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Mozilla M12 Released
Cyrrin writes "M12 source is up on the Mozilla ftp site. Binary builds should be appearing RSN." I've been playing with the pre12 builds all week and let me just say wow. It's getting faster and more stable. It's really exciting to see it all come together and climb out of the vapor. The preferences dialog is really slow, but progressive page rendering is fast. Good job to everyone involved, and welcome to the home stretch.
> Attempt to understand from someone else's perspective.
Quid pro quo. I would for once like the MS-bashers see things from a home user's perspective. From an IT manager's perspective. From a non-tech perspective.
I'll settle for an objective perspective.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
IE is not "just a COM component", it is a compilation of many COM components which can be reused very easily (that's why the executable is so small for such a large program). Anyone can incorporate a fully featured HTML viewer in their application, and, they can use that same component from several different languagues. This binary reusability is important, because it means a VB developer can use the spell checking from Word or the HTML viewer from IE, both of which are most likely written in C++. Now, the VB developer can do what they do best (drag little boxes around on pretty forms) and the C++ programmers can do the heavy work.
I'm not saying that Mozilla isn't reusable or anything like that, but you do have to give Microsoft credit for COM, which is really a very nice solution to a difficult problem (OLE and cross language component building).
My other
At least in lynx keybindings mode, you can use < and > to scroll left and right, respectively. I forget what the "w3m native" binding has for that. Also moving the cursor around off one edge or the other will also scroll.
DNA just wants to be free...
User controlled markup: Opera puts the controls back in the hands of the user, while the other browsers give the content creators absolute power. For example, Opera has the "scaling" ( magnification ) feature , and lets you control the rendering of the logical markup tags ( via a user supplied style sheet ). This together with the small footprint makes it a winner. I've played with the windows version, and will purchase the linux one as soon as it's out ( crossing my fingers that it will be as good as the windows version ).
Considering M11 was almost good enough to replace Netscape 4.61 as my primary browser, M12 should be an impressive sight to see.
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Open mind, insert foot.
People need some clues here. Embedded systems have resource constraints and the highest demands are placed on memory use. The memory footprint (code+data) is going to become the bottleneck.
The original poster is wrong because it is the compiled binary that executes. The source footprint is meaningless and typically grossly overestimates the generated code size. The poster quoted above is also wrong because download size underestimates the actual memory footprint; the distribution is compressed to around 50% of the executable format.
Finally all of these are only static measures of the code size and they make no indication of how much memory will be used once the program executes: eg size of data structures and allocation patterns.
BluesPower
I didn't know this. Do you have a reference?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
If everything works out OK, we get Opera 4.0 beta this week as well, and Konqueror is getting stylesheets last I heard - Q1 2000 is looking good. :)
-- Einar
The recent discussion on what constitutes a Mozilla alpha seems a bit academic now. I've also been trying the recent nightly builds, and stability has been improving rapidly.
My definition of an alpha is when the product is close to feature complete. Mozilla is almost that, and once the major bug fixes are done it's beta time - possibly with M13? It certainly looks that way.
I'm looking forward to replacing Communicator with Mozilla once and for all. Then I'll be down to just two applications that rely on Motif - one of which I'm rewriting to use GTK+ (the moxfm file manager), and another that will prbably have to remain a Motif app (NEdit).
Chris Wareham
Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames. His is worth reading, yours is useless and only points you out to be a child (mentally if not chronologically). Taking 30 seconds to back up your statements would have made a world of difference.
Just another attempt to increase the signal in Slashdot's daily signal-to-noise battle.
Sosumi. just kidding. DONT!
Suprisingly it is pretty small. The packed-up nightly builds which include all of the .sos for browser (with debugging symbols!), mail, news, etc, plus a lot of images, scripts, and demo pages, are about a 5MB download. Do a non-debug build, omit the mailnews libraries (leaving just the browser and some other stuf), and leave out all the demo images/html, and I think you're left with something pretty embeddable.
DNA just wants to be free...
Is it really helpful to post an announcement like this before it's entirely ready? Yes, the M12 source is up, but none of the binaries are yet, much less mirrored to other sites.
