"4. When will the widgets ever look like they're supposed to?"
I'm working on this right now. New widgets designed in XBL have come online recently and we just need to convert the front end to use them (e.g. titledbutton is being replaced by button, which looks like the examples on that page). Quirks aside, the new widgets are kicking ass. "Download a nightly build" if you want to see some of the conversion that has been done;)
Mozilla M1 was not "alpha". Actually, there was no M1, so I'll assume you meant M3. M3-11 were build-up milestones where the core feature set were created. M12 is supposedly "Engineering Dogfood" (although there has been some talk about "alpha" status).
Mozilla seems to use much more memory than Opera (although I didn't run the Opera beta/alpha/whatever very long), but Mozilla M12 could shut the sidebar easily, it could display the icons on toolbar buttons and work for most of the time where I found the Opera alpha to be annoying and require more perseverence to use. (This may be because of its quirky interface as well, I'm not an experienced Opera user).
who's gonna spend ages downloading 21Mb of source (and one or more hours compiling) when they can spend 20-30 minutes downloading a 5Mb binary that's ready to use out of the box? (lets also not forget the disk space requirements for compilation, memory requirements, etc...)
not everyone is interested enough in mozilla to do all this.
so what? there always has to be one "best". It just so happens that its us, on this planet anyway. Can you say for certain that (providing life exists elsewhere, which I believe is a pretty good possibility) we are the most intelligent beings in the universe?
this competition was not set up by mozilla.org, so if you (or anyone else here) are hinting at any corporate affiliation with Netscape/AOL, you'd be wrong. this is a competition set up by someone from an independent mozilla coding project, and I think its a great idea, encouraging people to get involved. also, some people may have read the book (e.g. from a library) but not have their own copy.
I think persistence in window sizing has been hooked up, but maybe it came in after M10 was branched. I'm not entirely sure. If not, its coming soon. There are some attributes on the XUL tag that suggest support of it.
what's the latest version you have? Earlier versions have retarded box drawing code which made responsiveness from the UI really really bad.
I find that the button bar elements of the UI now to be as instantaneous as native compiled code. The XPMenus still lag a bit though, but that's being worked on.
This is an exciting demonstration of the componentised Mozilla architecture. Write a core routines in some compilable language if need be, and then build a UI layer on top using JavaScript, XUL and CSS.
Not only is Mozilla a browser, its also a widget toolkit and development platform! We need more apps like this to show the power and extensibility of the tools being developed.
were your bad experiences with Cyrix chips? Being a casual reader of some game review sites, I've noticed that a noticable number of games supposedly exhibit problems with Cyrix chips, which require patches to be applied (?)..
I've never heard of that with recent AMD chips. I'm running a K6/166 and have never had any compatibility problems, and this machine runs at a similar speed to a friend's Intel Pentium 200 (non-MMX)
Has anyone seen/had any K6 compatibility problems? I'd be interested to know if they have.
Surely Microsoft is annoyed that all those Windows 3.1/Word 6.0 users are no longer a source of revenue for them? Well, under this new system, they would be! They'd have to keep paying for their outdated software! (Or upgrade to newer versions which would probably require them to update their hardware). This is obviously not a good idea for home computers. I'm hoping its targetted towards business users... Here's an article at PC World NZ that mentions it: http://www.pcworld.co. nz/magazine/pcworld/aug99/consumer.htm
First, this won't affect Mozilla. People should stop crying its potential death. Mozilla is an open source project and will remain an open source project, unless hell freezes over.
Second, as another poster said, a Windows 3.1 port is possible, but someone will have to do it themselves, just like those people who are doing the BeOS, OS/2 and Amiga ports. The thing is, no one's stepped up because there aren't enough Windows 3.1 users fanatical about their operating system to do it.
Besides, I imagine Mozilla would have serious problems running on most Windows 3.1 hardware (like my 486 DLC/40). It had enough trouble display webpages with graphics. Imagine trying to display an entire UI using the layout engine on it! Potential porters would be better off taking the layout engine and somehow making a chrome specifically for W3.1.
