focused on the project instead of looking for their names in print. They certainly have made their share of mistakes, but when they do they go back and code. ... And the result is the best browser and one of the better email clients on the market.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[swv3752]

Try Abiword then.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Frit Mock]

It think M$ has done much to make Mozilla sucessful ... or better, they did not do much and that way, they contributed a lot to Mozilla's success.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[drinkypoo]

Thunderbird really is as much greater than the other mail clients as firefox is greater than the other browsers. It lets you have an arbitrary number of pop3 (opt. with apop and/or ssl) accounts, likewise imap accounts (also opt. with ssl) and has the best html mail rendering engine around (gee, I wonder why.) Not to mention support for free/Free public key encryption. Yes sir, thunderbird is "the shit". I use firefox and thunderbird at home now (so I don't have to have the whole thing in memory at once if I'm not using both) and I could not be more pleased. I switched when I started having more problems with websites in MyIE2 than in Firefox and I don't expect to be looking back.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

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?

First off, I'd question your premise. Mozilla's technical achievements are impressive but not unique among high-profile OSS projects, and its marketshare is still badly lagging. Look at Apache, Linux, Perl, MySQL, KDE, Gnome. Mozilla is far from the only tremendous OSS success story.

Having said that, a few thoughts on what made Mozilla more likely to achieve success than a typical OSS project:

1. Highly visible niche - Web browsing, email, and "Internet suite" stuff in general are the most common tasks PC users perform. More importantly, the state of web browsing on Unix/Linux back in 1998 was truly awful, so you had a large slate of potential developers from the OSS community to draw on. (Although Mozilla did a poor job of that at first.) Nowadays, the size of the web browsing user base and the frequency of use means plenty of high quality bug reports and feature requests.
2. Corporate backing - Mozilla began life with all the resources of Netscape behind it. That meant plenty of experienced full-time salaried developers, plus a ton of press and the name-recognition and mindshare that go along with it.
3. Main competitor standing still - Except for Critical Security Updates, Microsoft has literally not touched IE in 3 years, and the last truly significant upgrade was 5.5, 4 years ago. Because IE is not a revenue source (unlike Office), MS has no incentive to add features or improve the product unless their marketshare drops, which it has not. (Sorry, 1% doesn't count.) Indeed, MS has a huge interest in maintaining backward compatability with non-standards compliant IE; the strategic purpose of IE is to enhance Windows lock-in by being the only way to access IE-only websites. (XAML serves the same purpose in Longhorn, which is why Mozilla won't be a true success on this measure unless it can get mindshare and marketshare for the redesigned Mozilla 2.0 XUL.) But the point is, it's easy to look good against 4 year-old competition.
4. It's not that hard - I know I might get flamed for this, but really. If tiny ol' Opera can produce a credible, full featured Internet suite, and the much smaller KHTML team can put together an excellent rendering engine, then the Internet tool space is not all that impossible to get right. By which I mean only that the Mozilla project--even including all the great work they've done on Bugzilla and the rest--is not a level of complexity equal to, say, KDE or Gnome, or even Linux. Hell, Firefox is essentially all the work of one programmer--which, while incredible (and also a testament to the modularity of the Mozilla code), still underlines the point.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that as recently as a couple years ago, the Mozilla project was generally regarded as a failure. Certainly the organization and management of the project have improved tremendously since the early days, but I think the main reason the tenure of the Mozilla Foundation has been so much more successful than the Netscape/AOL days is simply that they inherited a nearly-mature product and proceeded to spend the last year polishing the hell out of it. A huge amount of the architectural heavy-lifting that has allowed Firefox to be such a great program was done three, four years ago, but it wasn't until maybe Moz Suite 1.0 two years ago that you even had and end-user product that could stand up to IE 6.

Meaning that I wouldn't dispair for other OSS projects that still trail their MS analogues. A solid technical design--which most of them have--means the opportunity for the sort of rapid improvement and polish Mozilla has received in the past couple years. Once the user base begins to move in, usability bugs follow, and from there, perhaps, things begin to snowball. (I'm looking at you, OpenOffice...)

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[sphealey]

> What did the Mozilla Foundation do that has
> made Mozilla such a huge success?

1) Huge infusion of dotcom money to start the ball rolling
2) Later infusion and support of corporate entity (AOL) after original business model failed (or was killed if you prefer)

So, other projects just need to:

1) Be the original dotcom and bring in a few billions
2) Be acquired by a very large entity that needs them as a bargaining chip against Microsoft

sPh

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FooBarWidget]

What the... just take a look at a previous Slashdot story form not so long ago! People massively flamed down OpenOffice (and open source in general) for creating unusable user interfaces. Many Slashdotters have also said OpenOffice is nowhere near on par with MS Office. And here you are, saying that OpenOffice is a success?

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FooBarWidget]

"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!

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Colonel Angus]

So "slashdotters" are a collective that all have to share the same opinions? Quite frankly, Slashdot would be a joke if everyone just sat around replying "I agree! Corporate is good". The whole point of these forums are to discuss and spark a debate about topics that we're largely passionate about. Differing opinions and all.

Now, if parent had also been the one who was touting that corporate was good, but now is bad, the the point is valid and disregard the previous paragraph. ...and sorry about the Off Topic, but I see a lot of that sort of rhetoric where someone complains that multiple viewpoints are found in the forums as if that's not the way it was meant to be and I have yet to understand why.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Night Goat]

That is exactly what i was going to say. Abiword rocks for word processing!

