Or perhaps the fact that commercial developers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.... Like, say, AOL? And IBM? And Nokia? And all the other companies who are embedding it into proprietary code?
Someone is certainly welcome to fork the whole thing under the GPL, but why? You lose the development resources of Netscape over a philosophy.
The really interesting thing is that roca (Robert O'Callahan, who is quoted in the story) was emailed for comments by the author. Rob asked him not to write an article like the one he did based upon an informal suggestion on a newsgroup, but the guy went and did it anyway.
Mozilla DOES give you the option to install or not install everything except the browser. Use the Installer download and you can choose not to use mail/news, Chatzilla, etc. Of course, there's no setup utility for Mozilla like Netscape uses for 6, so you do have to download it, even if you choose not to use it. I suspect that this will change at some point, though.
There's a bug filed on this. None of the developers save one can seem to reproduce it at all (and the one who can only sees it intermittently). As soon as they figure out the problem, it'll be fixed. And yes, it is a regression from M12, according to the comments on that bug (I don't have the bug number on me, sorry).
Quite possibly nobody. He wasn't *THE* project leader, he was *A* project leader. And he still will be, for the most part.... His paychecks will come from a different place, but his new employer likes the fact that he's working on Mozilla.
You simply can't throw people at a rendering engine and expect it to be somehow better. The people who are developing the mail/news client (which is able to NOT be installed by using the Installer.exe) are trained in the standard protocols of mail and news transfer and know what features they should implement. But do they know the most efficient methods of handling every sort of rendering needed by a standards-compliant browser?
Likewise, would anyone working on the renderer know the mail specifications off the top of their head?
It's split up into teams because it actually works quicker when people are working in the areas they're experts in.
There will be no native widgets, because they A) can't be styled by CSS, and B) require far more platform-specific code than cross-platform widgets. Anyone's free to make a platform-native wrapper to Mozilla, but Mozilla's widgets will be cross-platform.
With that certainty out of the way, here's the good news. David Hyatt and others (Mike Pinkerton comes to mind, regarding the Mac side of the issue) have undertaken the goal of getting the XP widgets to look closer to the native widgets than they do right now. Hyatt is making what's known as XBL (the eXtensible Bindings Language) for just such a purpose. The first checkin of an implementation of XBL was allowing the styling of the scrollbars (this happened about a week ago). Pete Collins, a non-Netscape independent developer, has produced scrollbars that look pretty close to the default GTK setup (yes, yes, I know GTK+ is themable; it's not hard at all to make the scrollbars change appearance now). I'm sure someone will do Mac and Windows scrollbars, or whatever other platform desires a native-looking scrollbar. Do I really know how much this'll help the XP look appear native? Nah. But from Pete's initial code for the GTK scrollbar, it looks REAL promising.
I was just about to post on him, when I came across this one. The man is quite possibly the greatest mathematician of all-time; most of the principles key to Linear Algebra were first proposed by him and those who expanded on his work, vast amounts of standard algebraic formulas, extensions to calculus. The man, like Euler, churned out more mathematical formulas than most countries have.
And beyond that, he was a genius. At the age of six, as a punishment for misbehaving, a teacher ordered him to add up all the numbers between 1 and 100 and give the answer at the end of the day. It took him about a minute (the formula is n(n+1)/2). A six year old.:)
(On that note, another man like that would be Mozart, who was writing symphonies in his single digits. But he doesn't really qualify as a geek, even though he makes my top fifty list as one of the most influential people of the past millennium [even though we have another year before the list can be finalized].)
A much better reason to have Pascal on the list is because of Pascal's Triangle. Many areas of mathematics (especially related to multiplication and division of third order and up polynomials and related applications) would be exceedingly difficult (or at least horribly time-consuming) without Pascal's Triangle.
>Photoshop - THE original killer app for the Mac. There's a reason why Photoshop benchmarks are what they use primarily to compare the PowerPPC and Pentium chips...
Funny. I could have sworn the reason was that it sucked so much CPU that it made testing insanely easy (because discrepancies are quite apparent).:)
I still consider WYSIWYG printing to be the Mac's killer app. Imagine, in 1984, being able to print to a printer exactly what you saw on your screen. What a novel concept that was!:)
With 13% of iMac buyers having bought their first Mac having previously owned PCs (and a goodly number more having bought their first computer period), I should daresay that Apple is getting new customers. The iMacs increased market share for Apple. They certainly didn't cause it to dwindle (it outsold all other low end computers for months, and still continues to sell well).
I didn't say he wrote the first Web browser. Or even that Mosaic was the first Web browser.
But it was the first graphical Web browser that actually became mainstream (I'm sure SOMEONE conceived of it before NCSA and Andreessen, but do you hear about those browsers today?).
Scene: 1991, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
History: A computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, with the help of a company known as CERN, has pioneered a method for making information accessible to many by means of hypertext, known as the World Wide Web. This hypertext-based environment is wholly text-based, but is still a leap up from the likes of gopher and Archie, which modern man for the most part doesn't comprehend.
Characters: A young visionary by the name of Marc Andreessen, a friend at NCSA (who will remain nameless), and Bill Gates.
MARC: "Hey, did you hear about that development by CERN? They're calling it the World Wide Web! This is great... Now that damned gopher protocol can bite me!"
FRIEND: "So?"
MARC: "So, what? We're gonna make a browser, and it's gonna be fantastic! It'll be able to browse these 'hypertext' pages easily. Hell, it might even be able to support pictures. We might have a reason to not use ugly green-screen terminals any more!"
And thus, Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, was conceived and started by Andreessen and friends.
Skip ahead a little bit in time, and suddenly this "Mosaic" has spawned a new company, Mosaic Communications. A little bit later, the company would be renamed to Netscape Communications, co-founded by Andreessen and Jim Clark.
Now, Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 were written in the first ages of the World Wide Web; back when men were men, women were men, and sheep were sheep. (Ha ha, fooled you there, didn't I?) The codebase was revolutionary for the time (well, it's not hard to be revolutionary when you're the first one). 1994 comes and goes, 1995 is a blur, and suddenly Netscape 3.0 arrives, and the masses proclaim it good, because, well, frankly, there's nothing better (it's pretty damn good, but it's an evolutionary release).
Into the picture comes a raging upstart in the Internet community, whose fortune has been amassed by the sales of a buggy and yet popular browser known as Windows 95.
GATES: "Look at this 'Netscape'! They're stealing the profit margin! Time to beat them at their own game!"
And so, the Mosaic codebase having been licensed for previous browsers Internet Explorer 1.0 and Internet Explorer 2.0 (both of which were pathetic, at best), IE 3.0 was made. And the masses saw that it was decent; it was small and reasonably fast, the code being fairly fresh then. The bugs were many, but few seemed to care.
Along comes 1997, and the next browser from Netscape comes along and is known as 4.0. And the people wept, for it, despite having many new features, was not the fantastic product it could have been. And Microsoft released IE 4.0 several months later, and the masses said that it was good, despite several gaping security holes and having a controversial feature that integrated with Windows 95 and caused horrible burning bleeding death upon the desktop. For it supported Web standards (not completely) that were not final when Netscape 4.0 had been released. The masses knew that Netscape was in trouble.
For Netscape had been using the same codebase that had been in development since Netscape 1.0. And the aging code had been made anticipating pictures, but not dynamically generated content.
1997 came and went, and in early 1998, Netscape Communications released the source code to its browser.
People didn't know much of what to make of this. Some saw it as a last ditch plot to get back at MS, others saw it as a good move, and still others thought it was an idiotic move. March came and went, and October was suddenly upon us. Into the picture comes the new Web Standards Project, which has undertaken the role of belittling both 4.0 browsers for non-standards compliance. Seeing that their new source release wasn't fantastic, and to appease developers clamoring for something better, Netscape throws out the old source code and starts fresh on new code designed to be small, fast, modular, and standards-compliant.
1998 came and went, and there was 1999. And there was IE 5.0. And the people rejoiced, for it added "Sort by Name" to their Windows 98 Start Menus. And the developers wept, for it still sucked in standards-compliance in a major way, making cross-browser/platform development STILL horrible. The codebase was based on IE 3.0 and was starting to show its age, bloating to ungodly levels.
And then the Mozilla project came into the spotlight. And the press said that it was dead, for Jamie Zawinski had left Netscape, which had merged with AOL. The reasons for why the press declared death are a mystery, as Jamie had not contributed large amounts of code in months.
And now we arrive at the present. The press still thinks Netscape and Mozilla are dead. However, a good, fast, standards-compliant, cross-platform, customizable, and open source browser has emerged from the flaming wreckage of Mozilla Classic.
And in a couple of months, it will be in beta. And there was much rejoicing (yay).
Moral of this story: Don't speak of things that should have been in a design that weren't factors when the design was made. If Mozilla suffered from the same symptoms despite the fresh code, then you'd have a gripe.
(If you've read this far, you're obviously dedicated in Mozilla, interested in Mozilla, or just thought this was mildly entertaining. Or have no life.:) )
Only in the sense that Netscape first started the project (the original source release went towards development of "Mozilla Classic", a design that was scrapped almost exactly one year ago in favor of a modular, compact, exceedingly fast, and standards-compliant design) and provides a goodly number of engineers to it. Mozilla and Netscape are not the same thing (Netscape will release a branded version of Mozilla with features that can't be put in Mozilla due to licensing and export laws [encryption being the real big thing]). Mozilla's rendering component can be embedded free of charge in any program (well, that adheres to the principles of the Mozilla and Netscape Public Licenses), and Mozilla's browser can be customized by any company and released as a derivative product.
Add to that Ed.D, doctor of education, the degree my father holds (it's equivalent to a Ph.D, but the University of Northern Iowa gives out Ed.Ds to its graduate students in education; my mom is a Ph.D in roughly the same field, from the University of Iowa).
Most people certainly don't get their Ph.Ds by the time they are 26 or 27.
This is only true in cases either 1) when the field requires a Ph.D for a job to be attained, or 2) when the person elects to pursue a Masters and a Ph.D as a full time pursuit.
Fields like education typically do not have 26 and 27 year old Ph.Ds. My parents are both doctors of education (mother is a Ph.D and father is an Ed.D), and neither of them got it until they were past 35 years old (my dad got it at 38, and my mom got it at about 43). They both held full time teaching positions while they were pursuing their graduate schooling, and it took my parents 16 and 21 years, respectively, to get their doctorates.
Now, a physics person who can get into a graduate school (and afford the cost) straight out of college CAN finish a Ph.D in about 3 or 4 years. But the length of the doctoral thesis (the paper itself, mind you; not the actual work involved) is about a tenth of that required of someone studying in education or English. The difference between physics Ph.Ds and Ph.Ds or Ed.Ds or whatnot in the humanities is that the people in the humanities tend to get their degrees while holding steady jobs in the field, while high level physics degrees are typically required to land desirable jobs in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps the fact that commercial developers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.... Like, say, AOL? And IBM? And Nokia? And all the other companies who are embedding it into proprietary code?
Someone is certainly welcome to fork the whole thing under the GPL, but why? You lose the development resources of Netscape over a philosophy.
Of course roca read it. He's quoted in the damn thing (Robert O'Callahan).
The guy who submitted it was quoted in the article itself, using a newsgroup post that was never intended to be quoted. I daresay he didn't overreact.
The really interesting thing is that roca (Robert O'Callahan, who is quoted in the story) was emailed for comments by the author. Rob asked him not to write an article like the one he did based upon an informal suggestion on a newsgroup, but the guy went and did it anyway.
Mozilla DOES give you the option to install or not install everything except the browser. Use the Installer download and you can choose not to use mail/news, Chatzilla, etc. Of course, there's no setup utility for Mozilla like Netscape uses for 6, so you do have to download it, even if you choose not to use it. I suspect that this will change at some point, though.
There's a bug filed on this. None of the developers save one can seem to reproduce it at all (and the one who can only sees it intermittently). As soon as they figure out the problem, it'll be fixed. And yes, it is a regression from M12, according to the comments on that bug (I don't have the bug number on me, sorry).
Quite possibly nobody. He wasn't *THE* project leader, he was *A* project leader. And he still will be, for the most part.... His paychecks will come from a different place, but his new employer likes the fact that he's working on Mozilla.
That's hardly the situation.
You simply can't throw people at a rendering engine and expect it to be somehow better. The people who are developing the mail/news client (which is able to NOT be installed by using the Installer.exe) are trained in the standard protocols of mail and news transfer and know what features they should implement. But do they know the most efficient methods of handling every sort of rendering needed by a standards-compliant browser?
Likewise, would anyone working on the renderer know the mail specifications off the top of their head?
It's split up into teams because it actually works quicker when people are working in the areas they're experts in.
That issue is and has been dead for months.
There will be no native widgets, because they A) can't be styled by CSS, and B) require far more platform-specific code than cross-platform widgets. Anyone's free to make a platform-native wrapper to Mozilla, but Mozilla's widgets will be cross-platform.