"Also, WHY is mozilla (which I'm pretty sure is meant to be standards-compliant from day 1) taking so long to get off the ground?" they've had to develop their own XP widget toolkit from scratch, for one. There are many other reasons, but you can see a development roadmap here for an idea of whats happening when: Milestone Plan
watch the newsgroup if you like: news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.dev.skin s
there's not much there now, but it may get some more traffic as time goes on.
Skins are easy to make with Mozilla, since it uses a standard system to define appearance (CSS). All you need to know is CSS, and how to make graphics:)
Anyway, I'd like to know more about strange matter. Have people written about it?
Re:70-110 megs? You just don't get it...
on
Mozilla M8 Released
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· Score: 1
It depends on what you want. When I got sick of Navigator, I needed a browser and a mail client, as well as a Java VM. All in all, the IE5 folder in my backup disk is about 30Mb. Thats compressed cab files. I don't know how much it is installed. Sure IE5 may run as low as 7Mb - but that just gets you a plain jane browser. A lot of people are thrilled at that prospect, I personally wasn't, and I'd wager a few other people wouldn't be either.
BTW: Now I'm itching to switch back to Navigator. IE5's crashes are even more annoying than Navigator's, since IE most often topples Windows 95 as well (even though I don't have it "integrated"). IMO IE's best features are its speed and the ability for a crash in one window to not bring down the other windows like Navigator does.
No, Mozilla is the BEST example of the "its whats under the skin that counts" philosophy. Sure its *SKIN* is buggy, to use your own words, it "sort of works", but the core of the browser, its standards compliance and brand new layout engine are approaching completion. It already does things that MSIE5 wont or cant do.
It doesn't support HTML "a little better" it supports them better than any other engine available full stop because it is a completely standards compliant engine.
Also, Mozilla isn't even ALPHA. It's pre-alpha, *in development*. Its not ready for any sort of usability testing. In the words of one Netscape employee, the UI shell is a TOY to let them test that the underlying code is working. I would wager that if you wrote a program the program wouldn't be completely usable at every stage of the development process!
It was written from the ground up to be modular, so I would be most surprised if you couldn't have just a Navigator web browser. People are bleating about bloat and yet the browser is about 4.5Mb to download for the full suite of applications! That's even smaller than Navigator 3.0 Gold, and less than half the size of Win32-IE3.0. I download a build about every day, and it only takes about 20 minutes on a 33.6k modem all the way down here in NZ to pick it up. Also, after the size has finished going up (after all the features have been added), expect it to go back down again as they performance tune, pack the UI into JAR files etc. The reason the browser has all it does now is because (once again everyone) it is IN DEVELOPMENT.
Re:Improvement over Netscape, but barely
on
Mozilla M8 Released
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· Score: 1
No browsers support CSS 100% properly at the moment. IE doesn't do everything properly, it may *seem* like it does a lot (as a casual glance at the MSDN SiteBuilder Web Workshop DHTML/CSS reference may imply), but when pushed hard it either offers only a proprietary solution, or no solution at all.
Microsoft can claim they have best support, but if you want a particular feature that's in the standard, the high level of support is as good as Netscape 4.x's level.
When the time does come for 5.0 to be released to the public, I see an intensifying nightmare for web developers. Now they'll have to design sites for Netscape 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, as well as the IEs (fortunately IE5 is similar to IE4). Even with non-CSS based formatting, like tables, the three Netscape browsers will behave differently. Despite the standards compliance of 5.0, the decision not to support Windows 3.1 and mac68k will leave a number of users stuck with 4.x, waiting until Opera can come up with a completely compliant version of its software. As someone said somewhere, the web developer's life will get more complicated before it becomes simpler.
Slashdot Mirror
have you tried it? have you tried to use actual W3C DOM/CSS instead of proprietary IE crap?
what is it you want to do?
"4. When will the widgets ever look like they're supposed to?"
;)
I'm working on this right now. New widgets designed in XBL have come online recently and we just need to convert the front end to use them (e.g. titledbutton is being replaced by button, which looks like the examples on that page). Quirks aside, the new widgets are kicking ass. "Download a nightly build" if you want to see some of the conversion that has been done
-Ben Goodger
FE Geek, Netscape.
