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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Status Update 242

Posted by Roblimo from the unnamed-sources dept.
EmilEifrem writes "BrowserWatch has an interesting feature about the status of Mozilla. It's a mail from a Netscape engineer but it's NOT the official word from AOL/Netscape. It talks about how half of the Netscape engineers now use Seamonkey as their main browser, about upcoming dates (first Netscape branded alpha/beta doesn't seem to be far away) as well as engineering priorities and goals. Not the official word but an interesting read nevertheless."
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Mozilla Status Rumors

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  • Uhmm there is/was no "war" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Once Microsoft woke up and realized the Internet and the web were important they just forced Netscape off their platform - calling that a "war" is a bit of an exaggeration. MS is a huge fragile beast that relies on 90% market share and fights dirty to keep it.

    One could just as well ask why MS did what they did - they give IE away for free so there was no revenue threat. Netscape simply enhanced the average Window's user's experience. Either everyone on this thread is only 14 years old or they have completely forgotten the last 3 or 4 years of the WWW but netscape was a HUGE breakthrough and added to the popularity of ... Windows 95 (!)

    Mozilla continues as a threat to MS and an important innovation because entire web based applications can be built using XUL and XML using *one* tool (the browser). Wordprocessors, spreadsheets, MM apps are all possible without having Excel Word etc installed on the client and activated through COM Active/X and all the other bloated crap we "need".

  • Re:What happened to glibc2.0.x problems? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IT doens't work very well. The reason is that Mozilla is pervasively multithreaded internally, and threads changed (got a lot better) between glibc 2.0 and 2.1. The mozilla team do not want to program for glibc2.0 sucky-threads, since it would make mozilla development harder + less reliable (more indeterminate conditions+possible races), and glibc2.0 is thoroughly obsolete by now.
  • On www.lwn.net/daily/ they have a story about Mike Shaver, a big Mozilla developer and promoter, leaving at the end of Jan. Are any of the original big guys left?

  • It'll be Netscape 5.0 - not Mozilla (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of /. users seem to think that Mozilla will take over the browser market when it's released. Heck, maybe among the geek community that helped build and test it, but not to the average web user.

    Netscape will take Mozilla, brand it as Netscape 5. Netscape 5 will be on all the cover CDs, on Netscape's web site, on the ISP CDs, on the university boxes, - Mozilla as a branded product will have such small market share.

    That's just my 2 cents.

  • Re:Huh?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How the f#$k is this offtopic!?! HEY, MODERATOR - it's called an OPINION. You know, that thing that you don't have any of 'cause you get all yours from Slashdot.

  • Keep up the good work... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well done Mozilla team for making it this far. This is going to be the best web browser written IMHO. The important thing is that it's standards compliant. BTW why not vote for Mozilla in the Slashdot beanies awards? I've voted for mozilla as best improved open source project of 1999 as they made so much progress even though many people doubted them

  • Mozilla speed (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I've used mozilla, I've always found it slow, particularly the gui. I'm currently using the debian M12 package on a P100. Is this because there is debug code present? Is it likely to be quicker if i compile my own?

  • Re:can someone explain what seamonkey is? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A seamonkey is a tiny little creature, often sold in advertisements in the back of comics during the 70's, which would die almost immediately upon being exposed to anything resembling the outside world.

    Did that clear it up for you?

  • What if the popular "home brew" Mozilla distros decide to fake their user agent strings?


    I'm sorry to say it, but there's already a LOT of browsers out there faking the user agent strings. Filtering out them like that doesn't simply work. It's much better just to tell the customers what browsers are bad, and why, and also what browsers they recommend.

  • Please read the thread:
    "user-agent strings" by Judson Valeski on netscape.public.mozilla.netlib for some possible solutions.
  • If you use the port in /usr/ports/www/mozilla, it's much more stable. Although it does have trouble with slashdot, most other things work quite well.

    -Dom
  • You can see the "official" status [mozilla.org] message this was taken from. Search down for the entry named "Seamonkey" dated january 10th.
  • ...and there is always iCab, which is a serious browser for geeks who do not want to run Netscape 4.x bloat-ware (why drop the stand-alone install?) or IE and all related MS stuff (how many MS extensions does it take to run a simple web broweser?)

    iCab proves that you can make a small, HTML-spec browser without all of the bells and whistles and people will be interested. I am looking forward to the day that I get to send in my $29.

    I think that the Mozilla/Mac team should take a long, hard look at iCab. Is Mozilla trying to be more than iCab and, if so, are the added things really needed? Clean up the code base for a lean browser and get it out the door.

    It is strnage for me to see that iCab was started after Mozialla (granted, iCab had a working code base on the Amiga) and will be at final builds a longtime before Mozilla. Rumor has it the next pre-release of iCab will have JavaScript (finally) and will be the last pre-release beore a final version.
  • Just turn the toolbar off. On any decent browser, all that functionality is available by pressing the right mouse button. (On more idiotic browsers, one has to press and release the right mouse button before anything happen.) The icons both waste space and time (you have to mouse over to them). If you do a lot of web browsing, those buttons are a big pain, might as well just remove them entirely.

    --

  • Ok, well like the above poster said, iCab does not even have javascript. Java? whats that? Mail/news? what for? Please do not compare these prehistoric browsers against mozilla. Compare them to navigator 2.0.
  • Many browsers already offer the option to spoof a user agent string. I'd used this ability in Lynx several times to work around exactly this sort of server side client blocking. You've probably already got people doing exactly what you're describing, so it seems a silly concorn.

    I suggest you don't worry about people spoofing they're likely to be more technical people who understand the risks of doing so.

    Of course, there is a deeper issue. Take a random feature, say JavaScript (since you brought it up), that the site "needs". First, what about users with acceptable browsers who disable JavaScript? Are we to be turned away? This is another support problem area.

    Also, consider why they feel the need for JavaScript or similarly uncertain technologies? In many cases, JavaScript, DHTML, and the ilk are used just to "pretty up" the site. Maybe a better idea is to make the site use straight HTML, opening up your userbase to almost everyone?

    If you really need the JavaScript/DHTML/Java/Whatever, limit it's use and put a "This page needs JavaScript. We recommend Netscape 4.X or IE 4.X or later. We can't support anything else, sorry." on the pages.

  • funny you should say that...
    i remember when i first tried sawmill, it was a while back. and man, it really sucked hard. but that is what you get when you start a project. but good lord, sawmill is now one sweet windowmanager. Unfinished code should never be used by someone who is afraid to get burnt, or to lend a hand.


  • well, i know them as "brine shrimps" or something similar to that. When i grew up in Trinidad, there was a time my brother and i raised siamese fighting fish. and one of the thing that we fed em was those brine shrimps. you could buy em in the petshop, in little plastic bottles (they were the eggs or some such thing), put a certain amount in water and put a airpump in the container, and in a few days you have those yummy food to feed to your fishes. we also fed the fishes mosqutio larve. Ah those were some good days. I think i will give my brother a call and verify some of this info, since i do seem to have a bad memory.

  • IE suffering half those problems is an exaggeration imho. But certainly one problem it does have annoyed me the most this past Christmas when I was using my dad's Windows machine. The partial download problem. So much loss of productivity (relatively, in Christmas holidays terms) just because I had to completely re-download so many things.

    I use wget (under Linux) to do most large downloads anyway. I don't enjoy using Windows so I never go looking for a wget-like utility either.

