Slashdot Mirror
JWZ isn't the only one
preed-man
writes "I don't know what's up in
Mountain View, but
it's not good: AOL has
laid off about 430 Netscape employees; in addition to this, a "key Mozilla.org figure" has resigned as well. It's a somber time in
Mountain View. " CT : Sorry about the lag in
story postings. Reformatted and reinstalled, but I now have
a nice shiny new Debian box.
1) Mozilla should get a working beta out - not a demo, or milestone, but a working beta.
2) They should dump their code to their FTP site more than once every two months; the last was 1-28-99 and it's like April already.
3) They should establish a usenet news group. (if they have, then promote it but I don't see "mozilla" on dejanews "Browse Group"
4) There needs to be a code overview/tutorial for morons like me that might possibly want to help.
5) Keep going, don't let AOL or people leaving stop you; you'll get there, it's hard but just do it right and things will work out.
iCab's wonderful. It uses the Quicktime layer for images (AFAIK), and i just forgot what I was saying. But anyways, I have a copy of QT4, and in iCab images seem to render rather quickly. It could just be that your computers a lot slower than mine (iMac, Rev. B, for now), but I dunno. Perhaps its QT.
iCab is cool, and the Mac community seems to be open to new things. A Windows adoption rate would probably be low. It would probably get some support in Linux, but a Linux port seems unlikely (Perhaps if Apple made QT for linux...)
How do you do this in Pine? Can it be done on a stand-alone netscape? I don't see any buttons for news!
from the Pine main menu, select "?" (Help), and then navigate to "8. reading News".
Well you have to have a newsreader (any one will do, but Pine and the standalone browser are not newsreaders
However, there's lot's of them out there. If you use Pine, you may find it easy to use Lynx (which supports news:// URLs, but not always conveniently). Try typing 'lynx' in you shell, and if you have it, type 'g' and when prompted type the following URL,
'news://news.mozilla.org/'
Surely Netscape (Andresson) just realized that the
web was already growind rapidly, and set up a company to commercialize the existing Mosaic browser?
I'm not trying to argue - just curious to hear someone else's view of the early days of the web.
I'm using RH5.2, upgraded to 2.2.3, XFree86 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1..., and use it basically for C programming and net surfing. I've never used any other Linux distribution. I use Solaris at work.
What benefit might Debian give me over RedHat?
you might want to ask http://www.debian.org. It's probably less biased than your typical distribution evangelist :)
I agree, I am really really frustrated with Netscape as well. When I built my latest workstation, I used windows 95 on it as well as Debian, and I too caught the IE bug. I hate M$, and using IE made me feel like all dirty after bad sex. But still it did the job, and it did it somewhat well. Not to mention the fact that Microwhatever has some sort of monopoly on content generation, that makes browsing with their product even more important. BUT: I upgraded the Win part of the box to 98 ( I wanted more of the big brother features..hehe) and the damn thing would freeze, oh like 10 times an hour. And those windows people make fun of Mac users! Hehe. Anyway, so back to Linux 90% of the time for me, but Netscape is making me angry. It looks like hell, and, it crashes all the time. What is the replacement for netscape? I wanna know, cos I like to browse. And stay in linux. ??
Hm.. I don't know about this. I was an intern at MS last summer, and I used IE with NT (no netscape there, for obvious reasons). It seemed to crash several times a day, usually taking the taskbar down with it (yes, it restarts, but i never could figure out how to get the stuff in the systray back, whcih was annoying). Then again, I use ns3 most of the time because its more stable (and it seems to do psycho table layout like Stellar Crisis faster..)
The most affected people are those who have machines that are not supported by the Netscape browsers. I use a DEC alpha as my main computer and run a remote shell netscape from my p120(yes, i have a box dedicated to running netscape). I have tried mozilla, hotjava, and kfm on my alpha but they all suck royally. Don't even ask about em86. If Compaq wants more GNU/Linux users to buy alpha chips then they should push Netscape for a browser.
au contraire, mon frere (ou soeur!). in addition to the internal Pine documentation mentioned above, check out:
Pine FAQ 3.10: How can I use Pine for reading and posting Internet News?
IE is the first MS product I have EVER used that has beaten its counterpart. I don't even want to think about how much money and time they must have thrown into IE just to beat NS :) Fucking hell, IE is even more STANDARDS compliant than NS! Hopefully Opera can get their program to the point where I'd purchase it. I feel dirty.
you might want to ask http://www.debian.org. It's probably less biased than your typical distribution evangelist :)
uhmmm... so you send him to the place where all us debian evangelists hang out?
What benefit might Debian give me over RedHat?
well the biggest benefit is the better package management which makes it much easyer to keep all your installed packages up to date. debian also usually has packages with security bugs fixed and ready for download that redhat does but redhat is getting better and this prolly dosent matter much today.
I've been looking for these!
The rest of the people leaving were fired, and they're not developers.
In short, mozilla.org is failing to follow one of free software's most powerful and effective maxims: release early; release often. Just get the browser out there.
1. Where is 4.51 for FreeBSD?
2. The option to send email in HTML should be emphatically discouraged in the Preferences dialogue box, indicating, for example, that it is highly experimental and will cause lots of pain to users of standards compliant email clients.
Admiral Yamamoto
Uhh Netscape is way slower than IE. I have 2 computers. !. is Dual p2 300Mhz box and the other is a DX2 66Mhz box. IE 5.0 starts faster on the dx2 than Netscape 4.x does on my PII under Linux. I also have compared the 2 browsers on a lab full of computers some with diff hardware etc..
There's of course a lot that is not yet componentized, but as far as I can understand, the idea is to move as much as possible into the components directory, and reduce dependencies to a minimum, allowing developers and users to pick and choose components at will.
As for hurrying the initial release. I don't think so... So long time has passed that people expect the next release to be better than Navigator 4.5. If they don't get that, the press will be all over it and pronounce it the "failure of Mozilla". The project is far enough ahead now that a beta can be released within a reasonable timeframe.
More importantly: The M3 release saw enough stability and usability that it's now much easier for new developers to actually run the browser, find bugs, find missing features, and fix the code. Until recently, you'd have to be a real masochist to do that unless you had a very particular interest (such as being paid to do it, or needing it for one of your own projects ;)..
Mozilla is getting really close to being a project where you can finally download the code, spend a few hours fixing a problem, and contributing, as opposed to a project where you'd have to spend months getting to know it before you'd have a chance even to get it to build correctly...
Thats a significant step, because it means that Mozilla is finally getting mature enough to actually benefit from the open source model.
Try to reduce the size of history file, I mean clean it up and make it lean at settings, it worked for me. (To some reason NS 4.08 in my Linux box can't render freshmeat.com homepage, NS crashes- any ideas?)
Do a search for "Linux flash plugin" on one of the search engines. It's on a french site.
And it actually works well too!
Mozilla isn't far from being usable. The M3 release is actually getting quite useful (not much UI wise, but then I don't care about that ;). Give it a few more months, and you'll have a small. fast. standards compliant browser that's open sources, rapidly improving, componentized to the extreme, and that will run on anything from your toaster to a Cray... ;) Well, maybe not your toaster, but at least on a phone (I'm not kidding - it's still a few months away, but my company is working on it...)
There's no such thing as "finished"!
Where are all the announcements that each version has been released?
You have to remember that each of these announcements is also an advertisement to coders!
The last version I see on the ftp site is from January. It's April now.
Release Early Release Often and Screw "not finished".
Stick your cool Linux geekwear where the sun don't shine.
Good coders work wherever conditions are good and where
the work is interesting and don't care about trendy notions
of "hip".
Yet another wise comment about dumb AOL users. Hey, my
sister and mom are members of AOL. You insult my seester,
creep. You insult my mother. Meet you outside.
The Mozilla "demo' is almost there. The Windows version
probably still has debug code in it and scrolls text jerkily,
but otherwise loads things fast. It has not crashed on me yet
visiting a number of sites. I can't get the Linux "Seamonkey"
demo to load - complains about missing library which was not in
the rpm.
A few prima donnas leave Mozilla and you want to throw away
months of work by them and others. AOL has not laid off coders,
and if a few more leave for various reasons don't jump to
conclusions. People who leave are not necessarily jumping
ship but have their own plans and goals and even when leaving
they leave behind their work. Don't insult that with your really
dumb comments, which express ignorance of even ignorance..
I'm no big fan of AOL but it doesn't help the people who do
want to continue working on Mozilla under the AOL umbrella
to read such posts. Also it doesn't help those who may want
to work on the code outside of AOL. It may be easier for others
to do that in the near future when a working beta along with
code for just the components one wants to work on can be
checked out, instead of having to compile the who thing.
aren't you smart
It does things that a kernel, XFree, Gnome and KDE do; it is a very complicated system.
Sorry folks, but I must agree that IE kicks Netscape's rear end right now... For some reason, every single version of Netscape that I have tried, from 4.04 right up to 4.51, is notoriously unstable under Linux; I cannot get it to view more than 10 websites or 5 minutes later (whichever comes first) without crashing. Not to mention that it is also extremely bloated and inefficient, IMHO. And yes, I am using **STANDALONE** Navigator (Communicator would be even worse, IMHO). IE 5.0 under Windows is light years ahead at this point... Heck, it is even more **STANDARDS** compliant than Netscape right now... Now that is truly sad, to think that Microsoft can actually adhere to standards better. But I really want to see a better browser for Linux... I am DYING to see something better. Heck, I almost wish I could run the HP-UX or Solaris version of IE under Linux at this point, just for the sake of trying ANYTHING else. Any ideas, ANYONE?? And don't tell me Opera; I didn't like Opera's interface, and at the time I tried it, it had yet to implement things like CSS, Java, HTML 4.0, or ANYTHING that a modern browser must support. IMHO, anybody care to try hacking at something like Arena or Amaya??
http://monty.cnri.reston.va.us/grail/
If you want to see a cool new browser, check out GRAIL - It's written entirely in Python + Tk !!!
And you can have python applets, a bit like java applets. It's at version 0.6, and the developers are appealing for more support. Seeing as python is interpreted, it's intrinsically open source.
It's under Yet Another Public Licence of its own, though - seems reasonable all the same.
Funny thing is, despite being in python, it seems at least as fast as netscape on my box ( which is 400MHz K6-2, admittedly) It's pretty cool (and less messy feeling then mozilla) - I've always liked python.
The possibilities for extending this browser seem pretty limitless - and it's OOP !!!
It needs work though, and the developers say they are willing to give the CVS tree to someone else to look after - any takers? ( I've insufficient resources, and don't know enough Python or Tk, - but I've suddenly got an urge to start learning !)
source tarball is 385116 bytes !!!
The only thing to watch out for is the path resolving in utils/grailutil.py of the source tree - it's slightly broken for python 1.5.1 ( looks like it's 1.5.2 specific) the first try...except block is a bit off - it's for resolving paths. I just commented the lot out for a quick test - dunno how to fix it up right
ok there is this major problem with netscape at one time is seemed like it would de-rail microsoft in the same way we are (the oss movement) if we really have problems with netscape y more ppl contribute 2 mozilla.org ... and 4 the purists out there y not start your own browser we could probably have somthing that kicked ie's ass in a year may b less if there was corparate funding :)
Butchered *what*? AOL hasn't touched anything over at Netscape yet except for laying off some administrative types. The Netscape browser is still exactly what it was. And Mozilla development is still on track. If that doesn't release on time, let's look to the people that resigned of their own free will. JWZ played a major role in Mozilla, and it's gonna be difficult to recover from him leaving, but not impossible.
And if you just want to blame his leaving on AOL, read his resignation letter on his site again. The resignation had been building for sometime. AOL may have been the final straw, or it may have just been an excuse.
Mergers happen. Adapt and overcome, soldier.
-T
> Fact: Smart hacker types don't want to work at a company as seriously unhip as AOL
Check your facts. There's nothing unhip about working at AOL. They do cool things behind the scenes, and talking to people I know working there the pay is not bad, and even better when you consider the stock.
