Ah, but democracy on its own won't do much to get people out of poverty. Congo is a "democratic republic", but allows little political freedom, and is riddled by conflict. Zimbabwe has a political system modelled on British democracy, but is run by a madman dictator who's killing thousands.
There are even "real" democracies in Africa (in the sense of having truly free elections) that suffer massive poverty; consider Zambia.
If you read anything about Live 8 beyond the concerts themselves, or about the issues at the G8 meeting, you'd know that the real causes of African poverty involve corruption among African leaders, lack of effective rule of law, and an unwillingness among the people to challenge the status quo. It's not like you can just do an Iraq -- invade, install democracy, and hope all goes well thereafter. These problems are complex and long-term.
Oops, I may have misled you there. I just re-read the press release and the animated display isn't on the game packaging, it's on those cardboard cut-out poster things they set up in the games shop.
My guess is that they're still freaking expensive -- heck, it's a brand new technology -- but Microsoft are getting a special deal to plug E Ink's product for them. Also, in the electronics biz, you only get cheap pricing when you buy in lots of 10000 plus, no matter how much the widget really costs. That's why Dell overcharge you for the laptop screen.
Although both the story and this post are blatant plugs for a proprietary technology, the stuff they use for this clock (E Ink) really is quite cool, and can be used in many other gadgets.
I wonder how long it will be before these take over the world, and the sci-fi idea of every billboard and poster being animated becomes real? Maybe when the Pentium VI 10GHz Powerbook comes out, it'll have a screen that can be rolled up and put into your pocket?
Problem is, distrowatch doesn't do what this guy's trying to do, which is to produce a brief, easy to read, and easy to understand summary of the biggest distros.
Unfortunately, his attempt at doing so isn't that great, for the reasons you mentioned. It glosses over lots of useful information while getting stuck in details that beginners probably don't care about anyway. And he succumbs to acronym soup (HAL, KDE, GNU, CLI) without explaining any of them.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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OOo is not a web browser.
Yes, I know (although it did, in the past, have a Web browser component). But the point is that my statement about OOo is a logical consequence of your claim that a standard's intent is irrelevant. In other words, if your irrelevance claim is true, then my OOo claim must be true. Therefore, if you do not accept the OOo claim, you cannot accept the irrelevance claim (unless you contest the deductive reasoning). This is an example of a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Notwithstanding this, if my words have come across as aggressive then you have my apologies. However, observe that I have attacked (at several places) your argument that Mozilla doesn't have superior standards support, and you have not presented counter-arguments to most of my responses, or any new reasons why your assertions are valid. They are therefore still in doubt, and hence you cannot claim to have "proven" your point.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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Whether or not the standard is for mobile use or not is irrelevant. It is a standard, and Opera supports it.
A "mobile" standard is not "less good" than other standards.
Did you read what I said? I did not say that a "mobile" standard is "less good" than other standards. I said that for a browser which is aimed at desktop users, support for "mobile" standards is less important than support for standards intended for general use.
In addition, in asserting that "Whether or not the standard is for mobile use or not is irrelevant" you are claiming that the general target audience of a standard is irrelevant when considering whether a program should support it. Hence, according to your claim, support for any standard, in any program, no matter what it is, is always a good thing. If this is true, I can therefore claim that Opera (or Mozilla) is not as good a Web browser as OpenOffice.org, which supports about 60 data formats (including HTML), many of which are published standards.
As well as this, did you even read what you have said? You are presently claiming that Opera's support of WML et al. 'again means that Mozilla doesn't necessarily have "better standards support"'. But when you first made mention of WML et al., you did not claim that this was an indication of better overall standards support. However, from your very first message, you conceded that Mozilla (at least "might") support more standards overall than Opera does, and you have not denied this. I contend that this, alone, is enough to show better standards support overall. Alternatively, if you prefer, I will withdraw this claim and instead claim that Mozilla has, overall, better support for relevant standards, i.e. those which are intended to be supported by Web browsers on desktop computers.
In any case, given that you are continuing to make claims which I have already argued against, in ignorance of that which you have already accepted, and without providing any new arguments to support them, I suspect that it is unreasonable of me to expect to continue this discussion in an intelligent manner.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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BLINK and MARQUEE are non-standard extensions. You cannot compare WML, a proper standard, to these.
But you were trying to claim that "a standard is a standard", which I was trying to demonstrate to be false. You are now claiming that BLINK, when seen as a "standard", is different to a "proper standard" like WML. I agree. In the same way, as I was trying to explain, WML is a "mobile" standard and so is different to HTML, a predominantly "desktop" standard.
And the desktop and embedded versions of Opera actually use the exact same core. If desktop supports it, so does embedded, and vice versa.