Couldn't this sort of announcement wait until the mozilla.org announcement is made? I don't imagine they'll delay an announcement unnecessarily, and driving traffic to their FTP server prematurely might not be appreciated...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I see your point, but many of us continue to visit slashdot because it reports news as it's happening or before anyone else noticed it happened.
Here's what it sounds like you're saying: Slashdot users are oveloading the ftp servers so that the developers can't get any work done. Please don't announce things before they're ready for to be consumed by the general public.
Does this mean that slashdot community is no longer the developer community?
maybe slashdot is now where all the journalists of the world come to get an interesting topic for their next article or news story.
Wow, now THAT'S cutting edge! You've got a build that won't be out for 8 days! Is time-travel one of the new Mozilla features, or did you do that part on your own?
(sorry, I had to say it)
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?
Hate to break it to ya, but an unziped linux-2.2.13 source tarball is about 64MB.
XFree86 3.3.5 source tarballs added together (X335src-[1-3].tgz) ungziped and added together are, 160megs of source.
Mozilla is just a light wieght for what it does. :)
> So what happens when AOL/Netscape decide to
> take mozilla and roll it into a big happy
> Netscape 5?
Not that much; Mozilla will still continue to exist/be developed in its own right (AOL couldn't stop it if they wanted to).
DNA just wants to be free...
User controlled markup: Opera puts the controls back in the hands of the user, while the other browsers give the content creators absolute power.
I agree that the user should always be able to override styles set by the content author, but it is worth noting that other browsers can do the same or similar.
In Netscape 4.x, it is under Edit -> Preferences, go to "Fonts" and "Colors", and set to "Use my settings/Override document".
In Mozilla, you will find similar options under the "View" menu.
Under MSIE, the settings are scattered through out the "Internet Options" dialog.
Nothing currently in production is as easy or as complete as Opera's settings are, though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's all that IE is anyways. An up-to-date crutch to use while waiting for Mozilla.
:-)
"MSIE is great! I used it to download Mozilla!"
Ah, I eagerly await the day.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Could someone statically link M12 against glib2.1 and make it available? I still run glibc2.0 and would not like to break all my applications by upgrading.
Download and install glibc 2.1 binaries in some out-of-the-way place (/usr/local/lib/glibc-2.1/ for example).
Then use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to add said directory to the path the dynamic loader will use, before running Mozilla.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
MS didn't have time to get a browser to market, so they contracted with Spyglass. But when MS "bundled" the browser, they screwed Spyglass out of their share of what they expected to be large royalties.
Spyglass is so put off by what MS did, they don't even list IE as one of their accomplishments.
Source: http://www.kmfms.com/
Digital Wokan, Tribal mage of the electronics age
I don't think reading the RFCs is very important here. All that work has been done by the OpenSSL folk already. It should simply be a matter of making a new protocol handler, based on http://, that uses a different port and wraps the network socket with SSL.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
I would like to say -- "Get a clue" :)
Although the complete source code package has a size of 21 meg, this includes a lot of stuff. It includes all the OS specific trees, e-mail, editor, newsreader, front-ends. Embedded applications won't need nearly all that code. Probably only need gecko, and a few other modules, and gecko is under 2 meg.
So, what do you think *does* compete in the embedded market now? If you say IE, I'll scream...
-BrentIt seems that one great side effect Mozilla has had is pushing lots of open source OS's hard to fix various problems that they've had. A few months ago we saw a problem with threads and glibc on Linux that Mozilla exposed hardest and best.
Now, according to bug #14676, Mozilla has exposed some trouble in FreeBSD's dlopen() which has subsequently been fixed, making FreeBSD a better OS.
Mozilla is a Good Thing(R). :-)
Let me guess, your a real man. You code in emacs or vi. Well under X I'd rather use NEdit anyday. Rather than having to learn the archane syntax and multi keypress commands of emacs I'll stick with an editor that lets me get real work done quickly.
...
And on the console I'll stick to vim. Loads up fast on the overloaded servers I telnet to. Doesn't require ridiculous amounts of resources and disk space like emacs does.
