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Mozilla M10 Released
pangloss writes "On the heels of the "Whither Netscape 5.0?" story comes M10. Proxies are working. Check out the release notes or the brief blurb at MozillaZine, which cites the new beta release date (12/15/99). Cheers to the Mozilla Team!"
This is he original press release of Mosiac 0.9 in 1994, just 5 short years ago. Mosiac featured , among other things, "Native support for the JPEG image format"(which was a big deal at the time!)
One of the more interesting quotes in a Wired article is one of the First Review of Mosiac 0.9 (a fantastic,sometimes funny, look back in time) features some quotes from then VP of technology Marc Anreesen. "If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."
In just 5 years, Netscape has helped redefine the IT landscape, and has forced a lot of people to look again at the multi-platform delevopment model. As they rewrite the code base for the 21st centrury, Lets not be so hard on the team that has given so much.
Less than 50 posts and I can already read how Mozilla is buggy, how it's late and how IE is better. Maybe some of you haven't been following the Mozilla development? I'd like to clarify a few things for you.
Mozilla is still very much alpha. It means that there's a lot of bugs. M10 is definitely not for daily use. These milestones are released so that we can try them, report bugs and take part in the development process. If you don't want to do it, then you're better off with an old Netscape or MSIE.
Those of us who do know programming understand really well why Mozilla is special. That's because programmers usually know to pay attention to basics. In Mozilla I see a really small browser which supports standards really well and has a really fast renderer. It's way more important at this point than having a beautiful screen or flawless scrolling.
I'd like to talk more about programming big projects. I've been working on a big project for a year now and customers are amazed as I can't show anything yet. That's because I've been concentrating on building tools - a compact database, fast and versatile search engine and lot's of controls. When these are working well, it's really fast to build the application and it will be fast, reliable and small. This is exactly what these guys at Netscape have been doing too.
Many say that the browser war is over. It's not as the internet is a moving target. We'll get new complicated technologies and browsers have to support them well. As the renderer in Mozilla is done well, it's easy to make Mozilla support these technologies. It wouldn't have been possible with Netscape4 or the code that the Mozilla team dumped when they decided to start from scratch. And as MSIE is a huge program, it probably also hides a lot of bad code which makes developing it worse.
As I see it: Mozilla will probably be ready in the first quarter. It will still be small and fast and I'll definitely love to use it.
Now, if you look at your server logs, you'll notice something pretty interesting - users of MIE form a "normal" bell curve - they're distributed from 2.0 to 5.0, with the biggest bump at 4.x. But all the netscape users cluster around the latest distrubition, and virtually all of them are using 4.x. OK, to be fair, "you're" server logs means across the board (I imagine slashdot's server logs break every curve).
So what? So, when Netscape 5.0 is done, and it works great, people will upgrade. 30 million people. This is a major milestone (to my mind) for the open source community - linux is in the purview of a very (dare I say select) few, but Netscape is centered squarely in midstream.
Now, you can argue that Mozilla isn't true open source, but you'd be needling semantics, and missing the big picture: A major company which makes a mainstream product is using public and volunteer help to develop a product that a major percentage of the internet, and indeed the US population are currently using, to say nothing of the rest of the planet....
Linus may have been the prime mover, but Netscape is taking the concept (and the result) to the streets.
I think that's worth crowing about.
neil
Yes, the NPL is indeed another one of those sneaky bastard "open source" licenses.. However, it was finalized sometime in 1998, and I don't believe AOL bought Netscape until 1999, IIRC (I don't know, do I? =P). I'm not too excited about the MPL either, however, although it is better than the NPL.. Being somewhat of a die-hard GPL'er, I'm annoyed with the MPL's incompatibility with it..
You may want to read On the Netscape Public License by Richard Stallman. It covers the differences between the NPL, MPL, and GPL. The GNU Project Web site is also an excellent source of information with regards to free software in general, the GNU philosophy, and the history of the movement. ;) Ok, so, enough shameless plugs..
There are a couple well-known ones.. And a few others that I can't think of right now.. The first, and most obvious, would be Lynx, but I rather doubt that is what you are looking for.. On the other hand, there is Emacs/W3, which you may find to be of a little more interest.
~ Kish
Not very much of the code is from the original Netscape.
The last major piece of original Netscape code was the network library (netlib) which was replaced by necko (new faster modular networking library) in the M9 release.
The layout engine has been totally rewritten (that's why it's took so long to get this far) as well as the widgets and other front end code. A lot more code in Mozilla is designed to be cross platform to make porting easier.
So it's a hard task to find any major bits of original Netscape code in Mozilla.
--
Hmm... Try deleting mozregistry.dat in your c:\windows directory. Also, if you still have problems, try finding an deleting old profiles in the user50 directory that Mozilla had installed, and see if that helps.