The only unhip thing is that they have to deal with lemmings like yourself who just repeat everything you hear. Try having an original thought once in a while, and do some reasearch for yourself. Oh, and by the way, 2 people out of 2000 does not constitute fleeing. Yes, 2. Only 2 people so far have resigned of their own free will. The rest were laid off, and they were administrative types anyways.
-T
Hahahaha! The only reason IE supports any standard is so that they can try to "Embrace and Extend" it. MARQUEE anyone?
OK, Netscape have been guilty of this before, but now they're behaving, people want to kick them...
Bizarre.
I agree with you...I *hardly ever* have netscape crash but then again I have 64M.
au contraire, mon frere (ou soeur!). in addition to the internal Pine documentation mentioned above, check out:
Mercy Bow Coops ... funny thing is I have used Pine, oh, about every day for the past five years, and I have never known this. I guess sometimes one should read the manual.
I think you are largely right about some of the reasons but I wouldn't say that the parser is trivial.
*If* every page out there was 'well-formed' in the XML sense, then it would still be tricky, but figuring out how to do the right thing for the kind of random arrangements of tags that exist in most extant web pages is _definitely_ not a trivial task
All I can say is that you're not looking very hard, then -- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/ nightly/latest always contains the latest builds for Win32, Mac, and Linux, and sometimes source updates as well. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releas es contains the most recent Gecko "milestone" release. I'm running the 04-02-99 Win32 build right now (as in "I'm using it to post this message right now").
BTW, this is Zontar The Mindless, posting as an AC because Moz isn't sending my password correctly, it seems...
"Stock" being the keyword, my friend. Name another company where a rank and file worker can become a millionaire in five years.
So far as Communicators functioning as a mail and newsreader it is quite deficient.
1) Generating emails and posts in anything other than text needs to be *very hard*
2) Being able to operate sensibly on unix and networks WRT obtaining user information. Also in the windowsism of "outgoing SMTP server" being unwanted in unix.(Or any other system which can make a destinction between MTA and MUA.)
3) Most of the code to fix things is already freely available.
As for freshmeat....
The guy who runs the site insists on using a design that routinely crashes the netscape on the platform most of his visitors use (linux).
His is the only site I have ever visited that required me to upgrade a key library simply to render simple html. I'm not trolling when I say that this is simply retarded.
Web 101 - make sure your users can render your pages reliably.
Okay, Windows uses dirty tricks to make MSIE seem to load faster, I'll grant you that.
But have you actually used MSIE? Notice how quickly it renders pages. Notice how when you resize the window, it dynamically resizes everything, no need to redraw. UNLIKE navigator... which often needs to redraw the entire window AND reload everything...
Notice how much faster MSIE redraws really complicated and/or big pages.
Dude, there's just no comparison. The interface is just as good as that of navigator, and it is *way* faster.
- Politics. The debian distribution suffers and stands to suffer a lot more from political manoevers.
- Occasionally more user hostile than Red Hat.
- Constant moving of FTP sites and directories breaks APT, upgrades, etc and makes finding packages difficult or impossible.
Good points include Debian menus, consistent packages, near flawless upgrades.
Yeah... It needs (a lot of) work...but looking at the source code, it would be singularly easy to extend.
/not/ to be derivative.
It does munge some tables and frames - but it renders slashdot and freshmeat okay on my system.
It is somewhat disconcerting when it starts to draw them (it renders tables+ frames with zero/small width, then fills in the contents, and they suddenly grow - at first sight (ie. before it's truly finished page rendering) it looks more broken than it really is)
The way it imports your netscape boookmarks is cool too...
If nothing else, it shows that the C++ approach may not be necessary for a usable componentised browser. Lots of people hate C++ ( I don't, I quite like it, and I know C++, which is more than can be said about my knowledge of python - but grail drives home how powerful yet easy to use python actually is)
I was also impressed by the error trapping ( since python is interpreted)- when I went to a page that was too much for it to cope with, part of it crashed, but a requester came up [OK/Traceback], and after I clicked OK, or looked at the traceback, it backed up a bit and continued chugging along - I just typed in a different URL and it was fine. That was impressive, in a way ( although I'd have been more impressed if it hadn't crashed in the first place)
I'm now vaguely looking at the gtk bindings for python, as well as tk...
Could start from scratch on a project of my own.
Of course, I've seen the grail source now, so it would take some effort for it
Well, don't get your knickers in a twist over it. There are more than a few insiders I've talked to who are saying, "... and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!"
JWZ is said to be a loud mouth, an opinionated asshole, and that's the nice stuff. I've met him a time or two. Smart? No doubt, but not someone I'd want to socialize with.
Also, consider this: JWZ, like JG, are fully vested in their early stock options. At $150 the share for AOL stock, these guys are rich! So, maybe they've earned the right to kick back and enjoy something besides work for a while.
And of course in my world ill-formed HTML would be spit out by browsers anyway. Too bad I don't live in my world. :-)
(not really debating, but ...) That is exactly the point: rejecting ill-formed HTML is not an option. The web is full of hilarious HTML, and trying to support it resolves to a "do what I mean, not what I say" type of problem, and *that* is non-trivial.
I use netscape and it crashes a lot (both linux and windows); but whenever I try and help somebody on their Windows computer; it seems like IE locks up just as much. Ouch. Well, at least netscape doesn't take out the whole system on linux (except for one time it did; I was running KDE, but now I run gnome and it never takes out everything).
You're supposed to drink java, not smoke it.
Where is hamm? Or bo? I know they've been moved, where to and even why but it's annoying nonetheless when you rely on something like apt. My apt entry for debian-non-US is always breaking as well. In the future non-free and contrib will also be moved to other machines due to political problems making the headache even worse.
One of my main problems with Microsoft has always been they disregard of industry standards.
IE, as with most of they other products is no different.
IE 5.0 DOES NOT support CSS 1.0 fully (ironically MS own's the CSS patent), Netscape Comm. 5.0 Layout engine (Gecko) does.
See http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29588,00.html for more info
I agree definately.