When I want to learn another Lisp variant (I already know Scheme thank you very much), I may give emacs another chance. Until then
Chris Wareham
Don't count on it. This morning when I checked, ftp.mozilla.org had 9 different binary distributions online, and the mozilla.org website does indeed have an announcement about it. Now it is appropriate to consider announcing this on Slashdot.
Nevertheless, don't just assume all mirrors are up-to-date immediately; not all mirrors have any special access. When I checked this morning, the following mirrors appeared to be up-to-date:
So, I found 4 current mirrors. But the other 7 mirrors sites I reached were out of date. (And many listed mirror sites no longer appear to have mirrors -- the mirror list needs to be updated, it would seem.)
The moral of the story is that mirrors don't magically have the data, sometimes you have to give them some time -- and if you don't drive the load to the original source, the mirrors will work better for everyone...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
> Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames.
His was also wrong
Off the top of my head, I can think of several components that make up IE, all of which can operate independently. There's the renderer and the HTML/XML parser, to name two, then there's the container. COM components themselves don't even *have* titlebars, that's still a MFC Application thing.
But in Slashdotland, it's not about being right, it's about having information. Any information, right or wrong, as long as it bashes MS. It's not one bit different from the mass media trough all you god damn phonies look down on.
News for nerds indeed. I'm going to have to look into calling myself something other than a nerd.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
One thing that has to change in Netscape / Mozilla, is the speed. Go to freshmeat with netscape, and witness with pain the slowness with which the page is rendered. MUCH faster in IE.
Netscape is also TOO unstable, it can be made to crash just by switching between different netscape windows while loading them fast enough. I still like netscape better than IE, but I can certainly see why lots of people prefer IE under Windows.
Hopefully, and this is my belief, all this will change with Mozilla (once ready). With a fast, stable, clean and small (well..) browser, the free OS'es will have gone a long way towards the desktops.
// Simon
I know nothing about IE so I don't know who's right or wrong. The point is that he put information in his post, you didn't even try. If you had put the info in the post I'm responding to in the other one, everybody would have been better off. The best thing about forums like this is that many people put in different bits of information and then others pick it apart, add new information, etc, to add to the whole.
I think you're right about some people in the Linux/geek/whatever community that it's all about bashing MS but that's not true for everybody. Some of us actually want to learn and while I might not like IE, I'm all for learning about how it works from people like yourself that do know. It might take a second longer to add something to the conversation rather than just flaming but it makes everybody better overall.
I hear on the grapevine (actually at www.nedit.org) that NEdit 5.1 will be GPL'd and the next step is to make it a GTK application instead of Motif. Fantastic news if you ask me - nedit is the most kick-ass text editor on Unix IMHO.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I guarantee on my small insignificant life that you will be delighted with the new functionality, stability, and efficiency in M12. It still eats RAM like a mother, isn't luxuriant-feeling like IE, and falls over every once in a while, but it's well behaved, significantly more responsive-feeling, and handles far more page/frame/ecmascript/java issues... As an added bonus, the Win32 version can find and use all your old plugins, like Flash!
For the uninitiated, let's run down a few facts.
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Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.
Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.
Mozilla is quite modular.
Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.
Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.
Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.
Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.
The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.
Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.
Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.
Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.
Report any and all bugs to bugzilla.mozilla.com. Please follow the bug submission guidelines. A shitty bug report is worse than none at all, and wastes developer time.
If you wish, you can do hourly downloads of binaries, weekly downloads of tarballs, or up-to-the-minute CVS of mozilla.
You will be delighted with mozilla. If not, use something else.
-troll taker
1. It is way, way, way more stable, and is reaching the point where I can go for around 1.5-2 hours without a crash.
2. The speed of the rendering is much faster, the incremental reflow is much better, and can be tuned with some pref editing, and the scrolling no longer has that ugly grey! :-).
I'm happy to say, that the day the stable Mozilla is released, it'll make us all proud. The amount of fixes and speed increases seem to be accelerating quite quickly.
Congrats to the mozilla team.
