The browser is getting to be the best, kick-ass browser around though the mail/news component still needs some work. Simply put, mail/news is too slow and leaky. Try browsing through a few large folders and watch the memory shoot up. It's also missing a few things of 4.x such as watch/ignore threads.
Gripes aside I'm looking forward to the final release which can't that far away.
Go to Thailand, India or any other country where annual earnings are a tenth or less compared to the West. Now go into their computer stores and you'll see the price of legitimate software such as MS Windows is same as in your local store.
So to the average Thai, Windows does cost $1000 compared to their wages. Is it any wonder then that piracy is so rampant in these countries? It's not through some inherent maliciousness, but simply because the originals are so outrageously priced that no one can afford them. The same goes for other consumer media such as DVDs, VCDs, CDs etc. which are often even more expensive than the West (even to a Westerner like me).
There is a lesson here. Claims that Microsoft could increase its price for Windows to $1000 are ridiculous because no one would buy it. Even corporations who would quickly migrate at the first sign of this happening. There's simply nothing compelling about Windows that would cause people to shell out, especially with so many cheaper (and free) alternatives around.
Why is there a big rush to buy one of these things? Why not wait for the price to come down, the BIOS and hardware to go through a few revisions and for some games to appear?
Hmmm, so the difference between 6.2 and 7.0 is a few package upgrades. Big deal.
Perhaps I'd be more excited if someone said Redhat had listened to concerns about security and had made 7.0 the most secure-by-default Linux yet. Or if they had written simple tools that made Linux as easy to administer as Windows 2000. Or if 7.0 wasn't playing package catchup to Mandrake 7.1. Or if it supported substantially more hardware.
Since it does none of these things, I won't be in any hurry to try it out.
Nokia can blow it out of their ass if their schedule is upset by mozilla.org changes. If they really want a stable release for themselves, they should copy the whole tree into their own source control system and manage that.
But they still need to deliver the diffs they've made to the code which is something they haven't done yet.
I hate to say, but duh if you don't want to have this so-called "bloatware", simply choose not to install it when given the choice. It's optional. If you have the source, configure Mozilla to only build the parts you want.
Weird. My 450Mhz PC runs the latest Mozilla nightlies considerably faster than Communicator 4.x ever did on Linux. Sure, it's sluggish in certain things such as scrolling through mail/news headers but generally it's very fast especially for browsing.
I can certainly believe that the complexity of the skin can affect performance. The classic skin is probably lighter and much better for slow machines than the more graphics and alpha-channel intensive modern skin.
Mac users are too busy whinging how bad it is without helping it make it any better.
Mac OS is the Win16 of operating systems. It has such a brain-dead filesystem, threading model, memory model, and event handling model that it chokes when presented with code that no other modern OS has problems with.
Mac development tools are godawful.
Netscape has more engineers doing Win32 / Linux work than the Mac.
Apple engineers have been conspicuously absent from lending *any* support to Mozilla. I wonder why they are sitting on their hands?
If any of the above problems were addressed the situation would get better.
They get their money back through licensing their software to the likes of Sony.
At the end of the day, most Palm users will balk at the fee and will make do with what they have or they'll get the upgrade by other means, e.g. through warez sites.
I've used Redhat since 5.1 and I've become increasingly disllusioned with its progress with each release. While each point release has meant a few package upgrades, the inclusion of some important new software (e.g. 2.2 kernel, Gnome & KDE etc.), the fundamental operating system has hardly changed at all.
In particular, Redhat Linux is hardly more usable (to a casual user) than it ever was. There has been no substantial steps made to making the thing more user-friendly. A cobbled-together "solution" of Gnome or KDE, linuxconf and a few other disparate tools is not user-friendly.
Secondly, Redhat is still too happy to install a load of unwanted shit onto your harddrive as part of a default install. Most people simply do not need mail, news, ftp, http servers installed and running by default. What the hell are they thinking to leave these things enabled? Not only does this leave the box with gaping wide ports, but it degrades the overall machine performance. If anyone really needs them then they should have to turn them on themselves.
Yes it does allow controls to run with complete abandon. Once they are installed and on your machine you have no option but to disable ActiveX control support in IE if you want to stop them running. Once they are running they can do anything they like.
The medium security level (the default) does at least offer you the chance to prevent third party controls from installing themselves, but that doesn't stop safe for scripting controls getting onto your machine in other ways. For example, if you install MS Office, you'll get several controls like the infamous office assistant which was subject to a security alert not long back.