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Darren Winsper]

Who'd have thought a website with thousands of active posters would contain people with differing opinions. Startling, absolutely startling.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[flacco]

we used to get a "no, we have to use IE" response

the proper response to that is: "no problem, they'll both be on your machine. you can still use (unsafe) IE for the apps that depend on it, but use (safe and better) firefox as your default browser."

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[gpinzone]

They developed a product many, many people actually want. Software for "sale" requires many customers to make its ROI worthwhile. Many OSS projects don't.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FireFury03]

the proper response to that is: "no problem, they'll both be on your machine. you can still use (unsafe) IE for the apps that depend on it, but use (safe and better) firefox as your default browser."

No, you can't do that - that's far too confusing for the average muppet. If you leave IE accessible they'll keep using it for everything and keep complaining that whatever it was that didn't work under IE still doesn't work (the reason you told them to use Firefox in the first place). If you're going to migrate dumb users over to Firefox (in a office environment) then you have to do as much as you can to stop them using IE (unfortunately since IE is built in that's actually a pretty hard thing to do)

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FooBarWidget]

"So "slashdotters" are a collective that all have to share the same opinions?"

Well you people also treat "open source community", "open source" or "Linux" as a single collective being. "All open source software have unusable interfaces", "all programmers must be banned from UI design", etc. etc.

"Differing opinions and all."

Opinions are one thing. Passionately and zealously flaming and insulting everything related to open source is another.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Colonel Angus]

Well you people also treat "open source community", "open source" or "Linux" as a single collective being. "All open source software have unusable interfaces", "all programmers must be banned from UI design", etc. etc.

Please, don't refer to me as "you people" here because I am all for open source. I'm using it as I type this. I use it exclusively at home. I advocate and push those I know to use open source alternatives whenever it meets their needs.

I was in no way trashing open source. And hopefully you are in the minority for taking it that way. I was just stating that "slashdot" isn't one mind and I don't understand why people make such grand generalizations like that when we should all be intelligent enough to know far better than that.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Apathetic1]

The Enigmail Extension is the killer app for Thunderbird for me. I'm switching away from Outlook for e-mail, though I still use it for contacts and calendar. Enigmail makes GPG signing and encryption a snap.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Jahf]

You -can- do that, install Firefox with the "view in IE" extension. Train them to only launch Firefox. Tell them if the site doesn't work (maybe wait for a call to the helpdesk) to use the extension to launch IE. Remind them to close IE when done.

About the only thing left to be done would be integration of IE bookmarks ... having Firefox dynamically inject the IE bookmarks in a "view in IE" virtual bookmark folder, which when selected would launch an IE window.

When enough people start doing this you will start seeing cross-platform sites again (web developers sure got lazy in the time since that was my occupation). Sure, the true Firefox usage numbers will be dilluted (1 hit with Firefox then a bunch of hits with IE from the same address could be data mined fairly accurately though), but even 10% of users using an unsupported browser will be enough to start the ball rolling.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Davis Bacon]

I for one can categorically state that I have never contradicted myself on Slashdot.

(Yes I have.)

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FireFury03]

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.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Jahf]

I've worked support, too. Spend an extra minute or two with the user to explain -why- the function works that way or hold a training some afternoon where all can be present.

90% will get it if you take the time to teach them how -and- why rather than just saying "right-click here, blah blah blah" and leave.

I never said it was a perfect solution, but no solution will work if you go into assuming that your supported base is stupid.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FooBarWidget]

I didn't say you, I said Slashdotters.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[FireFury03]

As a server supplier, we don't have the resources to train up all of the end users (if we supply a server to a company with 2000 employees, we cannot train those 2000 people). It should be up to the techies at the company in question, but of course they also probably don't have the resources to train everyone and 9 times out of 10 the techies are almost as bad as the end users.

Explaining things clearly does work on a small number of the users - I for one have always tried to explain things to them. But unfortunately a large proportion of them seem to be of the opinion that they need the computer to do something for them and they don't need to know how it does it or why they need to do something so they don't listen to the explanation.

I think the problem I have always hit is that a lot of users frankly don't care while they're getting the explanation, they just want the immediate problem fixed.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Nasarius]

even though people are likely to use more webmail and less client-based mail in the future

There's no reason you can't use "webmail" from within a client. GMail is reportedly considering an IMAP interface, and even if that never happens, you can bet that someone will write a Thunderbird extension to support GMail accounts. Hell, I'd be writing that extension right now if I had a GMail account :)

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[David Gerard]

I did write a feature request to Gmail saying that there shouldn't be anything I can do with Thunderbird that I can't do with Gmail. The ideal would be for people to use Gmail because they want to, not because they're locked in.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[macshit]

GNU Hurd gets no attention because its leadership is too focused on idealogical matters and vanity.

What a silly statement -- as if the Hurd were just waiting for RMS's OK before it could get going!

GNU Hurd gets no attention because other projects captured the attention of the mass of hackers (for various reasons: easier to hack on, more accepting of random patches [no assignment hassle], or whatever), etc.

RMS (try as he might) really doesn't set the agenda. People hack on that which pleases them.

The one significant thing which the FSF `leadership' determines, which seems to strongly affect GNU projects, is the policy about copyright assignments -- and they have very good practical reasons for that (as recent events attest!).

