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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.
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.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..
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
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
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?
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.