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. "

Comments

Re:Yes, but can it compete?

[SEE]

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.

Nail on Head

[Foogle]

The first article really hits it dead on. Mozilla M10 is really a decent browser. It's engine, at least, renders most pages as well as any other (yes, MSIE5 is still better, blah blah blah). The only issue I have with it (and this article) is the UI. The GTK interface is kludgy at best. I compiled it under OpenBSD with Lesstif support and I was suprised at how similar it was to Netscape. Stable too! I say the Mozilla team gives some careful thought to the GTK interface. Too many gadgets and gizmo-widgets spoils the application.

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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Not just the press

[rde]

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.

Public attitudes to Mozilla.

[scrutty]

I'd just like to point out that IMHO public perceptions of the health of mozilla might improve a whole bunch if it was easier to get the darn beast to run

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.

Mozilla for Mac == Word 6 for Mac?

[ToastyKen]

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?