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. "
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
Because that's the naive approach?
That would have been like trying to plug holes in the rotting hull of a ship one at a time, rather than scrapping the whole thing and building a new one. It might take longer, but in the long run, it's the best solution.
Under Windows (at work) I use IE5 because it is a really really good browser and, moreover, it is available now at the same price as Mozilla.
Don't get me wrong; I love Open Source. But I won't sacrifice my ability to use my computer productively at the alter of free software. I need something I can work with. I've got a great OS, I just need a browser to go with it.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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
Sure. It's called Lynx ;-) It's butt ugly, but you can't beat it for reliability and speed (No more waiting for adfu).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
See, whenever you try to access a site and Netscape can't connect, it'll automaticlly prepend "www." to the address if it isn't already there. (Try accessing localhost when you don't have a web server running. It'll try localhost.com and www.localhost.com. Pretty stupid when you're trying to diagnose problems.)
To make this post almost on-topic, I am very much looking forward to Mozilla, so all this buggy, non-standard behavior will become a thing of the past.
Because nobody, and I mean nobody wants that. Why? You ask? Easy enough. Ever hear that Microsoft requires a compile at the end of the day, no matter how they get it? We have a similar policy where I work, and it really pisses me off. Here we're encouraged to do a slapdash job to meet deadlines.
Here are the disadvantages to such an approach:
I could probably come up with more, but I think you get the idea. It's like either building a pinto or a lamborghini. Sure a pinto is easier to fix (just duct tape and bailing wire, right?) but nobody wants to own one. Why does the software industry continuously ignore the fact that nobody wants a pinto - so why force people to buy them? I'm frankly glad that Mozilla has gotten it into their heads to do it right the first time. God knows we could use more of it.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
"...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)
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...
That's a horrible attitude. It's not unreasonable to expect that a company like AOL, with the resources that it has, could put together a browser that works reasonably well. I too have used Mozilla M11, and it just doesn't cut the cheese for me -- the interface is cute, but it crashes quite a bit and the dialogs repaint funny, and the text is too small, and it's a little bit slow, and... it's just not ready for consumption yet
So let's hear the bitching - It's not whining, it's criticism, and I think it's rightfully placed. If Mozilla can't give us a browser before the world ends, then we will go somewhere else, but to tell you the truth, I'm starting to feel strung along.
-----------
"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!
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.
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."
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
I asked the same question. The layout engine for Mozilla is set to have alpha channel blending -- meaning that it has the potential to properly support alpha channel transparency in png's.
> The person who owns PNG in Mozilla is
> newt@pobox.com, who was one of the
> creators of PNG. I suggest you contact him.
> There is currently no 8-bit alpha support,
> but he's working on that.
This is a response I got on one of the mozilla usenet forums about the png issue. There's the man to ask.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"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
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?
Please. This doesn't make any sense.
The compatability library that the Solaris IE
is based on, from Mainsoft, hasn't yet been ported to Linux yet. It has been
annouced, but not completed.
I have serious doubts that MS ported it to WINE
or any other win32-on-unix system. You might ask your 'informants' just what this port was based on.
Once Mainsoft has completed the Linux version of their product, then we might see Internet Explorer for Linux. At least, at that point, it's no more than a recompile, so they have no good technical reason -not- to release a Linux version. The decision they make, to or not to, will be purely strategic (undermine Linux as a viable platform by withholding MS products vs. hold the browser market and control of the de-facto web APIs... tough call... )
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Mozillazine speedily got permission to post a mirror of the article:
http://www.mozillazine.org/evolt_mirror/
Dave
--
That's ok. Software doesn't get written in a day (well, other than some of the projects I did for University, but that's another story. :)
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)
Now, seeing how lynx is very useful on more than occasion, here's how I use it:
...)
fetching pages for perl to munch on (lynx -source
Q&D downloads of files when I don't know the URL (if I DO know the URL, wget is much better fot this)
I'm telnetted into someone else's box over a modem, and running a GUI browser is truly rude
many other uses which I can't think of right now
(1) You call perl progress? Even basic has a more readable syntax. Anyway, downloading stuff is something is not a unique feature of lynx.
(2)I don't see how lynx helps you find something that you forgot the URL of unless it has an integrated search engine. In any case you're probably better of with a ftp client.
(3) Try running your browser locally, the idea of thin client is not that you remotely run a network client.
(4) I can't think of any useful uses either.
I think the only real situation where lynx would offer any advatages over a GUI browser would be if you were on a computer to slow to run a GUI. I noticed surfing the web is not in your list.
Also you mentioned progress in relation to a lot of technology that lynx doesn't support. We can discuss them in great length but I don't feel like it right now. I'll simply conclude with stating that lynx doesn't offer any replacements and is definitely not something that can be qualified as progress.
Lynx is just a gopher client with some addons. Gopher is as good as dead, the world moved on about five years ago.
Now would the biased person who moderated me down please restore my karma, I think his moderation skills are a bit 'overrated'. I think moderation is slipping anyway, I noticed a lot less postings actually are moderated. Perhaps it would help if more moderation points were given to people. I only get 5 or so every few weeks.
Jilles
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.
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?
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.
> Ever hear that Microsoft requires a compile at the end of the day, no matter how they get it?
Microsoft operates on a daily build basis. If you break the tree, you tend to get a lot of blame heaped on you, so last-minute kludges tend to be made to get the thing to compile. It's far from "no matter how you did it" because eventually your kludge will break it again.
Guess what: Mozilla operates on daily builds too. Sure would be nice if gnome would -- on a virgin system, gnome out of CVS won't even begin to compile. Now it dies with some nonsense about ORBit in automake macros. Been broken in some fashion for months.
'course, just getting something to compile isn't terribly meaningful, but at least it keeps integration testing going, whereas a broken tree brings it to a screeching halt.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> frivolous use of any content/technology that would otherwise be useful (java, jscript, animations, etc
And of course YOU are the authority on what is frivolous. Why this country would be in an artistic golden age if they only painted art I liked, right?
I defy you to even tell me what ActiveX is, BTW, and the similarities to plugins.
Mozilla won't make it up the steps if it doesn't work with Shockwave. end of story.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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?
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
Mozilla has continuous rolling builds hooked up to Tinderbox. You break the build and your name shows up in big red lights. This is pretty standard. You shouldn't check into a tree until you've tried it...that only makes sense.
--GnrcMan--
Netscape 4.7 is usuable. It doesn't crash on me (90% of the time) and all of it's functionality works. I can't say that for M11 yet. It crashes at least once per session and a lot of the functionality is missing. The UI is also a little kludgey. It has a lot going for it, but I think they should stick with something a little less flashy until they're off the ground. i.e. Lesstif. I compiled Mozilla with lesstif on my OpenBSD machine and it was pretty close to going toe-to-toe with Netscape.
They're almost there... Soon now, I think.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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.
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...
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!
"So what? In my experience, perl does a much better job than BASIC :o)"
Proponents of both languages claim it gets their job done quickly. Opponents of both languages claim that programming in them results in very messy code.
"Sorry... I meant "when I'm too lazy to use the command-line ftp to get files"
You're weird. On the one hand you choose to use an archaic and primitive tool like lynx and on the other hand you are too lazy to use a commandline tool.
"lynx doesn't really have to progress, in the usual sense of the word, in order to remain functional."
Well I just pointed out that it lacks functionality (your list of technologies) so that makes it less functional. But I got the answer I wanted: even you don't actually use lynx what it was made for: browse the web.
Jilles
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.
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!