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[Jahf]

As a server supplier, you shouldn't be dealing with training/supporting the web browser client side at all, unless the customer is paying for training services.

We diverged discussions, I was speaking about the helpdesk / support tech / admin / whoever who is employed on-site or at least on-demand for the company looking at an alternative browser.

Re:Model for other OSS projects?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Mozilla has something good. What is this? It runs on both Windows and Linux. Lots of OSS only runs on Linux. this is BAD for OSS.
How?
Here's how.
Let's say we have windows user A. User A is not a tech person, just your average user. Not dumb, but not good with computers. Now, User A is told by his tech friends of this great new Firefox thing. So he switches. Things like this continue. He gets Thunderbird. He gets OO.Org (hopefully faster...) He gets Gaim. Maybe a few other programs. Now, he's using all (or nearly all) OSS on Windows. Some tech friend says hey, why not switch to Linux, so he asks the fateful question:
"But most windows apps don't run on Linux, I CAN'T switch!" or "Will my apps run on this Linux?"

Now, if OSS developers offer Windows ports of their software, the answer is "YES!" If not, it's more along the lines of either "no" or "Well, yes, but you have to use wine/winex to make it work."
Now you see why making things run on windows is important. If we can capture the applications, switching OSs will be infintely easier.

Spin offs

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Isn't it time for spin off movies now?

Mozilla VS Explora!

Death match of the titans, who will survive!?

Re:Spin offs

[Sandman1971]

More like this.

Welcome to Iron Browser, where today we pit the challenger from Redwood.

Chairman Kaga: "So, Internet Explorer, which of the Iron Browsers will it be? Iron Browser OSS Mozilla? Iron Browser CS Opera? Iron Browser TXT Lynx? Yomigaeru Aiyan Browser!"
IE: "Mozilla-san"
Bang A Gong, get it on. Who's browsing reigns supreme?

Re:Spin offs

[Sekoku]

I was acutally thinkin' more along the lines of...

Mozilla vs. Godzilla.

Now, with 150% more out-of-sync lines and badly acted expressions!

Re:Spin offs

[TheSpoom]

And the match has started!

The competitors are circling each other... and...

OH NO! Internet Explorer has been hijacked by spyware! It's down for the count!

Mozilla & Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had trouble convincing people to use the Mozilla browser simply because the name M-o-z-i-l-l-a does not "cut it"! My suggestion is for Slashdotters and Opensource lovers to redeem the Netscape name from AOL so that we use it instead of Mozilla. What do you think?

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[SpinyManiac]

Lose the brand name for one of the top five web portals? No likely.

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[suffe]

*hint* *hint*

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[FireFury03]

What's wrong with "Firefox"? Seems like quite a snappy name to me.

Besides, the names "Mozilla", "Firefox", "Opera", etc. seem somewhat more imaginative than "Internet Explorer"... or infact most of Microsoft's other names (Isn't "Word" a really imaginative name for a wordprocessor? Maybe calling a web browser "Browser" will win more users?)

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[noldrin]

Or they could just set the default homepage to point to netscape.com since AOL did give Mozilla that start up cash.

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[0x0d0a]

What our taciturn friend is saying is that the Netscape line still exists, and is basically Mozilla with some tweaks made. You can give your "Mozilla"-disliking folks the real thing -- Netscape.

Re:Mozilla & Netscape

[SpinyManiac]

Good plan. Ask for a modest fee though.

Re:now all you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators please fix the above "anti-groupthink" moderation. Pointing out realistic flaws with what otherwise might be an excellent product and flagship of the Open Source movement might temporarily damage pride, but knowing that they exist in order that they should be fixed can only be to our advantage.

I can just see who

[millahtime]

My money is on either Microsoft Trying to buy it (yeah like that would go though) or AOL. If AOL tried I would fall out of my seat laughing.

Re:I can just see who

[wfberg]

My money is on either Microsoft Trying to buy it (yeah like that would go though) or AOL. If AOL tried I would fall out of my seat laughing.

Did you even read the about screen?

Copyright © 1998-2002 by Contributors to the Mozilla codebase under the Mozilla Public License and Netscape Public License. All Rights Reserved

Netscape.. Gee.. I wondered what happened to that company.. Didn't they already get bought up?

Re:I can just see who

[millahtime]

Netscape.. Gee.. I wondered what happened to that company.. Didn't they already get bought up?

FYI as to my AOL comment... they own Netscape now. Make sense?

Re:I can just see who

[Finuvir]

Don't you think that's why he'd fall out of his seat laughing? Seemed pretty clear to me. You just explained someone's joke to them.

Re:I can just see who

[roj3]

That's the beauty guys.. the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, not a for-profit corporation. They can't be "bought."

Re:I can just see who

[Night Goat]

Yeah, that was his joke. Way to go.

Internet Explorer Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

For just pennies a day, you could help IE get the help it needs to combat virii. Weekly updates will come with a picture of the browser you are supporting.... Please help.

I have nothing to say but "congratulations"

[DecayCell]

Firefox is, no doubt about that, the best browser around.
Long live Mozilla!

Lessons Learned

[millahtime]

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.

Re:Lessons Learned

[NutscrapeSucks]

It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper. ... I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well.