So why not bump up the security? Well that's great except it stops other features such as Windows Update and Microsoft's internet-based installers from working properly.
Your comments about W2K are also misleading. The ActiveX controls (and all in-process COM objects) run with the privileges of the host application since a control is contained in DLL. If you use Run As with IE (the host app) to prevent it access to certain folders then the controls will not have access either. Great, except that W2K still doesn't lock things down on installation. Only a knowledgable user will bother to manually lock things down and even then things could be touch and go.
For the other 99.999% of users, they're still lumbered with a fatally broken security model.
JS is partly the reason, but mainly it's due to the code not being optimized fully yet. Most of the JS functionality confines itself to places where speed is not that important.
Where speed is important, the JS drops back into C++ helper objects and whole chunks such as the rendering engine are entirely written in C++.
Mozilla is never likely to be as fast as NC 4.x in terms of perceived speed but hopefully faster rendering times and progressive rendering will make it appear more responsive.
When you have the source in front of you, you can make Mozilla as bloated or as light as you want. There's plenty of stuff that doesn't get compiled in unless you specifically ask for it. For example if you don't want mail news support then just set the build flags to not build that part. If you don't want PNG, XSL, SVG etc. then turn off those bits too.
Neither Mozilla.org nor Netscape is responsible for the BeOS version. If it's slow and buggy blame, or rather help the independent BeOS developers who are porting it their platform.
Assuming that BeOS has a decent set of GNU development tools (make, gcc etc) it wouldn't be insurmountable to make it work properly on BeOS. I believe that BeOS has some issues with dynamic library loading (or lack of surport for them) but that's more of a build and configuration issue than anything inherent in the source code. There are efforts afoot to address these issues.
What the hell are you talking about? The "Seamonkey" release (not "Gecko" which is the name of rendering engine) has not been "sitting on the shelf for over a year already" - it's been active development for the last 2 1/2 years. You could have downloaded it and its sourcecode at any point.
Perhaps you could point your incoherent whinging in the direction of Microsoft next time asking where the source code for IE is.
Honestly, the reason that C/C++ is used by Mozilla and practically other large piece of PC software is that it is the only way to get acceptable performance. Java, Smalltalk and other object oriented languages which throw away the nitty gritty details tend to run like a slug as a result. And nitty gritty is exactly what you need when you're writing something as complicated as a webbrowser.
XPCOM/COM is just an object technology and in itself doesn't make a product any more or less secure than if it were written with Corba or with plain-old DLL exported methods.
What makes IE so insecure is it's application of this technology to equal what Java was touted to do:
It allows 3rd party COM objects to install and run with complete abandon on your PC. Once installed, that control owns your ass.
It's security model is hopeless - any object marked safe for scripting can be created by any HTML. Even if the control isn't malicious it can be made to do malicious things when you visit a website.
While Mozilla contains a number of XPCOM components it is not possible for standard HTML to instantiate or exploit any of them. Standard HTML can only instantiate the standard set of Javascript objects and everything else is off-limits.
Only chrome can create arbitrary XPCOM objects and that's the implicitly trusted "application" that your Mozilla engine is running. AFAIK skins are treated as untrusted content.
Does that mean Mozilla doesn't contain bugs? Of course not, but it is designed to be safer than ActiveX controls in IE from the outset.
Security is very important for such people but they are the least likely to know how to protect themselves! Mandrake, Redhat and most other distributions install all sorts of crap including mail, news, telnet, ftp daemons that run automatically and silently in the background as Granny plays her games. All are potentially exploitable and should be disabled by default. Otherwise Granny might get a knock on the door from a nice FBI man asking why her PC has been used to store warez, pr0n and launch attacks on other machines.
If someone really wants these things, then it's hardly a chore for them to enable them. Most of them need configuration anyway to be useful. So they should be disabled by default not least for security reasons but also for increased machine performance and faster startup.
Are you suggesting that Microsoft don't do usability studies? Of course they do which is why Mandrake should too. Afterall, Corel manages it though their distribution sucks for other reasons such as hardware compatibility.
The unfortunate truth is that if you were to set up a usability study between W2K and Mandrake, Mandrake would lose big time. Even simple changes such as renaming or moving an icon could have a big impact on how usable an OS is.
Yes I have installed Mandrake, countless times in fact and it has a pretty good installer aside from the "choose how many packages to install" slider.
But go back and read what I said - I wasn't talking about installation, I was talking about any typical, everyday task a user wants to do. Usability tests involve sitting a user (novice, intermediate, expert etc.) in front of PC and asking them to do a bunch of tasks, ranging from just logging on, setting up their PC to log into their ISP, reading email, writing a document, printing it and so forth. It's obvious that few Linux distributors with the exception of Corel even bother with this. As a result a typical distro looks like a bunch of independently developed packages bound together with masking tape. Probably they assume all their users are expert enough to figure it all out for themselves.
Unfortunately that's absolutely the wrong attitude to take.
Yippee, more package upgrades! Now how about setting up a usability lab and asking users of varying skill levels to perform routine tasks on a new Mandrake install? I would be surprised if the users weren't floundering on all but the most basic of tasks.
If something is really secret then encrypt it but most users including myself have plenty of files kicking around our home directories that can't encrypted but should still be inaccessible to nosey users.
For example all of the standard resource files,.profile,.bashrc,.bash_history,.newsrc etc. can't be encrypted/decrypted since software needs to read them.
Eh? Gecko has from the very beginning worked on Windows and has been embeddable on Windows. That people are starting to use it this way should not be a big surprise at all.
In fact Gecko has been available as an ActiveX control for nearly two years now and quite a few products from HTML/CSS editors to skinnable browsers such as Neoplanet already use it.
They don't have to be linked together. Depending on the browser, the refferer contains the *last* site the visitor went to, irrespective of whether there's a link to the current site.
Slashdot Mirror
Gripes aside I'm looking forward to the final release which can't that far away.
So to the average Thai, Windows does cost $1000 compared to their wages. Is it any wonder then that piracy is so rampant in these countries? It's not through some inherent maliciousness, but simply because the originals are so outrageously priced that no one can afford them. The same goes for other consumer media such as DVDs, VCDs, CDs etc. which are often even more expensive than the West (even to a Westerner like me).
There is a lesson here. Claims that Microsoft could increase its price for Windows to $1000 are ridiculous because no one would buy it. Even corporations who would quickly migrate at the first sign of this happening. There's simply nothing compelling about Windows that would cause people to shell out, especially with so many cheaper (and free) alternatives around.
Why is there a big rush to buy one of these things? Why not wait for the price to come down, the BIOS and hardware to go through a few revisions and for some games to appear?
Perhaps I'd be more excited if someone said Redhat had listened to concerns about security and had made 7.0 the most secure-by-default Linux yet. Or if they had written simple tools that made Linux as easy to administer as Windows 2000. Or if 7.0 wasn't playing package catchup to Mandrake 7.1. Or if it supported substantially more hardware.
Since it does none of these things, I won't be in any hurry to try it out.
It sounds more like a problem with your hardware or drivers causing the problems you're seeing.
But they still need to deliver the diffs they've made to the code which is something they haven't done yet.
I hate to say, but duh if you don't want to have this so-called "bloatware", simply choose not to install it when given the choice. It's optional. If you have the source, configure Mozilla to only build the parts you want.
I can certainly believe that the complexity of the skin can affect performance. The classic skin is probably lighter and much better for slow machines than the more graphics and alpha-channel intensive modern skin.
- Mac users are too busy whinging how bad it is without helping it make it any better.
- Mac OS is the Win16 of operating systems. It has such a brain-dead filesystem, threading model, memory model, and event handling model that it chokes when presented with code that no other modern OS has problems with.
- Mac development tools are godawful.
- Netscape has more engineers doing Win32 / Linux work than the Mac.
- Apple engineers have been conspicuously absent from lending *any* support to Mozilla. I wonder why they are sitting on their hands?
If any of the above problems were addressed the situation would get better.At the end of the day, most Palm users will balk at the fee and will make do with what they have or they'll get the upgrade by other means, e.g. through warez sites.
In particular, Redhat Linux is hardly more usable (to a casual user) than it ever was. There has been no substantial steps made to making the thing more user-friendly. A cobbled-together "solution" of Gnome or KDE, linuxconf and a few other disparate tools is not user-friendly.
Secondly, Redhat is still too happy to install a load of unwanted shit onto your harddrive as part of a default install. Most people simply do not need mail, news, ftp, http servers installed and running by default. What the hell are they thinking to leave these things enabled? Not only does this leave the box with gaping wide ports, but it degrades the overall machine performance. If anyone really needs them then they should have to turn them on themselves.
The medium security level (the default) does at least offer you the chance to prevent third party controls from installing themselves, but that doesn't stop safe for scripting controls getting onto your machine in other ways. For example, if you install MS Office, you'll get several controls like the infamous office assistant which was subject to a security alert not long back.
So why not bump up the security? Well that's great except it stops other features such as Windows Update and Microsoft's internet-based installers from working properly.
Your comments about W2K are also misleading. The ActiveX controls (and all in-process COM objects) run with the privileges of the host application since a control is contained in DLL. If you use Run As with IE (the host app) to prevent it access to certain folders then the controls will not have access either. Great, except that W2K still doesn't lock things down on installation. Only a knowledgable user will bother to manually lock things down and even then things could be touch and go.
For the other 99.999% of users, they're still lumbered with a fatally broken security model.
Where speed is important, the JS drops back into C++ helper objects and whole chunks such as the rendering engine are entirely written in C++.
Mozilla is never likely to be as fast as NC 4.x in terms of perceived speed but hopefully faster rendering times and progressive rendering will make it appear more responsive.
Neither Mozilla.org nor Netscape is responsible for the BeOS version. If it's slow and buggy blame, or rather help the independent BeOS developers who are porting it their platform.
Assuming that BeOS has a decent set of GNU development tools (make, gcc etc) it wouldn't be insurmountable to make it work properly on BeOS. I believe that BeOS has some issues with dynamic library loading (or lack of surport for them) but that's more of a build and configuration issue than anything inherent in the source code. There are efforts afoot to address these issues.
Perhaps you could point your incoherent whinging in the direction of Microsoft next time asking where the source code for IE is.
Honestly, the reason that C/C++ is used by Mozilla and practically other large piece of PC software is that it is the only way to get acceptable performance. Java, Smalltalk and other object oriented languages which throw away the nitty gritty details tend to run like a slug as a result. And nitty gritty is exactly what you need when you're writing something as complicated as a webbrowser.
What makes IE so insecure is it's application of this technology to equal what Java was touted to do:
While Mozilla contains a number of XPCOM components it is not possible for standard HTML to instantiate or exploit any of them. Standard HTML can only instantiate the standard set of Javascript objects and everything else is off-limits.
Only chrome can create arbitrary XPCOM objects and that's the implicitly trusted "application" that your Mozilla engine is running. AFAIK skins are treated as untrusted content.
Does that mean Mozilla doesn't contain bugs? Of course not, but it is designed to be safer than ActiveX controls in IE from the outset.
If someone really wants these things, then it's hardly a chore for them to enable them. Most of them need configuration anyway to be useful. So they should be disabled by default not least for security reasons but also for increased machine performance and faster startup.
The unfortunate truth is that if you were to set up a usability study between W2K and Mandrake, Mandrake would lose big time. Even simple changes such as renaming or moving an icon could have a big impact on how usable an OS is.
But go back and read what I said - I wasn't talking about installation, I was talking about any typical, everyday task a user wants to do. Usability tests involve sitting a user (novice, intermediate, expert etc.) in front of PC and asking them to do a bunch of tasks, ranging from just logging on, setting up their PC to log into their ISP, reading email, writing a document, printing it and so forth. It's obvious that few Linux distributors with the exception of Corel even bother with this. As a result a typical distro looks like a bunch of independently developed packages bound together with masking tape. Probably they assume all their users are expert enough to figure it all out for themselves.
Unfortunately that's absolutely the wrong attitude to take.
And Mandrake is one of the better distros!
If something is really secret then encrypt it but most users including myself have plenty of files kicking around our home directories that can't encrypted but should still be inaccessible to nosey users.
For example all of the standard resource files, .profile, .bashrc, .bash_history, .newsrc etc. can't be encrypted/decrypted since software needs to read them.
Alternatively don't install the mail & news when you get the choice, or use a lighter skin to begin with.
In fact Gecko has been available as an ActiveX control for nearly two years now and quite a few products from HTML/CSS editors to skinnable browsers such as Neoplanet already use it.
They don't have to be linked together. Depending on the browser, the refferer contains the *last* site the visitor went to, irrespective of whether there's a link to the current site.