I know. But this does not make it fair to cite features intended for mobile use when comparing Opera and Mozilla, when the latter isn't intended for mobile use. When people compare Konqueror with Opera, the focus is on their respective features as Web browsers, not on Konqi's file management abilities.
[...] I can say that SVG is irrelevant because it is not used by anyone anyway. It is only used in special cases. SVG might be intended to be widespread and used everywhere, but the fact is that it isn't.
In case you haven't noticed, "special use" and "not used by lots of people" are different concepts; you initially claimed the first, then later claimed the second. WML is intended for a specific goal, and is only used for that. SVG is currently only used for special goals, but is intended for broad goals. They are therefore different. Since WML isn't intended for desktop use, it's okay if a desktop browser doesn't support it. Since SVG is intended for desktop use, a desktop browser which doesn't support it is less good than one which does.
Notwithstanding this, we appear to have reached somewhat of a tenable, if fragile, agreement. Thank you.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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That isn't really relevant. The fact is that Opera supports these standards, and Mozilla doesn't. As Mozilla supports standards Opera doesn't. A standard is a standard.
Is it? So Mozilla is better than Opera because it supports the "standard" <MARQUEE> tag, or the "standard" <BLINK> tag? Not all standards are the same; different standards made for different goals do not apply in discussions of one particular goal. For instance, would you like Mozilla or Opera to start supporting the AutoCAD data format, or Rich Text Format?
The point is: Mozilla is a desktop Web browser. It supports desktop Web browser standards very well. Opera is a desktop Web browser, which also comes in a mobile version. It supports desktop Web browser standards to a good but lesser degree, and also supports mobile browsing standards. Therefore, as far as support for relevant standards goes, in a comparison between the Opera and Mozilla desktop browsers, Mozilla is better. When comparing them as mobile browsers, Opera is better.
(For the record, I think BLINK and MARQUEE are abominations, but that's another story.)
No, but it is not in very wide use today. If you can claim that WML and such are "irrelevant, because...", I can make the same claim about SVG and XSL/XSLT. They are not in wide use today - you will hardly ever see them used. Maybe on specialized sites, but not on the mainstream web.
Again, you are redefining your terms. You had argued that SVG was less important because it was specialised, and now you are claiming that it is less important because it isn't widely used. The former is false, but the is correct to some extent (although do not forget that no one will ever use a standard unless there are programs supporting it). In addition, claiming a standard which comes from a recognised standards body is irrelevant simply because it's not hugely popular is very different to claiming that something is irrelevant because it's designed for a different problem set on a different type of machine under different conditions.
Anyone can create a minimal browser and just support the bold tag, then claim that it supports HTML. But I think It takes a bit more than that to claim support.
Your analogy is valid but irrelevant. In fact, Mozilla had not-bad support for basic standards like CSS at a very early point in its development. The quality of its CSS support passed that of Opera probably no later than 2000. This is not a large number of years after the release of Opera 3, as you were trying to claim.
In other words: you said "I think [CSS] was first introduced in Opera 3, years before Mozilla was even thought about". This is, as I am so desperately trying to point out, false.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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Erm... sorry, I can't claim to be an expert here:-)
Perhaps it isn't to do with bugs, and is more to do with libart. Sorry, but I don't know enough to tell you...
As for libart itself, yes, it's LGPL, and it's distributed as an optional (?) GNOME component. Hence almost all Windows or Mac users, most KDE users, and many GNOME users, are without it. I think. Maybe.
I'll stop now before I confuse you any more...
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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They are still standards. But hey, I could easily say similar things about MathML - it is a very specialized standard. The same with SVG - it is hardly in use at all on "mainstream" sites. And so on. So Mozilla implements standards for specialized use, just like Opera does.
No. You are confusing "being made for a specialised use" with "being made for a specialised platform". WAP pages aren't meant to be read on desktop PCs, so Mozilla (which is fundamentally a desktop browser) doesn't support it or the related technologies. MathML is meant to be read on normal PCs, even if not everyone uses it everyday, so Mozilla supports it. A clearer comparison: nether Opera nor Mozilla support Microsoft CHM (made for a special platform) but both support Chinese Big5 text encoding (made for a specialised use).
In any case, SVG is most definitely not special-purpose in any way. If you know anything about it, you'll know that it's a very general standard for vector graphics and animation, similar in some ways to Macromedia Flash. It has potential applications on almost any Web site with graphics; just because it isn't in widespread use doesn't mean that it isn't general in design.
The other standard I was using as an example -- XSL/XSLT -- is also very much non-specialist. It is, for instance, of immense potential use on any site larger than a hundred pages, if only because it allows for infinitely better content management (among many other things).
Actually, Opera 7 also has "experimental" support for CSS3.