Please remember to post bug reports too =]. They say on the page, that finding and documenting the bug is half the work.
Lucas
A late reply, so it might nat get read :)
CSS is a big thing - it has the ability to define EXACTLY how things are layed out on a page, etc. This is where the problems lie, becasue current browsers don't support this precision.
That being said, CSS is still GREAT for defining fonts, body colors, etc. All it requires to make changes across an antire site (that might be 200+ html files) is changing it in a single place. CSS also has the ability to do relative font sizes based on the user defined prefered size - That is great becasue it still allows people to control their text so that people with bad eyesite can still read the web page.
So, you're right - I could make webpages that are totally unreadable by people who use browsers that don't support the STANDARD. But, they can be used in a controlled manner to make the maintanence of sites much easier and not impede people whose browsers don't support them.
Could someone statically link M12 against glib2.1 and make it available? I still run glibc2.0 and would not like to break all my applications by upgrading. Thanks
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?
I have a lot of respect for Mozilla, but I have to say: isn't it about time to fork the code-based into several smaller projects?
It would be nice, for example, if the mail handler were a separate program so that any mailer could (ab)use the same API in order to replace Mozilla's default. Or, is this already possible with the plug-in API?
For some reason I seem to remember around the time they were first working on Gecko that there was talk of the entire browser fitting on a floppy. It was supposed to be incredibly fast, small, and stable. Now all I hear about it is that it's slow and bloated.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
I compiled it this morning. It rocks.
The announcement was a little quick off the mark - binaries are due to be posted within the next couple of hours - but Mozillazine (great site) has news of M12 binaries for Solaris and RPMs for Red Hat
The speed at which Mozilla has come along recently is something else. If this isn't alpha, then it is damn close. Download, enjoy, and report those bugs!
Dave
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First of all, kudos to the developers!.
second, a litte offtopic:
There is on feature I want in a browser and still haven't seen anywhere.
I want a button that goes to the main page of the website.
e.g. when I'm browsing http://www.foobar.org/foo/bar.html and I press this button the browser has to go to http://www.foobar.org/
does anyone know if there is feature like this in Mozilla ?
this would save me a lot of time re-typing the adress in the location bar or searching for the 'home' button on a website.
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I installed KRASH and noticed that konqueror has an Up arrow that brings you up one directory in the hierarchy. Pretty nifty.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Mozilla requires Java 1.3 for it's OJI (Open Java Interface). Currently Java 1.3 is available only in beta, but that should change before mozilla is released.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
The Style Sheet support is FANTASTIC! (I'm a web developer, so I've seen the havoc that trying to support different browsers can reak!)
:)
For a really good CSS test, check out:
http://style.verso.com/boxacidtest/
It renders horribly in Netscape 4.x series, but in Mozilla, it is EXACTLY the same as the reference picture. It got me pretty excited
It's good. No, it's great.
I've been developing an app that relies completely on styles for changing it's display properties. Sadly some things just didn't work out right when I followed the CSS1 spec to the letter in IE5 (e.g. the "white-space: nowrap" style didn't work in td tags - you have to revert to the HTML 3.2 nowrap tag instead... bah!). However I decided to check out the output in Mozilla. Works beautifully. All styles are rendered exactly as described in the CSS spec. This is an incredible boon for me.
However... of course this won't mean we can just develop web sites to the full CSS spec. Unfortunately those older browsers still exist, and often don't even degrade properly. IE4/5 now seems to have a 60% market share (or something like that).
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
But I couldn't get it to compile out of the box, even with the IDL libraries installed. However, I did track down a binary RPM and all went smoothly. Still, the memory footprint and CPU usage are excessive for day-to-day use. A couple of pages takes up a whopping 30 megs of RAM! Lots of debugging code, I'd imagine. There's still plenty of minor glitches, but nothing that should be too difficult to fix.
I wonder if Opera will make it out before xmas for a comparison...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
You know, I've never really looked into the RFCs on SSL and https. Is anyone following Mozilla closely enough to know how hard it is going to be to get crypto into Mozilla after the fact, either by licensed RSA implementation "plugin" (ugh) or by use of some compatible, patent-free, open source library developed outside the United States and thus not subject to our boneheaded crypto export restrictions?