    In anycase, using IE is completely irrelevant to me since it doesn't run under Linux. Running Windows to just to use IE would be illogical. What I'm waiting for is for someone (or me) to implement a javascript on/off toggle button. Going to preferences has become routine, but that's tedious... :)
  • I hope so. I used the last beta(alpha? what?) version for Mac and it SUCKED. It was slower than cold maple syrup, crashed repeatedly (couldn't use it more than a few minutes), and I thought the user interface needed a TON of work. If anyone of you haven't used it, take a look at the Netscape homepage. It looks like the menu bar on top.
    This kinda scared me. After seeing IE 5.0, I'm tempted to switch, folks.....
  • I can't stand the fact that I can't resume downloads from microsoft updates. Of course I can't stand alot of other things about Windows...
  • I also notice Mozilla's sluggishness on my Celeron 333 Linux box, although it's far from unusable.

    Two things to note:

    1. Mozilla doesn't have its memory or disk caches enabled yet. Therefore, it loads every page from scratch every time, even when you just press the back button. This is a big contributor to perceived slowness (the kind of slowness most people are talking about whether they know it or not).

    2. Mozilla is doing more per page load than NS4.x... it is also building and exposing a complicated standards-based DOM tree structure. This is a very good thing, but it does take more time.

    Arguably IE 5.x is doing the same, so this shouldn't ultimately slow Mozilla down more than it slows IE down (unless IE cuts corners for speed--we know they cut corners on implementing the DOM spec, but we don't know why they did it).

    Ultimately, though, what other people have said is correct: Mozilla is pre-alpha, and until it is beta this is normal. Come back and complain if Mozilla is still slow when it hits beta, or better yet stop complaining and help the project out.
  • I don't know how some of you guys are using it so regularly. I grabbed the M13 build and it wouldn't stay running more than 5 minutes. And I wasn't even pushing it.

    -Vince
  • Yes. Exactly. I think that they should write a nice stable browser, and worry about the GUI later. How many Slashdot people will either write or download a plain-button "skin" in the end anyway? I know that I will...

    --

  • Yes, that's the install. But the *download* is about 50MB, and Microsoft doesn't provide a simple way to install a bare-bones browser. IE4 didn't even allow installing IE4 without OE4 until SP2 came out (which is when IE4 became useless...). At work, I was forced to install IE4, and then clean out the 5 or 6 packages it forced on me. No, I didn't install the Active Desktop <shudder>

    --

  • Please read my message carefully. I will re-quote it for you. Pay special attention to the highlighted text - that's the stuff you forgot to read:

    IE4 didn't even allow installing IE4 without OE4 until SP2 came out

    --

  • Please, stop pretending you don't know.... it is well known that the Mozilla interface SUCKS in terms of responsiveness/redraw time.

    The slow GUI is the main reason I don't use it. I really hope removeal of the debug code will make it substantially faster, or else I'm afraid this browser is going nowhere.
  • I got this too. I removed my old ~/.mozilla directory (used by M11) and then it worked fine.
  • And I'm certain that huge amounts of the critical work that you do requires a web browser.
  • Got my first core dump! Not so cool :(
  • I just installed Mozilla (m12 release) and of course the first site I pull up is Slashdot...the first story I read is on Mozilla. Pretty cool!
  • \begin{pedantry}

    I used the original CAB ('Crystal Atari Browser') on the Atari ST some years ago, when I first got an internet connection - it was pretty nice and surprisingly fast even for an 8MHz machine.

    There were two main editions; up to v1.5, when it was freeware, and after, when it became commercial (although with a nearly full-featured demo). Then at some point development switched to the Mac.

    The original was written in Pascal, and unless the MAc has a pretty recent version of Pascal I expect it will all have to be recoded. But still taking a lot less time than Mozilla, and with far fewer programmers. Hmmm... :)

    There's some stuff about CAB at http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~aclauss/Atari_CA B.html

    The browser I'm looking forwards to is Konqueror in KDE 2 - again coded in less time with a lot less programmers. :)
  • I'd disagree with an absolute "Never do anything useful with Javascript" proscription. There are some things that would be unacceptably slow, or just not implementable without a client side scripting layer.

    My take of this is that you are against performing client side field validation as a data integrity check. I would partially disagree. You can use it, provided that everything is validated at the server. This sounds redundant, but it isn't. A server side check requires a new page, Javascript checking requires some Javascript in the page. So, from a client perspective, it's faster. You need the server side stuff for people without Javascript or those attempting to bypass your security.

    I'd say that the vast majority of sites need to provide their core functionality in a function available from the lowest common denominator. This would be HTML 3.2 without Javascript, and possibly without frames. This doesn't mean that newer browsers cant take advantage of the new stuff, but never for the core features. Unless you must provide a function, and it's the only way to do it.

  • Skins will allow Mozilla to look "right" for the OS it's running on, and if I've been understanding the newsgroups right (see netscape.public.mozilla.ui on news server @ news.mozilla.org), there's something called XBL which will help with the look-and-feel part of the OS... This is all kinda new, I think XBL landed in the tree like this week, so...

    Incidentally, for those who hate the current UI, there's an "alternate UI" that's been developed, and you can check it out on the same newsgroup.
    W
    -------------------
  • 1. Where's your source?
    2. In all those pro-IE articles where they actually DO identify the source, it always seems to be some kind of bizzare subsection of users, like "business users who are forced to use IE at work" based on some tiny sample like 100 people.
    3. Netscape used to dominate with an even higher percentage (say, 1995). If IE didn't give up, then, why should Netscape/Mozilla/AOL/Time-Warner now?

    W
    -------------------
  • I swear, the only thing keeping me from throwing Netscape 4.x out the window and using iCab exclusively is the fact that there is no -- ZERO -- style sheet support.

    Even then I stil use iCab; it's fast, light, has some basic ad-blocking functionality, doesn't break too many sites (yes, I know it's the site's fault, not iCab's) and I still use it to test my CSS-styled sites -- what better way to find out what a site will look like without stylesheets enabled?

    Jay (=
  • My point is, they really don't seem interested in making it that fast.

    On the contrary, there are quite a few people devoted to increasing performance and reducing footprint. Check out the "performance" and "porkjockeys" newsgroups (linked from the www.mozilla.org site).

    I'm sorry the progress isn't as fast as you'd like. There are no obvious "big wins" left and most changes result in only incremental improvements, but they are being made and performance is an important focus of the mozilla project -- second only to standards compliance.

    If you're interested in making speed improvements why not pitch in now rather than wait for us to "finish" as you stated in an earlier post?

  • Huh?! (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )

    I hate to say it, but that article was nearly unintelligible. Browserwatch could have done better by summarizing the content themselves, rather than being lazy and slapping the entire mail in via cut-and-paste.


  • And how do you know he is not?

  • Well, duh. That's what I was talking about in my original post.

  • Mozilla, its not bad, its good =) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm using Mozilla right now.. really, its pretty good. Oh, its got bugs, but thats to be expected. The groovy thing is, the bugs WILL ACTUALLY GET FIXED. No fooling. That totally blows me away. Most things seem to work, although I can't log into hotmail, it seems to ignore me when I press the login button. Grunt. I imagine if more people used it we would get a finished mozilla quicker. Hint hint =)

  • Mozilla rocks... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...no Gareth rocks, there's a difference! ;) Anyway good luck to the Mozilla team, it's my first ever download of their product today and it's brilliant. BTW this is on Windows unfortunately :( - however I'm impressed with the stability. BTW if you're running alladvantage in Windows to get a few extra pennies (i.e. a poor student like me who needs as much as you can get) you'll notice that it doesn't give you credit when browsing with Mozilla. However it detects the browser that you're using by checking it's titlebar. Therefore if you edit the file.\chrome\navigator\navigator.dtd and change the lines beginning !ENTITY mainWindow.title and titleModifier from Mozilla to Microsoft Internet Explorer (or probably also Netscape) then it'll still add up your credit while you're browsing using Mozilla.
  • I disagree. I don't think a browser should ship with a JVM. Rather, the JVM should be supplied by the OS (either built-in or as some sort of installed package). Java is not only for websites... There are whole Java Applications and non-Internet related Java-based tools.