On windows Netscape is as stable (maybe more?) than IE.
Plus Netscape 5.0 (gecko) is going to kick IE butt! With features that are missing in IE 5.0 such as full CSS 1.0 compliance, better XML etc., etc...
news.com as some stuff on it http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29588,00.html
I think that's the problem right there.
Netscape 5.0 is the better product (IE can't come close to gecko's standard's compliance)
Netscape for windows is a kick-ass product, very stable and fully functional, flexible UI.
Netscape for linux needs A LOT of work. It's only
a shadow of it's windows counterpart (sad but true)
The bottom line is that for LINUX to get a high quality browser (short of starting something from scratch) either Netscape has to invest into some talented *NIX programmers or us penguins will have to become more involved in mozilla development.
http://www.mozilla.org - mozilla project homepage
http://www.mozillazine.org - information on the mozilla project
Absolutely. And Frontpage, too. And just about any WYSIWYG HTML editor I have ever seen.
... not just bad, but abusively so (emits illegal URLs, two tags, no closing or , wraps around , etc.)
However, the world champion generator of hilarious HTML is Lotus Domino
I thought I submitted Plain Old Text on the last post (oh well, it ate my tags). Stupid me.
Wow, Rob, I'm impressed. You finally switched to Debian.
I would never run anything on RedHat. It's just too buggy.
Some of the people "laid off" actually volunteered to go.. they were considering it anyway, and it allowed their group to save others.
A couple hints: watch http://www.ex-mozilla.org/ and the about: entries.
I agree.
... jeez
WTF is wrong with people who alternate between "we're going to take over the world!!!" and "omigod JWZ resigned it's the end of the browser war let's surrender now!!!" The rhetoric sounds like a lot of brittle and highstrung manic depressives.
Microsoft owns the 95% of desktop OS business and it doesn't seem to stop developpers of at least 20 or so other free and commercial OSes. People working on KOffice (which is getting very good) didn't not do it because of the existence of MS-Office
JWZ is just making some harsh judgements - that's his prerogative - it may help in the end. Who knows? It's not the end of the world or mozilla.
Uhh mozilla is not dead. Is this some kind of MS thought police invasion of /. ??
Because of this I'd like to make the following feature request:
I'd like Mozilla to have directory editing abilities like lynx - i.e. cut paste copy and delete files in a browser window open on any directory I can access and have privileges for - this would practically make it a file manager of course... DO IT! I would make mozilla a full featured app!
BTW In X Window versions of Netscape and Communicator you already can drag and drop files into a mail window (as attachments) from a browser window open on the local file system or drag a link from the Location dialog. Of course in Linux/*BSD's you can only do this inside Netscape since Motif D'nD doesn't work on the desktop (even with CDE it seems). It'd be nice if Mozilla for X ended up using XDND which GNOME/KDE/WindowMaker do or will support.
Current state of the project:
IMHO Mozilla on MS Windows is just faster smaller and with even a modicum of improvements on the stability side will be heaps better than IE5. It's true - go try both of them. BTW the IE5 download is HUGE - I wonder what *that* is like to compile.
Mozilla on X/Unix *works* (barely) and *is going to get better* If you've got gtk 1.2 etc installed go grab a binary and run it.
Okay, I can see JWZ being important, but according to the article, this John Giannandrea guy was responsible for the so-called "Smart Browsing," one of the least important technologies Mozilla had to offer, IMHO.
We all remember smart browsing, right? Smart browsing is where a company pays Netscape to send more customers it's way by use of the "location" panel. Instead of the program taking the user where the user wants to go, the program takes the user where netscape has been paid to take the user.
This is not a great loss.
AOL rip through Netscape was not an administrative one. It was just that. IS Dept among others took heavy hits losing a lot of good people.
AOL objective appeared to be more of letting everyone know just who is in charge and accomplishing what Microsoft started and had to complete by proxy.
I'm no smart hacker, but my friend has worked at AOL for 5 years as a measly tester and can now retire with 10 million+ dollars (which grows about 5% per day nowadays). AOL has made many people very, very rich. I think it is a shame that they lay off people, when they have more money than they can ever spend.
JWZ is a bit of a whiner. He is probably a multi-millionaire who has low tolerance for "failure". He should have hung in there a little longer than a year before he called it quits. He should also be grateful to Netscape for making him financially independent.
Let's face something here. Linux doesn't have a GREAT browser, I don't know if any OS does, but I really think Linux should. Everything else is great. I prefer Netscape on my system to Opera or Arena, but Netscape is still slow, a hog, and not as stable as it could be.
They seem to have forgotten the first commandment, as spake by the lord ESR:
1. "release early and release often!"
They are bound by the unholy cathedral
If JWZ thinks his resignation means he can't work on Mozilla anymore, then he clearly just doesn't get the whole open source idea, and probably never will.
if you had any clue as to who jwz was then you would realize the stupidity of your statement. no where did he say that because he was leaving mozilla that he couldnt work on it, what he did was was the he was disillusioned with the project and was leaving it to other ppl to manage. due to his experience and knowledge of the project i would imagine that he will still contribute to it from time to time but he wont be devoting his life to it.
Of course on the other hand, do ANY of the devs working on this get it?
do you get it? it certainly dosent sound like it, or are you just trolling?
As a fairly long-time Linux user, I must say that I fear for the platform because of Netscape's incompetence in putting out a web browser that compares with IE. Wait, before you dismiss what I'm saying, take a hard look at IE 5.0 (or 4.0 for that matter). Look at the feature set of 5.0 -- features like CSS2 which aren't even part of the spec for Mozilla. When I boot into Windows and use IE, I end up not wanting to boot back into Linux if I'm browsing something because of the sheer wasted time that Netscape causes me. This is not an insignificant factor for me. Between Netscape crashing and destroying newly created bookmarks (inexcusable -- it should save the file when you add one), locking up and not crashing, sitting locked for periods of up to three minutes while attempting to do a DNS lookup which can't be aborted, and the extremely poor rendering engine, Netscape wastes a lot of my time. IE doesn't crash often, doesn't have blocking problems on DNS, and has an extremely fast progressive rendering engine. The rendering advantage particularly shows up on slow sites where a banner ad or some image near the top of the page isn't loading and thus, on Netscape, prevents the display of the entire page. On IE, you will be able to see whatever has been loaded. As soon as I get a faster computer, I will be using IE in VMWare -- I'm just totally fed up with the fact that Netscape hasn't improved significantly since 3.0 or maybe even 2.0.