I didn't know this, my apologies. This is, indeed, a sign of very good CSS support, because it shows that the makers are willing to go beyond what they need to do to just claim ordinary standards-compliance (i.e. support existing recommendations), and are taking the extra effort to position themselves ready for big new standards. In overall standards support, though (particularly with the XML-based standards), Opera is still not at the forefront.
I would argue that Opera 3 is actually better than even MSIE 6 in some situations since it has a more correct implementation. MSIE can't even get its box model right.
Then you seem intent on backing an unwinnable position, unless you intend to go to such a fine level of detail as to be irrelevant. Yes, IE's implementation of CSS is more than a little bit dodgy, but it is of decent completeness with respect to both CSS1 and CSS2 (maybe 80% - 90%, but I'm guessing). Yes, there are points where IE gets stuff wrong but old Opera or Mozilla versions get it right, but as you pointed out earlier there are plenty of examples where Opera 7 gets it wrong and IE 4 or Mozilla 0.8 get it right.
I think Opera 3 had just about complete support for CSS1.
No, this is wrong again. Maybe you missed what I wrote: if you consult the link I gave you, or try using Opera 3 for yourself, you'll see that its support for CSS1 is much less than complete, with positioning and inline element properties (like borders) being the glaring examples. Selectors like:hover are also noticeably absent.
True, but there was no release considered to be of even alpha quality until some time in 2000. That was M13.
You are redefining your terms after a claim; this is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You had claimed that Opera was supporting CSS years before Mozilla was, which is patently false. It doesn't matter that nobody knew about Mozilla or that the browser had bugs aplenty -- the point is, the support was there.
Also note that Mozilla was rewritten over four years, while Opera 7 was a complete rewrite of the browser core and GUI, and was done in about a year and a half.
Yes, I know, but
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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Yes, Mozilla might support more standards, but Opera can still claim to have very good standards support.
Then we are (in principle, at least) in agreement. I never said Opera had bad standards support overall, just that Mozilla's is better.
It supports SVG Tiny, XHTML Mobile Profile, WML (1.3 and 2.0), WAP CSS...
Do note that these standards are intended for mobile phones and PDAs, a market that Opera is trying hard to get into but that Mozilla isn't really designed for. Certainly, it's a separate arena to the "normal" full-size PC browser world -- if nothing else, the standards are simpler.
... and is ready for CSS 2.1.
This illustrates my point nicely. CSS 2.1 is a revised edition of CSS 2 with only a few changes. By contrast, CSS3 introduces a number of very significant changes. Both are still in the Working Draft stage at the W3C. Mozilla is the only browser to have started implementing the changes of CSS3 -- which is an example of why its standards support, moreso than that of other browsers, can be considered to be very good.
As for CSS, Opera has supported CSS for years and years.
Yes, but the question is of how well. Opera 3 (for BeOS, at least -- the only copy I still have) doesn't even understand CSS positioning, which is easily one of the most widely used parts of CSS.
As for being able to "hold up to a lot of the competition even today": no, this is not correct. Certainly, Opera 3's CSS support is better than Netscape 4 and IE 3, but those browsers really sucked (although NS4 at least understood a little bit of positioning). Looking through charts of what it supports shows that it is nowhere near the quality of current-generation browsers.
And finally, note that the Mozilla project was started in April 1998, switched to the current codebase after a few months, and released their first builds later that year. Opera 3 was released sometime in the first half of 1998, IIRC. This is hardly "years before Mozilla was even thought about".
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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First you go on about how previous versions of Opera didn't have full DOM support and then you pick out pages created specifically to list bugs in Opera to prove that it has worse CSS support?
I was trying to point out that Opera has not had good support for standards like CSS and DOM until recently, whereas Mozilla has had that support for upwards of four years. Opera continues to have problems, such as in those CSS examples and some areas of the DOM. Also, unlike Mozilla, it isn't (or at least doesn't seem to be) moving to implement DOM3 and CSS3 support. My apologies for being ambiguous.
It is really pointless to argue which browser has the better CSS support since results seem to vary, but this well known test site shows Opera as the current leader. Not that it proves anything apart from the fact that things may not be so clear in Mozilla's favor as you seem to think.
Okay, I'll agree with you that comparing the quality of CSS2 support between Opera and Mozilla is mostly pointless and unclear. (BTW, of course Mozilla has CSS bugs, but have you ever read the reports on Bugzilla? Most are about small, esoteric details buried deep within standards documents.)
My point is just that claiming that Mozilla somehow is vastly superior to other browsers, or at least Opera, when it comes to standards that are actually in wide use (HTML, CSS, DOM - MathML is hardly widely used on the web today) is simply incorrect.
