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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.
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
It 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). :-)
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
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