I realize that this is a complex question...
Netscape is horrid with standards compliance, as earlier posters have stated. IE 5, and to a lesser extent 4, are quite good with supporting HTML 4.0 and the CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets) specifications. Most of the sites I've seen with "IE only-looks bad in Netscape" only post that because their style sheets are CSS1-correct but Netscape has lots and lots of problems with some of the features in the style sheets. You may want to check out The Little Shop of CSS Horrors for a great demonstration of cross-browser compatibility.
IE's marketshare is growing because it is the *only* browser out there. To claim that Communicator competes with IE is to claim that a '96 model Chevy competes with this years model Ford. Sorry, it'll never fly.
We all know now that it won't work to compete against Microsoft on features alone. If IE and Mozilla are identical, no one will use Mozilla. Mozilla needs to compete in areas that Microsoft can't. Outside of just plain old web browsing. Mozilla will need to use applications like Internet Appliances, wireless phones, web pads, administration front-ends, as a wrench to get in the market. From there, they'll be able to overtake MS. Nokia, AOL, Zope, and other companies will be using Mozilla in their applications. As a plain browser, Mozilla and IE can be used interchangably. So there is no loss if everyone uses IE for web browsing. When Mozilla is finished, people will use it. But embedded is harder to replace. Mozilla needed to focus, not on just browsing, to the work with the companies that will embed mozilla to make mozilla the best embeddable browser ever.
-BrentNo. The announcement can't wait until there are binaries. *ANYONE* can generate binaries from the source.
Why wait for binaries to make an announcement?
What platforms do you think we should wait until binaries exist for before something is announced? If there's no unixware binary or no intel solaris binary or no sparc linux binary, should we wait?
Why wait for a webmaster to update a website when the files are on ftp?
here's how it works:
- developers write code and check in changes to source control
- interested parties check ftp sites or cvs and download snapshots. Read Changelog. Compile. Provide feedback. Repeat as often as time permits.
- developers/testers know well in advance of any official announcement when a new milestone is near *BECAUSE THE DOCS SAY WHAT WILL BE IN NEXT MILESTONE*
- developers announce on slashdot for the benefit of the testers who may not be able to build snapshots, but are interested.
- slashdotters download src code and compile to get optimized binaries that take full advantage of their system libraries and architecture.
I would never prefer a binary for something that I could easily build from source. The only times I get a binary are when it's for an OS that I don't have a nice development machine, or for something hard to build like X11.
I always see a "wait for the mirrors" article posted to every announcement like this, and it always gets moderated way up high. Maybe because it seems helpful. Well, actually what you're doing is insulting somebody's intelligence.
The Mozilla build team is experienced enough to figure out for themselves when to post the source - copies of the build probably went out to the mirrors before being posted on the mozilla site. By the time binaries are available the slashdot effect for the sources will have subsided. They know what they're doing.
The important thing right now is to get as many developers as possible building the source. If you're a developer and you're just downloading the binaries and maybe sending in the odd bug report, you're kind of wasting your talent don't you think?
For anyone who hasn't built it yet... the source download is 20-something meg, but it expands to 130 meg or so, then inflates itself to over 600 meg by the time it's finished building, so you'd better have a nice round gig free. The build takes about 45 minutes.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Browser != HTML engine.
Mozilla as a browser will not fit on a floppy. Various Mozilla technology components, such as the Gecko rendering engine, most likely will.
You don't really think that Nokia, who IIRC expressed interest in using Mozilla on a wireless device, will be using the same Mozilla browser as it's assembled on Linux and Win32, do you?
No, they'll prolly be using a version of the HTML engine, with a new browser wrapped around it.
I pulled down a pre-M12 nightly last week and for the first time, Gecko nailed ZDNet pages properly.
At last, some hope that it will be an acceptable mainstream browser. And, oh, at least on Win32, the XUL widget stuff is suddenly many orders of magnitude faster. Still a bit awkward-looking, but it's pretty much as fast as native dialogs.
