Mozilla is modular. When you run the installer, you can choose which components to download. Even if you download everything, you don't load mail/news code until you start mail/news.
I'm not sure why Slashdot people don't realize this. I guess they've never looked at the code, looked in the bin/ directory, or even run the installer.
Take a look at your Mozilla directory and count the shared libraries. Then look at "mozilla.exe". It's tiny. If you only use the browser, that's all that's loaded.
Actually just using shared libraries is not nearly adequate. They had to build XPCOM as well.
It disturbs me to keep reading comments "The Mozilla people are idiots, they should just do X, Y and Z and their problem would be solved" when in fact the Mozilla people have been doing X, Y and Z for years, and even that's not enough because the armchair critic has no idea of the full extent of the problem.
Yes, writing those applications doesn't prove that the interfaces are right, but it does prove that they're sufficient to build some interesting applications. And since the HTML editor and a mail/news client are pretty sophisticated applications, that gives high confidence that you can build other interesting applications.
They're already using a lot of contributed bug fixes and some contributed features, mostly small stuff.
These other big chunks (MathML, XSLT, MNG, PICS, Bidi, XMLextras) aren't even part of the main Mozilla build yet. It's considered just too risky to try to get them all integrated and fully working at this stage. All the Slashdotters whining about feature creep are wrong; it is nigh impossible to get big new stuff added to the tree, and has been for some time.
After the PR3 branch, expect to see these cool new items turned on in Mozilla, and then appear in the next major Netscape release (6.1? who knows).
You quote Shaver out of context. As he goes on to say, *perceived* speed of Mozilla can be much greater than 4.x, due to incremental reflow and other stuff.
> XML, XSL and CSS2 are the only things left to be
> included
I think you forgot "the DOM".
And these aren't just things you hack in at the last minute. The reason Mozilla's taken so long is because they had to rewrite the browser to get these things in.
I don't know how many times this has already been explained at length, but here we go again:
The IRC client was developed by a person on his own time before he was working at Netscape. He did it because it was cool. There is no impact on the rest of the browser. It was checked into the tree so that other peole could play with it and learn from it.
To suggest that people should be prohibited from using Mozilla in this way is absurd --- and entirely against the spirit of open-source software, to boot.
Can't anybody spot trolls anymore? Any reactionary comment from an Anonymous Coward should just be ignored, especially when it demands or dares moderation.
And what's with "crucifiction"? That spelling was only used by anti-Christians last time I hung out on the newsgroups.
This article has nothing interesting to say. Ever since people started trying to modularise their software, we've recognised that interactions between components are a major source of bugs, because that's where the complexity is. Anywhere you have a lot of bugs, you have a lot of security worries. There is nothing especially insightful about pointing this out again.
Open source software is no different, of course. Over time it may achieve generally better quality because more people can examine the code, but architecturally it is no different to any other kind of software. Mozilla isn't magically going to be free from security problems.
The sad, boring truth is that there is no easy way to make complex software secure. Avoiding componentization won't make things better, except that it will probably prevent you from building complex software at all, thus dodging the issue:-). You can swear off complexity and use Lynx on Linux 2.0, but most people want features that are fundamentally complex. Print out all the RFCs and W3C Recommendations for everything you need to get an HTML4/CSS1 Web browser working, and you'll see what I mean.
Intelligent design, elbow grease and lots of eyes are the only weapons we have. We'd better use them well.
As far as I know, Opera's support for the DOM is small to nonexistent, which means that even if their ECMAscript support is complete, it's still pretty useless.
Mozilla is definitely past the alpha stage. On Netscape's release schedule there is only one more beta before ship. It will improve a fair bit before Netscape ships, but maybe not enough to satisfy everyone this time around.
I personally doubt that Mozilla will ever be truly acceptable on the Mac due to the way its XP UI works. What Mozilla and the Mac both need is for someone to build a Galeon-like native UI shell for the Mac that wraps the Mozilla/Gecko engine.
Anyway, Netscape shipping is not the end of the Mozilla story. It's only the beginning.
I seriously doubt that CAP is really sending these messages. The message just doesn't sound like them, and besides, they've probably never heard of Slashdot. It could well be some troll trying to give them a bad name.
Before you launch the missiles, you should check with the Slashdot crew to find out the IP address they're coming from...