But I was not referring to "standards that are actually in wide use"; I was talking about standards in general. While plenty of the things that Mozilla supports aren't used widely, plenty of others are, or seem to be headed that way (like XSL and XSLT, which many developers love, but aren't supported by Opera).
The bottom line is: yes, when it comes to widely-used standards, there's no difference between Opera and Mozilla ("widely-used" is a fragile term though, 99% of sites don't pass validator.w3.org). But ultimately, Mozilla is more standards-compliant, if only because it supports so many of the newer and cooler standards that Opera doesn't. In other words, without support for things like SVG and XSLT, Opera can't claim to have very good standards support like Mozilla can. After all, you need the newer, more advanced aspects of the standards to do awesome things like cross-platform desktop interfaces.
It still proves that Opera is quite portable too. Version 7 even more so. But money speaks, and BeOS and OS/2 probably aren't viable markets.
I agree wholeheartedly, Opera is more portable than the vast majority of commercial software. But the original point, that Mozilla is much more cross-platform than anything else, still stands. Perhaps BeOS and OS/2 were bad choices; try replacing them with AIX or HP-UX.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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Are you sure? On windows with the autostart, it pops onto the screen faster than Opera 7 for me.
Well, as the AC pointed out I was referring to not using the pre-loader. For me, at least, the pre-loader itself takes almost as long to start up as Mozilla does without it.
That said, sure, with autostart it's faster than even IE on some systems... but I think that's cheating just a bit (even though IE does the same!).
In any case, start-up time has been improving in recent versions, and should improve even more with the move to the compenent-based design.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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I think the answer in both cases is "when it's done" (isn't that always the case?). XForms comes with the added caveat that it's not a formal recommendation yet, only a draft. SVG apparently has too many bugs to enable as yet (and in Linux at least, depends on libart, which most people don't have AFAIK).
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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"by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence"? Sorry, but this is not entirely true. While it might support more standards, it does not actually have vastly better standards support compared to Opera when it comes so standards they both support.
How often do you try to write standards-compliant Web pages? Until version 7, Opera's support for the DOM sucked a lot. To this day it fails on a number of CSS test suites that Mozilla handles with aplomb.
And not supporting more standards is not as small a thing as you seem to think. As an example, ever tried making a mathematical or scientific page with MathML, then tried doing it without MathML? Opera not supporting this really does suck, for those of us to whom it's important. The fact that Mozilla does have support makes it more than a little bit better, in my view at least.
And Opera is available for BeOS and OS/2 actually.
You didn't read what I said -- ever tried using these? The latest Opera for BeOS is version 3, and the company has dropped support for the operating system. Mozilla for BeOS is a current version, and there are pseudo-nightly builds available. The story is similar for OS/2.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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I've used Opera 3.62 on BeOS.
As have I. FWIW, I much prefer Mozilla, if only because more present-day sites work in it. And Mozilla for BeOS is a current version, not a two-year-old version that the creators have dumped support for.
Don't knock Opera's portability, they are (as Netscape was) willing to port to platforms if they're given some help or support (technical or financial).
I'll agree that Opera is much better than most (indeed, almost all) companies when it comes to portability. But the point is, the parent was knocking Mozilla's portability, which is, as I tried to point out, second to none.
Okay, I'll grant you that:-)
But like most normal people, I happen to prefer not browsing in a terminal! So Mozilla still wins in that respect.
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
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What's so hard about defending the claim for standards-compliance? Mozila is, by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence. Internet Explorer has not-too-bad CSS and DOM support, but can't claim to support either as well as Mozilla does. There's also all the standards that IE doesn't even try to do right -- MathML, which is hugely important for those of us who use it, PNG, which IE only sort-of supports, XHTML, and SVG, even though it's off by default. These and many other open standards are supported natively by Mozilla, something that no other browser can claim to do (not even Opera or Konqueror/Safari).
As for performance... Mozilla is actually very fast, in some ways. The Gecko HTML engine is one of the fastest around, and handles super-complex CSS positioning with ease. (Yes, KHTML and Opera can be faster, but this is partly because they don't support many of the more complex aspects of CSS).
Also, although the Mozilla integrated suite takes forever to start up, Firebird/Phoenix is a good deal faster, and Gecko front-ends like Epiphany for GNOME and K-Meleon for Windows start up fast enough that if you blink, you'll miss it.
And finally: "fairly" portable? C'mon, there is no other browser that's available for as many systems as Mozilla is. Ever tried to use IE or Opera on BeOS, Irix, OS/2, or OpenVMS?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I am one of the others you mention ... and that was two bloody years ago. Amen to the "just ignore" advice.
Maybe not "as popular as Apple's iTunes", but have you ever tried emusic.com?
