Mozilla is a kick-ass browser in the making. As it stands it's still memory intensive, but it's fast, skinnable, extensible and standards compliant. The memory and performance issues are a pain, but development has so far focussed on features. Now Mozilla is feature complete (just about), the footprint will be addressed once M16 is out. Expect M17/M18 to have significantly smaller memory requirements.
Emacs should stick to being an editor since it's a shit browser. If you want a proper open source browser try Mozilla. It might not be GPL but it's as good as.
Opera will have a problem trying to win against the likes of Mozilla. While Opera is certainly lighter, but I don't see how a closed source and commercial browser can win out against an open source, standards compliant and free browser.
Slashdot do this all the time and it is a reminder to trust a thing they say. I recall a recent story saying that Mozilla M16 was out when anyone could have easily verified that it wasn't simply by going to Mozilla.org. Did that stop them? No of course not - a story about Mozilla generates hits even when it is complete bollocks. The sad part is so few readers pick up on all the bullshit believing blindly that whatever Slashdot says must be true.
If Slashdot has a shred journalistic integrity (assuming you can call those who summarise someone else's story as journalists), then they would do well to get their facts straight in the first place without looking like complete fools when it turns out to be nonsense.
Mozilla (or Netscape 6 if you prefer) has at least 2 more betas to go through before final release. Beta 2 is a month away and Beta 3 must be several months after that. That means Mozilla is unlikely to hit 1.0 any time before November. So how the hell do AOL/Gateway/Transmeta expect to ship a web pad if the software it runs is not even completed?
As I see it, it either means AOL/Gateway are being highly optimistic in choosing Mozilla as their embeddable browser or they are not going to use it at all, at least in the 1st generation device.
Mozilla is not suitable because it leaks like a sieve and is so bloated. It also has a mean time between failure of about an hour. All this will of course change by November when 1.0 comes out, but that's much too late for this device.
This is dumb. You could easily do the same with existing cellular technology. In most modern cities, a cell covers only a street or two at the most so it's not like it would be any less effective.
The amusing thing about all this is ActiveState are probably funding this venture partly with cash that Microsoft gave them to make Perl work better on Win32. I can see the headlines now - "Microsoft finances Mozilla development!"
Cretin. Plenty of people test it and raise bugs and fix them too. Mozilla is in beta so is it any wonder it's not perfect? It's certainly no worse of plenty of other open source projects were during beta cycles.
You could help too if you weren't so busy wallowing in your own crapulence.
Scripts are perfectly safe if you don't expose the objects or primitives to them that they can use to do harm. The reason for the ILOVEYOU virus was not the fact that scripting was there, but that:
Microsoft chose to hide file extensions so ILOVEYOU.txt.vbs looked like ILOVEYOU.txt
Microsoft chose to automatically run scripts when a user clicked on them
Microsoft chose to design a black or white security model - either an object is safe or it isn't for scripting - and then proceeded to create highly dangerous 'safe' objects
The unsigned artist thing is interesting since Napster requires that you know what you're searching for. Since by definition an unknown artist is, well, unknown, who the hell is ever going to find their songs?
So the Microserver runs Linux. Big Deal. The Gateway blurb says it does and that prices start at $1300. Par for the course for this sort of thing I would guess.
So what's the point of this story? It's not like it's some $99 net appliance that is secretly a PC inside. It's openly a PC inside and openly runs Linux.
Why do Slashdot print any garbage submission without even doing a cursory check to see if the facts are correct?
The M16 release is not out yet and won't be for several weeks at least! The builds you see on ftp.mozilla.org marked with M16 are nightly builds on the M16 development branch and not the final product. There is a whole bunch of bugs and stabilisation to be done before M16 will be released. It does no good to bitch and moan about the quality of M16 at the moment since nightly builds vary wildly in quality from day to day.
The Apple logo is still there and it *still* looks stupid. I think someone in Apple tought it would be a great idea to put something that looks like a button but isn't slap-bang in the middle of the menu real estate just to confuse users and complicate the menu code as much as possible.
Web sites don't get any customers unless they have a "presence". Getting one of those requires spending lots of advertising money nationally or globally to get the links and the hits which to generate the number of sales the site has to make to break even. On top of that things have to be cheaper, even after adding delivery. That makes margins low so volume must be high to compensate.
It doesn't take a genius to see that there is not enough volume in a market such as books or music for instance to support the number of stores that currently exist. Some of them *will* fail.
There must be plenty one or two year old e-commerce sites that are feeling the pinch right now. It can't be long before more of them fall.
Any reading the news since the ruling can't have failed to notice that Microsoft *still* continues to be anti-competitive. That's deeply arrogant for a behaviour for a company which should be standing like a penant child in front of the judge. And the excuses they give to justify their behaviour! Gates and Balmer must be severely deluded to think that a Microsoft monopoly is the reason we don't have more ILOVEYOU virii! Let's face it, this company is rotten and couldn't change for all the pirate software in China. It should be forced to split as much for its own sake as for others.
While it's laudible that such a feature appeared in Mozilla it's pretty limited and people shouldn't get too worked up about it not being on the menu. Why? Well...
You can enable it again if you want by editing the prefs file.
You can download a skin that has that menu option put back in.
You can download Junkbuster or the like and get much better ad-filtering anyway
Web advertisers would get around the feature easily enough simply by "morphing" their addresses and URLs
Websites would serve up shit content or boycott Mozilla altogether as "punishment" for trying to deprive them of their advertising revenue.
In other words don't get too worked up about. Be glad the feature is there for people motivated enough to enable it and let the other %99.5 keep generating the hits that keep your favourite websites up.
Maybe it's because those connected to the bug have been overwhelmed with stupid questions and flames and have probably given up replying in favour of doing some real work.
There isn't a conspiracy here except in the minds of those ignorant news organisations (including slashdot) who have whipped this thing into a frenzy of accusations without even bothering to check the facts for themselves.
The biggest problem to face many groups is trolls, kooks and clueless newbies.
I have never read soc.culture.singapore, but I glance at soc.culture.british from time to time and I am appalled by the posts in there. Most of the bandwidth of this group is generated by various cross-posting ASSHOLES beating the drum of their causes in a group that doesn't give a shit. There must be at least ten cross-posters at any time (though I doubt they even subscribe to SCB) who rant crap about Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Israel and a range of off-topic subjects.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla is a kick-ass browser in the making. As it stands it's still memory intensive, but it's fast, skinnable, extensible and standards compliant. The memory and performance issues are a pain, but development has so far focussed on features. Now Mozilla is feature complete (just about), the footprint will be addressed once M16 is out. Expect M17/M18 to have significantly smaller memory requirements.
Emacs should stick to being an editor since it's a shit browser. If you want a proper open source browser try Mozilla. It might not be GPL but it's as good as.
The compactness also comes from excluding or having only half-baked implementations of some important modern web standards.
Opera will have a problem trying to win against the likes of Mozilla. While Opera is certainly lighter, but I don't see how a closed source and commercial browser can win out against an open source, standards compliant and free browser.
Of course I meant:
Slashdot do this all the time and it is a reminder to never trust a thing they say.
If Slashdot has a shred journalistic integrity (assuming you can call those who summarise someone else's story as journalists), then they would do well to get their facts straight in the first place without looking like complete fools when it turns out to be nonsense.
In the spirit of really bad cash-in sequels, perhaps it should be called Amiga Too!
The Bladeenc site has had this notice up for ages now, why the sudden interest?
As I see it, it either means AOL/Gateway are being highly optimistic in choosing Mozilla as their embeddable browser or they are not going to use it at all, at least in the 1st generation device.
Mozilla is not suitable because it leaks like a sieve and is so bloated. It also has a mean time between failure of about an hour. All this will of course change by November when 1.0 comes out, but that's much too late for this device.
This is dumb. You could easily do the same with existing cellular technology. In most modern cities, a cell covers only a street or two at the most so it's not like it would be any less effective.
The amusing thing about all this is ActiveState are probably funding this venture partly with cash that Microsoft gave them to make Perl work better on Win32. I can see the headlines now - "Microsoft finances Mozilla development!"
You could help too if you weren't so busy wallowing in your own crapulence.
Are you getting the hint of who's to blame here?
The unsigned artist thing is interesting since Napster requires that you know what you're searching for. Since by definition an unknown artist is, well, unknown, who the hell is ever going to find their songs?
So what's the point of this story? It's not like it's some $99 net appliance that is secretly a PC inside. It's openly a PC inside and openly runs Linux.
The M16 release is not out yet and won't be for several weeks at least! The builds you see on ftp.mozilla.org marked with M16 are nightly builds on the M16 development branch and not the final product. There is a whole bunch of bugs and stabilisation to be done before M16 will be released. It does no good to bitch and moan about the quality of M16 at the moment since nightly builds vary wildly in quality from day to day.
The Apple logo is still there and it *still* looks stupid. I think someone in Apple tought it would be a great idea to put something that looks like a button but isn't slap-bang in the middle of the menu real estate just to confuse users and complicate the menu code as much as possible.
It doesn't take a genius to see that there is not enough volume in a market such as books or music for instance to support the number of stores that currently exist. Some of them *will* fail.
There must be plenty one or two year old e-commerce sites that are feeling the pinch right now. It can't be long before more of them fall.
Any reading the news since the ruling can't have failed to notice that Microsoft *still* continues to be anti-competitive. That's deeply arrogant for a behaviour for a company which should be standing like a penant child in front of the judge. And the excuses they give to justify their behaviour! Gates and Balmer must be severely deluded to think that a Microsoft monopoly is the reason we don't have more ILOVEYOU virii! Let's face it, this company is rotten and couldn't change for all the pirate software in China. It should be forced to split as much for its own sake as for others.
In other words don't get too worked up about. Be glad the feature is there for people motivated enough to enable it and let the other %99.5 keep generating the hits that keep your favourite websites up.
There isn't a conspiracy here except in the minds of those ignorant news organisations (including slashdot) who have whipped this thing into a frenzy of accusations without even bothering to check the facts for themselves.
Wait until it is released and then declare it a failure (or more likely a success).
Anyone taking the time to view the bug in question would see it's a non-story.
If this is too much effort, it won't be long before someone produces a tiny Mozilla distro much like others have done with Linux.
I have never read soc.culture.singapore, but I glance at soc.culture.british from time to time and I am appalled by the posts in there. Most of the bandwidth of this group is generated by various cross-posting ASSHOLES beating the drum of their causes in a group that doesn't give a shit. There must be at least ten cross-posters at any time (though I doubt they even subscribe to SCB) who rant crap about Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Israel and a range of off-topic subjects.