No. The Web is different. With millions of producers, you have to make sure they get feedback ASAP when they produce broken pages. Since testing is almost always of the form "fire up my web browser and make sure it looks OK", it is important that that Web browser detect and display all possible errors.
> Also, neither the article nor the MozOffice web > site (or roca himself, to be fair) implies that > MozOffice is a part of the Mozilla project.
Uh, how about the title of the article?
"Mozilla.org puts browser to work as word processor"
I assure you that my quotes were taken entirely from the newsgroup thread. I had not looked at James Russell's site. Now that I have, it doesn't really add anything to the newsgroup thread, being summarized as "what a great idea! now we have a domain".
I think of CNET as more in the league of a daily newspaper than in the league of rumour-and-clipping sites such as Slashdot. I thought they employed journalists, had editors, and at least claimed to report facts. It appears I was mistaken.
The article strongly conveys the impression that there is a real MozOffice project backed by Mozilla.org. That is false. All there is is a few people chatting on a newsgroup. I bet James Russell is real surprised to find out that he's the "leader" of a project that aims to compete with MS Office.
Even if CNET had skipped the misleading impressions and had run a "blue sky" story or editorial about the idea, it's still seriously questionable whether this is newsworthy. For if this is newsworthy, then start trolling gnome-devel, linux-kernel et al. and start reporting on every half-baked idea anyone ever comes up with.
This is all the worse because when I mailed Paul Festa yesterday I was afraid he'd write an article like this and it would get the knee-jerk reaction it did. I told him "MozOffice" was pure vapour in a few guys' heads, but he ignored me.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it support the DOM?
... well ... the difference between IE/Mozilla and everything else.
The difference between dynamic and static documents is
Mozilla's support for DOM2 is very nearly complete. Mutation events are the only big thing I can think of that isn't there yet.
XML/XSLT should definitely be turned on for Mozilla 1.0.
SVG will not be in Mozilla 1.0.
There is a team working on JS2, but I don't know what their schedule is.
Note that Mozilla 1.0 will have MNG and MathML, which IE doesn't have... IE doesn't have SVG yet either.
What use is Javascript without DOM support?
My take is that Brendan's busy enough doing actual work without have to worry about getting his diagrams pixel-perfect.
Mozilla is modular. When you run the installer, you can choose which components to download. Even if you download everything, you don't load mail/news code until you start mail/news.
I'm not sure why Slashdot people don't realize this. I guess they've never looked at the code, looked in the bin/ directory, or even run the installer.
Take a look at your Mozilla directory and count the shared libraries. Then look at "mozilla.exe". It's tiny. If you only use the browser, that's all that's loaded.
Actually just using shared libraries is not nearly adequate. They had to build XPCOM as well.
It disturbs me to keep reading comments "The Mozilla people are idiots, they should just do X, Y and Z and their problem would be solved" when in fact the Mozilla people have been doing X, Y and Z for years, and even that's not enough because the armchair critic has no idea of the full extent of the problem.
Yes, writing those applications doesn't prove that the interfaces are right, but it does prove that they're sufficient to build some interesting applications. And since the HTML editor and a mail/news client are pretty sophisticated applications, that gives high confidence that you can build other interesting applications.
They're already using a lot of contributed bug fixes and some contributed features, mostly small stuff.
These other big chunks (MathML, XSLT, MNG, PICS, Bidi, XMLextras) aren't even part of the main Mozilla build yet. It's considered just too risky to try to get them all integrated and fully working at this stage. All the Slashdotters whining about feature creep are wrong; it is nigh impossible to get big new stuff added to the tree, and has been for some time.
After the PR3 branch, expect to see these cool new items turned on in Mozilla, and then appear in the next major Netscape release (6.1? who knows).
Helper apps via Internet Config has landed. Dunno if it works.
You quote Shaver out of context. As he goes on to say, *perceived* speed of Mozilla can be much greater than 4.x, due to incremental reflow and other stuff.
> XML, XSL and CSS2 are the only things left to be
> included
I think you forgot "the DOM".
And these aren't just things you hack in at the last minute. The reason Mozilla's taken so long is because they had to rewrite the browser to get these things in.
> If that's really the culture at netscape, it's
> pretty sad, though it explains a lot.
It isn't, of course. It's a Slashdot user's fantasy. Or do you believe everything you read here?
I don't know how many times this has already been explained at length, but here we go again:
The IRC client was developed by a person on his own time before he was working at Netscape. He did it because it was cool. There is no impact on the rest of the browser. It was checked into the tree so that other peole could play with it and learn from it.
To suggest that people should be prohibited from using Mozilla in this way is absurd --- and entirely against the spirit of open-source software, to boot.
Can't anybody spot trolls anymore? Any reactionary comment from an Anonymous Coward should just be ignored, especially when it demands or dares moderation.
And what's with "crucifiction"? That spelling was only used by anti-Christians last time I hung out on the newsgroups.
This article has nothing interesting to say. Ever since people started trying to modularise their software, we've recognised that interactions between components are a major source of bugs, because that's where the complexity is. Anywhere you have a lot of bugs, you have a lot of security worries. There is nothing especially insightful about pointing this out again.
:-). You can swear off complexity and use Lynx on Linux 2.0, but most people want features that are fundamentally complex. Print out all the RFCs and W3C Recommendations for everything you need to get an HTML4/CSS1 Web browser working, and you'll see what I mean.
Open source software is no different, of course. Over time it may achieve generally better quality because more people can examine the code, but architecturally it is no different to any other kind of software. Mozilla isn't magically going to be free from security problems.
The sad, boring truth is that there is no easy way to make complex software secure. Avoiding componentization won't make things better, except that it will probably prevent you from building complex software at all, thus dodging the issue
Intelligent design, elbow grease and lots of eyes are the only weapons we have. We'd better use them well.
I strongly suspect that these messages are trolls. After all, we've had LSD and Emily Dickinson, what's left?
As far as I know, Opera's support for the DOM is small to nonexistent, which means that even if their ECMAscript support is complete, it's still pretty useless.
Does Konqueror support the DOM and dynamic documents yet?
Do any of these other browsers?
Mozilla is definitely past the alpha stage. On Netscape's release schedule there is only one more beta before ship. It will improve a fair bit before Netscape ships, but maybe not enough to satisfy everyone this time around.
I personally doubt that Mozilla will ever be truly acceptable on the Mac due to the way its XP UI works. What Mozilla and the Mac both need is for someone to build a Galeon-like native UI shell for the Mac that wraps the Mozilla/Gecko engine.
Anyway, Netscape shipping is not the end of the Mozilla story. It's only the beginning.
I seriously doubt that CAP is really sending these messages. The message just doesn't sound like them, and besides, they've probably never heard of Slashdot. It could well be some troll trying to give them a bad name.
Before you launch the missiles, you should check with the Slashdot crew to find out the IP address they're coming from...
No. The Web is different. With millions of producers, you have to make sure they get feedback ASAP when they produce broken pages. Since testing is almost always of the form "fire up my web browser and make sure it looks OK", it is important that that Web browser detect and display all possible errors.
> Also, neither the article nor the MozOffice web
> site (or roca himself, to be fair) implies that
> MozOffice is a part of the Mozilla project.
Uh, how about the title of the article?
"Mozilla.org puts browser to work as word processor"
I assure you that my quotes were taken entirely from the newsgroup thread. I had not looked at James Russell's site. Now that I have, it doesn't really add anything to the newsgroup thread, being summarized as "what a great idea! now we have a domain".
I think of CNET as more in the league of a daily newspaper than in the league of rumour-and-clipping sites such as Slashdot. I thought they employed journalists, had editors, and at least claimed to report facts. It appears I was mistaken.
I read the article.
Heck, I was quoted in the article.
The article strongly conveys the impression that there is a real MozOffice project backed by Mozilla.org. That is false. All there is is a few people chatting on a newsgroup. I bet James Russell is real surprised to find out that he's the "leader" of a project that aims to compete with MS Office.
Even if CNET had skipped the misleading impressions and had run a "blue sky" story or editorial about the idea, it's still seriously questionable whether this is newsworthy. For if this is newsworthy, then start trolling gnome-devel, linux-kernel et al. and start reporting on every half-baked idea anyone ever comes up with.
This is all the worse because when I mailed Paul Festa yesterday I was afraid he'd write an article like this and it would get the knee-jerk reaction it did. I told him "MozOffice" was pure vapour in a few guys' heads, but he ignored me.
I hope you'll be pleasantly surprised when you find out that you're wrong.