Ah, but democracy on its own won't do much to get people out of poverty. Congo is a "democratic republic", but allows little political freedom, and is riddled by conflict. Zimbabwe has a political system modelled on British democracy, but is run by a madman dictator who's killing thousands.
There are even "real" democracies in Africa (in the sense of having truly free elections) that suffer massive poverty; consider Zambia.
If you read anything about Live 8 beyond the concerts themselves, or about the issues at the G8 meeting, you'd know that the real causes of African poverty involve corruption among African leaders, lack of effective rule of law, and an unwillingness among the people to challenge the status quo. It's not like you can just do an Iraq -- invade, install democracy, and hope all goes well thereafter. These problems are complex and long-term.
Oops, I may have misled you there. I just re-read the press release and the animated display isn't on the game packaging, it's on those cardboard cut-out poster things they set up in the games shop.
My guess is that they're still freaking expensive -- heck, it's a brand new technology -- but Microsoft are getting a special deal to plug E Ink's product for them. Also, in the electronics biz, you only get cheap pricing when you buy in lots of 10000 plus, no matter how much the widget really costs. That's why Dell overcharge you for the laptop screen.
My bad. I'm not sure I'd recommend that page to a complete linux n00b, but you are right there.
Although both the story and this post are blatant plugs for a proprietary technology, the stuff they use for this clock (E Ink) really is quite cool, and can be used in many other gadgets.
For example they are building bendable 200dpi grayscale screens and some Xbox game boxes are using it to create an animated picture on the side of the box.
I wonder how long it will be before these take over the world, and the sci-fi idea of every billboard and poster being animated becomes real? Maybe when the Pentium VI 10GHz Powerbook comes out, it'll have a screen that can be rolled up and put into your pocket?
Problem is, distrowatch doesn't do what this guy's trying to do, which is to produce a brief, easy to read, and easy to understand summary of the biggest distros.
Unfortunately, his attempt at doing so isn't that great, for the reasons you mentioned. It glosses over lots of useful information while getting stuck in details that beginners probably don't care about anyway. And he succumbs to acronym soup (HAL, KDE, GNU, CLI) without explaining any of them.
OOo is not a web browser.
Yes, I know (although it did, in the past, have a Web browser component). But the point is that my statement about OOo is a logical consequence of your claim that a standard's intent is irrelevant. In other words, if your irrelevance claim is true, then my OOo claim must be true. Therefore, if you do not accept the OOo claim, you cannot accept the irrelevance claim (unless you contest the deductive reasoning). This is an example of a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Notwithstanding this, if my words have come across as aggressive then you have my apologies. However, observe that I have attacked (at several places) your argument that Mozilla doesn't have superior standards support, and you have not presented counter-arguments to most of my responses, or any new reasons why your assertions are valid. They are therefore still in doubt, and hence you cannot claim to have "proven" your point.
Whether or not the standard is for mobile use or not is irrelevant. It is a standard, and Opera supports it.
A "mobile" standard is not "less good" than other standards.
Did you read what I said? I did not say that a "mobile" standard is "less good" than other standards. I said that for a browser which is aimed at desktop users, support for "mobile" standards is less important than support for standards intended for general use.
In addition, in asserting that "Whether or not the standard is for mobile use or not is irrelevant" you are claiming that the general target audience of a standard is irrelevant when considering whether a program should support it. Hence, according to your claim, support for any standard, in any program, no matter what it is, is always a good thing. If this is true, I can therefore claim that Opera (or Mozilla) is not as good a Web browser as OpenOffice.org, which supports about 60 data formats (including HTML), many of which are published standards.
As well as this, did you even read what you have said? You are presently claiming that Opera's support of WML et al. 'again means that Mozilla doesn't necessarily have "better standards support"'. But when you first made mention of WML et al., you did not claim that this was an indication of better overall standards support. However, from your very first message, you conceded that Mozilla (at least "might") support more standards overall than Opera does, and you have not denied this. I contend that this, alone, is enough to show better standards support overall. Alternatively, if you prefer, I will withdraw this claim and instead claim that Mozilla has, overall, better support for relevant standards, i.e. those which are intended to be supported by Web browsers on desktop computers.
In any case, given that you are continuing to make claims which I have already argued against, in ignorance of that which you have already accepted, and without providing any new arguments to support them, I suspect that it is unreasonable of me to expect to continue this discussion in an intelligent manner.
BLINK and MARQUEE are non-standard extensions. You cannot compare WML, a proper standard, to these.
But you were trying to claim that "a standard is a standard", which I was trying to demonstrate to be false. You are now claiming that BLINK, when seen as a "standard", is different to a "proper standard" like WML. I agree. In the same way, as I was trying to explain, WML is a "mobile" standard and so is different to HTML, a predominantly "desktop" standard.