I would say that UI is something where it's not clear that Mozilla has really learned their lesson:

They wanted a Netscape 4 Clone, but I it's pretty clear that went over like a lead balloon. What people really wanted was a IE Clone (Firefox).

(Apologies for the sig, but the numbers show that most NS4 users switched to IE rather than Mozilla, which sucks.)

Due to what though?

[airjrdn]

I'm not putting down Mozilla, I'm using Firefox right now and have switched my wife, Mother, and my own PC's to using Firefox and Thunderbird almost across the board. I do think however you have to give credit where it's due. The massive rise in their popularity isn't soley due to the fact that they are offering a solid browser, it's also due to the fact that MS isn't.

Re:Due to what though?

[Lispy]

Ok, I know how to switch my wife, but how the hell did you switch your mother? I was planning on doing so for years.

Stupid joke I know, please ignore: ;-)

Re:Due to what though?

[airjrdn]

ROFL, no, that was a good one.

Re:Firefox.

[Sekoku]

>>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*

Significant advantages?

[Apocalypse111]

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?

Re:Significant advantages?

[Sekoku]

>>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?

>>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,

Well, nothing...really. Just that the browser add-ons you mentioned are just that, add-ons. That, and they probably (I have never used them) have Spyware attached to them.

Re:Significant advantages?

[magefile]

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.

Re:Significant advantages?

[kyknos.org]

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.

Re:Significant advantages?

[j_sp_r]

Because IE is flawed, tightly integrated with the OS it makes holes big ones. Also, it's the pagerendering of Firefox that is faster and as soon as you get spy/adware it renders IE useless (convinced a lot of people just to try firefox that way, IE wasn't working, try this) Futhermore these plugins, I don't know them but let's say they work as great as Firefox, still you have IE under the hood that sucks (slow rendering etc)

Re:Significant advantages?

[kyknos.org]

yes lots of extensions but i still miss one - google toolbar

Re:Significant advantages?

[CeZa]

- As mentioned, cross-platform. - Security holes aren't left open for months. - Beginning to be much faster than IE. - Mozilla team has something to work for. They desire to be the best browser. IE is complacent and therefore goes un-updated for months at a time. I don't know how much of a security risk it is, but I would imagine that a daemon with complete control over the system being used for web browsing would pose a major fundamental risk. A flaw in Mozilla might allow for your favorites to be deleted, but a flaw in IE can give complete control of the system to the attacker.

Re:Significant advantages?

[Apocalypse111]

Well, I can't speak for the other 2, but I have been using Slimbrowser for some time, and it has no spyware. And I'm not sure that the term add-on is appropriate, I think it would be more accurate to call it a "shell" for IE (but that's just semantics). I'm quite pleased with it. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try out FireFox when I get back to a broadband connection (I can't stand waiting for downloads on dialup), though. People say so many good things about it, its worth downloading to try it, even if I decide to stick with my current setup.

Re:Significant advantages?

[digidave]

One important note is that Mozilla offers more than security through diversity. Mozilla avoids IE's Zone and ActiveX problems that are the cause of most of its security problems. Security comes from a better security design rather than just diversity.

I know that's not really what you meant. You wanna talk about features. Run Firefox and head over to http://update.mozilla.org/extensions to see what a lot of the fuss is about. There are hundreds of extensions you can use. My personal favorite is the Web Developer one that gives me a toolbar for editing live CSS on any site, changing my browswer to different screen sizes (test sites on 800 x 600 for example), outline all tables, validate HTML, etc. I have 6 or 7 extensions installed now and they're all extremely useful.

Re:Significant advantages?

[Sekoku]

>>Just one of the advantages is that mozilla (and opera) is multiplatform.

Sorry! But, You are wrong. At least, in the version 5 series. Version 6 is not a program for Mac.

Only multiplatform problem for IE is the .nix. Otherwise, it can be used on the "Major" OS's.

Re:Significant advantages?

[Conor Turton]

Google Toolbar has been available for Firefox for ages.

Re:Significant advantages?

[tessonec]

yes lots of extensions but i still miss one - google toolbar

This should be enough, then...

Re:Significant advantages?

[Ex Machina]

http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

*whack*

Re:Significant advantages?

[kyknos.org]

yes but it lacks what i need google toolbar for - google pagerank indicator useful for SEO

Re:Significant advantages?

[auburnate]

I second that. I miss the google toolbar ... very powerful ... I'm sure Google or Mozilla will rise to the challenge and give us "our fix" ...

Re:Significant advantages?

[Ex Machina]

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

Re:Significant advantages?

[kyknos.org]

oh thanx! MOD parent up INFORMATIVE ;)

Re:Significant advantages?

[lucas teh geek]

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

Re:Significant advantages?

[FuzzieNorn]

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.

Re:Significant advantages?

[kyknos.org]

.nix is a major problem in my opinion. But AFAIK myIE and other "better" variations of IE which was the original poster talking about does not even exist on MacOS

Re:Significant advantages?

[FireFury03]

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.

Re:Significant advantages?

[troon]

See the advice on my site which explains a few of the reasons.

Re:Significant advantages?

[Walrus99]

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.

Re:Significant advantages?

[FireFury03]

PNG is supported, just not alpha blended PNG. I just design my site as if everyone had alpha blended PNG support - if someone uses IE it just looks a bit crap but it's still usable.

Although I've long argued that someone should retheme Firefox to look like IE and then write a virus that installs it on everyone's machines :)

Re:Significant advantages?

