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Planning For Mozilla 2.0
wikinerd writes "The MozillaWiki maintains a number of pages on Mozilla 2.0 which reveals lots of possible new features of the popular browser. What does your wishlist include about Mozilla 2.0, and how has the release of Firefox affected your use of Mozilla?"
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
I'm very happy to recommend Firefox for IE users though - Mozilla's Netscape-style interface can be a bit confusing if you haven't seen them before.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I was never excited about Firefox (or whatever it was called at the time) because it looked like if took away all my power settings and generally dumbed things down. Then I found out about 'about:config', and haven't loaded mozilla since.
I think it's time for all the mozilla people to just accept the inevitable and focus their development effort on Firefox.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
Personally, I'm digging the Firefox/Thunderbird duo.
I have never had any major problems in Firefox. Most of my problems stem from simple-minded web devs relying too heavily on IEs mechanisms and not putting enough emphasis on interoperability.
And, Thunderbird is turning out to be one of the best email clients I've used in a while. With its bultin in RSS reader and junk mail filter, it is, for me, a complete package.
My solution was to download nifty little Firefox with IE. No matter how mad the sys admins were, one could always delete history, cache and cookies with Firefox after each session. (Except at Shanghai City Library, where Firefox wouldn't even install.)
With a large bundle like Mozilla, I could never have downloaded it fast enough to have the patience to wait for it. Size matters.
I'm speaking as an armchair nerd here. I'm the kind of guy who can configure a LAN, but only for the purposes of playing games (and the multiplayer aspect has to be worth 4 hours of fighting with four versions of WinXP). Hell, I don't even have a /. account.
I have used Mozilla and now use Firefox for browsing. Selecting one has always been simple; there have only been one new version I've been aware of at a time. I have never used Linux despite the fact I would like to poke around, at least to try it, for the most part because of the huge number of packets and versions to choose from (I believe this is a fairly common criticism).
It seems to be that Firefox has dented IE's marketshare because 1) it works, and 2) the significant media blitz - the biggest OSS release I've been aware of. If you introduce a new and improved Mozilla (which I suspect has less name recognition now for most surfers than Firefox), wouldn't it be damaging the Firefox advertisements by confusing the names in the minds of the public? In other words, might it be smarter to work on just one browser for the time being?
What am i missing?
I've stuck with Mozilla for my main usage, but almost always have a Firefox instance open. That way I can be logged into my web-based applications as more than one user, as one example.
Probably the main reason I didn't switch over to Firefox was that when I imported settings from Mozilla there were minor issues that I didnt' feel like resolving at the time. My mail folders didnt' have mail in them and my bookmark bar didn't show up in Firefox. I'm sure if I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting I could fix it, but why bother? I have bonded with Mozilla and will probably stay with it as long as it remains a vital project.
One feature I like that I haven't found in Firefox is profile switching. Not a big deal, but a nice feature.
Also, if you have two applications for mail and browsing, then you have two applications to keep up to date.
I've never understood the whining about "bloat". I like feature-rich applications and my computer can handle them just fine, thank you.
Either way, we have an embarassment of riches. I'm still stuck with Windows on my work machines, but the bulk of the actual work I do is in Mozilla, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. Love them both. Thanks to all the developers! Keep up the great work.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
.. it's that they get off their butts and actually fix all the annoying bugs that have been around for YEARS, many of which affect huge numbers of users, yet seem to get ignored in favour of new features... (sound familiar?)9 3 /. to mozilla!)
Just look at the age (and popularity) of most of the bugs off tracking bug 163993 (Mozilla bugs with large community interest):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1639
(cut & paste into your browser - no linking from
No, I don't use firefox, because it seems too much like IE to me (you know, but without most of the security holes). Of course, maybe thats's why it's so popular...
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
Use standard GNU autoconf for the builds. Get rid of all the code that says things like "#ifdef HPUX ... then do this and that and this and that because HP's C++ compiler (no, not that one, the other one... and that specific version, too!) can't make a negative zero or some such tomfoolery ... #endif". When I try to build Firefox 1.0 (One Point Fucking Oh!) on HP-UX 10.20 it falls over and dies because I'm not using HP's C++ compiler... nor the other one... and especially not that version... I'm using gcc! What do you think I am, an idiot? Why would I use anything but gcc/g++?
But it's worse than that. A few simple platform-checking #ifdefs could be fixed, the code converted into autoconf checks and replaced with HAS_FOO macros... but no. The build tree isn't even a tree -- it's a fucking forest! There are like 17 different build trees, each one gnarly and moss-covered and subtly (or not so subtly) different from the next, all plastered together into one shambling mass of code. Some of the sub-trees hard code ld -foo -bar -ZxCvB commands instead of invoking $(CXX) to be the linker. Some of them hard code cc as the compiler instead of using $(CC). I shit you not. Oh, and you can't type "make" in a sub-trees to build just that sub-tree. You have to start all over from the top level. After a few days, I gave up.
It's bad, folks. Really, really bad.
I'd be embarrassed to release something like that as a 1.0 version. 0.6 alpha 2? Sure thing, no problem. But 1.0 is supposed to be finished.
P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a "you must accept cookies in order to see this site" message, and had to pull up a page's HTML source code just to try to find out what address the cookie was coming from.
Firefox is ahead of IE on so many levels, but is years behind on this one.
Truthfully, as small and quick as Firefox is, I still have to say that I like the Mozilla browser so much better. I love control of my browser, and clicking on the tools menu drop down and having direct access to all of the managers (cookies, popups, etc..) is the greatest options on could have as easy as they can give it to you. Firefox was a little tricky to get used too at first, and I particular dont like the button interface.
Are you really sure that's a fair comparison? You ask if firefox is any less bloated than mozilla, stating that it takes 10-12 seconds to start up and it crashes randomly. But then you go on to say:
I do appreciate the growing number of extensions for Firefox, though I wonder why they can't have been adapted for Mozilla since it also uses XUL. I currently use Image Zoom, Advanced Highlighter Button, User Agent Switcher, Web Developer, All-in-One Gestures, Nuke Anything, Print It, and Flashblock...
Are you sure it's not an extension that's bringing down firefox? Or slowing down the start up time. You can't really compare stock mozilla against a customized firefox for speed and stability. I realize that you may love those extensions and wouldn't want to live without them, but otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.
support Active X controls under Windows
NO!! NO!! NO!!
Active X is the worst security model anyone could think of. Not having active X support is the #1 feature of Mozilla/Firefox. You can say tabbed browsing, better png support, etc all you want, but not having active X support is the number one reason it's better than IE at keeping spyware off of clueless user's computer. Clicking yes/no is not a good security model.
You didn't offend us. You come off like an arrogant prick, though.
A few years back, it was the pro-Microsoft fscks who yelled all the 'get new hardware' insults, and the OSS community that championed old-hardware-working-better-with-less-bloat.
Seems that as OSS has gotten more popular, it's been taken up by the people who flash plastic rather freely at the big box stores. And they figure they're in charge now, and the goal of OSS is to be as big and bloated as Microsoft, 'to compete with it.'
What a crock.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"