Slashdot Mirror
Two Interesting Mozilla Articles
DragonHawk writes "First, a short review of the Milestone Ten release, which gives you a good idea of where Mozilla is at. Second, and more interesting, is this article on press attitude towards Mozilla. It gives you a real good idea of how big a project this is, and just how far they've come. Any web user should check them out. "
Mozilla is going to die if it doesnt get finished VERY soon.
Are you actually saying that, if Mozilla takes another 18 months, but when it is released it is better than the contemporaneous releases of either Opera or Internet Explorer, and you don't have to pay for it, you wouldn't switch to it? And that enough other people wouldn't switch to it that it would utterly fail to gain enough marketshare to not be considered "dead"?
And, of course, on Linux and many other platforms the only competition to Mozilla is earlier versions of Netscape, as Opera and IE on those platforms is either neither planned or still vaporware. Are you saying that a free Mozilla released in 18 months would not replace Navigator 4.x as the dominant browser on those platforms? If so, is this because you think people would keep paying for Opera, because IE will be released for Linux, or because nobody will upgrade from Netscape 4.x to Mozilla?
I really wonder what standard has to be applied to a reply to your post to qualify as a "stupid remark" relative to your post.
That, in itself, would be a victory. Microsoft would then make its operating system GUI dependent on an open-source product.
No, it doesn't help crush Microsoft directly. But for MS to use open source software as a major part of its OS? Can you say PR victory? Can you say credibility? If Microsoft did this, they'd render themselves completely unable to FUD open source software.
Will Mozilla have the ability to use the "View Source" command and edit, copy, paste, etc. the source which is being viewed? Yes, this functionality is already present in M10.
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
The funny thing is, I wrote a long rant, about how each nightly build has ever increasing usability, and as a joke I was going to put *crash* at the end, and it crashed :) :), to nice and mostly usable (crashing when you write amusing /. posts)
Anyway, M11 nightly builds went from barely usable (couldnt http-post) to http-post working, but quitting when you press any key
I wont push my luck this time...
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Word 6 was just plain a crummy product :)
.)
It was slow as blazes, and took out or encumbered features that I used daily. Equation editor is no substitute for the old typesetting commands, inserting symbols (greek) is much more complicated, and the mail merge is, well, wretched.
Aside from the unbearably slow, these problems exist to this day (or worse: open a file that uses the old formats, and it changes the *original* file to the new format without permission, unless you knew ahead of time to mark it read-only).
If it weren't for LyX, I'd still be using Word 5.1 today, as well as Excel 4. IM!HO, these were the last good products to come out of Redmond.
A while back, I needed to send out many job applications. I figured out that it would be easier to add mail-merge to LyX than to fight with the current MS version (hey, let's display the results of the conditional from the first record, rather than the conditional! See, a nice easy nothing to click on to make changes. Bleach.). I was right. With the mailmerge patch applied, I can now not only write merge code as was once possible, I can do the things that *should* have been in word's merge capacity to start with. (IF/ELSEIF, unlimited recursion . .
What worse can you say about a product than that it was easier to write something to replace it than to use it?
I would just like to point out that I originally saw these two articles linked from LinuxToday. I submitted them to Slashdot because they actually are not really Linux-specific at all, and are of interest to the general geek population. But I wanted to give LT their fair credit for good linkage.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Hands up all you mozilla bashers out there... slashdot must have the lowest ratio of feeding hands to biters in the quadrant.
Will Opera be better than Mozilla? Possibly. Is that a reason for abandoning Mozilla as doomed from the start? Absolutely not.
I've been using M10 for a while now, and I've got to say I'm impressed with the progress that's been made.
Shame on Netscape. They were supposed to build a web browser to meet the growing needs of today's users and instead they went and built a web browsing architecture to meet the growing needs of tomorrow's users and businesses. But I wanted it now, damnit!
Well said, that man. You've stirred at least one soul into resolving to finally getting around to submitting bug reports.
Remember: Mozilla may be bug-ridden, but that's mainly because of the large number of unreasonable assholes who look on it as a finished product, and give up as soon as there's a dodgy refresh.
It's not even beta, for fuck's sake.
...the ability to use the "View Source" command and edit, copy, paste, etc. the source which is being viewed? I never have like this particular lack of functionality in the previous Netscape browsers. Otherwise it sounds like the guys are doing a great job so far. Keep up the good work!
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Just compiled M10 this morning, and I'm not
impressed at all. On my AMD K6/2 400 Mhz it's
really jumpy and slow. Also, the proxy info
dialog doesn't let you enter in anything.
The text fields are there, but no input is
possible, so I couldn't even test out the
browsing. However, just trying to open windows
and pull down menus was quite slow.
I just did a default configure and make; did I
miss something?
--- witty signature
I don't think I've had a usable result out of any of the linux milestone builds since M6. It seems to be hellishly sensitive to shared library versions that I just don't seem to find commonly in place on many of the linux boxes I use.
I realise that this comment will generate a multitude of responses along the lines of "It works just fine for me loser, stop spreading FUD" but I'm just honestly reporting the state of play as I find it.
I would love to use a OS browser with the functionality that Mozilla offers , I would like to chip in to the development towards stability, even if only in the form of usable bug reports, just not quite enough to manually upgrade my libc , C++ runtime , compiler , ORB etc to match what seem to be specific linking requirements that you just don't get from the majority of GTK Unix Apps, even including that cherished old scapegoat for stability problems, GNOME .
The searching I have done seems to indicate that the released builds will work fine out of the box on up to the minute Red Hat installations, but I haven't been able to coax them into working on the older Red Hat SuSE or Debian boxes I have access to.
I'm just wondering if the ability to run on a wider range of GNU/Linux systems out there might engage or enhance that massively parallel debugging engine that helps drive OS projects along at such a staggering rate of improvement.
-- Oh Well
As a Mac user, I was concerned about the non-Mac-ness of Mozilla's interface. But some people argued the merits of using XUL for cross-platform-ness, making it easier to port and synchronize and so forth...
HOWEVER, isn't this precisely what happened with Word 6 on the Mac? In the interest of making the software identical across platforms, the Mac version lacked consistency with all other Mac applications, and didn't function in the way a Mac application was supposed to behave.
Everyone was up in arms about this, even causing Microsoft to release a (non-free) "downgrade" to Word 5.1. The people rejoiced when Word 98 felt much more (though not enough, imho) like a standard Mac application.
Is not the same thing happening to Mozilla? After all, even if, a skin is written to make it LOOK like Mac app, as long as it uses XML and not standard Mac toolbox controls, it simply will not FEEL like a Mac app. In M10, for instance, text-selection is a simple inverted white-on-black box, instead of using the standard Mac settings for text-selection coloring.
Likewise, many controls do not function as they do on a Mac. This will not be changed with a mere skin.
I think interface consistency within an operating system and the apps written for it are incredibly important, and I'm afraid Mozilla will not achieve this goal, and remind us in many ways of Word 6's cross-platform interface fiasco.
So my question is, will it be possible to actually make the Mac version of Mozilla use actual standard Mac controls? Does XUL support this? Or does it only support an approximation, in effect rewriting the Mac controls and not quite getting it right and getting a slightly off feel?
I realise that ;) :/) was meant to be ironic.
:)
M10 didnt have all the functionality I wanted, (proxys were still odd) whereas M11 rocks. Its stable enough. My initial post (the one that died, heh) was amazement at the rate of progress, the post that made it to slashdot (twice for some reason
I meant to inform people about the rate of progress, and that the nightly builds are useable, but only for the strong of heart
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Its just what the dir name said "1999-10-18-12-M11" :)
I think its the target milestone that this nightly build is aiming at, please dont hurt me, I really like moz, its quick and has a nifty interface, besides, no other decent graphical browsers work at all for me.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent