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Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 has been released, and in addition to numerous bug fixes now includes ECMAScript for XML (E4X). Mozilla 1.8 will serve as the code basis for Firefox 1.1. In other Mozilla related news, WebSideStory saw Firefox's usage growth slow down to just 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan) making Firefox's 10% marketshare goal for 2005 potentially more challenging. Their stats also saw Internet Explorer usage drop below 90% for the first time in many years."
It almost seems like bloat is a function of nothing but how many people are working on it. Firefox was created to be the non-bloated Mozilla. When there were few people working on it, that goal was easily attained. Now that it's become the primary development focus, though, I'm hearing allegations it's the bloated one.
Are small projects just easier to optimize?
One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.
In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.
Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
Most users don't know they want tabbed browsing, but everyone I've seen who has used it for a bit, gets pissed off when they have to use Internet Explorer. This is especially bad at school because, for some reason, they think it's a security concern to be able to use File->New Window (it says it's been disabled by security settings). This can be circumvented by just starting IE again from the start menu, but it's still an annoying piece of shit.
I have this buddy with Windows XP. You know, the kind of person who doesn't understnad just how dangerous .exe files are. As expected, this system was full of all kinds of spyware by the time I got to it. It wasn't even possible to open regedit; a spyware program was killing it. I couldn't even download Firefox from IE; I had to use the old ftp client to ftp over to ftp.mozilla.org to get the program.
So, I get and download Firefox for him. I explained to him "OK, I'm going to reinstall this system and not give you the admin password when I get time. In the meantime, use this to browse the web". I got rid of the IE icon from his desktop and replaced it with Firefox using the IE icon.
A couple of days later, my friend says he wants to keep Firefox. He told me the tabbed browsing was "tight".
I think Firefox is currently the best open source application for non-technical people out there. It is 100% open source and better than the competition (better CSS than IE; more security than IE; more feautures than IE).
As you know, Firefox is based off the Mozilla 1.7 branch. The Mozilla devs did a lot of work 'deCOMtaminating' Mozilla for 1.8. Essentially they're removing XPCOM interfaces from various performance-critical parts of the app, allowing tighter binding + faster execution. It makes a huge difference, especially on slower hardware. Firefox 1.1 will be based off Mozilla 1.8, so it will take advantage of the streamlining.
Flash for Website Navigation is bad because:
- it renders your page inaccessible for blind,... people
- people can't use their browsers comfort functions with Flash (like Open in new Window)
- Flash is too dumb to distinguish between right mouse clicks and drags (like the ones used in mouse gestures), it opens a popup menu with lots of useless commands on right-click - Flash Animations and Intros annoy the shit out of your site users when they have to wait for them even though you have already seen them (slow down site usage which kills your userbase)
- Flash Player is not available for all Browsers on all Operating Systems
- Who says all your visitors want your page to look the same (Font, Font-Size,Sound,...)
You should think a bit about all these points before you decide you really need to break compatibility and comfort just for a bit of eye-candy/bells and whistles.
Linux is not Windows