And the desktop and embedded versions of Opera actually use the exact same core. If desktop supports it, so does embedded, and vice versa.
I know. But this does not make it fair to cite features intended for mobile use when comparing Opera and Mozilla, when the latter isn't intended for mobile use. When people compare Konqueror with Opera, the focus is on their respective features as Web browsers, not on Konqi's file management abilities.
[...] I can say that SVG is irrelevant because it is not used by anyone anyway. It is only used in special cases. SVG might be intended to be widespread and used everywhere, but the fact is that it isn't.
In case you haven't noticed, "special use" and "not used by lots of people" are different concepts; you initially claimed the first, then later claimed the second. WML is intended for a specific goal, and is only used for that. SVG is currently only used for special goals, but is intended for broad goals. They are therefore different. Since WML isn't intended for desktop use, it's okay if a desktop browser doesn't support it. Since SVG is intended for desktop use, a desktop browser which doesn't support it is less good than one which does.
Notwithstanding this, we appear to have reached somewhat of a tenable, if fragile, agreement. Thank you.
That isn't really relevant. The fact is that Opera supports these standards, and Mozilla doesn't. As Mozilla supports standards Opera doesn't. A standard is a standard.
Is it? So Mozilla is better than Opera because it supports the "standard" <MARQUEE> tag, or the "standard" <BLINK> tag? Not all standards are the same; different standards made for different goals do not apply in discussions of one particular goal. For instance, would you like Mozilla or Opera to start supporting the AutoCAD data format, or Rich Text Format?
The point is: Mozilla is a desktop Web browser. It supports desktop Web browser standards very well. Opera is a desktop Web browser, which also comes in a mobile version. It supports desktop Web browser standards to a good but lesser degree, and also supports mobile browsing standards. Therefore, as far as support for relevant standards goes, in a comparison between the Opera and Mozilla desktop browsers, Mozilla is better. When comparing them as mobile browsers, Opera is better.
(For the record, I think BLINK and MARQUEE are abominations, but that's another story.)
No, but it is not in very wide use today. If you can claim that WML and such are "irrelevant, because...", I can make the same claim about SVG and XSL/XSLT. They are not in wide use today - you will hardly ever see them used. Maybe on specialized sites, but not on the mainstream web.
Again, you are redefining your terms. You had argued that SVG was less important because it was specialised, and now you are claiming that it is less important because it isn't widely used. The former is false, but the is correct to some extent (although do not forget that no one will ever use a standard unless there are programs supporting it). In addition, claiming a standard which comes from a recognised standards body is irrelevant simply because it's not hugely popular is very different to claiming that something is irrelevant because it's designed for a different problem set on a different type of machine under different conditions.
Anyone can create a minimal browser and just support the bold tag, then claim that it supports HTML. But I think It takes a bit more than that to claim support.
Your analogy is valid but irrelevant. In fact, Mozilla had not-bad support for basic standards like CSS at a very early point in its development. The quality of its CSS support passed that of Opera probably no later than 2000. This is not a large number of years after the release of Opera 3, as you were trying to claim.
In other words: you said "I think [CSS] was first introduced in Opera 3, years before Mozilla was even thought about". This is, as I am so desperately trying to point out, false.
Erm ... sorry, I can't claim to be an expert here :-) ...
Perhaps it isn't to do with bugs, and is more to do with libart. Sorry, but I don't know enough to tell you
As for libart itself, yes, it's LGPL, and it's distributed as an optional (?) GNOME component. Hence almost all Windows or Mac users, most KDE users, and many GNOME users, are without it. I think. Maybe.
I'll stop now before I confuse you any more ...
They are still standards. But hey, I could easily say similar things about MathML - it is a very specialized standard. The same with SVG - it is hardly in use at all on "mainstream" sites. And so on. So Mozilla implements standards for specialized use, just like Opera does.
No. You are confusing "being made for a specialised use" with "being made for a specialised platform". WAP pages aren't meant to be read on desktop PCs, so Mozilla (which is fundamentally a desktop browser) doesn't support it or the related technologies. MathML is meant to be read on normal PCs, even if not everyone uses it everyday, so Mozilla supports it. A clearer comparison: nether Opera nor Mozilla support Microsoft CHM (made for a special platform) but both support Chinese Big5 text encoding (made for a specialised use).
In any case, SVG is most definitely not special-purpose in any way. If you know anything about it, you'll know that it's a very general standard for vector graphics and animation, similar in some ways to Macromedia Flash. It has potential applications on almost any Web site with graphics; just because it isn't in widespread use doesn't mean that it isn't general in design.
The other standard I was using as an example -- XSL/XSLT -- is also very much non-specialist. It is, for instance, of immense potential use on any site larger than a hundred pages, if only because it allows for infinitely better content management (among many other things).
