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Netscape Communicator 5.0 Delayed
dougc1 writes "According to this CNET article, Netscape plans to delay release of Communicator 5.0 for two more months." Well, I'm doing okay with 4.7, but it sure would be nice to have a more stable and faster Netscape - someday. (sigh)
Hey why not just start another Open Source project dedicated to doing just that?
I might. Or jump onto someone else's. I'm sure there will probably be quite a few people willing to rip the bulk out of the monster.
Plus what's keeping you from starting now?
I've thought about it, but I'd rather wait until the final 5.0 version comes out.
Finkployd
Secondly, is it really very surprising that they can't make it work very well on even one particular Unix system, let alone the overwhelming majority.
Finally, even if they did make it work, it would surely be nothing but yet another annoying Winix program, ranging between awkward and anathema to Unix programmers.
I admit to not being an expert, but...
I see (reasonably) regular reports of crippling security holes in IE (or more specifically the HTML engine, so Outlook too...), NT and occasionally Office. They tend to release fixes fairly soon but they don't exactly shout about them so I'm guessing that there's a fair number of users entirely unprotected.
I don't follow the security community by any means, but when I see this many holes getting reported, I get worried. So what if they plug them in the end? They let them through in the first place, which they shouldn't have done. And stuff like Word/Excel macros and ActiveX seem to have been disasters waiting to happen.
If someone wants to tell me that they just get publicised because it's MS then I'll be happy and go away. But I don't recall hearing of this sort of quantity of security holes found in Netscape or Solaris...
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The window of opportunity closed by mid-2000? Please.
First, Biil Gates, in the most recent issue of Forbes, admits that products other than W2K have been slowed by a diversion of resources to that product. Microsfot hasn't started any IE 6.0 hype yet, and no reports of even early IE 6.0 alphas have leaked out of Redmond yet. IE 6.0 is not going to be delivered in six months.
Second, on every non-MS platform, Mozilla will be far better than any version of IE available in six months. IE 5.0's codebase is very Windows-centric and its apparent speed advantage on MS OSes is because of OS integration. To get good performance on non-Windows platforms would require a re-architecting like the Netscape-Mozilla change, which would have been leaked if it were underway.
Third, the lighter-weight Mozilla will be a viable upgrade choice for the millions of 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM Win95 Pentiums out there; IE 5 isn't, and 6 will probably be worse. And they aren't going to all just dissapear anytime soon; many buisnesses (like General Motors) are just now finally getting rid of their 486es with Windows 3.1.
Fourth and finally, there is no network effect "window of opportunity" to close. Legacy browsers mean e-commerce sites need to be usable by a wide variety of browsers. Amazon.com still maintains Navigator 1.x compatibility; almost any mass-media type of site can still be rendered with Navigator 3.x. As a result, there will always be a lag effect that allows a new browser a chance to make a marketshare dent.
Just get it done and get it out there. As long as you can make it reasonably fast and bug-free, I'll be more than happy. Take as long as you need; I know you're not dragging your feet 'cause I can see your source.
That said, I'd be mad if Netscape released their current M12 builds as Netscape 5.0. It's still not particularly stable (though it's improved vastly in that regard), keyboard accelerators only work maybe a tenth of the time (on the Mac anyway; I can't seen to get a LinuxPPC build working), and the launch time is still too slow.
I do, however, like the progress that's being made. The Mac installer is great, the rendering engine is fast, and at least the skins are configurable (though I wish someone would put up the old purple skin). Perhaps when M12 is finalized Netscape should start basing Alpha builds off of it. But let the software mature to the point where it's actually ready to be released before you go and release it.
I'm running the beta right now. Seems a bit faster than 5, depending on the page you browse, stability is about the same, no crashes yet. Has a neat print preview feature, nothing to write home about though.
Saw it written and I saw it say, pink moon is on its way. None of you will stand so tall, pink moon is gonna get ye al
Mozilla stopped using gtk widgets AFAIK like six months ago, I believe everything is rendering locally, so all the platforms look the same. No more having things lay out wierd on Unix because the widgets are different than on Windows or MacOS.
Does anybody know if the official netscape version is using GTK for its widgets like mozilla is doing? I really really hate motif. I think that is one of the biggest things I dislike about Netscape under linux is that it is real ugly.
Also one more bit of speculation about the delay, what are the chances that they are taking so long so that AOL 6.0 can use Netscape? How long is AOL's contract with MS to use IE? It would be really a great trump card for linux if we had AOL support, which AOL using the Netscape code could give us. Not that I like AOL mind you, in fact I hate it, but I know lots of people who worship it and it would still be a great "big app" to have in the community.
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Simple.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
I certainly hope you're wrong. I really do. And if you're not, then I wish they'd go back to Bill.
What's the problem? Well, suppose Microsoft wants to sell as much as they can. (Good bet, that.) This means they need to make their software accessible to everyone they can. That means they probably need to go at least one standard deviation below the mean. Once they get something that someone with an IQ of 85 is going to be able to be happy with, do you really think they'll bother making something for those of us who are a few stdevs out on the other end? Of course not.
That's why we're fucked.
So incremental reflow is the way it draws part of a page at a time, right?
Mozilla used to be usable on Slashdot... after they put in incremental reflow, it isn't anymore.
Since I'm on a P166, rendering the page is what takes the longest time. It doesn't seem to have any concept of skipping to what's CURRENTLY loaded; instead, it draws every possible step in the loading of the page.
And since it uses all available processing power, I can't scroll the text (hey, if you're going to all that trouble to let me read the text as it's loading, then let me read it!), or click "Stop", or anything.
Now... incremental reflow is a very good idea - I used to gripe a lot about how browsers could show part of a page when you clicked "stop", but wouldn't think of showing the page when the download is stalled - but it's got to be implemented right.
IE renders a typical Slashdot article in 5 seconds. Netscape 4.7 takes more like 20. Mozilla M11... I've never had the patience to find out.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
When Mozilla is out, I'm going to be changing the source code to ignore META tags.
Think about it... all they usually do is make the browser do something I didn't want it to do, like bring up a popup ad.
Their legitimate uses are mostly for search robots, so my browser shouldn't care.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You don't need to use imwheel, you just need to use a version of XFree86 from the last year or two, and you need to follow the instructions on the X Mouse Wheel Scroll Page (basically make sure scroll wheel support is turned on in XF86Config, then add new netscape entries to your .Xdefaults file).
Then voila, you've just added mouse wheel support to an app that was written before mouse wheels existed. I was thinking about how cool this was the other day while wondering why Regedit (in Win98) was ignoring my friend's wheel mouse...
I think the basic reason for incremental reflow is to enable a user on a slow connection to read the text without waiting for all the images to load.
Before the switch to the Gecko rendering engine, using the old Mozilla code, incremental reflow was actually introduced in a project called Mariner. It worked very well too, but they shortly thereafter switched to the Gecko engine and Mariner was shelved.
Once incremental flow gets to the stability that Mariner was in, I think that it will be a definite plus. But for now, my builds exhibit the same problems you've mentioned. Slashdot, and many other pages, load excruciatingly slow and don't let me scroll the page until loading is finished. But on the plus side, it doesn't crash either, which is improvement over older builds.
XUL seems cool and all but just think what harm it can cause in the hands of AOL. I would hate to have five or so ad buttons on the button bars when I visit so-and-so site. The less control the web site has the better.
Mozilla team, please don't do this to us.
BTW: Does anybody know what the "big" features of the 5th generation browsers are. It seems like the 2nd generation brought in frames and stuff, and the 3rd generation brought in javascript or whatever, then the 4th generation were big into dynamic html and css and stuff. What is the "must have" feature in 5th generation browsers?
*Disclaimer* The above history of browsers is very likely to be very wrong, I just meant that each new browser has introduced something big.
You seem to think we all speak with one voice.
Is it really the same people saying both things?
Anyhow, the Free Mozilla is available for anyone patient enough to run it (I tried it, but I'm back with 4.7 for now). Proprietary Navigator is delayed, but i'd rather see that than a buggy product.
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Microsoft tends to ignore security holes whenever possible.
I don't want to pick on you in particular but this has gotten out of hand. Microsoft has not ignored any security hole and they don't do it whenever possible! Their fixes on their web page for the security issues.
Dang it people Microsoft is not evil! Guess what? They do care about their customers. You just don't give them a chance by declaring everything they do as FUD, marketing, or incompetence.
Microsoft is not a perfect company and have made many mistakes. But if you are going to accuse them of something then make sure you are rightly accusing them. Otherwise your FUD is far worse than anything from Redmond.
http://java.sun.com/products/hotjava/3.0/ (~ 5 MB)
I'm definitely not an expert on this (for expert information check out http://www.mozilla.org docs or the netscape.public.mozilla news groups) but I'm pretty confident in my understanding XUL and teh general architecture of Mozilla. With that out of the way, here are some comments about some of the ideas posted concerning XUL, AOL, and "bloat".
t )but mozilla will remain mozilla - simple and open.
.xul, .css and .js files but that's about it. Mail, News, and Editor are not seperate beasts. They do not add significantly to the weight of the code base. They simply organize and display functionality (that is already a necessary part of the browser) in a different way. When you launch Mail (or news or editor) in mozilla, think of it as launching another browser window because it's not much more than that. Anyone is free to put together a browser without a mail menu item and without a few XUL and javascript files but they won't be cutting out any "bloat".
Websites will not be able to modify your skin (not in mozilla's first release anyway)
Netscape/AOL can put whatever they want into their branded version of mozilla (Navigator/Communicator/whatevertheydecidetocalli
Mail, News and Editor are not 'bloat'. They are small efficient apps built on top of the same code that Browser is built of. The code that could be pulled out that isn't required by (a part of) the Browser is very small. You could nuke a few
I am all for modification and customization and look forward to the many versions of mozilla the browser or mozilla the communications suite that will soon be available.
Asa
For you who didn't bother to read the article!
A Mozilla alpha version will be released Dec 15 and the first beta will be released somewhere in the middle of February. This is not the same as a branded Netscape Beta, which will take place some time after the Mozilla Beta.
The article mainly complaints about Mozilla lateness and worries that corporate users are moving towards IE. They also partly blaim XUL for some of this lateness.
You don't have to have a publically posted email address or webpage.
According to the Mozilla page, Navigator and Mozilla are essentially distinct projects. They say that Navigator will most likely be based on submitted Mozilla code, however, and that it will be marketed as "good" and branded under the Netscape name, as well as contain proprietary stuff that can't be part of Mozilla for obvious reasons.
How many have read through the halloween documents? M$ Wants the Internet. Bad. How would they do that, though? decommoditization of protocols as the author of that email put it. In other words, close-sourcing the Internet. That would sure put a crimp in the *nix marketshare, wouldn't it? But how would they do this? Simple:
Basing their dominant browser on standards, but adding in their own proprietary "plug-ins" that add extra features that we would eventually become dependant on, despite the fact that it would be just as easy (easier, even) to write a java applet. I know java ain't that stable on Communicator, but that's besides the point--it's open. So, rally behind Netscape! Even when you have to use Winblows, use Communicator! We'll be stuck with it for now, but we'll be rewarded with Mozilla later on. Forgoe downloading Shockwave or Flash plugins, boycott sites that use them! If we all go along with it, it won't go away.
Copy Protection: A clever method of preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers from using it.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
AND, I guarantee he reads /. But will he respond here? Doubtful. He won't even respond to polite email.
Feh. Just keep coding and bug fixing. He'll fade into oblivion with the rest of the naysayers.
FYI...it's "Gecko." Just so you know.
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I mean, how long's it been since IE 5.0 came out? And a real "new" version of Netscape anything?
I like IE because it has a more mature DOM that (in my opinion) you can do more with using less code. I like the fact that it has an XML component that's actually useable. I like the more complete adherance to CSS specifications (again, in my opinion). I like the open ended object/active x/ole/whatever they're calling it this week/ structure (this is more MS strategy stuff, but what they hey).
I don't like the security holes (found in other software), the lack of input into design decisions, and occasional stability problems. Those are pretty big "don't likes" actually. On the other hand though, Netscape doesn't really have anything I like (as a developer), and some of the same dislikes. Makes it an easy decision doesn't it?
All that said, I think that Mozilla's only chance is to become the consumer browser, because I would choose IE as a development platform in a hot minute. I've read several articles mentioning the fact that IE is eclipsing NN/C in the intranet/internal development marketplace (some posted here) and I agree totally. If I had to support netscape right now it'd double my work. I'd have to write everything twice, AND some things I couldn't do at all. The long and short of this long message is (and here's the flamey bit): I don't think netscape/mozilla, given many delays before producing a useable product, being so far behind what MS has accomplished with the technology curve, I don't think they'll be a viable competitor in the marketspace. If they pull off a miracle and make it better, I'd use that in a second instead too. I'm a traiterous pragmatist.
Off Topic FUD and crap following
vvvvvvvvvv
Just as a side note, I've been vett'ing slashdot for quite a while now and have drawn some interesting conclusions. It seems that Big automatically == BAD and Small/independent automatically == GOOD. I think in some part it goes to a hearkening back to the grassroots origin of the internet. Is there a "good" "big" company that fits into the narrow slashdot canon? And not just because they're the next great white hope against microsoft, but because they make good stuff that people can use and like?
I remember how the knives came out after the Red Hat IPO once they became BIG and therefore BAD. If a Big(bad) company actually puts out a good product, will anyone actually notice for all the knees jerking?
End FUD and crap ^^^^^
cdensch doesn't do signatures
I don't wanna be too offensive here, but I am astounded by the fuckin' guppies that are posting basically "me too" to these discussions. Slashdot goes back and forth. Every two weeks the headlines are either:
"Mozilla doing well!" - usually a milestone release
and
"Mozilla's eating it!" - usually a *totally* uninformed editorial on ZDNet
And the replies are always basically "Yeah, mozilla sucks/rocks" depending on what the spin-of-the-day happens to be. I mean, go back and do a search of "mozilla" stories and you'll see what I'm talking about.
People who are following the mozilla story (via mozillazine.org and mozilla.org) seem to have a clue, but most of these comments are just like so uninformed and following the spin, it's makin' me sick.
"Genko" engine indeed. Feel free to moderate this down. I just had to vent.
A big-ass Coward
God I am looking forward to a nice final from Mozilla....using html for the window layout is going to be interesting..assuming the source will be easy to get at, it'll be a cinch to customize the browser to your own liking..
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On the PC side of things, I really have no major browser complaints.. with Linux(installing SuSe tonite on a box I just built, this is my first major use of Linux, as opposed to minor admin stuff, so wish me luck!) I havent used the browser enough to build a list of what it's lacking.. so this is coming from a Mac OS point of view..
I would love to see a browser that merges the best of IE and Netscape.. each of them has strengths, and each has weaknesses..
I love the History on IE, I abhor the netscape history. PLEASE let me go to where I've gone before, even if I have already closed the damn window.
I like that I can click and drag an image in Netscape to see its dimensions..great from a design point of view..
IE seems to bog down quite a bit when loading long pages with a lot of text.. Netscape, for my uses, is all around the quicker browser in day to day surfing..
Rare is the day that Netscape doesnt crash.
What about you guys? Since we are on the topic of new browser releases, what features in the current crop of browsers do you love and hate? Be interesting to see what has driven various people to a particular browser...
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driph
Did you read the article?
"Netscape Communications has yet to
produce its fifth-generation browser, and it doesn't expect to release a trial version
for another two months."
I guess "trial" is c|net's word for "beta".
I agree. Ever use IE? Windows?
Ever stop to think that Mozilla is alpha-level software, and therefore should be about as consistent as a bad random number generator, until the beta release?
(which is, by the way, why they can't release it as Netscape 5.0 anytime soon...)
Now let's look through, and see who marks their software correctly:
Wine: alpha level. Yep, lots of stuff doesn't work.
Dosemu: beta level. Ok, it's impressive how much they got to work. About as good as a DOS box in NT, but certainly not perfect.
Windows 3.0,3.1,'95,'98: gold. Not even close! Let me know when you implement *libraries* properly. (waiting for Windows 2000, I suppose)
IE 4.0 or 5.0 for UNIX: gold. Oh god, it's worse than alpha! It doesn't usually load on Solaris, in my experience. Microsoft's web site claims that *Solaris* needs random kernel patches, and that it's not MS's fault. Heh. Heh. Really, we couldn't code around this. Frickin' bad Windows-emulating porting software. IE runs more reliably under SoftWindows--or even Wine, where possible.
Netscape 4.7 for Unix: gold. Not really. It still crashes sometimes, can leak memory, and table rendering needs some work. But it's pretty solid. Definitely better than your average beta.
Anyhow, the point *is* having something that works. That's why they're still working on it, pushed back the date, and don't claim that it's anything it isn't advertised as... It's fast, nifty looking, and not yet stable. But compare this with claiming it has features it lacks, and it looks much nicer.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
So we can very well build custom versions of Mozilla without any AIM or other annoyances.
:)
Oh, and we will
You think it's small and fast now? Wait until I get done with it. After ripping out the "cram every internet client we can think of" code, it will be one fast, small, WEB BROWSER. Nothing else, just a web browser.
Finkployd
Your post was more of a troll than anything else, but I'll answer it anyways.
Mozilla's team is more inefficient than IE's, you say.
Oh, definately. After all, it's not as though Mozilla's team has nearly completed the amazing task of creating a modern, full featured browser from scratch in a little more than a year, when IE5 took about 6 years to reach its current state. Very little of what is in Mozilla is recycled code. All the engines have been entirely redesigned, and the engineers working on the project seem to have dropped the philosophy that worse is better.
IE5.5, on the other hand, I don't really care about. I'm not too excited about what I hear is a 70+ MB download for a Print Preview feature, and a couple modifications to the GUI of Windows. I'll probably download the thing, but I don't imagine that people connected by modem will.
I mean, come off it. "IE is efficient! They had a couple dozen people work hard for a week for the next generation browser that will finally kill Netscape for good!" (Not a quote, but a mindset. Read comments on ZDNet and BetaNews)
I'm not impressed. That's the bottom line, so far as I am concerned.
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If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Mozilla beta will still be released b4 christmas? please tell me yes
Well, if it's pushed back two months, and it's December now....I'm going to have to go with no.
There probably should be another milestone around that time though.
Finkployd
There is a difference between mozilla and communicator. Mozilla is currently alpha (at least that's being discussed at mozillazine). It will likely hit beta some time after that (late januari?). After mozilla goes final, netscape will add its stuff and start testing it which will take another few months. I don't expect a communicator 5 release before spring 2000 and that is assuming that there will be no more major setbacks.
Mozilla is a fine project from a software engineering perspective, I'm really excited about its probabilities but from a management perspective its a classical example of how not to manage a poject. It is taking up lots of resources (netscape engineers) and it is suffering from excessive feature creap which has caused the deadlines to shift enourmously (like half a year).
I think the people at netscape will have a really hard time convincing the rest of the world to run communicator 5. From an engineering perspective it certainly is an interesting product but engineers are only a minority of the target audience.
If mozilla is going to survive it will be on its technical merits. The mozilla project is promising a lot and judging from the nightly builds, it is delivering on those promises.
If on the other hand it will fail it will be because it came to late and missed its window of opportunity, which in my opinion will be nearly closed by spring 2000. Microsoft has been in the luxurious position that it had a great GUI for their browser for nearly two years. All this time they have been able to focus on producing a better rendering engine. I have a hard time believing that they won't release a better one before communicator ships. And they just got a few extra months to perfect their stuff.
Jilles
Actually, I don''t think blink is standard html, its just an extension that came about long ago during the early years of the browser war. personally, I hope it never becomes standard html, its just annoying.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
From playing with a simple DTD and XML example I came to the conclusion that IE 5 doesn't really care about verifying an XML document against its DTD - as long as the syntax of both DTD and XML are OK, the XML document will be displayed. Try adding an element like <argh> somewhere (don't forget the closing tag!), it displayed just fine for me although it sure wasn't part of the DTD.
Are there any options that you can switch on I didn't find?
I grabbed M11 a while ago. I liked the html rendering capabilities, and most other things. But, is that what the interface is going to look like? Or is it just sitting like that until developement can be completed on the core engine, and more attention paid to the interface? In its current incarnation, it doesn't matter how fast/stable/whatever it is, its just too ugly.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
That's what MozillaZine asks us. There is a survey where they ask about readers' feelings regarding the current builds.
I have been trying Mozilla for months already. It has improved steadily but they are still making big changes there. For example they started doing incremental reflow. While it's nice, it caused some pages to load very slowly. IMO, that's still one thing to fix before Alpha.
I guess it's good to delay Mozilla until it's ready and free of bugs. Mozilla is designed from ground up, small, fast and supports standards beautifully. It'll be a pleasure to use it.
But I couldn't but notice some fear. Some people are scared that AOL will fill Mozilla with ads and make it unusable. While AOL might do it, remember that the source code of Mozilla is free. It's right there at ftp.mozilla.org and you're free to get it any day. So we can very well build custom versions of Mozilla without any AIM or other annoyances.
As a site builder I have a variety of different browsers that i use to check my code (I use real HTML, none of this WYSIWYG for me :-). And one of the biggest problems is the varying amount tags that any one browser understands.
I am now trying to strictly use style sheets and none of the deprecated tags, but with IE and Communicator still not accepting all of them it is hard, and these are the browsers that most of the public are using.
eg.a problems with Communicator - obscure method of embedding tags (non-W3C) and a problem with IE - still doesn't understand blink.
So thats first on my wishlist, certainly would make my job easier.
You folks don't get pissed off when an open source product is delayed because it is deemed not ready, yet you get rather hostile when a closed source company pushes back the release of one of THEIR products instead of shipping it broken. Make up your minds.
I tried HotJava 3.0, a web browser written completely in Java. According to Sun, it runs on any machine with a 1.1.6 or better Java virtual machine Now that I have a fast (P-II 350) box and a quick JIT JVM (Sun's JDK 1.3beta), there are no more problems from a speed point of view.
However, as I read relatively complex pages like Slashdot most of the time, there is a problem with scrolling down a page - it flickers, twice for each PageDown I press. It's even worse if you use the mouse with a scroll bar. I don't know if this is an AWT or Swing problem, or related to my graphics card driver, but I find it very annoying. Apart from this, there are few rendering problems (ugly radio buttons, white on gray, but that's it). It supports HTML 3.2, JavaScript (full ECMA 1.4 support, but I don't know that standard) and, of course, Java. I'm probably going to try it with IBM's fast 1.1.8 JRE under Linux soon...
Almost a hundred comments posted, and not even a single person has uttered the words 'Mozilla is dead'. Congratulations, Slashdot readers.
Anyway, before anyone decides to reply with that to my post, I figure I'll offer a link to Mozilla's Tinderboxen. This page shows whether the up to the minute builds are compiling successfully or not, as well as showing all checkins to SeaMonkey (Mozilla) in the last 12 hours. (Although you can go back as far as you want to, actually.)
I figure that looking at this page on any weekday while the tree is open can prove to any skeptic that Mozilla is just flying along. Even on weekends and at 4:00 am, there are usually a few people checking in this and that. After all... Between midnight (pacific) and now on Friday night, two people have been checking in periodically.
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If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
And I'm suffering :-) But I don't care, it feels good, and darn it, I'm going to be really bummed if mozilla finally comes out without a single line of code in it from me. So...
:-) I'd think that the timing of AOL 6 would depend more on the availability of mozilla that vice versa. It's a no-brainer that AOL will switch to mozilla when the time is right - and that together with the increasing Linux user base, will put netscape/mozilla back on top in the browser wars more or less immediately. We haven't even considered the slashdot effect yet - what happens when several thousand well-connected and highly motivated geeks hit the cyber-highway to promote the Lizard and email it, DCC it, icq it, whatever, to everybody they know? This will make the mellisa virus look benign :-)
...Not that I like AOL mind you, in fact I hate it, but I know lots of people who worship it and it would still be a great "big app" to have in the community.
:-) (and you ;-) are joining the mozilla effort. Think about it, this is about the last chance you get to scratch that itch before every feature gets frozen - and how many chances did you get before to work on a massive, professional project like this?
Does anybody know if the official netscape version is using GTK for its widgets like mozilla is doing? I really really hate motif. I think that is one of the biggest things I dislike about Netscape under linux is that it is real ugly.
There's no chance that motif will be used - the choice is between MFC or some such and GTK. I guess I have to drill down into the code to know for sure whether native widget sets are supported, but it sure looks to me like GTK is going to be completely cross-platform. Themed GTK is absolutely gorgeous and I can't think of a single thing about native windows widgets that GTK doesn't do as well or better. Obviously, mozilla's use of GTK is a big boost for it and we're going to see a lot more cross-platform packages done that way.
Also one more bit of speculation about the delay, what are the chances that they are taking so long so that AOL 6.0 can use Netscape?
They're taking so long so that it will be done
How long is AOL's contract with MS to use IE?
ISTR it was extended to 2002 - however if the contract is found to be illegal it will vanish instantly. I don't think AOL will have a lot of trouble with that - they just have to be sure BillG won't kick them out of the oneline service promotion deal in Windows.
Yup, AOL is key, however much they suck, Microsoft sucks MUCH MUCH more. IMHO, having mozilla on Linux is the biggest app of all.
At this stage of the game, a lot more non-netscape developers (like me
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Mozilla has been planning since the summer to release a public alpha in December, followed by a beta a few months later. In some cases these two releases were called "mozilla beta" and "netscape beta", admittedly a confusing way of describing the releases, and one which was rectified a while ago.
A few months ago some reporter misunderstood the release schedule and reported Netscape would release a beta in December. Since then this inaccuracy has propagated into all subsequent news articles through the common journalistic practice of re-using previously published work instead of doing original research.
Now suddenly some reporter discovers what's actually going on, but instead of printing a retraction of earlier stories they say the Netscape beta has been "delayed". It isn't true, and while I expect it from the news sites I've been reading it from for months, I figured Slashdot would be able to figure it out. I guess not.
Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself:
The Milestone Chart
Quoting from the article "[ Fwd: The Plan]" (1999 September 24) in the newsgroup "netscape.public.mozilla.porkjockeys":
Geez I get so sick of people complaining about ads, I suppose you think all TV Shows should be commercial free and we all should just pay out our asses to support the multi-million dollar tv shows they air too. huh?
Like it our not, those ads provide a way for people to get paid without you giving them money, you should be thankful. I can understand your gripe with something like Geocities that just pops it up in your face which is wrong, or porn sites that have 50 banners and no content, but some people like to eat and if you don't pay them for thier work and the banner companies will, then so be it.
In the recent past, /. has had several interesting articles:
;-)
1) Netscape for Linux blows. If we don't get a decent browser, we may well "loose the war" on the dekstop, whatever the heck that means.
2) Mozilla is constantly late.
3) There seems to be a rabidity in the expectation and support of Mozilla.
4) There is a bevy of _other_ browsers being produced for Linux, or already exist.
For instance, what about Opera?? To quote from the Nov 20th posting on the Opera page:
"As Opera for Linux development leader, I'm looking very forward to releasing an early beta within the next 4-6 weeks. This doesn't mean that it will be a perfect product. It simply means that I'm trying to make all of our prospective Linux users happy. I feel confident that the high level of stability we have come to expect from Opera will shine through. Linux users will soon have a choice!"
A couple thoughts: If Opera for Linux is good, or some other browsers pull through (like the KDE konqueror), will we all stop caring as much? Should we care as much? Will open source development on Mozilla diminish? Should it diminish? Survival of the fittest, ya know.
It would be nice to have an open source browser, but we sure have used a commercial one (Netscape) for a long time now. What if konqueror or one of the others pulls through? It seems we all want to put our eggs in the Netscape basket. It would seem embarassing for Open Source if Mozilla failed I suppose, but is that a good enough reason for the rabid support of Mozilla? I think history would bare out a different story. Mozilla may be a bump in the open source road, where companies learn to interface with the open source community. Don't get me wrong, I wish Mozilla all the success in the world, and they may eventually get it really right, but it seems we are all being myopic. Maybe we should try to look down the road a little bit. I believe in the concept of OSS development. Just because one project fails, doesn't mean the whole world is going to turn around and say "Just kidding! We knew all this stuff would fail. Let's stop supporting it now." If Moz fails, we'll survive, Microsoft will still get its, Linux will be happy, and we'll all be surfin' fools.
Anyway, just some blathering. I'll be quiet now.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi