It was faster, and more stable than the Mozilla bundle.
You do realise that that was the case because it was as bare-bones as it could get, right?
By the time it hit the 0.8/0.9 range, the Mozilla Foundation had realized that it was so much better a browser than the full suite that it was able to compete with IE, and that's when the advertising started.
This is blatant revisionism. The truth is that because it was new, people got excited, and flocked to it. This is how it got exposure. What also added to the spotlight a lot was that it tried to be an IE clone in terms of looks. Just check the articles of back in the day as far back as Firebird 0.6. The Mozilla Foundation decided to follow the wave. The roadmap shows this: http://web.archive.org/web/20030801081914/www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
And Netscape was in a rapid downward spiral, so it wasn't exactly difficult to take market share from it even without advertising.
If that was true, Mozilla would have had a bigger market share back in the day. Yet many stayed with Netscape.
The problem is that "most" isn't the target for high profile websites, they need to be as close to identical as possible.
Most websites don't use most of the rendering abilities. My point was that most websites will look the same. It's lesser-used things like display:table CSS that might have some small bugs.
The assertion that cross browser testing only came about because of MS was just plain wrong.
It is not wrong. Remember that the web browser wars didn't start until IE entered the market.
In fact, it could be argued that for a few years, cross browser testing wasn't necessary because of Microsoft since IE was the only browser with any significant market share.
Not true. Many clients still demanded compatibility with Netscape 4.x and both PC and Mac versions of IE5.
I have never left Windows 95 behind; it's still running on my main PC. Windows 95 OSR 2.x is the best Windows OS to me. Total control, no eye candy, good stability, and you can run it without IE.
Chips are getting faster, just not in Mhz or Ghz anymore. When chip makers found out that they couldn't increase the magic CPU cycles per second number, they started adding cores.
The reality is that it's all about architecture. The improvements in chip design make them much more efficient, and thus faster.
When you're blocking the ad servers, you're already blocking their JavaScript, so NoScript isn't helping there. You can block Google-Analytics with Adblock as well, if you haven't already.
NoScript is nothing more than a fad. Possible vulnerabilities in JavaScript get patched really quick by Mozilla. Exploits in the wild are rare. Just keep your Firefox/SeaMonkey/Flock/K-Meleon/Camino/(insert other Gecko web browser here) up-to-date, and you're fine.
are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey)
This is a popular myth. The reality is that a bunch of people didn't like the direction that the Mozilla project was taking with Mozilla, so they got together and started the Phoenix project.
People rallied behind it because it was new and fresh, and then the Mozilla Foundation started to do marketing for it, which the Mozilla Suite never got. This culminated into the release of Firefox 1.0, and eventually the dropping of the Mozilla Suite.
Windows 95 wasn't even close to usable until OSR2 and that was practically Win98 and as I recall didn't ship until '97.
Windows 95 OSR2 shipped in 1996, a year after Windows 95 was released. It wasn't like Windows 98 at all, as it didn't have IE rammed through its shell.
Or even better: let's write code for yesterday's hardware. Not everyone has a computer of today, and the more computers that can use your software, the better.
While the article is good information, the article is poorly written. There are a lot of run-on sentences, and multiple typos in every paragraph. The most glaring example is that each time the author means "you're", he writes "your" without fail.
$300 TV is cheaper than a game console? I beg to differ. The Nintendo Wii is $250, the XBox 360 Arcade is less than $200, the Nintendo DS is $130, and the PSP is somewhere below $200.
The problem is that more attention is given to this test than other bugs (rendering and standards support included) that are more important because of the buzz. Most users don't understand that a web browser that passes ACID3 is not more standards compliant than one that doesn't by default.
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The Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) has had this for ages as well.
You do realise that that was the case because it was as bare-bones as it could get, right?
This is blatant revisionism. The truth is that because it was new, people got excited, and flocked to it. This is how it got exposure. What also added to the spotlight a lot was that it tried to be an IE clone in terms of looks. Just check the articles of back in the day as far back as Firebird 0.6. The Mozilla Foundation decided to follow the wave. The roadmap shows this: http://web.archive.org/web/20030801081914/www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html
If that was true, Mozilla would have had a bigger market share back in the day. Yet many stayed with Netscape.
Most websites don't use most of the rendering abilities. My point was that most websites will look the same. It's lesser-used things like display:table CSS that might have some small bugs.
It is not wrong. Remember that the web browser wars didn't start until IE entered the market.
Not true. Many clients still demanded compatibility with Netscape 4.x and both PC and Mac versions of IE5.
Every rendering engine that isn't Trident renders most things the same way, as long as the code is valid.
So what? They say the same thing about GNU/Linux.
I expect this will be modded troll.
I have never left Windows 95 behind; it's still running on my main PC. Windows 95 OSR 2.x is the best Windows OS to me. Total control, no eye candy, good stability, and you can run it without IE.
It's definitely, damn it!
If your kid frisbees the discs across the room and breaks them, you can just copy the game from someone else. At least, you could if there was no DRM.
Quit abusing the apostrophe.
Most malware infections are thanks to the vulnerability between the keyboard and the chair.
So no, we won't see less infections with a securer Windows.
Long live Haiku!
Chips are getting faster, just not in Mhz or Ghz anymore. When chip makers found out that they couldn't increase the magic CPU cycles per second number, they started adding cores.
The reality is that it's all about architecture. The improvements in chip design make them much more efficient, and thus faster.
Firefox bashing will commence in 3... 2... 1...
When you're blocking the ad servers, you're already blocking their JavaScript, so NoScript isn't helping there. You can block Google-Analytics with Adblock as well, if you haven't already.
NoScript is nothing more than a fad. Possible vulnerabilities in JavaScript get patched really quick by Mozilla. Exploits in the wild are rare. Just keep your Firefox/SeaMonkey/Flock/K-Meleon/Camino/(insert other Gecko web browser here) up-to-date, and you're fine.
This is a popular myth. The reality is that a bunch of people didn't like the direction that the Mozilla project was taking with Mozilla, so they got together and started the Phoenix project.
People rallied behind it because it was new and fresh, and then the Mozilla Foundation started to do marketing for it, which the Mozilla Suite never got. This culminated into the release of Firefox 1.0, and eventually the dropping of the Mozilla Suite.
Windows 95 can still be very useful.
Windows 95 OSR2 shipped in 1996, a year after Windows 95 was released. It wasn't like Windows 98 at all, as it didn't have IE rammed through its shell.
Or even better: let's write code for yesterday's hardware. Not everyone has a computer of today, and the more computers that can use your software, the better.
While the article is good information, the article is poorly written. There are a lot of run-on sentences, and multiple typos in every paragraph. The most glaring example is that each time the author means "you're", he writes "your" without fail.
$300 TV is cheaper than a game console? I beg to differ. The Nintendo Wii is $250, the XBox 360 Arcade is less than $200, the Nintendo DS is $130, and the PSP is somewhere below $200.
Font face? That was part of CSS2 from 1998, which has since been replaced by CSS2.1, which doesn't have font face. It's CSS3 that supports it again.
So Microsoft doesn't deserve kudos at all. It's only there because they never followed up on CSS2.1.
Such an important feature like that should have an option to turn it off. Other features of Firefox can be turned off easily, why shouldn't this one?
I'm not proposing to have it disabled by default either.
I use SeaMonkey, by the way.
The problem is that more attention is given to this test than other bugs (rendering and standards support included) that are more important because of the buzz. Most users don't understand that a web browser that passes ACID3 is not more standards compliant than one that doesn't by default.
The list mentions which standard the bug/quirk that is tested belongs to. They don't test the entire standard, obviously.
I was not advocating that all about:config settings should be available through options UI. Try again.