Suppose someone ported GTK to the Mac. Would it be violating Apple's copyright if someone wrote an Aqua skin to make GTK apps blend in with the rest of the OS?
Or how about Mozilla or IE? Is it OK for IE to ape the Aqua look as it does now, but Mozilla because of Apple's legal department?
I'm not sure I understand why people are so critical of projects like this. It's not like you would be compelled to include this stuff in your kernel, so how does it affect stability?
On the contrary, you would have to grab the patch (since it's unlikely to be part of the kernel tarball), apply it, find the config option to enable it and rebuild. If you had done all that it is because you want to include it and probably with a very good reason.
You've said it yourself. If people want native widgets they should use another product that embeds the engine into a native UI.
As it stands, gfx widgets certainly aren't bug free but they're usable, they're not memory hogging and they're no slower than normal widgets assuming the skin is sensible. The last two points need elaboration because people tend to confuse widgets with skins:
Concerning bloat - most of it has little to do with the widgets and more to do with packaging and internal structure issues that affect the whole of Mozilla. Having 100 DLLs instead of 10 eats up extra megabytes of memory. Having unbounded or untuned internal memory caches eat up extra megabytes of memory. Having inefficient structures (especially trees of them) eats up megabytes of memory. Gfx widgets consumption is comparison is neglible. Sure, there's an overhead if you start associating images with each widget but that's no different than if you skinned GTK, Mac OS X or Whistler. Use a lighter skin if that bugs you. But the basic widget functionality is only a few hundred K and if you're suggesting that Mozilla should have these widgets anyway for HTML forms then you haven't lost anything have you?
Concerning speed - the limiting factor is not the gfx widget which is as fast as any native C++ object but the bindings to Javascript and the complexity of the CSS associated with the widget. Obviously a skin that renders a button as several opaque graphics above some centred text using a non-system font is going to be a lot slower than one that just draws the button as framed text.
And a note about acessibility. Mozilla is much more accessible than *any* other browser though existing tools will need updating to benefit. Afterall, the whole app is skinnable and extensible, allowing anyone to integrate it with a touch screen, screen reader, braille printer etc. or to use large fonts and buttons for the UI. There are also efforts to increase compatibility with existing software where possible, e.g. implement WM_GETWINDOWTEXT on frame windows to enable screen readers that use that mechanism.
AOL hates any messaging product that competes with AIM, or their AOL chatrooms so I fail to see how the inclusion of an IRC chat client into a browser which is binary compatible with NS 6 but free of all the AOL marketing junk helps them in anyway at all.
People should be praising Mozilla.org (an entity largely consisting of Netscape employees) that it should have the balls to cock a snook at AOL like this and get away with it.
Perhaps you would rather haved a completely separate frontend for each platform that Mozilla was supposed to run on?
Assuming Mozilla was developed for Win32, Mac & Unix(GTK) this would have lead to 3 times the amount of UI development, localization, bugs & management for 3 UIs that were ultimately meant to look and feel the same anyway. And HTML form controls wouldn't be CSS-compliant either because they would be limited by the abilities of the native controls they were using. And users for other platforms such as OS/2, Unix(Motif), Unix(QT), Amiga, BeOS, Microwindows could all go screw themselves.
As it stands, the gfx widget approach is pretty sucessful. It has meant platform parity, massively reduced development times & easy porting to new platforms. The gfx widgets might not be 100% copies of the native widgets but for most people they're close enough. And this even assumes there is such a thing as a native widget to begin with. On Unix there isn't, on Win32 and Mac there are but plenty of apps choose to ignore them (e.g. Lotus OfficeSuite, IE 5.5, Encarta, Media Player 7, Quicktime 4, Sherlock, Kai Powertools, etc.).
Mozilla 0.6 is a milestone release based on the same branch as Netscape 6. It is aimed at developers who wish to create products that extend Netscape 6 or who wish to port it. Read the release notes for more info.
The 0.6 tag has little to do with the "version" of Mozilla that NS6 is based off because Mozilla doesn't even use version numbers yet. See the roadmap for more details.
Jesus Christ, some people are never happy. In old days this sort of stuff would be hardcoded in but now that it's all controlled at run time people still complain.
Everything from the browser, mail/news, editor, wallet, and the IRC client are MODULEs. If you don't want something then choose not to install it. Alternatively remove the JAR file and edit a few text files after installation and it goes away too. Even if you do leave it installed, the memory overhead of having the IRC chat client is low (consisting of some extra registry entries and chrome overlays) until you choose to run it.
Any substantial piece of software written in the last 3 years will run like a dog on that sort of configuration. I'm afraid the answer is to upgrade or stick with the stuff you're running now.
Even a memory upgrade can take away some of the pain. I have a P133 with 84Mb at home and it manages to run NS 6 on Linux. The UI (especially the menus are) a bit slow but page rendering is acceptable. I reckon it would be possible for someone to knock together a 'lite' skin for Moz/NS6 without any graphics or clever CSS that worked fine on lower end machines.
Superior in every way huh? I suppose battery life, form factor and price count for nothing then?
Like many people I bought my Palm to be a pocket organizer and it does it's job superbly in that regard. The Palm Vx model has plenty of space for all the names, appointments and memorys I could ask of it with plenty of room to spare for games and utilities too. It also fits in my pocket without looking like I'm carrying a giant deck of cards in there. While it would be nice if it could play MP3s, I could literally go out and buy an dedicated MP3 player for the money I saved over an iPaq.
And IRC & SSH? Well I've seen similar apps for the Palm, but is little point in such stuff without a modem since you may as well use the computer you plugged your handheld into to get connected in the first place.
I liked this movie a lot, but I came out thinking it stunk. The reason was the closing "what happened to characters after the story" captions. They didn't mesh at all with the rest of the picture and gave the whole thing a hurried feel. Would it have killed the studio or director to have one more scene to explain what happened next instead of this?
Apparantly not. I came out thinking Unbreakable was more like Animal House than the supernatural thriller it had been up until that point.
Although the stupid double-thickness bar running along the bottom with no information in it (and no method to turn it off) brings NS 6 back into the lead of space wastage. You can turn off that stupid bar in 4.7 with CTRL-ALT-S.
And you can turn it off in NS 6 by unchecking the "View|Toolbars|Taskbar" menu option. Not too tricky was it?
Change the skin then. Basically the button size is dictated by the theme so if you're not happy with the default one then use one which is lighter. Check out the Netscape theme site and Themes.org for more themes.
Netscape != Mozilla. The number 1 priority with Mozilla developers (and that includes Netscape engineers) at the moment is reducing the bloat and improving performance.
Most of the problems boil down to:
Packaging. The ~100 Mozilla DLLs should be condensed to 30 or so to reduce the per-DLL memory overhead.
Loading unecessary services. A lot of XPCOM objects are created at startup when their creation could be deferred until they are actually needed.
Boundless and untuned caches. Mozilla caches a lot of stuff and tweaks to the cache settings can dramatically affect memory consumption.
Memory leaks. Leakage is pretty flat (in the browser anyway) but there is still work to be done here, especially tracking down refcounting problems.
Inefficient structures. Certain structures hold onto more data than is absolutely necessary such as those to do with stylesheets.
All of these things are being worked on but don't represent anything that can't be fixed. Mozilla (and therefore the next version of Netscape) will benefit from these changes.
Maybe at the moment, but there are two linked efforts underway to improve support for OS X (an OS that isn't even out yet). Firstly, it's being Carbonized and secondly, there is work to make a hybrid browser - use Quartz for the rendering and Unix for the TCP/IP. Full info is here. In other words, Mozilla is coming to OS X. This is a minor miracle considering how Apple have done their very best to ignore Mozilla.
IBM have a responsibility to ensure that their hardware works with any popular modern OS. Whether FreeBSD qualifies is questionable but various flavours of Linux certainly do. In that sense they must support Linux.
As to whether they offer telephone support is another matter. We all know that support costs money and an IBM engineer could spend all day on the phone talking to a clueless user about the Linux they just installed. Such support is best left to the Linux distributor who at least know the nitty gritty details of their particular version.
The PS2 is going to be around for 5 years at least, so there's no point at all in queuing for hours. So you (might) get to buy a PS2 before anyone else - big deal. How about waiting for some games to appear and the price to come down?
Well I didn't say "people don't need", I said "most people don't need". The point here is that while a handheld that plays mp3s makes a great geek toy the vast, vast majority of handheld owners buy their devices as electronic organizers and balk at devices that cost twice the price and do their jobs less well. Obviously the situation in the handheld market bears that out.
Personally, I'd love an iPaq to play for many of the same reasons you suggest, but I can't imagine ever replacing my Palm Vx with it because the Palm is just so damned good at what it does.
Exactly. I use Netscape 6.0 for most of my browsing and the worst problems I encounter are visual quirks and problems with sniffers. These should disappear with time. Usually though it makes absolutely no difference what browser you're using.
Most people simply don't need the power (drainage) of an uber-device like the iPaq or any other CE handheld for that matter. Sure an iPaq can play mp3s and movie clips, but it costs twice as much and eats through batteries. The reason that Palm is still winning is because good organizer software, price and a long battery life count for much more in the handheld market.
While I like the idea of Gnutella, the reality is pretty unbearable at the moment. In typical usage where you're connected to a large network, Gnutella is so excruciatingly slow that it's practically useless. Napster might be the "wrong way" to do things, but at least it works.
If Gnutella is going to succeed it needs to be more intelligent. Nodes shouldn't be hammered with search requests. Nodes need to be scored by their actual throughput of search data should be cached to make searches quicker.
Gnutella also needs anonymity and security features to prevent spyware from seeing what's going on, so it should be possible (though not mandatory) for a node to nominate a bunch of anonymizing servers that search and encrypted data packets ping-pong through before reaching their destination.
People should be aware that they now use redirection scripts for every link in their directory - e.g. this page) - they can (and probably do) associate everything you click on with your "My Yahoo!" id.
Slashdot Mirror
Be will be releasing the sound card drivers sometime next year that allow you to listen to it.
Or how about Mozilla or IE? Is it OK for IE to ape the Aqua look as it does now, but Mozilla because of Apple's legal department?
Would you care to explain what a distributed kernel is then since you seem to know?
On the contrary, you would have to grab the patch (since it's unlikely to be part of the kernel tarball), apply it, find the config option to enable it and rebuild. If you had done all that it is because you want to include it and probably with a very good reason.
As it stands, gfx widgets certainly aren't bug free but they're usable, they're not memory hogging and they're no slower than normal widgets assuming the skin is sensible. The last two points need elaboration because people tend to confuse widgets with skins:
Concerning bloat - most of it has little to do with the widgets and more to do with packaging and internal structure issues that affect the whole of Mozilla. Having 100 DLLs instead of 10 eats up extra megabytes of memory. Having unbounded or untuned internal memory caches eat up extra megabytes of memory. Having inefficient structures (especially trees of them) eats up megabytes of memory. Gfx widgets consumption is comparison is neglible. Sure, there's an overhead if you start associating images with each widget but that's no different than if you skinned GTK, Mac OS X or Whistler. Use a lighter skin if that bugs you. But the basic widget functionality is only a few hundred K and if you're suggesting that Mozilla should have these widgets anyway for HTML forms then you haven't lost anything have you?
Concerning speed - the limiting factor is not the gfx widget which is as fast as any native C++ object but the bindings to Javascript and the complexity of the CSS associated with the widget. Obviously a skin that renders a button as several opaque graphics above some centred text using a non-system font is going to be a lot slower than one that just draws the button as framed text.
And a note about acessibility. Mozilla is much more accessible than *any* other browser though existing tools will need updating to benefit. Afterall, the whole app is skinnable and extensible, allowing anyone to integrate it with a touch screen, screen reader, braille printer etc. or to use large fonts and buttons for the UI. There are also efforts to increase compatibility with existing software where possible, e.g. implement WM_GETWINDOWTEXT on frame windows to enable screen readers that use that mechanism.
AOL hates any messaging product that competes with AIM, or their AOL chatrooms so I fail to see how the inclusion of an IRC chat client into a browser which is binary compatible with NS 6 but free of all the AOL marketing junk helps them in anyway at all.
People should be praising Mozilla.org (an entity largely consisting of Netscape employees) that it should have the balls to cock a snook at AOL like this and get away with it.
Assuming Mozilla was developed for Win32, Mac & Unix(GTK) this would have lead to 3 times the amount of UI development, localization, bugs & management for 3 UIs that were ultimately meant to look and feel the same anyway. And HTML form controls wouldn't be CSS-compliant either because they would be limited by the abilities of the native controls they were using. And users for other platforms such as OS/2, Unix(Motif), Unix(QT), Amiga, BeOS, Microwindows could all go screw themselves.
As it stands, the gfx widget approach is pretty sucessful. It has meant platform parity, massively reduced development times & easy porting to new platforms. The gfx widgets might not be 100% copies of the native widgets but for most people they're close enough. And this even assumes there is such a thing as a native widget to begin with. On Unix there isn't, on Win32 and Mac there are but plenty of apps choose to ignore them (e.g. Lotus OfficeSuite, IE 5.5, Encarta, Media Player 7, Quicktime 4, Sherlock, Kai Powertools, etc.).
Mozilla 0.6 is a milestone release based on the same branch as Netscape 6. It is aimed at developers who wish to create products that extend Netscape 6 or who wish to port it. Read the release notes for more info.
The 0.6 tag has little to do with the "version" of Mozilla that NS6 is based off because Mozilla doesn't even use version numbers yet. See the roadmap for more details.
Everything from the browser, mail/news, editor, wallet, and the IRC client are MODULEs. If you don't want something then choose not to install it. Alternatively remove the JAR file and edit a few text files after installation and it goes away too. Even if you do leave it installed, the memory overhead of having the IRC chat client is low (consisting of some extra registry entries and chrome overlays) until you choose to run it.
Even a memory upgrade can take away some of the pain. I have a P133 with 84Mb at home and it manages to run NS 6 on Linux. The UI (especially the menus are) a bit slow but page rendering is acceptable. I reckon it would be possible for someone to knock together a 'lite' skin for Moz/NS6 without any graphics or clever CSS that worked fine on lower end machines.
Like many people I bought my Palm to be a pocket organizer and it does it's job superbly in that regard. The Palm Vx model has plenty of space for all the names, appointments and memorys I could ask of it with plenty of room to spare for games and utilities too. It also fits in my pocket without looking like I'm carrying a giant deck of cards in there. While it would be nice if it could play MP3s, I could literally go out and buy an dedicated MP3 player for the money I saved over an iPaq.
And IRC & SSH? Well I've seen similar apps for the Palm, but is little point in such stuff without a modem since you may as well use the computer you plugged your handheld into to get connected in the first place.
Apparantly not. I came out thinking Unbreakable was more like Animal House than the supernatural thriller it had been up until that point.
And you can turn it off in NS 6 by unchecking the "View|Toolbars|Taskbar" menu option. Not too tricky was it?
Hmm weird Slashdot doesn't like the NS theme site link so here it is as text - http://home.netscape.com/themes/index.html
Netscape theme site is here
Change the skin then. Basically the button size is dictated by the theme so if you're not happy with the default one then use one which is lighter. Check out the Netscape theme site and Themes.org for more themes.
Most of the problems boil down to:
- Packaging. The ~100 Mozilla DLLs should be condensed to 30 or so to reduce the per-DLL memory overhead.
- Loading unecessary services. A lot of XPCOM objects are created at startup when their creation could be deferred until they are actually needed.
- Boundless and untuned caches. Mozilla caches a lot of stuff and tweaks to the cache settings can dramatically affect memory consumption.
- Memory leaks. Leakage is pretty flat (in the browser anyway) but there is still work to be done here, especially tracking down refcounting problems.
- Inefficient structures. Certain structures hold onto more data than is absolutely necessary such as those to do with stylesheets.
All of these things are being worked on but don't represent anything that can't be fixed. Mozilla (and therefore the next version of Netscape) will benefit from these changes.Maybe at the moment, but there are two linked efforts underway to improve support for OS X (an OS that isn't even out yet). Firstly, it's being Carbonized and secondly, there is work to make a hybrid browser - use Quartz for the rendering and Unix for the TCP/IP. Full info is here. In other words, Mozilla is coming to OS X. This is a minor miracle considering how Apple have done their very best to ignore Mozilla.
As to whether they offer telephone support is another matter. We all know that support costs money and an IBM engineer could spend all day on the phone talking to a clueless user about the Linux they just installed. Such support is best left to the Linux distributor who at least know the nitty gritty details of their particular version.
The PS2 is going to be around for 5 years at least, so there's no point at all in queuing for hours. So you (might) get to buy a PS2 before anyone else - big deal. How about waiting for some games to appear and the price to come down?
Personally, I'd love an iPaq to play for many of the same reasons you suggest, but I can't imagine ever replacing my Palm Vx with it because the Palm is just so damned good at what it does.
Exactly. I use Netscape 6.0 for most of my browsing and the worst problems I encounter are visual quirks and problems with sniffers. These should disappear with time. Usually though it makes absolutely no difference what browser you're using.
Most people simply don't need the power (drainage) of an uber-device like the iPaq or any other CE handheld for that matter. Sure an iPaq can play mp3s and movie clips, but it costs twice as much and eats through batteries. The reason that Palm is still winning is because good organizer software, price and a long battery life count for much more in the handheld market.
If Gnutella is going to succeed it needs to be more intelligent. Nodes shouldn't be hammered with search requests. Nodes need to be scored by their actual throughput of search data should be cached to make searches quicker.
Gnutella also needs anonymity and security features to prevent spyware from seeing what's going on, so it should be possible (though not mandatory) for a node to nominate a bunch of anonymizing servers that search and encrypted data packets ping-pong through before reaching their destination.
People should be aware that they now use redirection scripts for every link in their directory - e.g. this page) - they can (and probably do) associate everything you click on with your "My Yahoo!" id.
Now would be a good time to switch to dmoz.org.