[pen]

pagerankstatus.mozdev.org

Re:Significant advantages?

[CaptainTux]

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.

So then, if someone is making an inaccurate, unfair, or uneducated statement or judgement about a particular product due to their own ignorance of how fix the problem AND is probably passing the "X software SUCKS" line to all of their friends and family thereby causing harm to the product we should sit back and allow them to continue in and SPREAD their ignorance?

The reality is that most products "suck" to a particular person because they simply don't understand how to accomplish something they want to do. It doesn't matter if the product *can* actually do said function or not, it sucks because THEY couldn't make it do it and therefore it's the products fault.

Why is dispelling unfounded assumptions, myths, and judgements a bad thing?

Re:Significant advantages?

[Dan Farina]

MS sucks.

Okay, that should do it for our quota....

Re:Significant advantages?

[PeterPumpkin]

You can squeeze alpha blending out of IE 5.5+ by using MS's CSS behaviors and/or filters. Try this canned Google search.

This is kind of a pain, and doesn't solve alpha PNG backgrounds.

However, IMO, the more sites that bend or break in IE, the better - so, move along, nothing to see here ;)

Re:Significant advantages?

[0x0d0a]

I haven't used remade MSIE browsers. But there are some important features in Firefox that I'm not sure MSIE browsers have. I'll mention them, though I realize that it may be irrelevant.

* MSIE's search capabilities go to MSDN. This is an area where bundling is a bad idea -- MSDN just isn't as *nice* as Google.

* MSIE's rendering engine isn't as standards-compliant or featureful as the Mozilla/Firefox engine, Gecko. The most galling thing to me is the lack of alpha-channel PNG support. Most websites *do* avoid using features that are broken in MSIE, but it's still awfully frusterating.

* MSIE is not as threaded as Mozilla -- when a page is rendering, interacting with the browser *stops*. The window can't be dragged. It's very disruptive.

* I can use the same setup on my home Linux boxes and when I need to use Windows at work. Not such a big deal if you only use Windows.

* Aliased searches. This is really important to me. I have a number of aliased searches set up, so that I can type "gg foobar" to search Google for "foobar". Same goes for imdb to search IMDB and fm to search Freshmeat. It's like WAIS all over again, but better.

* Highlighting style. MSIE uses the standard Microsoft approach of completely highlighting a "word" if you've highlighted most of the word. This drives me bananas, because I frequently do not want to highlight text along word boundaries. There may be a way to disable this behavior, but I am not aware of what it is (I had a bunch of other reasons to use Firefox).

* I can change Firefox. Again, for most people, this is no big deal. I used to use the uber-lightweight webbrowser dillo, and when I wanted a feature or didn't like the way something worked, I could just submit a patch, and did so on several occasions. It was awfully nice. I've yet to need to submit a Firefox patch, but the ability to do so is really nice.

* Stability. I've had a couple of stability problems with Windows and (oddly enough) Office after MSIE crashes. Firefox dying (and that doesn't happen all that much) doesn't seem to affect the stability of other software on a system. Dunno if that affects MSIE clones as well.

Re:Significant advantages?

[FireFury03]

I'm not going to use icky javascript workarounds for this stuff - my site is readable in IE even if it doesn't look as nice as it should - IE users can live with it. I am contemplating doing some browser detection and putting a message on each page for IE users saying something to the effect of "you're using an insecure, non-complient browser - this site (and many others) will work far better in FireFox"

I'd love to know why the code is in IE to start with but just not used though.

Re:Significant advantages?

[PeterPumpkin]

A nice little reminder script for Exploder users

<script>
if ( navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer" )
{
if (confirm ("The United States Department of Homeland Security\'s Computer Emergency Rediness Team strongly recommends you use a different browser for security reasons.\n\n Would you like a list of alternatives?"))
{
document.location = "browsers.htm";
}
}
</script>

The catch

[philbert26]

The catch is badly-written websites that don't work properly without IE. Some sites won't let you do business unless you use IE. For me this is a sign that they don't know what they're doing (do you want an online credit card payment system from these guys?), but lots of people will assume that this means IE is better.

I am watching Mozilla with keen interest because it is an interesting test of the security through obscurity problem. If Mozilla takes a big market share it will attract the attention of the bad guys who currently target IE. Then we shall see if open source is a liability or an asset.

Re:The catch

[philbert26]

Oops, should have been a link in there.

Re:The catch

[HFXPro]

I think even more fun is the websites which won't let me view them with the message I need to use IE or Netscape 7.0+. Got to love when a rebranded product will allow you to enter a site but not the original.

Re:The catch

[joeljkp]

Like AMG. Ugh, I used to love browsing through there, but they just released their site "upgrade", making things even more obtuse and non-standards-compliant than before.

Obligatory Futurama quote

[laserbeak]

our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high,

all hail hypnotoad!

Mozilla Rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mozilla Rocks

[suffe]

but it was buggy

It's come a long way since that.

and I liked the simpleness of Mozilla 1.6 better

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?"

Re:Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it should turn 1.0 by September. At least, that's what Mozilla has stated.

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.

Re:now all you need

[IamTheRealMike]

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

Firefox is faster

[DMNT]

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

Re:Firefox is faster

[cuzality]

Firefox...doesn't start rendering the page when it gets it's first byte

Can be modified in user.js -- see Speed up page rendering from Texturizer.net's Firefox Tips & Tricks.

Re:now all you need

[HFXPro]

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.

Re:now all you need

[Ex Machina]

that is such a troll dude ... now, if they could point out what pages actually render slower (div in div, table in div, quirks mode, etc) ... then it would help

Re:now all you need

[Ford Prefect]

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.

Re:Firefox.

[Sunspire]

Now all it needs is an easy update feature.

It needs an update feature that can be made to automagically download and apply the latest versions without any user interaction whatsoever if so desired, but of course optionally also a "ask before installing" feature. That would be a great boon for home users (install and forget) and lazy sysadmins (what, you expect me to walk around the office installing stuff manually, dream on).

If Firefox follows the Mozilla stable/latest branching system the updater should allow you to follow one of the branches. For example you could configure the browser to keep up with the 1.0 branch and grandma would silently get 1.0.1, 1.0.2 etc. installed with security updates and bugfixes. For more experienced user the first time after an 1.0->1.1 update there could be a one-time page describing the new cool features on the next startup.

Hari Seldon

[solarlux]

Thanks to the planning behind this foundation, after the Microsoft Empire falls, there will only be 10 years of anarchy instead of 100. In its place, an even greater (but planned) empire will replace it. That new republic will be open source.

Rumor also has it there is a second foundation, located at Slashdot End in the galaxy...

Re:Hari Seldon

[MikeCapone]

Nice weather on Trantor this season, don't ya think?

Re:Hari Seldon

[stealth.c]

Not if The Mule has anything to say about it.

Re:now all you need

[julesh]

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):

- 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 .3 seconds. I suspect it might be using a garbage collector that has been badly tuned (?).

- 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.

Re:now all you need

[duffbeer703]

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.

What about Cello ?

[CodeArtisan]

While I am a big Mozilla fan (and I'm posting this from Firefox) I was a little disappointed that Cello's 11th birthday was overlooked by Slashdotters on June 8th this year. Back in my youth, Cello vs. Mosaic was the hot topic of debate.

Dont forget....

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run Firefox from a USB stick, so you dont even have to install it on the machine you are working on.

A fitting Tribute ...

[polyp2000]

Would be that today a v1.0 firefox release.

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Significant advantages? Pretty Colors!!!

[Brain Stew]

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.

Re:now all you need

[FireFury03]

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.

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Finance ?

[Etyenne]

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>

Re:Finance ?

[16K Ram Pack]

Dunno. But I certainly owe them some money. I'll send $5 by the end of the week. If every /.er with Firefox did so, could we hire them a programmer for a year?

Re:Finance ?

[haijak]

$5 is cheep.

If tomorow Mozilla foundation said they had to charge like normal software? What would you pay for a comertal product equal to mozilla?

$10? $25? $50?

What is a safe and functional internet experance worth to you?

As soon as they started the "Foundation" and started accepting donations. I put in $50 and I plan to do that again this year.

Re:Finance ?

[16K Ram Pack]

The thing is, $5 is more than most people are paying (and I'm really skint - family to support - no new hardware in 2 years). $2 is more than most people are paying.

Mozilla could do with a campaign to get people to donate, and work with sums like $5, perhaps telling people how much has been donated as a totaliser, telling people what it will pay for. Certainly a "pay for your own bandwidth" would be a starter.

I'm also donating money I get from second hand sales on EBay and to friends. So far have a massive 2UKP ($3) but the amount will rise!

Re:Firefox.

[Frit Mock]

Yes chummer, for sure ... this "feature" is the least thing Mozilla needs, because it opens the door to exploits wide, very wide, realy wide ...

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Re:Firefox.

[EtherMonkey]

More important, I wonder how many more times it will change its name before then.

Re:Firefox.

[Stevyn]

how about "emerge --update mozilla"?

Good things come to those who wait. And by that I mean take 48 hours to compile gentoo and it's packages and you'll have a system that's easy to upgrade with a command.

Debian FSG

[DrMorris]

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.

Yes... you might even say it's NEWS

[roj3]

>>All of this terrific news wouldn't have been possible without help from lots of individuals and organizations.

I hope the Mozilla team starts thinking more seriously about public relations! Considering ALLLL of the IE problems lately, the one-year anniversary of the Mozilla Foundation is cover-worthy news. Alas, (and no disrespect to /.) the news is receiving zero coverage.

I for one, would love to help with Mozilla PR.

Re:now all you need

[geschild]

Although I have the mod points to fix the parent, I won't because the moderation was fine. Your post, however, deserver an "overrated". But because I'd like to think of myself as having standards (not to be confused with morals), I'll just reply:

Bullshit! Firefox is faster than IE. If the grandparent is talking about load time: that point has been beaten to death by now. IE 'loads' faster because it doesn't. That has been done at boot time. Keep Firefox open at all times and then test speed differences.

Untill you get a clue: people with lesser standards, mod parent down! ;p

Re:Firefox.

[kyle_b_gorman]

great idea...we can call it "activeX"!

Re:Firefox.

[prandal]

Yeah, right, automagically update without telling the user and you're wide open to a nice little DNS poisoning attack. Then you're suddenly downloading a trojan instead of a Mozilla/Firefox update.

One common flaew

[prandal]

Shells for IE (including AOL's monstrous dumbing down exercise) all suffer from the one common flaw. They ALL suffer from the security holes in the MSIE backend. It's just another exercise in (in)security through obscurity.

Re:Firefox.

[joeljkp]

Actually, you don't even need the "--update". "emerge mozilla" will upgrade it just fine.

On FireFox, speed, and machine specs

[Schwartzboy]

I have two WinXP Pro machines with 2 Ghz+ processors and 1/2 Gig of RAM each, a Slackware Cyrix machine and a Win98 PIII that are both at about 700 Mhz with 256 MB RAM, and the wife (who has finally consented to try Fire-something in the wake of the recent IE security issues and much whining from me) has a 2.4 Ghz P4 running Win98 with 1/2 a gig of RAM. On all of the machines I've used, Firefox performs exceptionally well compared to IE with some exceptions:

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.

Re:On FireFox, speed, and machine specs

[FireFury03]

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.

I'd guess that's because IE has it's own (very broken) built in Java VM, whereas Firefox uses an external plugin. Personally I would prefer to wait a little longer for Java to fire up safe in the knowledge that I'm running the official Sun Java VM instead of Microsoft SecurityHole

Re:On FireFox, speed, and machine specs

[0x0d0a]

IE still uses the Microsoft VM?

I thought that Microsoft killed that off, and that it had ceased to exist years ago.

Re:On FireFox, speed, and machine specs

[FireFury03]

Well it sure as hell doesn't use the external Sun one...

Konqueror

[MikeCapone]

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.

Re:Konqueror

[It'sYerMam]

I haven't had much experience with konqueror (I'm a Gnome, and use firefox) but I guess its lack of attention is due to its being tied up with KDE.
No matter how good it is, if it is a KDE type application not available on Windows it won't be as popular.

Re:Konqueror

[MikeCapone]

I haven't had much experience with konqueror (I'm a Gnome, and use firefox) but I guess its lack of attention is due to its being tied up with KDE.
No matter how good it is, if it is a KDE type application not available on Windows it won't be as popular.

Very true, and I do think that they should try to make it as a standalone application, but I was mostly speaking about the fact that KDE is quite popular with the Linux crowd yet I almost never see posts about Konqueror in browser discussions on Slashdot.

It's too bad, really, because Konqueror is quite excellent and has only been getting better.

Re:Konqueror

[It'sYerMam]

Well, you've inspired me to try konqueror, although I expect to stick around with GNOME and Firefox, especially since whenever I have to use Windows I use firefox.
Perhaps you Konquerors aren't as outspoken as those are for firefox/Mozilla?

Re:Konqueror

[tupps]

You see heaps of discussions on Slashdot about Konqueror. It is just in disguise as Apple's Safari browser.

I think that this and the branches of the Mozilla engine a true examples of what makes open source so powerful.

Re:Konqueror

[MikeCapone]

Well, if you try it, just make sure to check out the options and to customize & configure it to your liking. Stick with it for a bit, it's a little different in some ways, but once you're used to it it's quite speedy and efficient.

Re:Firefox.

[Sunspire]

It's not like no other software has ever implemented automated updates before...

Something as simple as signing the patches with a Mozilla Foundation private key thwarts any DNS attacks.

ANY security failure scenario you're likely to devise is probably just as effective even if you don't have automatic updates. Automation would likely be an improvement as the program itself can do strict cryptographic signature checking instead of a million users blindly downloading binaries from ftp.mozilla.org, download.com, tucows, betanews, and god knows where, any of which could be compromised. And the bottom line is, without an automatic system a large portion of the userbase will NEVER update.

o/~ So...

[radoni]

...what's the Mozilla Foundation's corporate song? o/~

Re:Firefox.

[Sunspire]

I don't think this sort of system would be appropriate for Linux as the distributions fill this role nicely with packaged security updates. You can't really go around changing files in Linux outside of the users home directories willy-nilly anyway, as an autoupdater would. On windows this is not unheard of, many Adobe programs for example have a system service that check and optionally update your programs for you.

Microsoft's response

[Gunark]

Has anyone at Microsoft said anything about Firefox? I'd be curious to see what they think about all this (or if it has even registered on their radar at all).

Re:Microsoft's response

[Nasarius]

They would be very stupid to say a word about Firefox, just like they're being stupid to run ads against Linux. It gives their competitor an air of legitimacy.

Mozilla 1.8a2 released

[xdc]

In case this hasn't been mentioned already, Mozilla 1.8 Alpha2 is now available for download.

• Linux installer (HTTP)
• Linux installer (HTTP) (Europe)
• Windows installer (HTTP)
• Windows installer (HTTP) (Europe)
• Mac OS X installer (HTTP)
• Mac OS X installer (HTTP) (Europe)
• Mozilla.org FTP directory

Opera

[essreenim]

I saif f#@$ not f*** - its fold disguised.
I use Firebird and Im a fan of Mozilla but I think it get a disproportionate amount of coverage.
I am a fan of OSS too..
Mozilla will do just fine without such padding stories. And dont forget Opera.

Re:now all you need

[Mitchell Mebane]

Here's my two performance gripes about Firefox (0.9.2/WinXP/512MB RAM/Athlon XP 2400+): 1) Absolutely horrid DHTML performance. (Bug 21762) 2) When there are more than a few tabs in a window, resizing the window is extremely slow and choppy. I suspect the browser is trying to resize all of the pages at once, instead of just the visible page.