It's still months away from being a product, but it's clearly turned the corner. Now if they can work on usability, especially in terms of plugin/embed support, etc., they may yet have something interesting indeed.
It was buggy and unstable (considerably more so than 4.61), so yes, but the bulk of the difference between M11 and M12 is supposed to be bug fixes, so that should be less of a problem.
Other than Lynx, there's no released browser out there that's free of major problems. I use Netscape because I need inline graphics and ECMAScript, and it sucks less than the alternatives. I plan to switch to Mozilla (or some other Gecko-based alternative) as my regular browser as soon as the bug fixes get it to the right point where I can use it and still get all my work done.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Not really. A web browser is a commodity product. Like bread. You buy one brand of bread one week, but another brand the next week. Nothing keep you using one brand of bread over another expect your own preference. It's the same with a web browser. There is no technical reason forcing you to use a certain web browser. Use IE this week, Mozilla the next. Even if IE had 100% marketshare, it wouldn't mean anything when Mozilla was released.
I agree with you about MS FUD though. They'll try to milk as much from IE as they can. DIE, baby, DIE!!
-BrentI got my source at ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/packages/infosystems/WWW /clients/Netscape/Mozilla/mozilla/releas es/m12 :)
sorry for no html link, i suppose i could look at a little html for that, but like I said, I already got mine
Of course, Emacs does do a lot more than Mozilla.
HTH. HAND.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No wonder Microsoft wanted to see Netscape dead. Microsoft has everything to lose if the world will collectively embrace a new, standards compliant browsing platform. Mozilla will provide just that, and like M12 is starting to show, offer an additional bonus: it's quickly becoming the absolutely best browser out there.
Sooner than you think, the Mozilla 1.0 release will be in the hands of anyone that's interested, in complete source form. This WILL spawn zillions of of new, Mozilla-based browser version. They will have minuscule market shares at first, but that's when the big players will enter: Computer manufacturers will start making browsers to bundle with their machines, application developers will start integrating browser features into existing apps, big corporations will create custom browsers for internal use.
Each of these new browsing platforms will make little difference on its own, but grouped together, they will create a single, compatible, cross-platform application environment that is based on accepted industry standards. Mozilla will be the catalyst of life in this expanding pool of diverse browsers, and together the pool will quickly challenge Internet Explorer's position as the dominant browser.
There will be no reason to ponder if Compaq, Dell or Apple will include the Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer with their machines. They can and will roll their own, emphasizing their brand's unique selling proposition through innovative, custom features and look-n-feel.
How will that be possible? Luckily, it's a certainity that Microsoft will be barred from forcing their distribution channel (OEMs) to distribute Internet Explorer with other Microsoft products. This will level the playing field and launch wide-scale Mozilla-based browser development.
The emerging new browsers will share an API that is the W3C standards suite, and in this Microsoft-vs-the-world situation Microsoft will witness their embrace-extend-extinguish strategy becoming a public relations nightmare. Eventually Microsoft has to follow suit and develop a standards compliant browser. When this is realized at Redmond, it may very well be that the company will even switch to use the Mozilla layout engine as a goodwill stunt.
Consequences: Microsoft will lose some of the applications barrier to entry they've so feverishly protected all these years. Faced with this reality, they will even claim that the barried never existed. The Open Source camp will rejoice, but only to see Microsoft products grow their market share by sheer inertia.
Marko
Disclaimer: my crystal ball was being polished, so I had to pull this out of my ass. Sorry.
Marko Karppinen
They knew all along that cludging standards and implementing their own half-assed versions would make it more difficult for the end-user, but they did it anyway for the same reason all software companies make their own proprietary file formats, etc. They wanted to lock the end-user into using only Netscape. Yes, some of it had to do with general coding laziness, and some of it had to do with not wanting to have to wait for the various international bodies to shove stuff through committee and release a spec, but most of it was classic monopoly-building strategy.
What they didn't count on was MS coming along and being better at this game. MS and monopolies -- you'd think they could've seen it coming.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes