Doug Turner is the lead developer for the Minimo project at Mozilla. This project has a focus on small consumer devices and so this news of a WindowsCE port is very exciting.
Those figures are quite dated, actually. According to Global Reach the Internet has over 800 million users. The CIA factbook shows only 600 million which puts their data at about two years old.
I have seen sites which already use various pop-up-divs with javascript to close them, and as long as the images are proxied by the web server (to the ad server) so that the user agent doesn't know the difference, then they can't block those images.
A sliding div withing the content area is not a pop-up. It's not a pop-under. It is an annoyance and we're working a solution for it but pop-ups have an entirely differnt set of usability problems that are much worse than in-content advertising. I'll consider it a huge success if we've convinced the market to move away from pop-ups even if the alternative are these modal sliding divs that don't break out of the content area.
Also, as far as image blocking goes, while the stock Firefox build blocks images from specific domains (so you wouldn't want to block the ad if it came from the same server or proxy as the good images) a simple ad-on like AdBlock gives users the power to easily block ads without losing the legitimate page content.
Anyone reasonable person will conclude that a world dominated by Firefox could hardly be any better than a world dominated by IE.
I think I'd like to meet one of your reasonable persons.
The resonable people I know would surely prefer a Web dominated by a standards-conforming browser that was faster, safer, more secure, more usable, and ran on a dozen platforms than a Web dominated by a browser that pushes proprietary lock-in technologies like ActiveX, is filled with security holes that are deeply tied into the OS, and runs decently on only one or two platforms (depending on your definition of 'decently'.)
The reasonable people I know think that an open source, open and published standards-based, cross-platform, free solution would be a much preferable monopoly than an expensive, single vendor, single platform, proprietary system.
I consider myself fairly reasonable and I think that a Web server world dominated by tools like Apache, PHP, Perl, Linux, Python, and MySQL would be a fine thing compard to one dominated by Windows, IIS, MS SQL, and ASP.
Is a world dominated by BIND DNS "hardly any better" than a world dominated by a proprietary alternative like MS DNS? I don't think so.
I'm all for healthy competition between decent organizations who share the goals of a free and open Web, but I think you go a bit far when you suggest that a wildly successful Mozilla Foundation would be no better than a wildly successful Microsoft.
Now that it appears that FireFox is coming really close to squeezing on the 5% margin, my question is: will web designers really consider making their sites compatible with 92% of IE and 5% of FireFox? That could be a lot of work, depending on the site. Or are site designers just more likely to say "as long as we have 90% compatibility, that's good enough"? Turning away 10% of your customers seems like a lot, though, too.
Well, we're not targeting 5%, we're very likely already past that and headed to 10% in a hurry. IE has already dropped below 90% according to OneStat and is on the verge according to WebSideStory. Throw in a couple percentage points for other standards-compliant browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and Safair and in a couple months it starts looking a lot closer to 15% than to 5%.
I think that most business I know would adjust the height of their front door if it meant that they could increase their customer base by 15%.
And now that Firefox has proven it's superiority to IE, why doesn't some one finish porting KHTML to windows so we have a second good reason against IE ? Look what we've done with one single engine (20%). Now imagine what could be done with another free and open engine like KHTML. Let's hope : another 20% for KHTML, and IE sinking to a mere 45% against two such great competitors.
I think this Firefox growth has a lot more to do with the application than the engine. Gecko has definitely improved but we're still shipping the Mozilla suite with the same Gecko and it's getting only a fraction of the downloads that Firefox is.
I'm all for more quality browsers, but a great engine doesn't gain marketshare without a great application around it.
Well, they did pay for it. I wouldn't call it "stealing" their thunder.
Actually, Firefox wasn't an AOL project at all. It was explicitely not an AOL project. Blake and Dave were striking out in a new direction with Firefox (then called "m/b" short for mozilla/browser, the CVS directory where the new app lived) and while it does rely on the Gecko core, it's not an application that AOL paid for.
Actually, there were over 1 million downloads of Thunderbird 1.0 in the first ten days after the release and the total is over one a quarter million today, two weeks after the release.
Seth's a good guy. He was responsible for much of the Mozilla mail code that lives on in Thunderbird.
You don't have to take my word for it, either. Google for Seth or look at Bonsai and Bugzilla over at the Mozilla project to see how much he's contributed over the years.
Donors from over 80 countries? For an ad in a local newspaper?
The NYT is available world-wide. It's the most distinguished newspaper in the U.S. Donors to the campaign understand this and believe it to be a worthy cause (or they wouldn't be donors, right?)
On the downside, that means that anyone who can pose as the update server gets to insert arbitrary code into your Mozilla install without your knowledge - now that's trojanning!
Um, no. That is absolutely not the case. The information bar and the trusted sites list is simply a user convenience/inforamtion mechanism like the pop-up blocking bar. After adding a site to the whitelist, a user still has to agree to the software installation. A site cannot "insert arbitrary code into your Mozilla install without your knowledge" because the install doesn't happen until you agree to the install. There are no prompt-less installs.
I'm interested in hearing about how this deployment is going, if there were bumps in the road, and what we could do to make it easier next time. Please email me. Thanks.
Interesting project, although I think building a lean browser from the ground up is the better approach compared to trying to strip the bloat off Mozilla.
I think that anyone who has ever built a rendering engine capable of displaying even 95% of today's websites would beg to differ with you. Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine is the most capable standards supporting code available. Minimo is an attempt to get that rendering engine leaned down some and running on small devices.
I've spent some time testing Minimo on an iPaq and it rocks. It can handle just about any web page you throw at it, like Mozilla and Firefox, and it fits in your pocket:-)
We don't bundle the Flash installer, but our plugin service allows you to add flash support when you first encounter sites that offer flash content. The service all happens with a couple of clicks in the browser, and doesn't even require a browserrestart.
I would think they build from source (don't know if they count that too). But still disribution downloads are not in the 1 million.
We don't count that well but it's likely pretty insignificant. We offer anonymous CVS access and maybe we could count the full checkouts from that tag. We do count source tarball downloads at our primary mirrors and those account about 4,000 of the nearly 1.2 million downloads so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Doug Turner is the lead developer for the Minimo project at Mozilla. This project has a focus on small consumer devices and so this news of a WindowsCE port is very exciting.
--Asa
I've run Firefox 1.0 on windows 95 with great success.
--Asa
f you find it slow, you might try Opera or K-Melon(I think the KHTML engine on windows).
Kmeleon is Gecko, not KHTML. I don't believe that KHTML has been ported to Windows.
--Asa
According to the CIA World Factbook....
Those figures are quite dated, actually. According to Global Reach the Internet has over 800 million users. The CIA factbook shows only 600 million which puts their data at about two years old.
--Asa
Also, as far as image blocking goes, while the stock Firefox build blocks images from specific domains (so you wouldn't want to block the ad if it came from the same server or proxy as the good images) a simple ad-on like AdBlock gives users the power to easily block ads without losing the legitimate page content.
--Asa
Anyone reasonable person will conclude that a world dominated by Firefox could hardly be any better than a world dominated by IE.
I think I'd like to meet one of your reasonable persons.
The resonable people I know would surely prefer a Web dominated by a standards-conforming browser that was faster, safer, more secure, more usable, and ran on a dozen platforms than a Web dominated by a browser that pushes proprietary lock-in technologies like ActiveX, is filled with security holes that are deeply tied into the OS, and runs decently on only one or two platforms (depending on your definition of 'decently'.)
The reasonable people I know think that an open source, open and published standards-based, cross-platform, free solution would be a much preferable monopoly than an expensive, single vendor, single platform, proprietary system.
I consider myself fairly reasonable and I think that a Web server world dominated by tools like Apache, PHP, Perl, Linux, Python, and MySQL would be a fine thing compard to one dominated by Windows, IIS, MS SQL, and ASP.
Is a world dominated by BIND DNS "hardly any better" than a world dominated by a proprietary alternative like MS DNS? I don't think so.
I'm all for healthy competition between decent organizations who share the goals of a free and open Web, but I think you go a bit far when you suggest that a wildly successful Mozilla Foundation would be no better than a wildly successful Microsoft.
--Asa
I think that most business I know would adjust the height of their front door if it meant that they could increase their customer base by 15%.
--Asa
I'm all for more quality browsers, but a great engine doesn't gain marketshare without a great application around it.
--Asa
Well, they did pay for it. I wouldn't call it "stealing" their thunder.
Actually, Firefox wasn't an AOL project at all. It was explicitely not an AOL project. Blake and Dave were striking out in a new direction with Firefox (then called "m/b" short for mozilla/browser, the CVS directory where the new app lived) and while it does rely on the Gecko core, it's not an application that AOL paid for.
--Asa
The MPL requires that any changes to Mozilla files be made available to Mozilla. If they've created new files, those do not have to be returned.
--Asa
The MPL requires that any changes to Mozilla files be made available to Mozilla. New files do not have to be returned.
--Asa
I know it does not sound like much but I think a manual is what Mozilla really needs.
Like this?
--Asa
Thunderbird users. What? Both of them?
Actually, there were over 1 million downloads of Thunderbird 1.0 in the first ten days after the release and the total is over one a quarter million today, two weeks after the release.
--Asa
Seth's a good guy. He was responsible for much of the Mozilla mail code that lives on in Thunderbird.
You don't have to take my word for it, either. Google for Seth or look at Bonsai and Bugzilla over at the Mozilla project to see how much he's contributed over the years.
--Asa
I install Firefox at work. Tabs (MDI) is logical. But there is no built-in contsruct to save the tabs as groups
Actually, there is.
--Asa
Donors from over 80 countries? For an ad in a local newspaper?
The NYT is available world-wide. It's the most distinguished newspaper in the U.S. Donors to the campaign understand this and believe it to be a worthy cause (or they wouldn't be donors, right?)
--Asa
A word of caution: there will be significant bugfixes between now and the final release
Our plan is only minor spit and polish bug fixes, actually.
--Asa
On the downside, that means that anyone who can pose as the update server gets to insert arbitrary code into your Mozilla install without your knowledge - now that's trojanning!
Um, no. That is absolutely not the case. The information bar and the trusted sites list is simply a user convenience/inforamtion mechanism like the pop-up blocking bar. After adding a site to the whitelist, a user still has to agree to the software installation. A site cannot "insert arbitrary code into your Mozilla install without your knowledge" because the install doesn't happen until you agree to the install. There are no prompt-less installs.
--Asa
Do the Mozilla folks have any good recommendations on when to use Firefox vs. Mozilla?
t s. html
http://www.mozilla.org/products/choosing-produc
--Asa
I'm interested in hearing about how this deployment is going, if there were bumps in the road, and what we could do to make it easier next time. Please email me. Thanks.
--Asa
Interesting project, although I think building a lean browser from the ground up is the better approach compared to trying to strip the bloat off Mozilla.
:-)
I think that anyone who has ever built a rendering engine capable of displaying even 95% of today's websites would beg to differ with you. Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine is the most capable standards supporting code available. Minimo is an attempt to get that rendering engine leaned down some and running on small devices.
I've spent some time testing Minimo on an iPaq and it rocks. It can handle just about any web page you throw at it, like Mozilla and Firefox, and it fits in your pocket
--Asa
We don't bundle the Flash installer, but our plugin service allows you to add flash support when you first encounter sites that offer flash content. The service all happens with a couple of clicks in the browser, and doesn't even require a browserrestart.
--Asa
I'm interested in hearing about this deployment. Please email me if you get a minute. Thanks.
--Asa
I would think they build from source (don't know if they count that too). But still disribution downloads are not in the 1 million.
We don't count that well but it's likely pretty insignificant. We offer anonymous CVS access and maybe we could count the full checkouts from that tag. We do count source tarball downloads at our primary mirrors and those account about 4,000 of the nearly 1.2 million downloads so far.
--Asa
cquark, I'm interested in hearing how this deployment worked out for you. please email me.