Re:now all you need

[Fnkmaster]

Realistically, Mozilla performance has been reasonable for some time. It's true that back during the M1-M10 milestones and thereabouts, things could get hog-slow at times, but pretty much all the 1.x releases and even later 0.x releases have been reasonable on even vaguely modern machines. And the release of Firefox made performance go from good to excellent on modern machines - subjectively, on modern machines, most users will state that Firefox is perceptually faster and much more responsive than IE 0.6 (on slower/older machines, startup and load times are still worse than IE and rendering settings may need to be tweaked if you really want optimal performance from slow net connections or CPUs). And when it comes to browsing the web, subjective speed is really more important than any minute differences in render speed anyway.

Most of the complaints about Mozilla performance have been answered long ago - if you want something fast and light, get Firefox, download the extensions you want, huzzah. If you want a full-featured browser suite with email client and web development tools, go for Mozilla. If you are still running on a Pentium 233 and want to run the full Mozilla suite, don't complain that it's slow, you are running on last century's hardware.

Re:Firefox.

[Darby]

More important, I wonder how many more times it will change its name before then.

Heck, mine changes every time I start it up. (Posted from Mozilla WaterKoala 0.9.1)

Why I champion Firefox but not other OSS

[NYTrojan]

It's the user interface. That's where it all begins. Mozilla and FireFox especially look and FEEL like real 'for profit' programs. Open Office and The Gimp do not... not entirely.

Let me elaborate. First off, I know that OOo and The Gimp are just as, if not more, useful, featureful, easy to use as the MS equivalents but it's about presentation. They have a very distinct 'Wal-Mart brand' feel to them.

Now, first things first, I understand that this is much easier for a browser to pull off than an office suite or drawing tools... There's simply much less UI to deal with. Still if the program doesn't make you FEEL like it is as smooth to run as MS's, it'll make the switch harder to make for joe-sixpack even when the extra features sure would make you think it's worth it.

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Re:Such a success.

[Malc]

Going to the English version of http://www.futureshop.ca/ crashes Firefox 0.9.2 everytime for me.

I have the following extensions installed:
* Tabbrowser
* DOM Inspector
* Live HTTP Headers
* Flash block
* Googlebar

I can't even disable half of them because they don't show up in the extensions dialog. Who knows if it's an extension or the browser. I certainly don't have time to figure out which files to edit to disable them myself. IE here I come...

Re:Model for other OSS projects? [CORRECTION]

[FireFury03]

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 :)

Re:Such a success.

[PeterPumpkin]

Works For Me.

The extension specs have been changing, things go haywire and you have to clean up before upgrading (yes, you did upgrade from a previous release, I can tell.) Uninstall Firefox, delete your profile, and reinstall. It will work fine. Read the release notes next time ;)

Cleanup: Backup your bookmarks, and download the Firefox install binaries if you don't have them. Go to C:/Documents and Settings/[your_login_name_on_bootup]/Application Data and delete both the Phoenix and Firefox directories. Then reinstall.

I certainly don't have time to figure out which files to edit to disable them myself.

Me neither, I'm too busy screwing around reading Slashdot :P

Re:Such a success.

[Malc]

I did this upgrading from 0.8 to 0.9. You're telling me that I have to do the same from 0.9 to 0.9.2? That's ridiculous! They better have upgrading fixed by September because there's no way you can expect the average user to do that.

clear some things up about performance

[TejWC]

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

Congrats to the people behind Moz foundation

[gangz]

One thing that Mozilla has proved to the software community is that Open source projects can survive. And they can make a decent (if not in billions of $) profit. I think the main reason behind Mozilla's success are the developers. I am not talking about the on and off developers, but people like Asa Dotzler, Doug Turner, Christian Beisenger, Mitchell Baker, Boris Zbarsky, Brendan Eich, and the other drivers of Mozilla and not forgetting the countless others who are developing applications *using* Mozilla. Three cheers to everyone. I think the Mozilla foundation has evolved a wonderful business model for any entrepreneur looking to build software based on OSS.

Re:Model for other OSS projects? [CORRECTION]

[0x0d0a]

I was *wondering* what magic of routing I wasn't familiar with there for a moment. :-)

Re:now all you need

[0x0d0a]

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.

IE has an HTML editing component? When did they add that?

Re:HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

[stars_are_number_1]

It should probably be noted that Mozilla as a project has been around longer than one year. It's just the Mozilla Foundation that's celebrating its 1 year anniversary.

When Netscape collapsed back in 2002(?), the Mozilla project that is was based on lost its primary supporter. AOL and others got together and ponied up the dough to get the Foundation started, and Mozilla took on a life of its own....Life After Netscape.

Re:Firefox.

[Darby]

Heh no security update for you?

Heh, I'm not running windows

IE is slow and ugly

[billstewart]

I've generally found that IE is slower and uglier than the Mozilla / Firefox browsers (at least if you run the "Leave Mozilla Preloaded" stuff.) There are exceptions - Slashdot has their "break Mozilla" features, but usually I get better performance with Mozilla. There's also the issue of tabs, which saves me the time I'd spend hunting through lots of windows.

Re:now all you need

[indiechild]

Try using the latest Firefox instead of an old version of Mozilla. Firefox 0.9.2 seems snappier than IE to me, and even the startup time is now practically down to nothing.