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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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Basically, Netscape (for it is they!) have thrown away their old code, then used GTK+, and thrown that away (didn't have customisable look and feel, which is essential when none of the actual FEATURES work) and re-written everything again. The result doesn't work, and probably needs more work than just fixing GTK+, Xlib or even Motif, but it gave everyone something to do while pointing the blame desperately at each other. What a catastrophe.
A typical bug report in Bugzilla has commentry like this:
Bob: Mozilla breaks horribly when I do this. I do it a lot, and so does every other Mozilla user, someone should fix it.
Fred: Agreed. Marking this as M9, we need a fix soon
Pete: M9 is too close. Users can live without until M11
Dave: Put this down for D19 and FU2, I have two bodies on it now
Dave: Wait. Not our problem, this is Fred's.
Fred: I can't reproduce this. Marked Works for Me
Bob: Why isn't this fixed yet? It is easily reproducible, follow my URL
Dave: Nope. Can't reproduce
Bob: Did you click on the URL?
Dave: Oh, wait, now it does. I think this will be fixed when FlyingPig lands next week. Marking FP
FPTeam: Flying Pig is delayed, because it turns out we have to implement abstract classes not just pray. We didn't know that.
Bob: I don't understand, I have waited four months for this..?
Dave: This is now first priority for M15. We will definitely have this.
Fred: I can't commit to that. Call it M16 and we'll squeeze it in later
Harold: Just doing some admin. Nothing to see here, move along. (now M17)
FPTeam: Marked as fixed because FlyingPig landed today. FlyingPig is still pretty buggy. Please don't open more than one window or breathe near the computer. Sorry.
Bob: Nope, still not fixed as of M17, where is everyone? Why can't a simple bug be fixed in under twelve months?
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Why is it so hard? I have lots of ideas, but none of them is very complementary toward the Mozilla team. I think an equally valid question is, "Why did Microsoft take nearly five years to complete NT 5?" and many of the answers are probably the same. Let this be a lesson to you, do not work on products which are supposed to solve everyones problems all at once.
Nick.
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.
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
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.
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":
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