With that certainty out of the way, here's the good news. David Hyatt and others (Mike Pinkerton comes to mind, regarding the Mac side of the issue) have undertaken the goal of getting the XP widgets to look closer to the native widgets than they do right now. Hyatt is making what's known as XBL (the eXtensible Bindings Language) for just such a purpose. The first checkin of an implementation of XBL was allowing the styling of the scrollbars (this happened about a week ago). Pete Collins, a non-Netscape independent developer, has produced scrollbars that look pretty close to the default GTK setup (yes, yes, I know GTK+ is themable; it's not hard at all to make the scrollbars change appearance now). I'm sure someone will do Mac and Windows scrollbars, or whatever other platform desires a native-looking scrollbar. Do I really know how much this'll help the XP look appear native? Nah. But from Pete's initial code for the GTK scrollbar, it looks REAL promising.
Technically, it IS an abbreviation (for Macintosh). It's not an acronym. :)
I was just about to post on him, when I came across this one. The man is quite possibly the greatest mathematician of all-time; most of the principles key to Linear Algebra were first proposed by him and those who expanded on his work, vast amounts of standard algebraic formulas, extensions to calculus. The man, like Euler, churned out more mathematical formulas than most countries have.
:)
And beyond that, he was a genius. At the age of six, as a punishment for misbehaving, a teacher ordered him to add up all the numbers between 1 and 100 and give the answer at the end of the day. It took him about a minute (the formula is n(n+1)/2). A six year old.
(On that note, another man like that would be Mozart, who was writing symphonies in his single digits. But he doesn't really qualify as a geek, even though he makes my top fifty list as one of the most influential people of the past millennium [even though we have another year before the list can be finalized].)
A much better reason to have Pascal on the list is because of Pascal's Triangle. Many areas of mathematics (especially related to multiplication and division of third order and up polynomials and related applications) would be exceedingly difficult (or at least horribly time-consuming) without Pascal's Triangle.
Two different Darrens, no less. And it was still
successful.
It's part of CSS2.
And supported by Mozilla.
>Photoshop - THE original killer app for the Mac. There's a reason why Photoshop benchmarks are what
:)
:)
they use primarily to compare the PowerPPC and Pentium chips...
Funny. I could have sworn the reason was that it sucked so much CPU that it made testing insanely easy (because discrepancies are quite apparent).
I still consider WYSIWYG printing to be the Mac's killer app. Imagine, in 1984, being able to print to a printer exactly what you saw on your screen. What a novel concept that was!
With 13% of iMac buyers having bought their first Mac having previously owned PCs (and a goodly number more having bought their first computer period), I should daresay that Apple is getting new customers. The iMacs increased market share for Apple. They certainly didn't cause it to dwindle (it outsold all other low end computers for months, and still continues to sell well).
I didn't say he wrote the first Web browser. Or even that Mosaic was the first Web browser.
But it was the first graphical Web browser that actually became mainstream (I'm sure SOMEONE conceived of it before NCSA and Andreessen, but do you hear about those browsers today?).
Scene: 1991, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
:) )
History: A computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, with the help of a company known as CERN, has pioneered a method for making information accessible to many by means of hypertext, known as the World Wide Web. This hypertext-based environment is wholly text-based, but is still a leap up from the likes of gopher and Archie, which modern man for the most part doesn't comprehend.
Characters: A young visionary by the name of Marc Andreessen, a friend at NCSA (who will remain nameless), and Bill Gates.
MARC: "Hey, did you hear about that development by CERN? They're calling it the World Wide Web! This is great... Now that damned gopher protocol can bite me!"
FRIEND: "So?"
MARC: "So, what? We're gonna make a browser, and it's gonna be fantastic! It'll be able to browse these 'hypertext' pages easily. Hell, it might even be able to support pictures. We might have a reason to not use ugly green-screen terminals any more!"
And thus, Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, was conceived and started by Andreessen and friends.
Skip ahead a little bit in time, and suddenly this "Mosaic" has spawned a new company, Mosaic Communications. A little bit later, the company would be renamed to Netscape Communications, co-founded by Andreessen and Jim Clark.
Now, Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 were written in the first ages of the World Wide Web; back when men were men, women were men, and sheep were sheep. (Ha ha, fooled you there, didn't I?) The codebase was revolutionary for the time (well, it's not hard to be revolutionary when you're the first one). 1994 comes and goes, 1995 is a blur, and suddenly Netscape 3.0 arrives, and the masses proclaim it good, because, well, frankly, there's nothing better (it's pretty damn good, but it's an evolutionary release).
Into the picture comes a raging upstart in the Internet community, whose fortune has been amassed by the sales of a buggy and yet popular browser known as Windows 95.
GATES: "Look at this 'Netscape'! They're stealing the profit margin! Time to beat them at their own game!"
And so, the Mosaic codebase having been licensed for previous browsers Internet Explorer 1.0 and Internet Explorer 2.0 (both of which were pathetic, at best), IE 3.0 was made. And the masses saw that it was decent; it was small and reasonably fast, the code being fairly fresh then. The bugs were many, but few seemed to care.
Along comes 1997, and the next browser from Netscape comes along and is known as 4.0. And the people wept, for it, despite having many new features, was not the fantastic product it could have been. And Microsoft released IE 4.0 several months later, and the masses said that it was good, despite several gaping security holes and having a controversial feature that integrated with Windows 95 and caused horrible burning bleeding death upon the desktop. For it supported Web standards (not completely) that were not final when Netscape 4.0 had been released. The masses knew that Netscape was in trouble.
For Netscape had been using the same codebase that had been in development since Netscape 1.0. And the aging code had been made anticipating pictures, but not dynamically generated content.
1997 came and went, and in early 1998, Netscape Communications released the source code to its browser.
People didn't know much of what to make of this. Some saw it as a last ditch plot to get back at MS, others saw it as a good move, and still others thought it was an idiotic move. March came and went, and October was suddenly upon us. Into the picture comes the new Web Standards Project, which has undertaken the role of belittling both 4.0 browsers for non-standards compliance. Seeing that their new source release wasn't fantastic, and to appease developers clamoring for something better, Netscape throws out the old source code and starts fresh on new code designed to be small, fast, modular, and standards-compliant.
1998 came and went, and there was 1999. And there was IE 5.0. And the people rejoiced, for it added "Sort by Name" to their Windows 98 Start Menus. And the developers wept, for it still sucked in standards-compliance in a major way, making cross-browser/platform development STILL horrible. The codebase was based on IE 3.0 and was starting to show its age, bloating to ungodly levels.
And then the Mozilla project came into the spotlight. And the press said that it was dead, for Jamie Zawinski had left Netscape, which had merged with AOL. The reasons for why the press declared death are a mystery, as Jamie had not contributed large amounts of code in months.
And now we arrive at the present. The press still thinks Netscape and Mozilla are dead. However, a good, fast, standards-compliant, cross-platform, customizable, and open source browser has emerged from the flaming wreckage of Mozilla Classic.
And in a couple of months, it will be in beta. And there was much rejoicing (yay).
Moral of this story: Don't speak of things that should have been in a design that weren't factors when the design was made. If Mozilla suffered from the same symptoms despite the fresh code, then you'd have a gripe.
(If you've read this far, you're obviously dedicated in Mozilla, interested in Mozilla, or just thought this was mildly entertaining. Or have no life.
Only in the sense that Netscape first started the project (the original source release went towards development of "Mozilla Classic", a design that was scrapped almost exactly one year ago in favor of a modular, compact, exceedingly fast, and standards-compliant design) and provides a goodly number of engineers to it. Mozilla and Netscape are not the same thing (Netscape will release a branded version of Mozilla with features that can't be put in Mozilla due to licensing and export laws [encryption being the real big thing]). Mozilla's rendering component can be embedded free of charge in any program (well, that adheres to the principles of the Mozilla and Netscape Public Licenses), and Mozilla's browser can be customized by any company and released as a derivative product.
Add to that Ed.D, doctor of education, the degree my father holds (it's equivalent to a Ph.D, but the University of Northern Iowa gives out Ed.Ds to its graduate students in education; my mom is a Ph.D in roughly the same field, from the University of Iowa).
This is only true in cases either 1) when the field requires a Ph.D for a job to be attained, or 2) when the person elects to pursue a Masters and a Ph.D as a full time pursuit.
Fields like education typically do not have 26 and 27 year old Ph.Ds. My parents are both doctors of education (mother is a Ph.D and father is an Ed.D), and neither of them got it until they were past 35 years old (my dad got it at 38, and my mom got it at about 43). They both held full time teaching positions while they were pursuing their graduate schooling, and it took my parents 16 and 21 years, respectively, to get their doctorates.
Now, a physics person who can get into a graduate school (and afford the cost) straight out of college CAN finish a Ph.D in about 3 or 4 years. But the length of the doctoral thesis (the paper itself, mind you; not the actual work involved) is about a tenth of that required of someone studying in education or English. The difference between physics Ph.Ds and Ph.Ds or Ed.Ds or whatnot in the humanities is that the people in the humanities tend to get their degrees while holding steady jobs in the field, while high level physics degrees are typically required to land desirable jobs in the field.