Whither Netscape 5.0?

An anonymous reader wrote in to point us to a Time Digital article (By Nathaniel Wice: Hey man!) about AOL Shelving plans for Netscape 5's release yet this year. So is the browser war really over? Does Mozilla have a chance?

Comments

Total bullshit

[linuxci]

Sorry about the strong headline but I'm personally fed up with articles like these. Mozilla was delayed for one reason - they originally tried to base an open source project on their terrible Communicator codebase. They worked for months on that and nearly had a shipping version but they decided to scrap it and rewrite the browser totally. Now although it's nearly a year 'late' at least we're getting a small (5 MB) and standards compliant browser rather than yet another bloated released based on Communicator.

I wouldn't say Mozilla is ready yet and has a few months to go but the progress has been much improved the past few months and external developers are starting to get involved. Look at http://www.mozilla.org/ and check the weekly status updates, check http://www.mozillazine.org/ for more up to date news. There's a lot going on. Open source didn't prove to be the ultimate solution for Netscape, the couldn't release the source and suddenly get a top class browser. They had to improve the code before anyone would go near it and that's what they have done. It's took them longer than expected because they didn't understand that people wouldn't hack on any crap. They've got their act together and are doing well.

There are a number of ways to help.
1) Contribute patches and bug fixes
2) Provide testcases for bugfixes (The Gecko bugathon)
3) Rate bugs in order of importance.
4) Download builds regualrly to test them.

Read the getting involved document on mozilla.org for more ideas.

Mozilla is not dead, it's coming back to life.
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Re:Total bullshit

[bmetzler]

I've got an even better idea. Why don't they hire some damn developers and get the thing out the door? I would willingly pay for a decent browser for Linux and I bet tons of other people would too...

They have hired some developers. If you check bugzilla, there's something in common with most of the people that are assigned bugs. They have e-mail addresses with the @netscape.com domain. IE, Netscape (AOL) employees.

I need to rant a bit. You just can't please everyone. Some people say that Netscape has too many people working on the Mozilla project. The other people say that Netscape doesn't have enough. Netscape has what they have, and the project is going smoothly. And what's more, they've been choosing strong software models over fast development cycles. The next browser will kill IE. And that's all there is too it.

But the thing I really hate is the concept that consumers/non-programmers have that software development is rather quick. I mean, how many of you have had the experience of letting marketing know of a new product coming up so they could prepare for it. 3 weeks later they come back and ask when the product will be done, not understanding the development is a major process and takes time. They just expect it too be whipped out in no time flat. Oh, and bug free too. And they don't realize that you've spent 6 months on it already, just to get it to the point it is.

People usually don't see development time. The Mozilla Project is an eye-opener for most people because they have no idea how the development cycle works. Mozilla isn't being developed any slower then anything else, but people don't see anything else to compare it to. MS announces IE in beta and then releases it 3 months later. They don't realize that MS has spent much time on it before the beta to get it to that point.

Think of Windows 2000. That's been in development for a long time. But we don't hear the same conclusions about that? Why not? I'm not going to get into any pro/anti-Microsoft reasons here, but for one thing, the closed development cycle is hidden. Therefore it's not percieved the effort put into it. It's the same for any industry. The cars that a manufacturer releases this year weren't developed and prepared for manufacturing in 3 weeks. It takes years. For anything.

No, the battle isn't over. In fact, it hasn't even begun. When Netscape releases their Mozilla-based browser, then we'll see the real battle. And Mozilla has been developed, not to just ship crap out faster then MS, but to ship a product that beats IE hands-down. And it doesn't matter how long it takes Mozilla to achieve that, that's the only thing that counts right now.

-Brent
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By the same account Microsoft has lost the OS war

[linuxci]

So the delay of Mozilla has meant Netscape has lost the browser war has it. I think I'd better become a reporter.

Microsft have officialy lost the OS war due to the delay in releasing their closed source operating system called Windows 2000 which was originally due out in the beginning of the year. Microsoft had originally called Windows 2000 NT5 and expected it to be released in 98, then 99, then who knows.
Insiders inside the Microsoft Corporation said this was to make sure they had integrated their messenger with every component of the operating system and also to add new features to control the user interface (e.g. a colour picker to change the colour of the screen of depth). This is one of a series of delays for Microsoft products since their experimentation with closed source in the seventies. This proves that closed source does not work.

Now you don't see many articles saying that, so why do you see that about Mozilla?
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TIME got its content from this CNet article

[mozillaZineAdmin]

The TIME journalist got practically all of the content for his piece directly from this News.com article:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-808813.html

Paul Festa, writer of the above CNet piece, is not known for his kind words to Netscape.

Had either Paul or the writer of the TIME article actually did *any* research whatsoever, they would have found that Mozilla is chugging right along, and gaining more and more "third-party" support as time goes on.

It astounds me that /. readers are not only _not_ reading the contents of the TIME article before posting their opinions here, they aren't even reading Taco's piece correctly (and somehow coming to the conclusion that Communicator has been shelved completely). I would suggest checking out Mozilla.org, or mozillazine.org, or a nightly mozilla build before making comments about its demise. Ignorant badmouthing does the Open Source community no good. Even Linus T. made unqualified comments about Mozilla the other day. Seems like y'all *want* Mozilla to fail.

Re:Why Mozilla 5.0 will die. (At least on the Mac)

[mozillaZineAdmin]

You obviously are misinformed. The UI can be done to look *exactly* like Mac users would expect.

You don't understand the reasons behind Mozilla's interface. The interface was implemented the way it was so that they could maintain one codebase with very little native code. In addition, the CSS2 and later specs essentially require that things like buttons, form-fields, drop-down menus, etc. be implemented by non-native controls, because the specs require them to do things that non-native controls can't do (change opacity, for example).

Please attempt to inform yourself about Mozilla before making such disparaging comments. You've used a pre-beta build that has had little or no work done on the user experience, because they've been focusing on getting the back-end code running properly. What good does it do to work in the user experience if the back-end code is shifting out from underneath it?

These issues will be addressed, but you can express your concern in the Mozilla newsgroups, and let the developers know how you feel. That's much more constructive criticism than what you attempted here.