I hope you're not suggesting Communicator 4.0, released BEFORE IE4.0, was a catch up to the then contemporary IE3.0...
If you are, I'd have to laugh my ass off.
Um no.
Mozilla M1 was not "alpha". Actually, there was no M1, so I'll assume you meant M3. M3-11 were build-up milestones where the core feature set were created. M12 is supposedly "Engineering Dogfood" (although there has been some talk about "alpha" status).
Mozilla seems to use much more memory than Opera (although I didn't run the Opera beta/alpha/whatever very long), but Mozilla M12 could shut the sidebar easily, it could display the icons on toolbar buttons and work for most of the time where I found the Opera alpha to be annoying and require more perseverence to use. (This may be because of its quirky interface as well, I'm not an experienced Opera user).
who's gonna spend ages downloading 21Mb of source (and one or more hours compiling) when they can spend 20-30 minutes downloading a 5Mb binary that's ready to use out of the box? (lets also not forget the disk space requirements for compilation, memory requirements, etc...)
not everyone is interested enough in mozilla to do all this.
I have a glibc2.0 (I think) RH5.2 system. Mozilla runs just fine for me o_O (last nightly build I tried was last week)...
maybe you should download it and try it out, you might find it just works...
so what? there always has to be one "best". It just so happens that its us, on this planet anyway. Can you say for certain that (providing life exists elsewhere, which I believe is a pretty good possibility) we are the most intelligent beings in the universe?
Let me assure you, Mozilla developers already understand this. Lets see anyone else try and put together the same technology any faster.
this competition was not set up by mozilla.org, so if you (or anyone else here) are hinting at any corporate affiliation with Netscape/AOL, you'd be wrong. this is a competition set up by someone from an independent mozilla coding project, and I think its a great idea, encouraging people to get involved. also, some people may have read the book (e.g. from a library) but not have their own copy.
I think persistence in window sizing has been hooked up, but maybe it came in after M10 was branched. I'm not entirely sure. If not, its coming soon. There are some attributes on the XUL tag that suggest support of it.
some interesting bugs are tracking these issues at bugzilla:
0 4 5 4 8
P olicy.html
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/config
but we DO want your input. We want your bug reports!
We especially like specific examples of problems (e.g. "the Open Location menu item causes a crash on Win32").
These comments and bug reports help get broken stuff fixed, and a better product made faster!
what's the latest version you have? Earlier versions have retarded box drawing code which made responsiveness from the UI really really bad.
I find that the button bar elements of the UI now to be as instantaneous as native compiled code. The XPMenus still lag a bit though, but that's being worked on.
This is an exciting demonstration of the componentised Mozilla architecture. Write a core routines in some compilable language if need be, and then build a UI layer on top using JavaScript, XUL and CSS.
Not only is Mozilla a browser, its also a widget toolkit and development platform! We need more apps like this to show the power and extensibility of the tools being developed.
were your bad experiences with Cyrix chips? Being a casual reader of some game review sites, I've noticed that a noticable number of games supposedly exhibit problems with Cyrix chips, which require patches to be applied (?)..
I've never heard of that with recent AMD chips. I'm running a K6/166 and have never had any compatibility problems, and this machine runs at a similar speed to a friend's Intel Pentium 200 (non-MMX)
Has anyone seen/had any K6 compatibility problems? I'd be interested to know if they have.
Surely Microsoft is annoyed that all those Windows 3.1/Word 6.0 users are no longer a source of revenue for them? Well, under this new system, they would be! They'd have to keep paying for their outdated software! (Or upgrade to newer versions which would probably require them to update their hardware). This is obviously not a good idea for home computers. I'm hoping its targetted towards business users... Here's an article at PC World NZ that mentions it: http://www.pcworld.co. nz/magazine/pcworld/aug99/consumer.htm
First, this won't affect Mozilla. People should stop crying its potential death. Mozilla is an open source project and will remain an open source project, unless hell freezes over.