2) They should dump their code to their FTP site more than once every two months; the last was 1-28-99 and it's like April already.
3) They should establish a usenet news group. (if they have, then promote it but I don't see "mozilla" on dejanews "Browse Group" 4) There needs to be a code overview/tutorial for morons like me that might possibly want to help.Way to go rob, debian rules ;)
The Netscape toolbar allows you to have folders that behave like hierarchical menus, at least the Motif version does.
Building Mozilla with full debugging takes ~320 megs for me. That's too much for me to participate in development, but it's not as bad as 1 gig.
Mozilla has several (a dozen or more) newsgroups.. They're on DejaNews somewhere (although I must admit that I've never been able to find them there on my own..)
You can still participate in discussion by pointing your favorite news reader to news.mozilla.org
>With more Netscape developers off of the project >it may force the community to pick up the peices
"force" ?? I seriously doubt if resignations such as these are of any help to keep the motivation of that community to help FS projects like Mozilla as high as it could be.. I don't want to blame the people resigning BTW.
Spend the time to read this, and then come back and post thoughtfully.
I want to die peacefully in my sleep as my grandfather did...
But then again, they do buy a lot of machines from My Favorite Comupter Maker.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Let me clarify: in my experience, there always seem to be one or two people who really drive a successful development effort. While others put in a ton of work, these are the folks who you can single out and say "this wouldn't have worked without these guys". Think Romero and Carmack at id back in the olden days, Seymour Cray at Cray Research or (and you just knew I'd go there) Linus with the Linux kernel.
These are the folks who seem to be leaving Netscape/AOL now. You can call them prima donnas or credit hogs or whatever, but the fact is that all really legendary development teams have them, and they always seem to fall apart when they lose them. In that manner, 2 of 2000 can be really important.
PS: Don't call me a lemming. We prefer "sudden decelleration syndrome addicts".
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It also began to display a page before all the images were loaded...
IIRC, Netscape was the first decent web browser for Windows, too..
I still get a kick out of seeing the 'Throbbing N' in some movies of the time..
What people don't realise is that there is nothing wrong with Mozilla as it is; it is simply not finished, that's all.
In any case, this had little to no effect on Mozilla itself. Coders are still working as hard on it as they were a year ago.
Egcs supports the standard of C++, and gcc doesn't. This is a no-brainer, really.
I hope that the Mozilla team survives after such a strong lashing. While things sound like they're starting to crumble, the fact remains that the world needs a good browser.
:^)
Perhaps it would be good (at this point) to not worry about integrating the mail and news clients into the initial release of Mozilla. Focusing on the browser is key. Something just needs to get out to the world that shows that something has been done. I don't mean developer test versions (such as M3) either. Those releases do show a lot, but only to a small crowd.
Besides, it would be nice to componentize the release of Mozilla -- a "Browser Package" could contain just the browser, while a "Communication Package" could include News/Mail/etc.. Not only would it keep download times smaller for slow modem owners, it would allow the Mozilla team to get away with skipping the Communication Package for now.
Maybe I'm just too anxious to see the first major release of Mozilla.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
that would be SGI then, I assume?
Since their servers are mostly O2Ks last time I checked.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I think this is a bad sign for Netscape/Mozilla. With Jamie Zawinskileaving and the recent layoffs at both Netscape and AOL, I'm beginning to worry about the future of the Mozilla project.
At the same time I think they can rid themselves of all doubt simply by releasing a product as small as iCab, has many more innovative features, and runs faster. There are two things lacking in iCab. First, it crashes on my computer. I expect this to be fixed soon. Second, it is slow in rendering images. I think Netscape/Mozilla can out do this easily, which would restore faith in the project, and enhance Mozilla's standing in the browser wars.
Good luck guys.
-Ben
Microsoft, amazon.com, eBay, etc. I guess it does pay to work for a startup if you know they have an excellent product that no one knows about and you get decent stock options. ;-)
Let's see. You're basically saying that the kernal programers (and nearly everbody else) are good enough to program around the *known* bugs in GCC 2.7, but the Mozilla programers aren't, so that's why they are using a complier pretty much no one who's installed linux is using to complie code with. What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps it would be good (at this point) to not worry about integrating the mail and news clients
into the initial release of Mozilla.
Or, better yet, not integrate them at all?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I just peeked at their site and it looks like they're going into beta soon. Does anyone know how it compares to Mozilla? (I was quite pleased to see *something* on their Web page, they seem to update once every two months...)
I doubt this will be the "death of Mozilla", but it's good to know that there are other projects out there.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
My guess is that there are two reasons (disclaimer: I do program but I don't do HTML, this is just my understanding of the situation):
:-)
First, parsing HTML is trivial but displaying it is at best difficult for anything more complicated than Lynx. Even for Lynx it's probably not easy (although I haven't looked at how they do it) Formatting is generally a tricky business.
Second, there are a bunch of non-HTML things which I can imagine would seriously complicate the situation, such as plugin architecture, JVMs, Javascript, and other such things.
Of course, it is (as usual) possible that I'm completely wrong about all of this.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Why is it a serious problem for Linux? I agree that Communicator 4.x was awful, but Navigator is (barely) bearable until a decent free browser gets out, and I can think of two or three projects offhand besides Mozilla to do this (mnemonic and kfm come to mind). Mozilla just has the biggest advertising budget.
:-)
The situation isn't "Mozilla or bust".
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Hmm, as I said I don't have much experience with this but I'd think that well-formed HTML would not be particularly difficult to parse, especially given that there are a number of XML libraries available to jumpstart a parser anyway. It's just a matter of remembering what context you're in, whether tags can be implicitly closed, ...
:-)
Trivial might be going a little far though, I admit.
