Slashdot Mirror
Why Mozilla is Alive and Well
primetyme writes "There's been a lot of press recently stating that the Mozilla project is a failure, a waste of time, and a failed open source endeavour.
I recently had the chance to talk with Chris Hoffman, one of the lead engineers from Netscape working on the Mozilla project, about why Mozilla is in fact a monumental success for the open source community, Web developers, and end users in general. "
I'm so glad to hear that netscape is gonna still be alive. I would hate to have to use Internet Explorer on my computer. I erase it every time i reinstall MacOS.
The first time I hit the link I received a "memory access violation" from the site. And now I get no response. Anyone else get through? And could you give an abstract.
Thanks.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Mozilla sounds like a great project, but unfortunately I need a browser NOW that is reliable enough for me to check /. ever 15 minutes or so:). Rather than writing a program which is so versatile(which is a good thing don't get me wrong). How about making one thing fully functional at a time.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Just wondering if there is a mirror or a working link of that comment...
But I doubt many people here thought mozilla was dead in the first place. Considering what they started with, they've worked miracles.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Why does Mozilla have such a communist logo? Yuck.
I have followed the Mozilla project from almost conception til now. I have downloaded every pre-alpha (may burn your HD) they have put out. It has gotten a lot better from the first builds. I like the newest interface they have put on it. It is a little buggy but hey it's not done yet. It finally loads Slashdot though and holds the login, so that for me is a bonus. It's runs pretty fast on the 60 Mhz Pentium Linux machine that I have right now. Can't wait til it's finished. That will be a grand day for the Internet in general and finally put my faith back in Netscape.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
Why does this matter? Because Mozilla is going to fully standards compliant. To wit:
What that means to us is that the days of having to code for 16 different browsers, while not over, are numbered. And the ability for one browser to try to lock out other browsers with little "Netscape Now" icons will be sharply limited. Yes, there will probably be proprietary add-ons, but developers have already been burned by these in the 4.x browsers: I don't think they will use them again.So we come to Mozilla. Yes its buggy. But speaking as a professional developer, that's OK at this stage of development. What's more important is that it is well-crafted.
Instead of a hodge-podge of shoddy code (like the old Netscape source base) it is well crafted, well designed code that is going to be extremely maintainable.
This is kind of like early versions of the Linux kernel (I ran 0.95, FTR): they weren't feature complete, weren't anywhere /near/ bug-free. But they were designed well and had a dedicated team of competent coders working on them. It didn't take long at all for Linux to become something to be reckoned with.
What we need to do is the same thing that early Linux adopters did: focus on the technology and give it time to mature. Marketing is /nothing/, technology is /everything/. Oh yeah: have a little loyalty, because its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.
-- Slashdot sucks.
But isn't publicity often like this? The Mozilla process is new (at least for most mainstream readers) and the result highly anticipated. The news outlets will be back and forth on this topic until they see a product that is at least equal to Internet Explorer 5 (which Nescape 4.7 definitely isn't). They're bashing Mozilla right now, but when it's ready they'll move on to "Ït kicks butt, but is it too late?" just as millions of us are quietly dumping IE.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
PS: This was a joke :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Mozilla developers need to learn the one word Netscape developers never seemed to digest:
DELIVER
Everything else is meaningless until they do.
While I think Mozilla has done a great deal, and I'm very impressed by it (whenever I can get it to compile) it reveals a problem with open source. If someone ever complains on /. or elsewhere, they're told "It's opensource, you work on it". The problem is that mozilla is a huge project and it takes many many hours to even understand how a bit of it works. This limits the number of people who can work on it to people who are very skilled, and have the time to figure it out.
Iain
PS Sorry for the newspaper headline like topic, but it was to fit it all in.
PPS Sorry if this is just stating the obvious.
"Connection Refused"
That didn't take long...
"...talk with Chris Hoffman, one of the lead engineers from Netscape working on the Mozilla project, about why Mozilla is in fact a monumental success for the open source community, web developers, and end users in general."
Now, don't get me wrong. I love Mozilla AND I don't think it is dead (yet). BUT, isn't this a little like asking Bill Gates if Windows 2000 is dead? For crying out loud, what ELSE is the lead developer going to say? "Yeah, it's dead. I'm just playing Solitaire and reading Slashdot all day."
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Much on the contrary, because it does limit contributors to those with sufficient skill, this guarantees that the result will have a very high quality. This automagically filters out people who either aren't skilled enough or people who don't have the time to make significant contributions. So the people who are able to contribute are those who are able to make the most significant contributions. This is not a problem with Open Source; this is its advantage!!
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Hey, this could be a learning experience for some. When Mozilla is released, and becomes popular overnight, some users will think "hey, the media has no idea what they're talking about." I beleve after the first release, there will be a wave of developers to jump on board. I know I'm not going to use IE. I just really don't want MS controlling the standards on the internet.
.sig this pop I as Watch
Mozilla is dead!! Long live Mozilla!!!
+--
stack. the off
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!
/. every 15 min or so' than NS 4.7 or MSIE 5.0.
We all complain to a deafening din that the web browsers are bloated and patchy and leaky and nasty. Then when a team actually is bold enough to say, "Alright, knock it over, burn it, and start over," people bitch, bitch, bitch that it's not ready already.
The fact is-- THE MOZILLA PROJECT *IS* WORKING. I use Mozilla on a daily basis now. It's wonderful. Strangely enough, it works faster and crashes less often for 'checking
Why don't YOU start writing a browser so you can have one NOW and then come back to us and tell us how full of crap the Mozilla team is.
Yup, you've got it right, the Media needs things to bitch/whine/moan about. And a failure for Open-Source, as well as one of the main competitors for IE is a juicy story that won't take much work, and will fly past their editor's desks.
Saying that it's got good underpinnings, and will be great when it finally gets finished doesn't make much of a story.
In fact, did you see it mentioned on Slashdot before someone wrote an article saying the converse? And Slashdot is one of the better Media outlets.
I'd say something is fundamentally wrong with the way Media operates. As soon as we get intelligent agents (or something else) going, we can then monitor projects on a good news basis, or a how-can-I-add/help my projects of interest, instead of looking for fires to put out.
-- Ender, Duke of URL
The develop/test cycle is out of vogue.
The most succesful software shops are focusing on having something compile every working day, regardless of how minimal that is.
Check out "Extreme Programming Explained" for more info.
Look, this project has taken WAY too long. IE, unfortunately, has gained so much ground because of its advanced features, it's sad. I refuse to use it because it always crashes on my Macs, but let's face it: IE *is* better at this point and has been for a year. It caches pages MUCH faster, gives me an actual print setup and preview, etc. I can't run Java on Mac becuase it will drive it into the crapper in a matter of minutes, while I can seleect between different MRJ plugins with IE. And look at all the litle features I see people eating up all the time with IE 5. I still refuse to use it, but I am sometimes forced to b/c I am a web developer. I don't have a choice.
Mozilla better appear soon, or we've seen the last of "Navigator" or whatever it is...... Remember "Internet Time?" Seems those hungry buggers working on Nutscrape 5 forgot about the old days......
When a stupid complaint is made-- i.e. "Whaa, whaa, it's not done yet. Mommy, when am I going to get my cookie? You're lazy!"-- and the petitioner is told to go help, the help requested isn't necessarily "Go wade through reams of C and C++ code, do something cool, and then complain."
There's also testing, i.e. running the thing and watching what happens if/when it crashes. I think the Full Circle stuff provides some useful information to them when it crashes. Writing JavaScript test cases, bug reports, making suggestions, etc, etal...
I'm not saying put out a crappy browser. I'm saying the exact opposite. Put out a quality, less functional browser. Then build upon that. I'll bet Mozilla would gain more support, patches and coders that way.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
There's been a lot of comments lately saying that Mozilla is dying, and in order to be "compatible" we should all start using IE. Even if a usable implementation of IE were available for Linux/BSD/whatever, would it be used? Possibly. But not by me. You see, compatibility is not one of my considerations. If I wanted to be compatible I wouldn't be running Linux would I? I'd be running what 90% of everyone else is running: Windows. I like being incompatible. And I will continue to use Netscape until Mozilla is usable. I don't care if its going to be compatible or not, since I live on that fringe of society which enjoys making life difficult for the norm. My web pages doesn't work in IE? Aaaw, well thats just tough mate.
I said a problem with the ethos of "It's opensource, so if you want a feature, you can add it".
I have begun using PNGs (no GIFs) on my web sites, but none of the browsers I have encountered fully support PNGs. IE4+ supports PNG best so far but even it doesn't support partial transparency.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
What's the deal with the topicmozzila.GIF icon? /. still seems to have quite a few gifs, actually.
/. have been a premiere site for Burn All GIFs Day?
I wouldn't say anything on any other web site (well, maybe GNU or Debian...), but shouldn't
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
It got it own /. Icon! WHOOPIE!
To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish. ---Euripides
...that is the way Microsoft does it.
Comon everyone! get with the (microsoft) program! It's the only (microsoft) way to do things!
Have you looked at the mozilla source? Your argument would some weight if you could cite specific problems with the source--but then, people would only say "Good job, you've found some problems; you're obviously smart enough, so go fix them." If you can't code, then use the nightly builds and report any bugs you find. There are all kinds of ways to help with the development effort. In the Open Source culture, there are complainers and there are contributors (a constructive criticism can be considered a contribution, by the way). Contributors are people who would rather make something happen than just sit back and carp about the state of the project.
Why do you think the mozpeople were so keen on re-designing from the ground up? Ease of maintenance. This means, making it less difficult for developers to dive in and work on the project, among other things like easier cross-platform implementation, i18n, etc. Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
slashdot broke my sig
This is typical 3-year-old talk. By proper upbringing, a child learns that it can't always have what it wants. We are all living in the same world, and we're sharing the same problems. Be reassured that whatever pains you feel, there are millions who share it with you.
Mozilla is an Open Source project, and was created from the start to be one. Which means the main part of the fun, is actually participating in the team. In some extreme cases, the final product is just a biproduct of the efforts. This means that people uses more time to design, code, redesign, recode and test. Just because they feel like making the best they can - to top their own and others' records. Just like in sports.
To read hundreds of comments about Mozilla being too unstable and we-need-a-workable-system-NOW!-mentality, STRONGLY reminds me of childishness. Good qualities in humans that relates to other human beings:
1) be respectful, patient, understanding and forgiving
2) don't take anything for granted
3) don't be disappointed
4) be thankful for what you get, both the good and the bad lessons
Of course you can rant and shout out your rage and frustration. But please don't do it at people actually working towards a solution.
It's very much like shooting yourself in the foot.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I'm really glad to hear that the Mozilla project is still going strong. While I don't really have the time to look at the source/contribute, I think that this is not only a great project but a VERY VERY important one as well. A recent slashdot editorial discussed how lack of funcionality with new types of content made the writer's wife turn away from Linux and I think that is a reasonable fear. I think that MSIE has some big problems, but I do like some of its features/support for web content (however superfluous/nonstandard it may be). I think that one of the greatest strength's of having an open source browser project is that it allows developers to add functionality. I don't know what the license is for Mozilla, but they really ought to make it GPL. Why? Simple. I don't expect netscape or any browser company to stay abreast of all the new features of their competitors browsers or of all the new web content mediums. However, I think nerds, programmers and developers everywhere can and will. If Mozilla was GPL'd, when MS comes out with a new browser with a new feature that Netscape lacks, programmers could easily add the functionality and release "their" version of netscape. Then, netscape, realizing how cool this new feature is, could put it into the "official" release. The same scenario could be repeated to add support for new web technologies. This is the strength of the project that can't be overlooked. By making this project open source, it allows the OSS and Linux communities to have a browser that can stay abreast of new web technologies faster than any closed source MS venture, can fix bugs and security holes (of which MSIE is NOTORIOUS) faster than its closed source rivals, and thus ensure both NS's position in the browser market as well as Linux's position in the OS market.
I think that all the people that have been saying "Mozilla is useless because I want something now...blah blah blah... I use IE because I can have it now..." should look at themselves in the mirror. I could see you about 3+ years ago with Linux. "I need a fully featured OS now...."
Do you see the problem? Instead of bitching about how you are impatient for a revolutionary browser that will knock the boots off of all current browsers to come out into at least a beta release, why don't you think about testing or at least supporting the project.
I am sure not everyone wants to cludge up their system by testing, but support goes a long way even if it is a simple "Keep up the work guys, I can't wait to see the finished product!"
This is not a simple project, and ignorant criticism is not helpful. I think that the developers would get the job done quicker and better with more support.
Well, I can't get to the article either, but it seems to me that if and when it's all done, it will be quite a triumph, that is, if all we hear about the quality is true. I sure hope so.
;-)
I'm going off to Coast Guard boot camp at the end of the month and when I get done with all my school (early spring) I expect to come back online and find the whole world straightened out.
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
Okay, I'll probably get (Score: -6, Flamebait) for this but here goes.
;) Perhaps the community needs to set up a Hire-Some-Graphic-Designers-And-Documentation-Expe rts Fund?
Much on the contrary, because it does limit contributors to those with sufficient skill, this guarantees that the result will have a very high quality.
Not always necessarily true. The second part of the poster's statement was "and have the time to figure it out". I imagine there are quite a few highly skilled people out there who would contribute to [Open Source project of choice] but don't have time because they've all got full-time jobs working for a software house producing closed-source software.
Also, companies generally do not pay for software developers who don't have a clue, at least if they can help it, so the full-time employees of a software house are not necessarily any less skilled than the contributors to an open-source project - and often they've been hired because they have the specific skills required to do the job. (I.T. skill shortage notwithstanding.)
So to suggest that having maybe several hundred skilled volunteers poring over code is necessarily going to produce a better result than having a couple of dozen skilled full-time employees who are being paid to do it is a little naïve.
It worries me that there are some fundamental skills that still appear to be very rare in the open-source community - the two biggies that spring to mind are user-interface design and documentation. It is probably the nature of the beast, of course, that none of us can draw for toffee and we all hate writing documentation, of course
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
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"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
It's already been done, but they're not going to release it. MS officially deny it, but from speaking to those who should know, it was apparently a fairly easy port from the Solaris IE codebase. Mind you, given how much IE for Solaris sucked, I think I'll stick with Netscape...
Of course, this is all unsubstantiated, and I have no actual proof, but I trust my informants, who have no need to lie about such things.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Admittedly there is a maximum number of core programmers for a project before it becomes muddled, but one of the big advantages of OSS is that anyone with a keyboard can fix the little bugs that crop up. I'm not saying that once Mozilla is stable people will flock to join the team, but that people will start using and patching it.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Mozilla milestone M11 is coming out any minute. Here's the open bug list. Obviously, the team is on the green and just about to sink the putt.
This is the one, guys. This is the first mozilla named "mozilla" instead of "apprunner". This is a fully functional browser, with all the trimmings (plus more), and it just could be good enough to browse with. If not, we can make it that way. The source code is only 20~ something meg - it's a reasonable sized project. It's ours. This is the time to jump in and help.
Guys, this is our last chance to claw back the client side of the net from Microsoft.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
am i the only one that couldnt get the link to open?? any mirrors??
If anyone is interested in what exactly the developers are doing on mozilla please see this page. It's supposed to be updated once a week http://www.mozilla.org/status/
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
CmdrTaco, please note. Netscape aren't the only people who could benefit from more eyes. Almost certainly everyone on Slashdot would be -more- than happy to help clean tarballs, debug code, and tweak capabilities in the Slash code, but we really can't, unless you put even a rough-cut tarball up. I am very grateful for the code that -is- there, and I wish there was some way of repaying you for your efforts in creating and maintaining the Slashdot code and site. Donating bug-fixes, speed-ups or possible refinements might be one way to do exactly that. All I need, to do so, is fresh code.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Instead of bitching, go download the nightly release and do some bughunting/verifying.
You'll find that mozilla is really beginning to move beyond it's alpha state into something usable. Now just for the bugs...
How am I Redundant being the Third post? And without anyone else asking this. Moderators, please check your "order" listings before you say Redundant.
I have level 2 with my karma, and I choose to only post at 1. And then I get moderated down for a simple question.
I was asking for an abstract on the articles. Please use your moderation points more wisely!!!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Amen to that my brother !!!! Why not build the browser first, then add all of the other mail/news/bloat stuff later. Maybe I'm being a little simple here, but why does the browser have to do everything under the sun... flame me if you will... but the drones at MS figured that out with IE...I don't want my browser to be my mail client/newsreader. I just want a friggin browser.
With todays technology why can't they build the beast so that it's modular, if you want all of the bloat..okay... just plug it in. Whatever happened to the basic Unix philosophy of making small programs that WORK and can be used as building blocks to do larger tasks. WHY MUST I BE OPPRESSED WITH BLOAT ?????
Remember back in old days when America was building these horrifically large inefficient cars? Then some companies from Japan called Toyota and Honda came out with these little efficient cars that weren't the most attractive things on the road.. but they just worked. That was the start of a revolution. HEY HONDA.. BUILD ME A FRIGGIN BROWSER DAMMIT.
Architecture is best done by a small number of people designing with as many components as possible (Cathedral style) whereas refinement and implementation is best done by a large body of developers (Bazaar style).
Mozilla is one of the best examples of mixing the two styles successfully, but they definitely need more developers helping in the Bazaar.
As for new testers, I also doubt that this would be highly useful at this stage.
At this stage of the development cycle, the team should all know each other, be able to gauge the quality of input from each other, and know what to expect from individual testers (i.e., is this tester telling me something useful??).
The notion that just throwing more people at even small tasks like testing, flies in the face of logic and the anecdotal evidence of numerous projects, including open source projects.
I've been using Linux and open-source software in general for a year and a half now, so I know that makes me a Johnny-come-lately, but this has been my experience: if I want software to do something, I can always find it, and either it works better than its equivalent in Windows, or it's a few months away from doing so. I've been "spoiled" by getting everything I want from OSS. My problem (and possibly others' problem) is this: if the open-source movement can make an entire Operating System, which is updated frequently, and is becoming increasingly user-friendly, shouldn't a decent web browser be a trivial matter? Please don't consider this flamebait, I'm just trying to explain the mentality of the "whiners".
grep -ri 'should work'
I use IE5 because it is a really really good browser ... available now at the same price as Mozilla.
You mean you pay the same amount of money for both products.
Price? What price is giving a single company (any single company) control of the future of the information age? A lot more then money, I would say.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
if you did, you would know that the last thing the mozilla team needs to contend with at this stage is more developers.
thanks for playing.
Been there done that, and it's just not that hard. Part of the HTTP request header includes the name of the browser making the request, so it is common for sites that make use of templating engines and database back ends to serve a different page based on which browser is making the call, and whether various modules are installed.
What might not be obvious is that what we're really talking about is different levels of HTML compliance more than which browser. Yes, it takes a little more work, but it's not rocket science, and these techniques widen the audience for any given site.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I can build and *run* from CVS now, and the only thing I needed to do was update libIDL. It's still a *little* crashy, but really not that bad. They do still have some memory usage issues, though.
The page rendering is great, and forms work better than they did before.
I think they'll be able to have a decent beta by the end of the year.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Why does evrybody seem to assume the whole world will be jumping on mozilla as soon as its released. They won't, you'll just be coding another version of your page for yet another browser.
The idea is that, with a fully standards compliant browser supporting HTML, CSS, and DOM, you won't be coding another version of your page for yet another browser. You will be coding another version of your page for the last time. Because if NS5 and IE6 are both standards compliant, you can write one set of code that works for both.
I agree that backwards compatability will continue to be a pain. It always is.
Mozilla will be yet another not fully backwards compatible browser.
That is (unintentional, I think) FUD. Mozilla will not be backwards compataible with non-standard extensions. However, if you code your pages to use standards only, like I do, it won't be a problem at all. HTML and CSS are very forwards-compatible, by design.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What other open source project would you expect Netscape Communications Corp (or AOL) to be involved with?
The fact that it has taken a whopping long time for the (marginally usable) M10 release to arrive is not a clear example of failure; the project has had to labour under several significant constraints:
This left gaping holes in the source code tree, things that had to be reimplemented.
What with the above gaping holes, and other things that had grown into being ill-designed, it made huge sense to rebuild a whole lot of the functionality from scratch.
If a version that is of "production quality" is released in the next 4 months, which is not inconceivable, that essentially means that Mozilla has been recreated in two years, which is certainly not a monumental failure.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
For all those people whinging that Netscape 5/Mozilla is late, blah, blah - how about getting off your arses and making it happen quicker? You don't have to be a coder to do this. You simply have to run the browser and submit bug reports. The sooner bugs are found, the sooner they will be fixed.
Fred Brooks may be a great writer and visionary but he didn't forsee the enormous scaling potentials in Free Software. In particular not he, nor anyone else, considered debugging to be a massively parallelizable task. (That is, until Linux made it big and everyone and their pet monkey wrote ZDnet articles about it).
As is often quoted here, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
--Ben
so it is common for sites that make use of templating engines and database back ends to serve a different page based on which browser is making the call,
I did some graphics work for a design co. back in the summer, and the site they were working on had 5 different code bases, to cover all possibilities for different browser versions.
I thought that was a BIT much, but the client (a very large airline, BTW) demanded compatibility and was willing to pay for it.
So, it's possible, as long as people don't spoof their Client Headers.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Erm, the thing that makes Moore's Law work is the fact that as the number of developers increases, so too does the amount of managerial overhead in making sure that team A knows what team B is doing. An open source project is different: Everybody knows what everybody else is doing - there's the source right there. Furthermore, managerial overhead is close to nil since we're dealing with volunteer time and volunteer labor. Therefore, an OSS project should be able to sustain a much larger number of developers. Linux, for example, has hundreds if not thousands of developers. A project with that many coders would likely collapse in a commercial software house or else become a terrible, bloated mess. (Windows 2000, anyone?)
Mozilla will not be anything special until it gets into beta and has a large user group. It is possible that such a user group will not be obtained until the official release though. Anyhow once mo has a large user group people are not going to care how buggy it is or if it sucks because the community will debug it and give me a good linux browser finally.
So? Amiga has its own Slashdot Icon. You think we're ever going to see /that/ come back to life? ;)
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Without denegrating C-T's great work on the Slashdot software, I'd like to point out there's an Open Source weblog at squishdot.org. It's in quite an early state - looks rudimentary next to Slashdot, but it has a real Open Source Definition compliant license and releases are done reasonably often. Future versions will probably incorporate ZDiscussions, a component of Confera which is distributed on the zope web site, and of course the whole thing is built on Zope.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
(Note: I am talking about the final, finished Mozilla browser, whenever that may come)
I'm a Mac user. I get IE and NS bundled on my System CD-ROMs.
Therefore, I hope to steve that Mozilla 1.0 gets bundled with MacOS (X or 9.x) System CDs
Imagine the captive audience!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I don't think any of things have anything to do with daily builds. All a daily build means is that all of the checked in code builds together. It doesn't mean you have to check in your code at the end of every day. It doesn't mean you can't take an extra day to document everything before you check it in. It doesn't mean you can't take the time to architect and design and properly code your unit before you check it in. Daily builds also have nothing to do with arbitrary deadlines.
Where I work we do daily builds. But we are missing all of the other problems you cite. We are the first project at my company to have daily builds and we are also the first project to do a non-slapdash job with high code readability and non-crap software.
Your problems are with management, not daily builds.
In fact, if I recall, he seems to promote early involvement as the useful approach.
Price? what's the price of losing user base because Linux has a shitty browser? I would rather see IE on Linux trounce Netscape than see any Linux users go back to Windows because Windows has a funtional browser.
0 1 - just my two bits
http://www.heineken.nl/ The *are* a bunch of dope smoking commies over in Amsterdam. Pass the hookah!
I just wish they'd have focused on the browser portion only rather than trying to make it do mail and news and instant messaging. They probably could have cut a couple of months off the dev cycle.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Very few Bazaar projects start as Bazaars - usually a rudimentary but working product is gotten out the door in "Cathedral" style, after which outside contributors join up because there's something useful that they can contribute to. In contrast, at the start Mozilla was not anything that even developers could use, and thus the project didn't have much outside participation at that point. It's well beyond that now, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Newsflash folks - ITS LATE.
Nowhere in any open source document have I seen any support for the notion of piling on developers at the last minute.
When ESR designs and manages the construction of an entire OS, I'll put him on par with Fred Brooks. Until then, I'll stick with advice from Brooks that has served me well for a long long time, and will certainly outlive ESR's hype machine.
Okay, I for one do not find netscape communicator or mozilla a sufficient browser for linux as of now. Right now, they are both slow, memory hogs, and crash frequently. Does anyone know if there is a future for Konquerer, the KDE web browser? It seems really nice, just no java yet and its built into kfm.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Yah, open source is hard to get up to speed on, but in fact if you start doing it, you'll find that it's often easier than you think, and the more you do it, the quicker you can come up to speed the next time. So don't be shy - jump in and go for it!
Keep in mind that Microsoft's interest isn't in explorer itself, but in preventing another browser from being a standard upon which applications could be based. This is why they spent a fortune to push it on Apple--netscape being standard on macs could have meant apps for netscape instead of mac, which could then run on netscape on hardware that MS wants to run windows.
If linux gets consumer market share, expect IE to be released for it simply to block netscape.
hawk, esq.
IE 6 is supposedly going to be fully standards compliant.
/nothing/
Really?
In all honesty, I believe that about as much as I believed MS when it said that Windows 95 was going to be completely rewritten to be 32-bit, multithreaded, with no legacy code.
I guess you missed the whole Usenet astroturf campaign that MS used to discourage people from using OS/2. It's 4 years later, and we're still waiting.
I'll believe that a MS product is fully standards-compliant when I see it, and not one second before. (nb. This is not to imply that I believe that they won't or can't - anything is possible.. I just don't believe anything that comes from Redmond until I see it.)
Marketing is
Of course marketing is something - it (apparently) has you believing that IE6 will be fully standards-compliant.
Mozilla is Netscape. Netscape is just another company. If they can't cut it, sayonara. Oops, that already happened.
Note that AOL uses IE and will continue to certainly for another year.
http://browsers.evolt.org/mozilla.html
The box that got
Thanks for all the comments so far. Hopefully this gets moderated up so some people can actually read it
.djc.
Well put. And in that spirit Well done guys, keep up the good work!
I don't want to be saddled with buggy, non-compliant bloatware for the rest of my life as a web developer. I'm sick of coding for n browsers all the time. Remember the whole concept of platform-independent browsing? Yeah, some guy by the name of Berners-Lee thought the web should have one set of standards.The situation right now sucks. The Mozilla team has, in the truest open source spirit, decided to do the Right Thing, and I for one am very happy about that.
So you nay-sayers can go and browse in your bug-ridden, bloaty, crash prone OS, and wait for the next set of MS Web Standards to hit the streets. I hope you enjoy it. But stop getting the way of a worthwhile project.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
LOL, Sorry that's really funny.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
What ever became of that jack-ass that made the big public stink about quitting the project? Where's he now? Does he feel like a moron yet?
Then, after the 3.0 release, the hack C coders who created it decided to rewrite the whole thing in C++. This was going to take "6 months." None of them had any OO development background, BTW.
Two years later, the company was bleeding money badly and laying off developers. Designer 4.0 still hadn't shipped. Meanwhile, Corel Draw had gone through two major revisions.
Lessons learned:
- Never be arrogant about market lead. That can be lost in a single release cycle.
- Don't release buggy crap.
In a closed-source, commercial project, these two bullets compete fiercely. Open source means never having to say, "Release it or we'll lose revenue!"Excuse me?! M 9 ?!??! I'd suggest taking a look at the nightly builds. M9 and the current nightly builds can hardly be called the same browser.
Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
This is indeed the case. Both myself and the other MathML developers were able to get right into the guts of the Mozilla layout engine with very little effort. I had some basic frame manipilation code up and running with only a few hours of work. Roger Sidje (head MathML honcho) has managed to single handedly get large amounts of the MAthML spec running with only a couple of thousand lines of code... the basic system is incredibly modular and fairly easy to understand.
Mozilla is an exemplary Open Source project, particularly when it comes to software Engineering quality. The existing team are really helpful *and* ethusiastic (unlike FSF projects for example) when it comes to "outsiders". The systems they have in place for maintaining the schedule(bugzilla), system quality(bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai), etc are some of the best I have seen anywhere at keeping problems in check.
A note on timescales.. somebody said that it had taken 2 years to get to the point we are at right now. I think that that needs to be broken down a bit. The original Raptor(new layout engine) team (circa 5 folk) started in October 97 AFAIK, the Raptor source was released a month after the Classic Mozilla source in April 98...no sizable team was working on the code until October 98 (!!). Essentially Mozilla has been built in a little over 12 months... for a 1.5+ million line (Open or closed source) program that's bloody amazing!
I think that everyone (especially dorks like Jesse Berst) should give the Mozilla team a big hand instead of shooting them down. Hats of to guys like Mike Shaver, Chris Hoffmann, Rick Gessner, Kipp Hickman, etc, etc, etc
Apparently there will be some sort of official beta release, now that mozilla is architecture-complete. I haven't been able to find any explicit information about this. Anyone have any info? I would like to know projected dates, projected features, and projected stability.
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
There's a mirror of the interview at mozillazine.org
Like many of us, I had myself convinced at one point earlier this year that Mozilla would fail. All the rumors, from AOL killing it to it just killing itself have come to me through this site, and I'm glad for it, because I want to know the rumors. But I got caught up, and it wasn't until I downloaded M10 that I realized my mistake.
People, never could I have expressed this more strongly... try it out! I tried it out, and the bugs were quite obvious for the large part. However, the engine is quite nice, it loaded Slashdot very fast on my connection. But the real nifty part was when I was designing a web site... I kept trying to use CSS and transparent PNG images, but Netscape won't view them right. Interestingly enough though, Mozilla parsed it all perfectly! Even the transparent PNG, it all looked great!
Right off, I realized that the people who are making Mozilla aren't screwing around. These people are serious, and they are making a serious browser, one that seems to have its standards straight for once! If I could code, I would be doing all I could to help these guys, as they are working on an application that will be a cornerstone of Linux in the future! Please, people, just give the damn thing a chance, it might crash but it won't bite, and you just might be surprised!
Know ye not that ye are Gods???
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = S1001 (Memory allocation error)
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access 97 Driver] Too many client tasks.
Date/Time: 11/12/99 12:07:52
Browser: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; I)
Remote Address: ---.---.---.---
Template: C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\EVOLT\SHOWART.CFM
Query String: menu=8&cid=562&catid=25
DOH! Memory allocation error?...too many client tasks?...who would put an Access database into production...dum...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
So kfm is going to be feature-rich like Netscape or IE and yet still remain small? .. I notice you mentioned 'no java yet' .. thank goodness for that!! .. kfm was meant to be a damn file manager, what's with having to make every application do EVERYTHING... jeez.. Some people might find it useful but it's just worthless bloat for everyone else. Like mail readers and newsgroup readers within the browser .. WHY??!? .. I already have a mail reader - it's called pine - and a news reader - it's called tin.
.. just reading this as well as all the comments above gets me ticked off with it all.
Not really meant as a flame to the previous poster
Why can't we have one application for one task and keep things simple.
Mozillazine speedily got permission to post a mirror of the article:
http://www.mozillazine.org/evolt_mirror/
Dave
--
This site suffers from three fatal errors. Can anyone spot them?*
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = S1001 (Memory allocation error)
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access 97 Driver] Too many client tasks.
Date/Time: 11/12/99 12:23:34
Browser: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.12 i686)
Remote Address: (me!)
Template: C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\EVOLT\SHOWART.CFM
Query String: menu=8&cid=562&catid=25
1. Access database
2. Windows NT
3. Cold Fusion
Moderate this down as a troll or flame if you want, but the evolt.org site is a good example of bad application architecture, and instructive.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I used to love Netscape. Version 3 was a great product. It did everything I wanted it too. IE3 on the other hand was slow, ugly and buggy. Then one day I decided I'd try IE4. Some of the milestone releases look pretty good but the problem is IE5 is here right now. It works great... I can't even remember it crashing on me before. So what if Mozillia comes out? IE 5.5 will be out soon to fill any gap there may be between the two. Like it or not, Netscape didn't loose the web browser battle... they gave up before it even started.
I would rather see IE on Linux trounce Netscape than see any Linux users go back to Windows because Windows has a funtional browser.
That's a mighty big "if" there. MSIE is pretty much a Windows-only browser. Sure, MS has token ports to other platforms, but anyone who uses them will tell you their performance and reliability is the same as Netscape.
The thought of users turning to Windows over Linux because of the browser is bad, yes, but turning to IE over Netscape is largely the same decision.
That being said, would I complain if MS ported IE to Linux? No in and of itself. But if this hypothetical Linux IE port performed as bad as some of the other IE ports I've seen, it would only reinforce, my opinion of Microsoft products.
And that doesn't even touch the IE security-bug-of-the-month club. IE makes the old sendmail club look tame by comparison.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = S1001 (Memory allocation error)
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access 97 Driver] Too many client tasks.
Date/Time: 11/12/99 12:58:13
Browser: Mozilla/4.06 [en] (Win95; U)
Remote Address: 149.164.188.213
HTTP Referer: http://www.slashdot.org/
Template: C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\EVOLT\SHOWART.CFM
Query String: menu=8&cid=562&catid=25
evolt.org looks /.ed but mozillaZine has a mirror of the article
Let's not ask if it's going to happen. Let's ask how it's going to happen. The best figures I know of are in the recent findings of fact. These by the way have been found as fact. (duh) So you can treat them as more reliable than normal statistics. What they clearly show is that AOL by itself can tip the balance back to 50%+ for Mozilla. Let alone Compuserve (which happens to be a subsidiary). And all the other online service providers that were forced by Microsoft to push IE.
There are a couple things that have to happen before AOL and the other online services to unilaterally change the face of browser market share: Both these things are going to happen. I'm beginning to feel better already.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible
Ok, you abandon it and I'll keep using it. I happen to use it on a daily basis - having switched from writing all my technical documents in HTML, whereas formerly we used to use Word 6 format. This works marvelously - our docs are all internally hyperlinked now, they look great when you email them, they're a fraction of the size, everybody can read them, just using their browser. Ah, HTML is obviously here to stay. You're not just FUDding are you? WTF, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
To bad Mozilla isn't exactly an OSS project. It's a Netscape project that publishs the source. It's virtually 100% Netscape developers working on it. The OSS community has contributed essentially nothing but bitching to the project. With a 'true' open source project you're going to get a lot of duplication of effort as people grab the source and fix X bug, that will only get worse as the nubmer of people working on it gets larger.
Quit bitching about having to code for n browsers! Jesus, just write a page that works in all of them, they are all essentially HTML3 compliant. You're just bitching because you can't implement the same advanced features in all browsers. If you want to write a page that works in all browsers it's easy enough.
The logo reflects the fact that Shephard Fairey, who masterminds the Obey the Giant (nee Andre the Giant) campaign is also the person who designed the Mozilla site. He clearly has a fascination with Soviet imagery and iconography, as his wonderful series of Giant posters demonstrates. Also see BLKMRKT the agency he works for, for more examples of his work.
Yeah, M10 and the recent nightlies show a pretty good browser with what appears to be decent DHTML support and good speed. And yeah, it supports XML+CSS1. But last time I checked, draft-spec XSL support (which is very much a part of IE5, thanks) was both lousy and not part of the main branch. Boo.
And how's the ActiveX support? Crappy security model? Yeah. IT manager's nightmare? Yeah. Only really supported on Win32? Yeah. Integral part of MSIE, which they're shooting for compatibility with? Big yeah.
And unless they work really hard on making their icky dynamic-update module installation system usable by normal people (and SmartUpdate sure wasn't), they're still going to be way behind IE5 when they ship. Sure, Mozilla's cross-platform, but can it go on being a year behind in standards implementation and ease of use?
Not "HIS". "Ours". The community. Us. Not him. Not you. Us.
The Netscape license is OS. That means that this application is Free (speach, not beer). That's a good thing.
--EOF
Instead of bitching, go download the nightly release and do some bughunting/verifying.
I'd love to. I'm using Linux/PPC and I cannot get Mozilla to build on my system.
Are there any known workarounds that I should be aware of when compiling? Failing that, are there any precompiled binaries available?
Jay (=
I use alot of DHTML so I'm aware of the differences between the IE/Netscape implementations of DHTML.
It appears that at present Mozilla does not support as many of the property tags as IE does, for example, in IE I can put an ID on a SPAN tag and modify the SPAN's properties at runtime using CSS, unlike NS. Will Mozilla at some point completely support Microsoft's DOM model, or will we be going backwards in functionality?
From Jessie Burst's ZDNet totally uniformed article this week Why the Browser War is Over" at http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_4076.h tml, (which incidentally claimed at one point that mozilla would not support XML and then erased this assertion without comment):
Now it appears Netscape's browser won't survive. Zona Research is the latest to declare IE victor with survey results showing 64% of corporations picked IE over Navigator."
Let's pick out the lunacy of this:
1. When Netscape controlled 75% of the browser in '96, did Microsoft say the browser war was "over"? I don't think so. But apparently, to Berst, a 64% lead means "victory" now.
2. But it *DOESN'T* to Zona research. The study cited did claim it was the "end of an era" but not the era Berst is hoping for! Zona didn't say anything about the war ending between Netscape and IE. In fact, its saying that the war has NARROWED into a two-browser competition (they make an analogy to the cola wars which are an ongoing two-brand competition). (See http://www.zonaresearch.com/info/pre ss/99-nov08.htm for Zona's ACTUAL conclusions about the browser war.)
3. The study interviewed a grand total of 236 *CORPORATE* respondants, according to the press release at http://www.zonaresearch.co m/browserstudy/1999/nov99/index.htm They were asked about the browser they used "at work" (see http://www.zonaresearc h.com/browserstudy/1999/nov99/chart1_sm.gif) Note that this study tells us _nothing_ about non-corporate or individual usage.
4. To give you an idea of how this survey was conducted, "approximately 300 corporate IT professionals" (if 236 is approximately 300) from "a variety of market segments" were asked if they used a browser, and if so, what they'd downloaded lately. (See http://www.zonaresearch.co m/browserstudy/1999/nov99/index.htm) Looking at the bottom of the graph at http://www.zonaresearch.com/browserstudy/1999/nov9 9/index.htm, unless I'm interpreting it incorrectly, the browser questions had N=172 -- only 172 respondants to this question? So the 64% victory comes from the PRACTICES (not necessarily PREFERENCES) of 172 corporate user's AT WORK. Great.
5. Of those surveyed in Oct 1999, NINE said they were still using IE 3.x. Compare with FOURTEEN claimed to be using Netscape Navigator 5.x!! (See http://www.zonaresearc h.com/browserstudy/1999/nov99/chart2_sm.gif.) Fourteen people (6% of N=232)using a PRE-ALPHA product of Mozilla at work? That's weird.
6. The people interviewed "are selected from the IntelliQuest Technology Panel." (See http://www.zonaresearch.com/p roducts/products.htm#reports which are 32,000 people on some list I guess. Who are these people? I'm not in any way a survey expert but don't usually they say these people are phoned at random and there's such-and-such a margin of error..? Maybe someone out there knows (?)
7. According to the survey, 69% of users are REQUIRED or ENCOURAGED to use IE by their jobs (See http://www.zonaresearc h.com/browserstudy/1999/nov99/chart4_sm.gif) But only 64% do, suggesting that 5% are intentionally violating their work's mandate to use IE! And indeed, 31% of companies say to employees "use Netscape" but 5% more (36%) do! (See chart at http://www.zonaresearch.com/info/pre ss/99-nov08.htm - Looks like Microsoft's well known practices are squeezing corporations to use IE, but the users know better :)
8. Zona's list of "key clients" includes... surprise surprise... MICROSOFT! (See http://www.zonaresearch.com/info/clients.h tm
Hmmmmmm......someone leave the spin cycle on for too long?
I think it's important to note that the reason perceptions about IE "winning the war" are so important now to M$ is that it's self-fulfilling-- the notion that IE has "won" will encourage more people to use IE, thus more firmly establishing it as a standard which in turn causes more people to use it.
That's why it's so important to fight these attempts to declare a "winner" -- because some policymaker at some company who's on the fence on what browser to use is going to read it and go "oh, looks like I'd better go with IE which won the war rather than that non-XML supporting Netscape which is being ditched by AOL. Who wants those headaches?"
Losing the spin war is losing the browser war. We must get back control and get the truth out whenever bogus articles like this come out!
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Have you considered writing your techinical documentation in the sgml tools, format?
We find it very useful, since it can produce
i) well-formatted, hyperlinked and indexed HTML suitable for online documentation
ii) from the same files, indexed and numbered cross referenced well-formatted LaTeX pages suitable for conversion to postscript and pdf for downloadable documentation, and for printed manuals
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The other problem is that most open source developers like the GPL. Mozilla is not GPLed, and thus fewer developers are interested in helping with it.
All these sore heads remind me of the unwarranted attacks on Ross Biro, the original author of the Linux networking code. Those a-holes bitched at Ross so much when the code wasn't ready in a week, Ross Biro dropped out completely. It is one of the darker uglier events in the history of Linux. People who can't code should get a clue or shut up.
The complexity of those standards makes it clearly hard for anyone other than a large software development organization to implement them, something that is surely desirable from Microsoft's point of view. Many of those standards are of little or no benefit to end users, but simply allow marketers to push content at consumers that is ever more flashy. There is little widespread practical experience with components like style sheets, and the experience we have with components like JavaScript tell us that it's pretty much the worst scripting language in existence.
Furthermore, the complexity of those new standards also makes it hard for authors to produce web pages, at least unless they buy an bunch of expensive tools from Microsoft or other vendors. To me, that takes away from the original mission of the Web.
So, I'm wondering who is actually setting the agenda and why Mozilla is struggling so hard trying to keep up with an agenda that other people are setting. Is IE5/NS5 really where we want to go? Whatever happened to making it easy to share information and giving everybody access?
Well--the latest version I've tried was M9, and it seemed to have quite a long way to go before being as stable as Naviagtor|Communicator 4.[67].
Now, though I keep hearing people complain about the quality of Netscape's latest "main-stream" offerings for Linux, in my experience both work better than any contemporary or past GUI browser on Linux or Windows. I've yet to have a single crash with the Debian smotif-linked 4.6 or 4.7 versions--and I have used them quite extensively.
Currently I mainly use KDE's "file manager" kfm (w/libkhtmlw) for browsing, mainly because it uses less RAM than Navigator, and I find it also works extremly well.
I guess I just don't see a desperate need for a new "high-quality" browser for Linux--we already have some very good options. That's not to say I don't enthusiatically support the Mozilla project--in fact it's what finally motivated me to learn C++, and I hope I can eventually make some contributions to it.
- It's late to market, by a VERY long period of time.
- Open source developers aren't exactly lining up to help out with the project.
- In the meantime, a much better product is gaining significant market share.
Indeed, when you add up the facts, there can be no doubt: Windows 2000 is dead.Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Building daily just means the the production/stable source tree builds correctly. It does not mean that all checked out source code compiles or must be checked in daily. Groups that do daily builds often have two source trees: production/stable and dev/current. When code is solid, it can be moved from the dev/current tree to the production/stable. This method is as old as the sun. Check out Fred Brook's Mythical Man-Month . Published in 1975, he describes using a production source tree and a "developer sandbox". The point of daily builds is to have recent, but stable, software builds for internal "dogfooding".
cpeterso
Could someone please take the time to
explain to me why the open-source community
has not early and eagerly supported/encouraged
the Mozilla project? What seems to have
happend (at least as I see it anyway) is that
the project has at best been ignored
and at worst openly scorned.
This makes no sense to me as:
1. This would have been a great chance
to show other companies that opening
up their source code is a good thing
that will benefit all parties.
2. The browser is perhaps the most
important application on the desktop
today and not having a good one
can severly hurt an operating systems
adoption
Just my 2 cents...
github.com/chrispollitt
I have M10 (the default ICEwm look is killer) and I will definitely grab M11 when it comes out. Mozilla is my future browser, Come Hell or DOJ. Maybe the geniuses of slashdot will wait for Internet Destroyer fur Linux, but IMO they're delusional. (MS can keep that shit anyway, even IF!)
Seriously, I really like that red logo they have. It's a real eye-catcher.
The fundamental reason Mozilla is having such a hard time is that nobody gets paid to do it. As a software engineer, I know that much of my work was done purely because I got paid, and not because I was truly interested. If I didn't get paid, most of my bugs would go unfixed, and I would eventually quit once the interest wears off (it always does). The fact is that Gecko won't do anything anyone hasn't seen before - it will show web pages. Yes, it might do it faster than before with some new features, but the concept is old. Because of this, Mozilla will continue to see high turnover and disappearing developers on the project. It's disheartening to see everyone else in Internet business getting rich while these Open Source Mozilla developers are actually getting shafted by Netscape in its quest to regain browser market share. Open source is software development communism and it works only to the degree communist government works. In contrast, Microsoft operates on capitalism, and thus has a natural advantage over open source development.
just my personal opinion.
Actually, Mozilla is very modular. The loader itself (apprunner) is less than 20KB. Everything else is done with shared libraries, this biggest of which is less than 500KB.
That's not to say I disagree with everyone's main point here--that the developers should have first focused their energies on the HTML/browser component instead of the Java/email/NNTP cruft. If they had, we might not have got into this silly debate about Mozilla being a "failure" in the first place.
I agree with this 100 percent.
Get a fast, compact browser up and running first. I just want to surf the web fast and I don't need all of that other crap since I use other programs for e-mail and newsgroups anyway.
I think the problem is that most people are blinded by flash and glitz. They think that a program is better just because it has a lot of fancy features, even though they won't use them anyway. Sheer ignorance.
If Mozilla wants to compete, get the basic browser working FIRST, worry about all of the gewgaws later. If they do so, they'll have my loyalty.
In other words, it's really a "1.0" product.
May I make a polite suggestion to ANY person who writes or is learning to write HTML? First go to the web site at http://www.anybrowser.org and read why it makes sense and how to code for the greatest variety of browsers out there.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
this says communicator 5 beta is slated for next month... so i guess that translates to next march. but anyway heres an interesting link i stole from ZDnet: http ://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2392924, 00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01
"Who is this band of rogues?" I hear you asking. Why, it's none other than the KDE team! They're not only producing a browser that is HTML 4.0-compliant (a la Mozilla) but they're also adding support for *crucial* modern features like Java/javascript. For pictures of their sweet, dear Konqueror, then click here. The Konqueror is truly the next generation, my friends- it's like IE for Linux. Only faster, better, and quite simply, much much prettier. It renders Slashdot correctly (hooray!) as well as needed sites. Don't believe me? Go on, check out my screenshots. They haven't been doctored, although I could have (quite easily, I might add....) with the GIMP.
Interesting features of the Konqueror include:
In short, support KDE! Help them out too. Just because they don't have quite as much publicity as the Mozilla project... well, their product is competitive as far as rendering speed goes. (based on speculation/personal opinion; last Mozilla build I tried was M10, and I know stuff has happened since then...)
sgml is too complex, at least the people who developed XML thought so.
LaTex is useless as an output format (you don't want to edit the output anyway). Lets go straight to postscript/pdf.
Otherwise I agree that SGML is very useful for some purposes. But basically the domain you mentioned (technical documentation) is the only domain it is really used.
Jilles
The WWW Consortium got it right when they developed stylesheets. I don't care whose idea it was, it may have Microsoft's idea, who cares. But with stylesheets we can go to a page with pure structured html. That way we can render it anyway we want by putting in our own stylesheet (will mozilla have this capability?). Text-based browser can render it also. This way the web authors don't need to rely on tables and tags to make it perty.
The great thing about the WWW Consortium standards is that they do 'em the right way. Separate presentation from content is key.
I love stylesheets. I'll have to try the w3/emacs browser cause I guess it does nifty things with stylesheets, I think.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
Here it is (Linus talking about the state of Linux): and (like most good things in life it's free :)
a quote from the transcript reads:
Linus T.:" Suddenly I could understand what Scott was all about... There's a teaching there and I'll call it "the Sun disease" but it's true of others too. You start really hating your competition to the point that instead of doing the right thing for your customers, you try to screw over your competitors any which way you can... and then you come up with bad licenses for your new programming languages... Completely hypothetical example [laughter and clapping]. I was almost in a situation where I was thinking, "Okay, how can I screw Microsoft?" You start not thinking clearly.
ouch cat got my tongue...
LaTeX output isn't useless, unless you have another typographical layout engine lying around someplace. Converting plain text into kerned, justified, etc. output isn't trivial.
I remember that IE 4 took several years to get out too.
Mozila is following the recommendations exactly, mins a few bugs which will be worked out. Several months ago they decided not to support NS4 style DOM so everything will need to be recoded to standards.
NT5 er 2000 was suppose to be out in 95
This comes from former experience as an aol user and tech support slave (no NDA information is in here, for the lawyers :) AOL has this very pretty little screen that comes up after every big update. It often times will take anywhere from 3 minutes to 45 minutes to finish an update. (The upgrade from AOL's old browser to IE 3.02 was performed this way.) So, if they are unbound from their contractual obligations, then they can just update as often as they like. It's very likely that when Mozilla goes to middle beta stages that it will be open to AOL beta testers. (I know there are at least 50,000 and believe there are more, and they do post bug reports) After that and contractual obligations aside, AOL may force Mozilla on the world. (read: 15,000,000 consumers.)
people wonder why mozilla is such a big deal, the answer is simple. if you want to keep your browser up to date with all the newest frills you have to keep adding "features", sooner or later these features are so big and cumbersome that you have Internet Explorer. Eventually you have to totally re-write the browser to account for all the new technology that has been created over the years... enter in mozilla.
if you like a 90 MB download of a web browser, then go for IE, if you like a 5 MB download go get mozilla.
and besides, i never understood why people dont like th eidea of a new browser that is better. i understand sceptics and all, but shouldnt people want better products, and after all IE is far from perfect?
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
Not just an NT box, but an NT box publishing out of Access. I think Access was the limiting factor here, not IIS.
Actually, I do code pages that work in all browsers (lynx through IE5). Don't even ask how many I test in.
You're also right about me bitching about not being able to use more advanced features. Things like CSS and javascript to better tailor the browsing experience for the user. To help make my pages more accessible to disabled users. To help balance the the desire of the guy who's coughing up the cash for the webpage to have a spiffy looking piece of web real estate that is still useful and non-annoying for it's users.
So don't tell me to stop whining and code for old, obsolete standards. Those might be fine for your needs, but the rest of us have uses for something more. Like accessibility, usability, and yes, just cool looking shit.
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I think you'll find that CSS is mostly used to add more flashing and blinking to web pages rather than to separate content from presentation. And I fear that you are not going to see much web content that will render legibly unless you use its own CSS on one of the two major browsers.
Strictly speaking, there is nothing in CSS that allows flashing or blinking.
I don't think CSS can work the way you describe. All browsers I know have compliant or incomplete CSS support. The biggest plus about CSS is that it degrades gracefully. The HTML itself is very standard: P, TABLE, IMG, EM, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, H@, etc. So if you view the page with a browser with CSS, you get nice looking web page. Without CSS support the page looks like nothing less than regular boring HTML with all content (which a lot of people prefer).
I must digress that the pixel-based layout in CSS does scare me. I think pixel-based anything is a bad idea... limits the resolution people can view the page in.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
I'm still limping along with 1.1 (or is it 1.2?) at the moment; I'm not sure if 2.0 has been ported to FreeBSD yet (I ditched the bogus RH6.0 install a month or two back). Don't use it much anymore though as I tend to avoid the computers when not at work nowadays, sadly.
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"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Even though it seems to be taking FOREVER for Mozilla to be completed, I think it's important that they take their time. For one thing, it'll help the developers get the browser done right the first time (it's already quite impressive, in terms of rendering speed at least). Second, there's no real rush for a new browser anyway. Netscape WORKS. It's not perfect, but it does the job.
Perhaps some of you should stop whining about Mozilla. Help out instead! Grab the latest milestone release, send in bug reports, maybe even contribute code if you're a programmer.
Think about it - Do you want the browser to be released in a hurried fashion, filled with bugs? Or would you rather wait a little while longer so you end up with a stable, speedy browser?