Second, as another poster said, a Windows 3.1 port is possible, but someone will have to do it themselves, just like those people who are doing the BeOS, OS/2 and Amiga ports. The thing is, no one's stepped up because there aren't enough Windows 3.1 users fanatical about their operating system to do it.
Besides, I imagine Mozilla would have serious problems running on most Windows 3.1 hardware (like my 486 DLC/40). It had enough trouble display webpages with graphics. Imagine trying to display an entire UI using the layout engine on it! Potential porters would be better off taking the layout engine and somehow making a chrome specifically for W3.1.
"Also, WHY is mozilla (which I'm pretty sure is meant to be standards-compliant from day 1) taking so long to get off the ground?" they've had to develop their own XP widget toolkit from scratch, for one. There are many other reasons, but you can see a development roadmap here for an idea of whats happening when: Milestone Plan
watch the newsgroup if you like:n s
:)
news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.dev.ski
there's not much there now, but it may get some more traffic as time goes on.
Skins are easy to make with Mozilla, since it uses a standard system to define appearance (CSS). All you need to know is CSS, and how to make graphics
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Anyway, I'd like to know more about strange matter. Have people written about it?
It depends on what you want. When I got sick of Navigator, I needed a browser and a mail client, as well as a Java VM. All in all, the IE5 folder in my backup disk is about 30Mb. Thats compressed cab files. I don't know how much it is installed. Sure IE5 may run as low as 7Mb - but that just gets you a plain jane browser. A lot of people are thrilled at that prospect, I personally wasn't, and I'd wager a few other people wouldn't be either.
BTW: Now I'm itching to switch back to Navigator. IE5's crashes are even more annoying than Navigator's, since IE most often topples Windows 95 as well (even though I don't have it "integrated"). IMO IE's best features are its speed and the ability for a crash in one window to not bring down the other windows like Navigator does.
All it really needs is a reload button and a keyboard accelerator for "New Window" and it'd be perfect =)
No, Mozilla is the BEST example of the "its whats under the skin that counts" philosophy. Sure its *SKIN* is buggy, to use your own words, it "sort of works", but the core of the browser, its standards compliance and brand new layout engine are approaching completion. It already does things that MSIE5 wont or cant do.
It doesn't support HTML "a little better" it supports them better than any other engine available full stop because it is a completely standards compliant engine.
Also, Mozilla isn't even ALPHA. It's pre-alpha, *in development*. Its not ready for any sort of usability testing. In the words of one Netscape employee, the UI shell is a TOY to let them test that the underlying code is working. I would wager that if you wrote a program the program wouldn't be completely usable at every stage of the development process!
It was written from the ground up to be modular, so I would be most surprised if you couldn't have just a Navigator web browser. People are bleating about bloat and yet the browser is about 4.5Mb to download for the full suite of applications! That's even smaller than Navigator 3.0 Gold, and less than half the size of Win32-IE3.0. I download a build about every day, and it only takes about 20 minutes on a 33.6k modem all the way down here in NZ to pick it up. Also, after the size has finished going up (after all the features have been added), expect it to go back down again as they performance tune, pack the UI into JAR files etc. The reason the browser has all it does now is because (once again everyone) it is IN DEVELOPMENT.
No browsers support CSS 100% properly at the moment. IE doesn't do everything properly, it may *seem* like it does a lot (as a casual glance at the MSDN SiteBuilder Web Workshop DHTML/CSS reference may imply), but when pushed hard it either offers only a proprietary solution, or no solution at all.
Microsoft can claim they have best support, but if you want a particular feature that's in the standard, the high level of support is as good as Netscape 4.x's level.
When the time does come for 5.0 to be released to the public, I see an intensifying nightmare for web developers. Now they'll have to design sites for Netscape 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, as well as the IEs (fortunately IE5 is similar to IE4). Even with non-CSS based formatting, like tables, the three Netscape browsers will behave differently. Despite the standards compliance of 5.0, the decision not to support Windows 3.1 and mac68k will leave a number of users stuck with 4.x, waiting until Opera can come up with a completely compliant version of its software. As someone said somewhere, the web developer's life will get more complicated before it becomes simpler.