And of course in my world ill-formed HTML would be spit out by browsers anyway. Too bad I don't live in my world.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Well, since Netscape already supports RDF, XUL, an JavaScript, which are used throughout the browser for the UI, the only real things necessary for mail/news support that aren't there are POP3/IMAP/SMTP/NNTP support and the Address Book/Mail DBs, at the moment, the only real sticking point is the DB, as one is being written from scratch for it (AFAIK). So, to create a mail/news reader, all one needs is a few HTML-style files, a bunch of GIFs, a few JavaScripts, and the networking and database backend. That's a grand total of somewhere under 1MB for Mail/News. Tacking this onto a 2.5MB browser isn't really that big a deal -- although I am sure that someone will write the prefs code so selecting another mail/newsreader is a simple task.
We're not talking about a 10MB mailreader for this, you know.
Jim Cape
http://www.jcinteractive.com
Jim Cape
http://www.jcinteractive.com
Someone else has already pointed out most of your mistakes. I'll add one more. Having the code available as tarballs via ftp doesn't do much good. The code changes too often, and then you get people complaining about old bugs, which adds more noise to the newsgroups. Besides, if you are interested in working on Mozilla, then updating using cvs saves you time too.
I'm running the Nav-only version of 4.5 on Linux right now and it's frustrating not being able to click on mail-to and nntp links. But I agree that the browser is most important. Maybe a better solution would be hooks for using your own mail and news clients (e.g. slrn and Mutt).
If that was implemented then you could divert work on the Mozilla Editor to the browser too. As I understand it, the Editor is needed right now to provide editing capabilities for News and Mail.
| I use a DEC alpha as my main computer and run
:)
... well ... kfm. A file manager and a WWW browser, but a master of neither. It does make a nifty FTP client, however. On the Alpha, it's probably the least crash-happy graphical browser.
... well, worked. Or even *mostly* worked. The new rendering engine appears to be pretty nice (I was able to check out "viewer" at least - no real luck with "apprunner"), but without the interface around it, it's mostly an academic curiousity.
| a remote shell netscape from my p120(yes,
| i have a box dedicated to running netscape).
Seems a little extreme, but I suppose it's doable. It also solves the problem of other things like Realvideo and shockwave not being available for anything but Intel Linux either.
|I have tried mozilla, hotjava, and kfm on my
|alpha but they all suck royally. Don't even ask
|about em86.
Mozilla (old 102898 release) is at least somewhat usable. It's what I use on my Alphastation. Hotjava never worked properly on my Alpha - it would render the page you opened correctly, but if you tried to click a link it would render the new page behind the old one - which was still visible. This quickly got old.
Kfm is
I really wish Mozilla
-- Rick
| There is an open sourced Shockwave/Flash plugin
:) Unfortunately, at the time I tried it, Mozilla would crash when trying to start the program. Whether it's the lizard or the plugin that's the problem I really don't know.
| available. It shouldn't be hard to get it to
| work with Linux for Alpha
I actually tried this.
-- Rick
--Dan
No, they haven't. I refer you to ftp.mozilla.org, on which you may find daily builds of Mozilla for many platforms, as well as a daily sourcedump.
Ah ah -- there's a nuance you're missing there. The key word is release. That means a working, useful build of the product. Daily source dumps do not constitute a release. I've downloaded sources on three separate occasions, including the "official" 12/03 "release," and in all cases I couldn't even get the thing to build, and not for lack of trying either.
M3 is close (I was actually shocked when it compiled succesfully, although I still can't get it actually working) but it's taken a year to get this far!
Can someone in the know tell me why a minimal working browser was not released quickly, and features added in gradually, without breaking the source base for extended periods of time? Is it because, as JWZ noted, the actual released source was such a crawling horror?
I'd like to know. . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
IE still has more cruft. This will start to show later on, and IE might turn out to be another unmanageable micros~1 product. It's not bigger than 4.0, but it's sure close.
I admit it's sure hard to defend netscape these days.
support gun control: take guns from cops
ok so jwz left. That's terrible because he was one of the project's biggest supporters. But why does everyone think the whole world is falling apart when mozilla is doing so well? The gtk group is mostly non-mozilla and is quite successful (oh yeah jwz was very pro-motif). The java mozilla is still alive and kicking even though jwz predicted they would give up due to failure. Doczilla is a commercial SGML/Hytime browser based on mozilla code and they have just released a tutorial on working with mozilla code. Be Inc has hired a full time engineer to work on bezilla (their site has some interesting screenshots). There's even an amiga mozilla port underway...no actually there are two! And let's not forget all the bug reports submitted by people from all over. So don't tell ME that nobody is interested in working with the mozilla code when there are people working really deep into the code-not just cutesy changes but you can now have fun with XUL anyway...
---
Ok, I'm not a programmer, this is an honest question. It's not intended to be inflammatory.
So here goes: Is a browser really such a complicated piece of software? It just seems to me that compared to the kernel, XFree, Gnome or KDE, a browser would not be such a monumental project. I suppose that once you add in the news and mail, it's going to make things more complicated. But as someone pointed out earlier, why not modularize those things?
Again, I'm looking for education here, not flames. Why is it so hard to get a good browser for linux?
ftp://ftp1 3.netscape.com/pub/communicator/4.51/english/unix/ unsupported/
Funny how it only took me about three seconds to find it...
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
If JWZ thinks his resignation means he can't work on Mozilla anymore, then he clearly just doesn't get the whole open source idea, and probably never will. So maybe this is a good thing.
Of course on the other hand, do ANY of the devs working on this get it? Who knows. And IMO, without mozilla, Linux is just another "also ran" in the desktop arena.
Look, the layoffs were of non-coders. After a merger you can downsize on lawyers, purchasing managers, marketing people, etc. It's not a sign of weakness.
Now, the loss of two people important to Mozilla is a blow. On the other hand, Mozilla is far healthier now than it was nine months ago, when it had three months of futile pounding on the old codebase while Netscape programmers were busy working on 4.5.