Actually, Opera 7 also has "experimental" support for CSS3.
I didn't know this, my apologies. This is, indeed, a sign of very good CSS support, because it shows that the makers are willing to go beyond what they need to do to just claim ordinary standards-compliance (i.e. support existing recommendations), and are taking the extra effort to position themselves ready for big new standards. In overall standards support, though (particularly with the XML-based standards), Opera is still not at the forefront.
I would argue that Opera 3 is actually better than even MSIE 6 in some situations since it has a more correct implementation. MSIE can't even get its box model right.
Then you seem intent on backing an unwinnable position, unless you intend to go to such a fine level of detail as to be irrelevant. Yes, IE's implementation of CSS is more than a little bit dodgy, but it is of decent completeness with respect to both CSS1 and CSS2 (maybe 80% - 90%, but I'm guessing). Yes, there are points where IE gets stuff wrong but old Opera or Mozilla versions get it right, but as you pointed out earlier there are plenty of examples where Opera 7 gets it wrong and IE 4 or Mozilla 0.8 get it right.
I think Opera 3 had just about complete support for CSS1.
No, this is wrong again. Maybe you missed what I wrote: if you consult the link I gave you, or try using Opera 3 for yourself, you'll see that its support for CSS1 is much less than complete, with positioning and inline element properties (like borders) being the glaring examples. Selectors like :hover are also noticeably absent.
True, but there was no release considered to be of even alpha quality until some time in 2000. That was M13.
You are redefining your terms after a claim; this is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You had claimed that Opera was supporting CSS years before Mozilla was, which is patently false. It doesn't matter that nobody knew about Mozilla or that the browser had bugs aplenty -- the point is, the support was there.
Also note that Mozilla was rewritten over four years, while Opera 7 was a complete rewrite of the browser core and GUI, and was done in about a year and a half.
Yes, I know, but
Yes, Mozilla might support more standards, but Opera can still claim to have very good standards support.
Then we are (in principle, at least) in agreement. I never said Opera had bad standards support overall, just that Mozilla's is better.
It supports SVG Tiny, XHTML Mobile Profile, WML (1.3 and 2.0), WAP CSS ...
Do note that these standards are intended for mobile phones and PDAs, a market that Opera is trying hard to get into but that Mozilla isn't really designed for. Certainly, it's a separate arena to the "normal" full-size PC browser world -- if nothing else, the standards are simpler.
This illustrates my point nicely. CSS 2.1 is a revised edition of CSS 2 with only a few changes. By contrast, CSS3 introduces a number of very significant changes. Both are still in the Working Draft stage at the W3C. Mozilla is the only browser to have started implementing the changes of CSS3 -- which is an example of why its standards support, moreso than that of other browsers, can be considered to be very good.
As for CSS, Opera has supported CSS for years and years.
Yes, but the question is of how well. Opera 3 (for BeOS, at least -- the only copy I still have) doesn't even understand CSS positioning, which is easily one of the most widely used parts of CSS.
As for being able to "hold up to a lot of the competition even today": no, this is not correct. Certainly, Opera 3's CSS support is better than Netscape 4 and IE 3, but those browsers really sucked (although NS4 at least understood a little bit of positioning). Looking through charts of what it supports shows that it is nowhere near the quality of current-generation browsers.
And finally, note that the Mozilla project was started in April 1998, switched to the current codebase after a few months, and released their first builds later that year. Opera 3 was released sometime in the first half of 1998, IIRC. This is hardly "years before Mozilla was even thought about".
First you go on about how previous versions of Opera didn't have full DOM support and then you pick out pages created specifically to list bugs in Opera to prove that it has worse CSS support?
I was trying to point out that Opera has not had good support for standards like CSS and DOM until recently, whereas Mozilla has had that support for upwards of four years. Opera continues to have problems, such as in those CSS examples and some areas of the DOM. Also, unlike Mozilla, it isn't (or at least doesn't seem to be) moving to implement DOM3 and CSS3 support. My apologies for being ambiguous.
It is really pointless to argue which browser has the better CSS support since results seem to vary, but this well known test site shows Opera as the current leader. Not that it proves anything apart from the fact that things may not be so clear in Mozilla's favor as you seem to think.
Okay, I'll agree with you that comparing the quality of CSS2 support between Opera and Mozilla is mostly pointless and unclear. (BTW, of course Mozilla has CSS bugs, but have you ever read the reports on Bugzilla? Most are about small, esoteric details buried deep within standards documents.)
My point is just that claiming that Mozilla somehow is vastly superior to other browsers, or at least Opera, when it comes to standards that are actually in wide use (HTML, CSS, DOM - MathML is hardly widely used on the web today) is simply incorrect.
But I was not referring to "standards that are actually in wide use"; I was talking about standards in general. While plenty of the things that Mozilla supports aren't used widely, plenty of others are, or seem to be headed that way (like XSL and XSLT, which many developers love, but aren't supported by Opera).
The bottom line is: yes, when it comes to widely-used standards, there's no difference between Opera and Mozilla ("widely-used" is a fragile term though, 99% of sites don't pass validator.w3.org). But ultimately, Mozilla is more standards-compliant, if only because it supports so many of the newer and cooler standards that Opera doesn't. In other words, without support for things like SVG and XSLT, Opera can't claim to have very good standards support like Mozilla can. After all, you need the newer, more advanced aspects of the standards to do awesome things like cross-platform desktop interfaces.
It still proves that Opera is quite portable too. Version 7 even more so. But money speaks, and BeOS and OS/2 probably aren't viable markets.
I agree wholeheartedly, Opera is more portable than the vast majority of commercial software. But the original point, that Mozilla is much more cross-platform than anything else, still stands. Perhaps BeOS and OS/2 were bad choices; try replacing them with AIX or HP-UX.
Are you sure? On windows with the autostart, it pops onto the screen faster than Opera 7 for me.
Well, as the AC pointed out I was referring to not using the pre-loader. For me, at least, the pre-loader itself takes almost as long to start up as Mozilla does without it.
That said, sure, with autostart it's faster than even IE on some systems ... but I think that's cheating just a bit (even though IE does the same!).
In any case, start-up time has been improving in recent versions, and should improve even more with the move to the compenent-based design.
To find out, you could always check the newsgroups, or a site like MozillaZine.
I think the answer in both cases is "when it's done" (isn't that always the case?). XForms comes with the added caveat that it's not a formal recommendation yet, only a draft. SVG apparently has too many bugs to enable as yet (and in Linux at least, depends on libart, which most people don't have AFAIK).
"by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence"? Sorry, but this is not entirely true. While it might support more standards, it does not actually have vastly better standards support compared to Opera when it comes so standards they both support.
How often do you try to write standards-compliant Web pages? Until version 7, Opera's support for the DOM sucked a lot. To this day it fails on a number of CSS test suites that Mozilla handles with aplomb.
And not supporting more standards is not as small a thing as you seem to think. As an example, ever tried making a mathematical or scientific page with MathML, then tried doing it without MathML? Opera not supporting this really does suck, for those of us to whom it's important. The fact that Mozilla does have support makes it more than a little bit better, in my view at least.
And Opera is available for BeOS and OS/2 actually.
You didn't read what I said -- ever tried using these? The latest Opera for BeOS is version 3, and the company has dropped support for the operating system. Mozilla for BeOS is a current version, and there are pseudo-nightly builds available. The story is similar for OS/2.
I've used Opera 3.62 on BeOS.
As have I. FWIW, I much prefer Mozilla, if only because more present-day sites work in it. And Mozilla for BeOS is a current version, not a two-year-old version that the creators have dumped support for.
Don't knock Opera's portability, they are (as Netscape was) willing to port to platforms if they're given some help or support (technical or financial).
I'll agree that Opera is much better than most (indeed, almost all) companies when it comes to portability. But the point is, the parent was knocking Mozilla's portability, which is, as I tried to point out, second to none.
ELinks, Links or Lynx maybe.
Okay, I'll grant you thatBut like most normal people, I happen to prefer not browsing in a terminal! So Mozilla still wins in that respect.
What's so hard about defending the claim for standards-compliance? Mozila is, by a very long shot, the most standards-compliant browser in existence. Internet Explorer has not-too-bad CSS and DOM support, but can't claim to support either as well as Mozilla does. There's also all the standards that IE doesn't even try to do right -- MathML, which is hugely important for those of us who use it, PNG, which IE only sort-of supports, XHTML, and SVG, even though it's off by default. These and many other open standards are supported natively by Mozilla, something that no other browser can claim to do (not even Opera or Konqueror/Safari).
As for performance ... Mozilla is actually very fast, in some ways. The Gecko HTML engine is one of the fastest around, and handles super-complex CSS positioning with ease. (Yes, KHTML and Opera can be faster, but this is partly because they don't support many of the more complex aspects of CSS).
Also, although the Mozilla integrated suite takes forever to start up, Firebird/Phoenix is a good deal faster, and Gecko front-ends like Epiphany for GNOME and K-Meleon for Windows start up fast enough that if you blink, you'll miss it.
And finally: "fairly" portable? C'mon, there is no other browser that's available for as many systems as Mozilla is. Ever tried to use IE or Opera on BeOS, Irix, OS/2, or OpenVMS?