    And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most OS's come with a JVM already (MacOS - MRJ, Win9X - MS JVM, Linux - Java SDK, etc). Java should be an Operating System service and the Browser should call upon that service to perform Java code.
  • If Mozilla can cause ps to be killed by signal 11 (segmentation violation) then that means either ps or the kernel is buggy. Or possibly your hardware. Probably it is a lack of checking the return value of malloc combined with a memory leak in Mozilla that is causing you problems.
    It also means Mozilla is buggy, but we knew that already. It's not even alpha yet, of course it's buggy. It works pretty well for me, though.
  • I'm not speaking from experience, but I certainly would imagine that whatever sends "Mozilla 5.0" back as User Agent is just a string somewhere in the source, easily changed.

    I seem to remember that wget has an option to change the User Agent to whatever you want, so even today, the method you mention doesn't REALLY guarantee sucess.

    One possible solution might be to subject a browser to a quick series of queries, the response to which would be known ahead of time for a particular browser...not ever having dabbled in javascript, I don't really know how something like this would work.

    Perhaps Mozilla's javascripting engine is a module or a plugin for which you could have a custom version used on your client's sites, but once again, not having delved into Mozilla code, I do not know how this works.
  • If you're using Linux or Unix, stick the following under /etc/X11/Xresources, or your personal X apps configuration directory.

    ...and when is Malda going to give us real <pre> tags....


    !##NETSCAPE
    Netscape*drawingArea.translations:#merge\
    <Btn1Down>:&nb sp;&nb sp;ArmLink()\n\
    <Btn2Down>:&nb sp;&nb sp;ArmLink()\n\
    ~Shift<Btn1Up>:&nbsp ;Activ ateLink()\n\
    ~Shift<Btn2Up>:&nbsp ;Activ ateLink(new-window)\
    &n bsp;&n bsp;DisarmLink()&n bsp;\n\
    Shift<Btn1Up>: ActivateLink(save-only)\
    &n bsp;&n bsp;DisarmLink()&n bsp;\n\
    Shift<Btn2Up>: ActivateLink(save-only)\
    &n bsp;&n bsp;DisarmLink()&n bsp;\n\
    <Btn1Motion>:& nbsp;& nbsp;DisarmLinkIfMoved()\n\
    <Btn2Motion>:& nbsp;& nbsp;DisarmLinkIfMoved()\n\
    <Btn3Motion>:& nbsp;& nbsp;DisarmLinkIfMoved()\n\
    <Motion>:&nbsp ;&nbsp ;DescribeLink()\n\
    <Btn3Down>:&nb sp;&nb sp;xfeDoPopup()\n\
    <Btn3Up>:&nbsp ;&nbsp ;ActivatePopup()\n\
    Ctrl<Btn4Down>:PageUp()\n\
    Ctrl<Btn5Down>:PageDown()\ n\
    Shift<Btn4Down>:LineUp()\n \
    Shift<Btn5Down>:LineDown() \n\
    None<Btn4Down>:LineU p()LineUp()LineUp()LineUp()LineUp()LineUp()\n\
    None<Btn5Down>:LineD own()LineDown()LineDown()LineDown()LineDown()LineD own()\n\
    Alt<Btn4Down>:xfeDoCommand (forward)\n\
    Alt<Btn5Down>:xfeDoCommand (back)\n
    Shift<Key>space:PageUp()\n\
    <Key>space:PageDown()\n\
    <Key>BackSpace:xfeDoComman d(back)\n\
    !<Key>Left:xfeDoCommand(back)\n\
    !<Key>Right:xfeDoCommand(forward )\n

    Netscape*globalNonTextTranslations:#merge\
    Shift<Btn4Down>:LineUp()\n\
    Shift<Btn5Down>:LineDown()\n\
    None<Btn4Down>:LineUp()LineUp()LineUp()LineUp()L ineUp()LineUp()\n\
    None<Btn5Down>:LineDown()LineDown()LineDown()Lin eDown()LineDown()LineDown( )\n\
    Alt<Btn4Down>:xfeDoCommand(forward)\n\
    Alt<Btn5Down>:xfeDoCommand(back)\n
    Shift<Key>space:PageUp()\n\
    <Key>space:PageDown()\n\
    !<Key>BackSpace:xfeDoCommand(back)\n\
    !<Key>Left:xfeDoCommand(back)\n\
    !<Key>Right:xfeDoCommand(forward )\n

    #Restricttherangeofsizeincrementsallowed&nbs p;by<fontsize=n>directivesto
    #therange80%-120%ratherthan50%-& nbsp;210%.Defaultincrementis20.
    #KMSelfWedDec2915:47:57PST1999
    Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement:05

    #Cleanupthefsckingtoolbar
    Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled:false
    Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled:false
    Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled:false
    Netscape*toolBar.viewSecurity.isEnabled:false
    Netscape*toolBar.print.isEnabled:true
    Netscape*toolBar.home.isEnabled:true

    #Andsomeotherbraindamage
    Netscape*useStdoutDialog:false
    Netscape*useStderrDialog:false
    Netscape*noAboutSplash:true

    #Fonts--dialogsandsuch
    Netscape*attachmentProps*XmLabelGadget.fontList: fixed
    Netscape*AddressBook*mainform.fontList: fixed
    Netscape*XmLGrid*fontList: fixed
    Netscape*attachItemLabel*fontList: fixed
    Netscape*prefs*fontList: fixed
    Netscape*statusBar*fontList: fixed

    #Documentfonts--scalingdoesn'tappearto takeeffectw/TTFfonts
    Netscape*documentFonts.defaultFont*iso-8859-1.pr op:-ttf-garamond-120-noscale&nbs p;&nbs p;&nbs p;&nbs p;&nbs p;&nbs p;
    Netscape*documentFonts.defaultFont*iso-8859-1.fi xed:-ttf-couriernew-90-nos cale

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • There are still some little things wrong with Mozilla that keep me from switching.

    First off, why the heck don't the arrow keys work to scroll up/down? When I'm looking at a story someplace, it's habit to just nonchalantly press the "down arrow" key a couple of times -- having to grab the mouse, mouse over to the sidebar and either click in the arrow or grab the scroll thingie is really annoying.

    Second, anything that's gonna be my primary browser *must* have the security stuff built in so I can order stuff online or check my stocks. I know there are side-projects that have the encryption, but they all seem to be at different places designwise.

    Mozilla's looking better, but it ain't ready for me yet and it definately isn't ready for Joe & Jane Consumer yet.

    ----

  • Mozillas best chance is probably outside the wintel market, in alternative OS'es and as part of non-PC devices. The new Mozilla structure (and its status as open source) makes it easy to create specialized subsets, and port them to all sorts of devices. This may in fact end up being a lot more than a niche.
  • Their online banking system rejects all browsers but, like Netscape 3.x and 4.x, and IE 3.x, 4.x and 5.0x.

    They say IE5.5 is in beta and won't be permitted on their site until it's publicly released. Which sucks, since the only way I can seem to uninstall IE 5.5 is by re-installing Windows. Grr. (God knows I've tried.) Good thing I have Netscape.

    The reason, I'm surmising, is precisely what the other author mentioned -- support. The site uses a lot of JavaScript (mainly for keeping things secure, timing out sessions, and routing people between pages), but a lot more browsers out there would work fine, so I really don't see what the big deal is. Maybe they're just too cheap to get a few copies of other browsers and try them out.

    Fortunately, Netscape under Linux works fine as well.
  • "Keep in mind, Mozilla does support Java. You can use Mozilla with any OJI-compliant VM. The benefits of this are clear:
    - If you don't need Java, don't download it.
    - If you already have Java, don't download it.
    [etc...]"

    That sounds remarkably like the Internet Explorer 5 installation. I think that's a good thing. You've basically described a componentised system unlike the current monolith of Netscape. The new architecture sounds promising and reasuring.

    "- You can use multiple JVMs for development, testing, etc. "

    That's fine if you're a software developer or a techie, but it's hardly an end-user feature. There must be a clear and simple standard as most end-user will quickly be turned off when they get message saying they can't access a web-site due to an incompatible JVM. Besides, in an *IDEAL* world, we wouldn't have to test with multiple JVMs because they wouldn't incomapatible (but how easy is it to reproduce all of Sun's bugs so that your JVM is compatible with their standard?)

    "I find Sun's treatment of Java (i.e., pretending to support it as a standard, and then pulling out when everyone has been suckered in) a lot more disappointing"

    I couldn't agree more. The excitement I felt when I discovered Java and it's possibilities has turned sour. Makes you wonder if the management team at Sun could score in a brothel, or organise a piss-up in a brewery.

    "Please allow me the free will to make my own decisions"

    That's fine and dandy, end-user's like choices. However, you're average end-user (you and I will be in a minority if Mozilla is successful) doesn't want to have to choose between 4 different JVM versions, or 3 different VRML versions. They just want to choose whether they have Java support, or VRML. IMHO, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is the best rule of thumb that can be applied to a software product. There needs to be a simple way for your average end-user to install the software where they can make a choice on the type of components they want. A more knowledgeable person such as yourself will still be able to achieve what they want too.

    From reading the responses, it sounds like there will be a Mozilla distribution from Netscape. It sounds like that will ship with a JVM, etc.: my concern satisfied.
  • If you have something to protect, a server can never trust a client, whatever the environment. IMHO, that's just sound software development practice.
  • Perhaps it should be a requirement that they all use 100% of the time. I'm sure that would help with the upfront bug smashing.
  • Your math is making a lot of assumptions :).

    For all you know, 100% of the engineers could be using it 100% of the time. The statement doesn't say that that isn't possible. Most likely you have, say, 60% of the engineers using it 70% of the time, and the other 40% are using it 30% of the time.

    That comes out to 58% engineer-browsing being down through Mozilla. Still not stellar. But it's impossible to determine from that sentence what the actual figure is. The absolute minimum is 25% (the number you quoted), and the absolute maximum is 100%. It's anybody's guess what the actual number is.
  • I've been using Mozilla as one of my primary browsers for several months now. The only real problem is that lots of sites don't work correctly with it, especially where Javascript is concerned. Sometimes is buggy code (sites that check for a 4.0 Netscape browser specifically) and sometimes it seems to be issues related to backwards compatibility with older versions of Netscape.

    Unfortunately I hate to say the Windows version is a LOT more stable than the Linux version. I'm hoping thats not the case in the future. I'd hate Mozilla / Communicator 5.0 to be as crash prone as every other version Netscape's ever released for Unix.

    At least now if Netscape can't get it right, at least someone else can fix it!
  • Mozilla is coming along. So far, so good. But when I download it, it still has more than 5 megs. It still pops up a DOS window and does not have a nice design.

    HELLO! Does the word "debug" mean anything to you? What about the word "alpha"? The reason mozilla opens a console window is because it is needed for debugging. The same goes for the 5MB download. A lot of it is debug code, and code for reporting the bugs, etc.

    When was the last time you checked how big IE is? IE5 is at least 50MB. Netscape 4.x is about 17MB. Please don't compare a finished product to something that is not even beta.

    This is exactly why I am against introducing the browser to anyone non-geek until it is finished. They will try it, hate it, and will think that it will always be like that. "Yeah, I tried it a long time ago, and it really sucked!"

    --

  • Just install Junkbuster - the version at http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/ works well on Windows, and it's available on Linux, etc.

    You can set the user-agent to whatever you want, just point IE5.5 at it.

    As a bonus it can also block cookies and adverts, but these are configurable features.
  • I'm a web developer (on the coding side), so I like the idea of a standards complient browser. And you're right, on average it's unlikely that the core components like the rendered and javascript engines will fragment.

    The problem is that when a client can't access your website because their web browser is broken, they tend to think that your site is the problem. After all, their browser was fine until it hit your site. Just because we know that a browser should never crash for any input, doesn't mean that the average Win 9x user understands this. Simply telling them "Sorry, your problem" is a good way to lose a customer. Hence why we test sites on multiple platforms and browsers... Tedious, but necessary until people start demanding browsers that are standards compliant as well as (or better yet instead of) full of cool and often buggy "features".

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If you must depend on Javascript for your presentation (which appears to be the primary reason for being concerned with User Agent strings) don't use agent strings. First, they can be forged, second your site does not have a comprehensive list of browsers and their capabilities. Test functionality (query the DOM for instance) and not the User Agent string.

    Additaionlly, whoever the dumbass was who decided that doing Javascript validation of user input (and yes I realize that new morons probably reinvent this scheme hourly) should be shot in the face in public. The idea that such validation is effective, or actually provides any measure of security or integrity is ludicrous.

  • Busness needs to start addressing it's own fears.

    True if a clueless user dosn't recognise the defect is in his browser he may blame you for problems he experences.. However your not going to prevent this loss by telling the user you don't support his favoret browser..
    Worse yet he MIGHT forgive you for a defect but not for the browser rejection....
    If a clueful user runs into your website he will recognise the defect in his browser and put the blame where it belongs... He will NOT be so understanding if you tell him he has to use something else.

    This isn't a unique problem.. many busness have illrational fears.. a single product (some times a Microsoft product but not allways) will have a defect and busness people fear it as if it were a wide spread problem.. Windows has GPFs so they fear Linux GPFs to spite the fact that none exist.

    there is no easy way to address those fears. Often addressing them will just make the problem worse validating the original fear of it being a wide spread problem.

    10 years form now some manager will be worrying about defects located only in MsIE6.2 when everyone is using NetZen 2.3 (NetZen was created long after MsIE develupment stopped.. yeah but the bug was fixed in 6.5 and NetZen is only in 2.3... But NetZen never HAD the bug.. Then why is it still 2.3 and not 6.5 if it dosn't have the bug)

    The problem only HALF exists.. thats what makes it such a pain... Yes a bad Mozila clone with broken JavaScript COULD report itself as the codifyed Netscape 5.0... Or a Mosaic client could report it's MsIE 5.0... You just have to trust the user didn't tamper with the client... Konqueror lets you change this information from within the browser itself (no hexedit, no recomile..)
    Any Client can report false information if a user wants it to.. Information is on the net on how to get MsIE and Netscape to clame to be something else.
    Anyway if a user IS using a browser other than MsIE or Netscape chances are they allready have some clue... even knowing something else exists is a major bonus...
    A manager who knows Netscape and IE arn't all there is and that some browsers have problems with JavaScript allready have a clue.. you can educate him from there..

    Anyway chances are a user not using MsIE is clueful enough to know when it's a browser defect... but if you reject a browser you WILL lose busness...
  • I'm looking forward to this -- from what I understand, Mozilla will be far snappier than Netscape is, particularly on older machines with limited RAM.

    The fact that proprietary technologies had to be stripped from Netscape before the product was Open Sourced is a _feature_, IMHO. Sure, Java is nice, but I wonder when/if I've ever used ``Full Circle Talkbalk Software'', ``INSO International Proofreader'', ``Visibroker'', etc. Not to mention the unused features such as the newsreader (I prefer tin), the mail-reader (pine), and the composer (vim).

    I've only got 64 Mb of RAM, and after using Netscape for a good 30 minutes or so, my entire system bogs down. It's either memory leaks in Netscape or leaks in E/GNOME. Judging from past experience with other windowing environments, it's likely Netscape doing the leaking. ;-)

    Looking forward for the beta release (middle of February, wasn't it?)

  • This is pre alpha. That means there is probably still a lot of debugging code in it. Debugging code slows things waaaay down. Don't doom it before it's done, you can't judge a product by it's pre alpha quality.
  • "But the *download* is about 50MB, and Microsoft doesn't provide a simple way to install a bare-bones browser."

    That's bullshit too. They provide a small executable (500K or so) that allows you to select what you want installed. After that it downloads what you need. You can also choose to download everything and install it later.
  • You are right as far as wintel machines are considered. It's unlikely that a newby user running windows 98 will want to go to the traumatic experience of installing new software that will basically provide them with the same functionality they already have.

    However there's a whole lot of other devices outthere that are also in need of browsers, Unix workstations are only a small part of that group. PDA's & mobile phones are going to be a big thing the coming years and it already looks like they won't be running CE&IE. So guess what browser those things will run. The fact that you can run essentially the same browser as on your desktop will be great for marketing these devices

    Then there's also the good old settop box that will run linux or a similar cheap OS and will also need a browser. Many ISP's are considering to provide these devices to their new customers.

    I think some people have estimated that the market for non wintel browsers will explode the coming few years and mozilla will have a huge headstart there.

    That's only the non wintel side. On the wintel side ISPs are going to fall in love the way they can customize the browser they ship to their customers. With mozilla they will be able to integrate their specific services into the browser. You can probably do this to some extent with IE but you don't get the source code with that.

    Some statistics, Dec 1999:
    Internet Explorer: 78 %
    Netscape: 18%

    There's lies, big lies and statistics. What makes me suspicious is that:
    A you don't provide a reference
    B you don't tell how these statistics were gathered
    C which versions these statistics apply too (ns 4.7 vs ie 5.0?)

    About your comments on W2K. I might someday use it but certainly not on this machine (only 64 Mb). I once used Linux on a 486 with 8 Mb (it ran X windows too!).

    I haven't heard about any features in W2K (except it's improved stability) that would make it worthwhile for me to upgrade to W2K (I only use the browser and some plugins, play quake, framemaker and Java). And since w98 is stable enough on my PC (at home) I don't really care to give it a try.
  • I mean, even on a celeron the interface is kindda sluggish don't you think? And although the page rendering is MUCH improved from nutscrape 4.x, it is also sluggish compared to the silky smooth IE5 rendering.

    Yeah, and a car without tires is going to be pretty slow, too.

    People, you have to realize something here: Mozilla IS NOT DONE YET.

    People keep saying Mozilla is "too big", or "too slow", or "too buggy" to be considered a production browser.

    You know what? You're right. And the Mozilla people agree with you. It isn't production code. Or perhaps you missed the twenty or so warnings about this being an UNFINISHED product when you went to download it?

    Any programmer will tell you that you finish the program first. Then you test it. Then you get rid of the bugs. Then you test it again. Then you get rid of more bugs. Then you test it again. Then you optimize it for speed, size, or whatever floats your boat. Then you test it some more. You keep doing that, until it becomes a finished product. Then you ship.

    Analying Mozilla in a development state, with tons of debug code, dead code, and unoptimized code all over the place, and who-knows-how-many pieces still lying around on the floor, is just plain wrong.

    I don't barge in on you and criticize you when your work is half done. Give the Mozilla folks the same chance, eh?

    End of rant.
  • To remove some toolbar buttons and add Find button, put this in your .Xdefaults and run "xrdb -merge .Xdefaults" (and restart Netscape):

    Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
    Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
    Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false

    Netscape*toolBar.numUserCommands: 1
    Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandName: findInObject
    Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.labelString: Find
    Netscape*toolBar.userCommand1.commandIcon: Find
  • I'm glad to see this is happening, it's been a long time, but Mozilla just keeps getting better and better. I've been using M11 as a replacment for Netscape (although all I use it for is to read offline GTK+ documents) and it's been brilliant.

    We've come a long way, baby.
  • Sorry to break the news, but glibc2.0 will be around for a long, long time.

    Tell me, how many years has Sun been trying to kill of SunOS 4.1.3? Doesn't Netscape still release binaries for it?

    The moral of this story is: Now that linux is no longer a FRINGE OS, the old versions of it WILL live on and WILL need to be supported. It's no longer acceptable to release code for software that is expected to be used by everyone and design it so that it won't work on anything but the latest distribution of Linux that was released last month!

    What we really need is for RedHat/Cygnus to update the GLIBC 2.0 code, fix the problems, release new RPMS, and get on with GLIBC2.2!

  • Mozilla will be the code upon which any number of "commercial" web browsers will be based. Netscape 5.0 will be the bigest, publicity-wise.

    While Mozilla-proper will not support Java (or SSL), it does have in place the ability to snap in any Java VM that hooks into its API. Netscape will release its version of Mozilla with a Java VM built by Sun. If, for whatever reason, you don't like that VM, you will be able to snap another one in. (see http://www.mozilla.org/oji/ and http://www.mozilla.org/oji/oji-intro.html).
  • But when I download it, it still has more than 5 megs.

    Last time I checked, IE 5 added aprox 120mb to whatever Win32 OS you decided to meld it into. Saying that Mozilla is bad because it's greater than 5mb is like saying you don't like this car getting 10mpg, when your current car takes 20gpm..

    It still pops up a DOS window and does not have a nice design.

    A CLI box is != a DOS window. There is no command.com, and there is no DOSVM. This is a debug window for developers.. "Pre-alpha" not have meaning in your personal lexicon?

    As soon as the GUI gets faster (and nicer) Mozilla will be an option.

    The GUI is slick right now, although there are annoying bugs of things not implemented. Most of the slowness is, again, due to debug code. "Pre-alpha" ...

    If they don't release a public BETA VERY SOON, with a SETUP and a NICE FAST GUI, most people will stick to IE. And all efforts made have been wastedt.

    People bitched about Nintendo not releasing their Super Nintendo at the same time as the Sega Genesis. I still bought and loved my Super Nintendo, as did millions of others. Why bitch about delaying, when it's clear from the pre-alpha version that the quality will be much greater than the current 5th gen browsers, in an open source form which allows greater flexibility?
    ---
  • glibc2.0 is the development branch of glibc. Running a development C library is probably worse than running a development kernel, as rather than a simple kernel problem causing issues, it's a library problem that will trash any dynamically linked executables that depend on a behaviour.

    This is why Slackware did not put glibc2 into it until the 2.1 (stable) branch was released, and a reason why I do not respect Red Hat's distro inclusion methods.

    Please, upgrade to a stable glibc branch.
    ---
  • Unlike with the Linux kernel, even numbers in the minor quad for the glibc indicates a developer, or unstable, branch. I would not sooner advocate an unstable libc on a distro intended for consumer consumption, than I would advocate using Win 3.1 for running a heart and lung machine.

    Please do not join in the usage of unstable code on consumer machines. This leads to bad impressions of Linux, as people are exposed to what should be developer-only problems.
    ---
  • I mean, even on a celeron the interface is kindda sluggish don't you think? And although the page rendering is MUCH improved from nutscrape 4.x, it is also sluggish compared to the silky smooth IE5 rendering.

    Now, I don't think anyone here is willing to state that the reason IE5 does silky smooth rendering is "cause microsoft integrated IE5 into the NT kernel, infact KERNEL32.DLL is going to be replaced with MSHTML.DLL" or that it's silky smooth cause "bill gates is casting voodoo magic or making deals with the devil".

    Come on netscape, make it faster :P

    If it's faster when it's released I'll eat my celery processor (mm crunchy), I'm betting it's not going to get much faster - perhaps less BLOATED memory wise tho.

    BTW, I thought xpCOM was supposed to be a light version of COM :P
  • A site that `filters out browsers' is being unnecessarily aggressive against their own customers. It is difficult to stay in business when constantly telling your customer to shove it.

    Perhaps you should try writing your web pages more conservatively? The best pages don't use java or javascript much anyways. That is, if one doesn't consider `the carnival experience' as a critera for being a good web page.
  • With the advent of Mozilla and its inevitable widespread usage, fears of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of different "flavours" of Mozilla, with unknown problems (potentially) with JavaScript or perhaps other features that could cause support nightmares abound.

    Very true. I've had the dubious pleasure of working with Javascript recently, and writing cross-browser (NS and IE), cross-platform (NS on different platforms) Javascript is a nightmare. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that every implementation of Javascript has its own idiosyncrasies/bugs that make it necessary to test the JS on every platform you can get your hands on just to be sure that everything works, and then work around problems that arise if necessary.

    With the open-sourcing of Mozilla, the problem has the potential to become exponentially worse if different companies/organizations release slightly different variants of Mozilla that break in slightly different ways.
  • You're going to have to tell us which milestone it was, since there haven't been any alphas or betas yet :-)

    Personally, I really like the new chrome (think skin) in this M12-M13 CVS build (that I'm using to post this). And I'm sure that there will be others as soon as someone decides to do them (A good knowledge of CSS and the DOM would be required, but I'm pretty sure the whole thing is driven through HTML Style Sheets). The only thing that's annoying me right now is that the keyboard response is *really* slow - but that has a bug # and is release critical for M13. It looks small, somebody messed up the event priority (?I could be mis-reading, don't know that section of the lizard).

  • I had already seen this on Mozilla.org's Newsbot [mozilla.org]. The information was posted on netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey. You can read it on deja here [deja.com].

  • I really hope page rendering gets improved in mozilla/netscape.

    Being a webpage designer, the current version of netscape is a total nightmare to code for. It's pixel positioning is buggy to say the least, it's page rendering is still too slow, and it often crashes (especially in linux)

    I only use it to make sure that my webpages display correctly for netscape users in windows and linux, and to browse HOWTO files

    What I really hope mozilla turns into, is a functional 'non-bloatware' browser which renders flawlessley, is stable, fully supports CSS, DHTML, XML, PNG and runs faster than IE.

  • In case you haven't noticed, Mozilla isn't really trying to win the "war", at least that's what my take on this whole issue is. From what I understand, the Mozilla project is aiming to create a browswer that is stable, fast, supports standards, and modular. Since Mozilla will/already have/has support for skins, it has the option of appearing like any other browser or something completely new. Personally, I really don't care whether IE or Opera or Konquerer or Mozilla or even Lynx wins the "war", I just want to use a browswer that is fast and stable and customizable. So far Mozilla isn't quite there yet, but it will be.
  • Mozilla is coming along. So far, so good. But when I download it, it still has more than 5 megs. It still pops up a DOS window and does not have a nice design. As soon as the GUI gets faster (and nicer) Mozilla will be an option. As long as that isn't given, I'll use Opera or IE. The real problem for the entire project might be Mozilla coming too late. If they don't release a public BETA VERY SOON, with a SETUP and a NICE FAST GUI, most people will stick to IE. And all efforts made have been wastedt.
  • yeah, yeah, this has been out since the 13th on Mozilla's news server but slightly off-topic, who else noticed the "MONDAY, JANUARY 10th, 192000" at the top of that page? ;)
  • I've been using Mozilla all the time lately. I downloaded the M12 release [mozilla.org] and started using that. I became so impressed that I now use the nightly builds [mozilla.org]. The more people using and testing the better. If you're running on of the less peopular platforms certainly consider running mozilla as there's less people to report bugs for your platform. If you're running on a platform where mozilla doesn't run consider helping get the program to run on your platform often this won't involve too much effort as a lot of the code is cross platform. Help whatever way you can and we'll be rewarded with an excellent browser.
    --

  • Skins vs. native widgets (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:39AM (#1367945)
    I have looked at the latest build of Mozilla for the Macintosh, and I am very surprised that they are completely abandoning the MacOS Appearance Manager. Macintosh users are especially picky about having applications that are consistent in their look and feel, and the current Mozilla is about the worst offender I've ever seen.

    I don't think that Mozilla stands a chance to penetrate the installed base of IE 5 on Windows, and I predict that the users of the 2nd largest "alternative platform" - users of MacOS - will eschew Mozilla/Netscape 5 unless they pay some attention to the user interface standards of the platform.

  • Re:Design of Mozilla must address fears of busines (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16, 2000 @06:54AM (#1367946)
    You've already mentioned the reasons that E-Commerce sites technically cannot and financially cannot afford to try and 'filter' out user-agents. As you note user-agent strings are not guranteed and can be faked, Opera on Win32 does this already for example. Really you are looking at this the wrong way, the only reason the 'javascript' and similair problems exist is because the standards were ignored or not properly implemented: so it's in e-commerce sites interests to push for standards to be fully complied with. Luckily Mozilla/SeaMonkey is the most compliant browser in existance. Technically the core bits of Mozilla such as the renderer and javascript engines are unlikey to change between different people building/developing it, these are really deep core bits: no doubt people will alter the front-end but this wouldn't effect your E-Commerce sites. Finally, the worry you cite should be spurious because a site shouldn't be dealing with client problems as long as it is standards compliant: if you can say 'my site complies with W3C standards blah, blah' then it's the client browsers problem to become compliant. So Mozilla could offfer you a way out of having to test your site against 5 different browsers/versions, it's an opportunity not a threat!

  • Re:Design of Mozilla must address fears of busines (Score:3)

    by mikpos ( 2397 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @09:30AM (#1367947) Homepage

    Simply telling them "Sorry, your problem" to lose a customer.

    You will lose

    a lot
    more customers by simply telling them "Sorry, it is impossible for you to use our service". Being up front about the problems is the best solution, but it's almost never necessary. Face it: if you're doing something useful with Java or Javascript for anything, you're an idiot. Would you expect your accountant to say to you "I'll tell you what calculations to do, but you have to do them all. If you make a mistake, it's your own fault"? Probably (hopefully), you'd expect your accountant to actually do the calculations and check them over.

  • You can choose from phantom fears... (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @10:56AM (#1367948) Homepage Journal
    ... or kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear; I will choose free will!"
    (With apologies to Niel Peart)

    One major concern of several of these institutions going forward is the issue of browser compatibility.

    And well it should be. I hope said institutions work strongly towards favoring standards compliant software, and only produce standards compliant content.

    These institutions are VERY concerned about being able to continue filtering out browsers (primarily older browsers or those with known JavaScript problems) from their sites to keep support costs down.

    Well, so much for the theory that standards compliance was the issue. :) The above shows that the institutions in question are less concerned with browser compatibility and are more concerned with cutting costs.

    Filtering on USER_AGENT strings to find JavaScript problems is like filtering on the brand of your car to find emissions problems! "She's got a Toyota, I'm sure she is okay. Oh-oh, a Dodge, fail that one!"

    You need to tell these instituions that they are going about things all wrong. Browsers are supposed to be a commodity item, despite what Microsoft is striving for. You should be able to switch browsers at will, and assuming the browser implements everything correctly, have no problems. And if the browser doesn't work correctly, you switch to one that does. That is why keeping the browser market a commodity market is so important.

    The fact of the matter is, you can modify your USER_AGENT string right now! You can hack the binary and do a direct replacement, or you can use any of a number of proxy servers which can change the USER_AGENT string to report anything you want. Depending on USER_AGENT is an extremely bone-headed maneuver. USER_AGENT is designed for human consumption only. Don't use it to make content decisions.

    With the advent of Mozilla and its inevitable widespread usage, fears of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of different "flavours" of Mozilla, with unknown problems (potentially) with JavaScript or perhaps other features that could cause support nightmares abound.

    So say right up front, "We will not offer technical support, except for these browsers: X, Y, Z." That is to be expected. It is impossible for any company to test every possible program out there, and find which ones work and which ones do not. So if you've got a glitch, you have to make sure it isn't your software first. You do that by using a configuration the vendor has tested.

    But trying to restrict access to a site based on the brand of browser is ludicris! Give us the free will to make our own choices, thank you very much. Don't let phantom fears about browser compatibility worry you.

    (Sorry if I seem a bit miffed, but I am. As Tim Berners-Lee said so well, people who build pages built to work only on one kind of browser are hankering for the bad old days of computing, where a document produced by one system could not be read on another. We don't want to go there! We don't even want to get close. Stop the slide now, before you get deeper.)

  • Re:The GUI (Score:3)

    by Foogle ( 35117 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:08AM (#1367949) Homepage
    Y'know, you can compile it using any number of toolkits for the GUI. It still has Motif (Lesstif) support and you can even choose the frontend that Troll built for it in Qt.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Re:Only 50% of Netscape Engineers use it? (Score:3)

    by DanaL ( 66515 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @06:37AM (#1367950)
    Keep in mind that Mozilla is still (officially, anyway), pre-alpha, which usually means almost-working.

    It may be worse publicity to unleash an un-finished product on your co-workers and have them seem it crash all the time. (The last I heard, M12 was still crashing every hour or so, but then again, that's how often Communicator 4.6 seems to crash for me :) )

    Dana

  • Re:About time... (Score:3)

    by Relforn ( 105625 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:22AM (#1367951)
    There is a problem in general with how some people refer to "Open Source" software.

    Products which are GPL'd from the point of inception are "Open Source" in the truest sense, in that they start out as open projects with many contributors.

    As Navigator demonstrates, when you use the new verb-phrase "Open the source" you encounter unique problems turning the project from a closed-team project to an open project.

    I am certainly not an expert in these matters, but it seems that moving from a hierarchacal software development model radically changes how a project progresses. There are unique challanges that broad "Open Source" development encounters. In particular, when there isn't a widely known "reference design" out there for people to model their coding efforts on, as has been the case with Linux (it doesn't need an architect because people can just look at Unix in general for design guidelines), projects can run into trouble keeping a focus.

    As a result, for example, human factors issues are weakly addressed in Linux and it's native GUI projects. The overall conciseness of a design suffers when wandering coders can, well.. just wander through the code extending it.

    Hopefully people will use what I've just typed as an opportunity to extend the dialogue and not just flame the ideas I've put out for discussion.

  • Design of Mozilla must address fears of business. (Score:4)

    by dougman ( 908 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @06:34AM (#1367952)
    What exactly am I getting at? Well, since we're on the topic of Mozilla design...

    In my day job, I work for a company that helps to implement web sites for large banks and credit unions. One major concern of several of these institutions going forward is the issue of browser compatibility.

    These institutions are VERY concerned about being able to continue filtering out browsers (primarily older browsers or those with known JavaScript problems) from their sites to keep support costs down.

    With the advent of Mozilla and its inevitable widespread usage, fears of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of different "flavours" of Mozilla, with unknown problems (potentially) with JavaScript or perhaps other features that could cause support nightmares abound.

    Please, correct me if I haven't seen it yet, or I'm just plain ignorant to something, but what mechanism/process would an e-commerce site have to ensure that all those "Mozilla 5.0" User Agent strings are "clean" versions of Mozilla? Do you exclude these people from e-commerce sites for support reasons? Only allow people with "Netscape 5.0" User Agents? What if the popular "home brew" Mozilla distros decide to fake their user agent strings?

    Just a thought or three. Any ideas?

  • What about Java support... (Score:4)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @09:02AM (#1367953)
    From what I can see from the Mozilla FAQ (http://www.mozilla.org/docs/mozilla-faq.html) [mozilla.org], Mozilla will not contain Java as it is proprietary to Sun.

    I find this rather disappointing. I understand the sentiments, but I don't think that a browser is fully functional without a JVM. The browser needs to be distributed with a JVM, or it's not good from a Java perspective.

    I don't know why we're still stuck with Java 1.1 in browsers. Having Swing 1.1 on a local VM would be great (those JAR files are far too big to make using it in an Internet environment inpractical). Obviously Internet Explorer will not lead the way with a newer version of Java: Microsoft, with their attitude towards Java, will only update their VM when they have to compete with other major browsers. If Mozilla doesn't normally ship with a JVM, it will not be a major competitor to IE on the Java front.

  • Mozilla still does not compare to either 4.7 or IE (Score:4)

    by Carey ( 2195 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:42AM (#1367954)
    There are still a number of items that would prevent me from using Mozilla on a regular basis.

    IMAP Mail: there are still numerous bugs with the mail/news component. I use a Cyrus IMAP server and support for it has only been added in recent days. Since this is my primary e-mail client, it must be stable.

    SSL: I use S/IMAP and S/MIME, and connect to several secure sites. I can't use Mozilla for any of this due to the encryption export restrictions. I will have to wait for Netscape 5.0 - I hope??

    Java: the Java implementation is not complete and only available on a couple of platforms. Netscape 5.0 again?

    Roaming Access: I also use HTTP-based roaming access to retrieve my preferences at work and at home. This is a feature I do not want to give up.

    Some of these features are not available in IE and I admit that I am a power user, but I don't see how I can use Mozilla given these requirements.

    I hope the 5.0 release will give me the missing features, otherwise I will have to remain with 4.x until they are available.

  • Status updates (Score:4)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @05:43AM (#1367955)
    A good way to keep up to date with the current status of the Mozilla project is to check the status page [mozilla.org] every week and also checking MozillaZine [mozillazine.org] every few days. There's a lot of info about how the project is progressing and how far away they're from beta, etc.

    Mozilla is certainly usable at the moment. I'm using it to post this message and for 90% of my browsing under Linux.

    As more people start using Mozilla [mozilla.org] it increases the chances of finding obscure bugs [mozilla.org] and therefore reaching stability sooner.

  • Re:Design of Mozilla must address fears of busines (Score:4)

    by pen ( 7191 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:35AM (#1367956)
    What really annoys me is when sites think that it is their responsibility to protect me from viewing their site in a browser which they don't think is appropriate. If you really think that your site is going to suck so much in my browser, you could issue a warning. But don't ban me from the site because your page's margins will look 2 pixels off!

    Lately, this has been a growing trend, even with large sites. I can understand sites not supporting Netscape 2.x, but I have seen many sites that refuse to work with Opera 3.61, which supports just about everything one needs (including HTML 3.2, Java, Flash, and anything else that is available as a Netscape plugin.)

    If the page looks like crap in my browser, it is up to me to decide not to view it! Don't protect me from myself, please!

    --

  • This IS part of the official Mozilla status report. Nice to see it get some widespread publicity though.

    http://www.mozilla.org/status [mozilla.org]

  • the annoying things that Netscape does... (Score:5)

    by MoNsTeR ( 4403 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @08:40AM (#1367958)
    (slightly OT)

    I'm really looking forward to a full release of Mozilla since it'll finally mean a stable graphical browser for Linux (right?). But, having used Netscape browsers for so long, there's a few bugs/features that I'm worried will still be around to bother me. So I'd like to list my irks with Netscape and anyone who has used the most recent milestones can tell me (and all of us) if Mozilla still does them. The reason I don't just try it myself is that it requires glibc2.1 which I don't have and can't upgrade to. (please don't reply just telling me to upgrade / use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc, I've heard it before) Thank you.

    1. Blocking DNS lookups. Why is it that UNIX Netscapes have always shut down every single browser window while it's doing a name lookup? I mean, WTF?!?!?!

    2. Deleting incomplete downloads. With Netscape it's always been that if you're downloading, say, a 50MB game demo and your ISP kicks you off when you have about 49MB, you're just %$#@ed, cuz it deletes the partial file. I imagine this is to "protect" clueless users from their own stupidity, but it'd be nice if there was at least a toggle for it, or even better, a continue option.

    3. Cursor keys in the location bar. The guys at Netscape probably think this is a feature instead of a bug. I click in the location bar, put in a URL, hit Enter. The page loads. I've read the first screenful and want to scroll down, so I hit the down arrow or PgDn. Buuuuuut, my cursor is still in the location bar so instead of scrolling, I go whizzing back to some seemingly random site from my location history. AAAAAAAARGH!!! %$#@!!!
    I'd settle for being able to toggle the drop-down feature of the location bar.

    4. The "Personal Toolbar Folder". Ugh, this is just lame. Why can't I just remove it from my bookmarks and be done with it? Why does Netscape feel such an urgent need to burden my bookmark list with a folder full of crap I won't use?

    5. Copious number of toolbar buttons. With auto load images off, 4.7 has 11 toolbar buttons. And since Stop is way off to the right, I have to either browse with a really wide window or do show toolbar buttons as pictures only. It would be SOOOOO nice to be able to choose which of these buttons I really need. (and to have back the Find button, that was far more useful than Shop or My Netscape)

    6. Resizing causes the page to reload. I don't know why, but on some sites, if you resize the browser window, Netscape feels the need to reload the whole thing. This is another WTF?!?!?! kind of thing.

    MoNsTeR
  • Mozilla Frequently Answered Complaints

    C: Mozilla is not as good as my favorite production browser.

    A: Mozilla is pre-alpha software. It is not supposed to be as good as your favorite production browser. It is supposed to be as good as your favorite production browser back when it was pre-alpha, so please do post comparisons if you used pre-alpha versions of IE, Navigator, or Opera.

    C: Mozilla is too slow.

    A: Mozilla is pre-alpha software. It is supposed to be slow at this stage of its development per the industry-standard practices of building features first and optimizing them later, including debugging code in software being debugged, etc. You might better phrase this complaint as "Mozilla is being built using software engineering best practices rather than according to my personal list of priorities."

    C: I hate X about Netscape Navigator.

    A: Mozilla is a completely different code-base and is conceptually very different than Netscape Navigator. Many of the problems with Navigator do not exist in Mozilla (f.e. too many extraneous toolbar buttons). Mozilla is also an open-source project, which means anyone (the AOL/Netscape company, Microsoft, Richard Stallman, you) can download the source and build their own browser.

    C: Mozilla is too ugly.

    A: Mozilla's interface is completely skinnable (down to the existence, placement, and content of toolbars, menus, buttons, dialog boxes, etc.) so you are free to make it look however you want. Besides the default skin a number of people are spending their valuable time creating alternate skins so you actually won't have to lift a finger to have a pretty Mozilla as long as you like one of the alternate skins. Otherwise, sorry, you will have to lift a finger.

    C: Mozilla does not/will not contain Java.

    A: Mozilla already supports Java on some platforms and will sport complete support for the latest versions of Java in its production release.

    C: Mozilla pops up a DOS window on me.

    A: Mozilla binary builds are created by the project team so everyone who wants to can help test and debug the software. The DOS window is an important part of this process. Notices are posted on the web site and the ftp server that Mozilla does not have any anything of interest to a non-developer available for download. You are a developer interested in helping to debug the software right?

    C: Mozilla doesn't/won't have SSL, encryption, etc.

    A: Mozilla can't add this stuff into the open-source browser because of US export control laws, but Netscape is going to add it into the Netscape-branded version of Mozilla they release. Third parties outside the US may also add encryption to the Mozilla source code base to produce a browser with strong encryption capabilities available around the world (more than can be said for Navigator or IE).

    C: Mozilla on the Mac does not look like a Mac application.

    A: W3C standards require all HTML to be styleable, including GUI widgets. This cannot be done with native widgets on the Mac, hence Mozilla must use its own styleable widgets for all GUI components in web pages. Mozilla has also chosen to use the same widget set to construct its user interface. Besides extensive skinnability, Mozilla recently added a technology called XBL to improve the native look and feel of the application.

    C: I don't want to lift a finger to use Mozilla. I just want a fast, bug-free, pretty, featureful browser.

    A: Wait until the production release.

    C: I haven't downloaded any [recent] version of Mozilla, nor have I bothered to visit the web page recently, but Mozilla still sucks.

    A: ?

    Mozillans: Reply with corrections/additions and I'll add them to the next version I post next time a Mozilla article comes out on Slashdot.

  • From what I can see... Mozilla will not contain Java as it is proprietary to Sun.

    Mozilla will not include Sun's JVM in the main distribution, because Sun won't let them. Sun's JVM license is too restrictive, and Sun seems to be doing everything in their power to make sure the rest of Java is as equally well controlled by them.

    Keep in mind, Mozilla does support Java. You can use Mozilla with any OJI-compliant VM. The benefits of this are clear:
    - If you don't need Java, don't download it.
    - If you already have Java, don't download it.
    - If you do need it but don't have it, download it along with the Mozilla package. You don't waste any download time, as you'd have to download it anyway if they bundled it.
    - If Mozilla is updated, you don't need to re-download the JVM.
    - If the JVM is updated, you don't need to re-download Mozilla.
    - You can use multiple JVMs for development, testing, etc.
    - The JVM becomes a commodity product, able to be replaced at will. That is a Good Thing.

    I find this rather disappointing.

    I find Sun's treatment of Java (i.e., pretending to support it as a standard, and then pulling out when everyone has been suckered in) a lot more disappointing.

    I understand the sentiments, but I don't think that a browser is fully functional without a JVM The browser needs to be distributed with a JVM, or it's not good from a Java perspective.

    The browser needs to be distributed with Shockwave Flash, or it's not good from a Flash perspective.

    The browser needs to be distributed with a VRML viewer, or it's not good from a VRML perspective.

    The browser needs to be distributed with Windows, or it's not good from a Microsoft perspective.

    As far as I am concerned, that argument is highly bogus. Please allow me the free will to make my own decisions, thank you very much. :)

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