I mean, Mozilla is now to the point where bug hunting by non-coders is useful enough to recruit them. And when it eventually ships, even if it takes six months, it will take off.
I use Netscape 4.5/128-bit on FreeBSD and I have not had any significant crash problems. Sometimes it bugs out on really funky Java crap, but 99% of the time it's quite stable. It does have memory use problems, it won't let go of ram sometimes (all the time?).
;)
Maybe it's Linux that's not stable, hmm?
I"ll agree with the first two (although I'm not certain how the politics issue affects users), but "Constant moving of FTP sites"? Yeah, there are mirrors that come and go, but ftp.us.debian.org (replace "us" with your country code, or a nearby code) is pretty consistent.
I for one would happily PAY MONEY for a Quality >= GOOD browser. I have tried the iCab and so far as features and potential are concerned, I like it a -lot- better than the Nav4.06 I am using. Communicator has way too much stuff loaded up at the same time that I don't need, which is just a good/great browser. No built-in email, no built-in HTML Composer, no built-in news reader, and so on. I do like Netscape's newsreader, but I don't want to have the sucker loaded up in RAM just 'cause I have the browser up. IE 4 for Mac admittedly has a lot of features and capabilities that I really like, it's just that the damn thing has a tendency to break very ungracefully, not much but enough to be a pain, and it -still- has problems with sometimes refusing to load all the graphics, no matter what I do, not to mention how it funkily renders some pages' tables, eg. news.com. I got hacked off finally and went back to Nav4, which seems kind of anemic compared to the bells and whistles of IE4, and the 'feature rich' capabilities of iCab. I REALLY want Netscape/AOL(sigh) to SUCCEED!! But geez Louise, it has been over a year(?) since a major release?? And it looks like Nav5 won't be here until after y2k-day? Damn, man. Bottom Line: I think there is at least SOME kind of market for selling browsers, but they have to be good enough to justify it. I don't care if IE Vx.y is "FREE" forever, they throw all these features in there, but still don't get the BASIC stuff right! Not to mention feeling like a pawn in Gates' Internet Domination Campaign.
It seemed to me that Netscape hasn't really changed since v3.0...Well, maybe the icon...
This is the final nail in Netscape's cofin... I actually like Crashscape... kfm as a daily brower?
DrWatt
But there is at least one thing that may stall their effort. First and foremost is one of the very reasons that Zawinski cited for netscape's troubles - M$ destroyed the browser market by offering Explorer for free. Since iCab eventually plans to charge for their browser, it will be interesting to see how many people will part with $50 in order to use what can be had for free from two other companies.
Just the same, iCab has some interesting things going for it - cookie management, ad filtering, a "checkable" hotlist, etc. etc. These innovative features, along with a lean code base, may get them a loyal following. There are, however, a few things I'd like to see improved:
1. Most ad filtering only prevents the ad from being drawn - because the HTML is still there, the space is still allocated, so your stuck with something almost as bad as looking at the ads themselves - blank space. I'd like to see an option to REMOVE the HREFs that point to ads, rather than just keep them from drawing.
2. The personal toolbar (even in Netscape) is a nice touch - but it'd be nice if it would expand to multiple lines if a user wants to include more than one line's worth of URLs. Folders shouldn't be excluded either- the folder name should appear and behave like a hierarchical menu.
Maybe both M$ and Netscape should pay attention here. Sometimes the biggest isn't always the best.
The problem is that they need unix developers,
it seems.. I don't normally use Microsoft OS'es,
except that I have a job where I need to use
NT (on a laptop) every once in a while..
So while I was in NT, I decided to look at the
windows mozilla build...
WOW!
It renders much faster then IE 4, it LOOKS very
good, and it is VERY functional. If I could get
bookmarks implimented, I would use this as my
ONLY browser within windows.
I've tried to get the new mozilla to work in Linux
for a while now...just to be frustrated with an
immediate segmentation fault, or other immediate
crash, and I got apprunner to work once or twice,
but it always looked like hell. Suffice to say,
there are serious differences in parity..but
my last cvs update was march 4th. Impressed with
this latest mozilla binary, I'm compiling the linux
m3 version on my desktop..hoping it is somewhat
as good in terms of quality..
It's very obvious that the back-end components are
very high quality and finished...all we need are
more linux people to help them get a usable
front-end.
But mozilla is NOT a project in trouble. It is
VERY usable right now on the windows side, and
hopefully on the Linux side as well (watching
the compile continue as I type).
It just seems that everyone is extremely impatient.
Remember, the beta date is not until JULY 20th!
It's not broken or defective..just not finished.
And currently none of the browsers available are standards compliant.
If nobody follows the standards, they aren't really "standards" are they. I guess you could call them "W3C Feature Proposals".
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Can't blame this one on AOL. By the time Navigator/Communicator and IE were both released as version 4 products, Netscape had lost the huge technical advantage that it originally held over the IE team. Now more people use IE than use Netscape, and the lead is only going to widen as long as Netscape/Mozilla delays in coming out with their version 5, which is almost certain to be too late to turn the tide. Also, you certainly can't blame AOL for all the carping that people have done about the state of the source code that Netscape originally released for Mozilla.org.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It doesn't even fully support HTML 3.2, much less 4.0, and it seems like it has a tendency to munge tables. which is not a good thing. Another big downside is that CNRI has announced that they're dropping the project.
I like Python and all, and I think Grail was an interesting work, but it's definitely not a realistic replacement for Netscape/IE.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I agree. The lack of availability of IE on Linux is a major factor that keeps me from trying Linux -- I can't bear the thought of having to go back to Netscape again.
The guys who left netscape should get together and use the mozilla source to develop a kick-ass alternative to netscape and IE.
I'm not going to pass judgment on Mozilla.org, but Linux does need a Good browser. I like Netscape 3.01 better than any browser out there. And I know a few who agree with me.
I hope people do get behind Mozilla or start a new browser project for Linux. Is it legal to take raptor an run with that?
JWZs departure, and his explanation of it, give me pause. I have been wondering when the hell netscape would ship 5.0 and it was very disheartening to learn that they didn't expect to have a beta out until July. JWZ's revalations just confirm my fears.
(It seems to me that have a good, modern, browser is very important to the success of Linux and I hope that this will motivate people to chip in to the project.)
On the other hand, the news in this latest article isn't nearly as significant and I think the author should be given 50 lashes for trying to play up this new information.
JWZ was an early employee of the company. This other "key" developer sounds like a johny-come-lately, perhaps the sort of fair weather friend that JWZ seems to deplore.
JWZ, in addition to whatever he did in the early days, made (by his own assesment, at least) a real effort at making the open source Mozilla fly free. This other guy lead the development of a privacy invasion feature. The sort of tail-fin feature that netscape wasted their effort on when they should have been cleaning up the core of their browser and building in standards support.
As for the other layoffs, big woop. A sad symbol and no doubt stressful to those involved, but they don't sound like they are core to the developent of any products.
I wouldn't downplay the effect those layoffs will have, not just yet.
People are going to be feeling very insecure for the next while, revising their resumes and following up head-hunter calls, just in case...
AOL's not going to be able to stop the bleeding that quickly; it's great time for a career change in this business.
JWZ's second-last paragraph, first sentence, just about sums it up: "I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of resigning from Netscape."
--The more you know, the less you know.
If XUL (rhymes with goul) is anything like it reads at http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/languageSpec.html then mozilla will have been a smashing success in spite of JWZ's rhetoric.
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
Strongly disagree that Netscape is lagging behind MSIE. On the Windows side of my machine it handles my needs way better than MSIE, if for no other reason than the fact that it seamlessly integrates an HTML composer with the browser. The composer element is a *huge* benefit to Windows users that want to be able to create documents in a cross-platform file format. It beats the hell of the dreadful MS Front Page which requires you to launch three applications just to edit an HTML page.
They finally addressed lack of the ability to [TAB] between URLs on the page, which was a big shortcoming that had me switching to MSIE for a couple of years.
OK, so on my Linux side it takes a freakin' whole minute to launch Netscape (as opposed to one second on the Windows side). That's a serious problem but I think it is not a failure on the part of the product in general, just simply that they haven't taken time to optimize it for Linux.
AOL butchered Netscape Browser, Netscape fans and
:)
Netscape. When netscape was alone, it had a single
goal of product development and they would have
somehow managed to get Mozilla released. Now everything is with the new bosses...
Was it a M$ conspiray...?
This is probably because you're using windows 98 and IE is always resident - a very underhanded way of making the browser seem to load faster.
Yes. It's documented in the Freshmeat FAQ.
Get the glibc version of Netscape. Worked for me.
Jeremy D. Zawodny /
Well, you need friends who have access to Digital Unix' libraries then. The OSF version of Netscape is a typical Netscape, mostly stable, but crashes sometimes.
Before I got the libraries I used a P166 as a Netscape "server." Worked, albeit not as fast as my 633MHz Alpha.
Fucking hell, IE is even more STANDARDS compliant than NS!
More standards compliant? Huh?
I'd say there is no such thing as being "more standards compliant". Either you are standards compliant or you are not. Make no compromises here.
And currently none of the browsers available are standards compliant.
The web of today is in really sorry state. I had hoped that Mozilla would bring us some hope, but now that hope seems quite vain...
--
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
One of the key developers on the project just left though.....
Netscape did actually create a revolution. The web is largely a result of their ideas back in 1992-1995.
Unfortunately, since then they have done nothing innovative. It seems like they created the web, was pleased and spent the rest of their years parching Navigator.
What they should have done was to keep supporting and extending Navigator, but focus on the design of WWW2.
-segfault
The main reason is that the prize for joining is too high. First of all, you need nearly 1 GB of free disk space and waste amounts of time to compile this thing. Second, the development process is too complicated. You just don't use five minutes to fix a small bug in a system with 100 full time developers. When you submit it, they have probably rewritten the entire module. Of course you could try to keep track of what all of them are doing, but that requires too much time.
In emacs I can just find a bug in CC-mode, fix it and submit the fix right away (except for the fact that I can't find a bug in CC-mode (except java-mode, which is crappy)). I don't have to recompile anything. In mozilla, I find a bug, I try to fix it, but I can't figure out where it is, or what will happen if I fix it, or what other things I will break.
The correct approach would be a more kernel oriented design,
And BTW, Javascript is a crappy, and not general enough, extension language.
-segfault
When I tested it, it was with the original source on Solaris. I used some of the university's Ultra1 boxes (~200 mhz, 128MB RAM), and spread the source across 1 local and 3 NFS mounted disks (using symlinks).
The compilation took 1+ hour, nearly 1 GB of disk space, and the resulting executable size was ~100MB.
-segfault
Have a look at thise .xp?QRY=netscape.public.mozilla.*&DBS=1&de faultOp=AND&ST=IF
http://www.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=ps]/query_profil
There is mnemonic project , apparently
beta should soon be available. It uses GTK
libraries. All the development is done on
Linux but apparently it already compiles on
some other Unix-based platforms.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
You're kidding me. IE4 final was worse crash-wise than some of the betas of Navigator 4 I've tried. Netscape is big, slow, and crash-prone but it's smaller, faster, and stabler than IE on Windows. (And Netscape's Linux incarnation is significantly faster than its Windows version.) I think Netscape has a good thing going and if the Mozilla project gets in gear Mozilla 5 will just blow everything away.
I've never had any speed problems with Nav. PARTICULARLY under Linux... under Windows Mozilla is a bit sluggish, I'll grant you that. And the rendering glitches that IE seems to exhibit regularly make me a die-hard Netscape user. Until something else that's free and as fully-featured as Mozilla comes along.
Wow, that's weird. Netscape may be a tad buggy, but it loads in 10 - 15 seconds under Linux. It usually takes 30 or more under 'Doze (NT 4.0). But, nothing can touch Netscape under 'Doze. (Well, Opera, perchance.) IE4 is just so full of security and stability problems AND it slows the rest of your machine down that it's just not worth even bothering with.
On the other hand, there are challenges ahead. But that doesn't diminish Netscape's past accomplishments.