Mozilla Development Roadmap Updated 356
yota writes: "The guys at mozilla.org just published an updated development roadmap with some interesting thoughts about what will happen after Mozilla 1.0 will be released. Enjoy!" This is worth reading even if you skim toward the bottom and jump to the Intertwingle link. The Mozilla project isn't slapped together -- this kind of forethought and explanation is proof.
Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:4, Informative)
I use Mozilla as my primary browser (Nightly builds), and I find that it has gotten much better than it used to be. Bug reports hit Bugzilla [mozilla.org], and are usually updated and/or assigned the same day. Their system is really great.
Sure, the browser has a few annoying things. Text boxes STILL don't behave properly, opening a new window in any shape or form (Ctrl+N, or a javascript function) takes *forever*, and other little things. Overall though, Mozilla is a pretty decent browser. Gecko is a great rendering engine, and tabbed browsing is just totally fucking fantastic.
Once the speed issues are addressed and the behaivior kinks are worked out, that's when 1.0 should hit.
Unfortunately, I find that I do miss the incredible speed of IE 5x. Say what you will about IE security, but it's still the best browser out there. Fortunately, I can happily make that trade-off as a Linux desktop user.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2, Informative)
As far as 'best browser' goes, a Free Software advocate has to be incredibly hypocritical to recommend the use of IE. Mozilla works wonderfully for me, and I don't have to play the standard slashdot hypocrite, "believing" in one position, yet supporting another.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:5, Insightful)
The automatic leap from the fact that someone uses free software to the idea that they hold some cherished belief in The Cause and spend their every waking moment promoting Free Software to others is a pretty big one to make.
You wouldn't call someone a hypocritical compact car advocate if they drove a Geo but said the Suburban has more head room, would you?
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:4, Insightful)
And IE is a good webbrowser; that is fairly clear. Some slashdot people like to use the best, instead of being coerced into this insanity that for some reason is expected of them
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Try using ctrl-t, to open a new tab. It's a lot faster than ctrl-n, and tabbed browsing is one of the nicest extras in the new mozilla builds anyway.
Just out of curiousity, is there any way to make the centre-button-click open the linked document in a new tab, instead of a new window?
For me, tabbed browsing and centre-click to open in new window are two huge UI features in Mozilla (especially compared to IE)...it would be so nice to be able to use them together.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:3, Informative)
Ctrl+pgup, Ctrl+pgdn.
I would have expected Ctrl-Tab to do it, but it doesn't work...
Ctrl+tab has traditionally been used for "switch between frames and the url bar" by web browsers and "switch tabs" by tabbed dialogs. See bug 114974 [mozilla.org] and the linked bugs for some heated controversy on the subject of what Ctrl+tab should do in the tabbed browser.
I'm a member of the "that's what windows are for" camp. That is, I think the tabbed-browser feature is an unnecessary duplication of what window managers do, a waste of screen space, and a waste of keyboard shortcuts. Thus, I sided with keeping Ctrl+tab for switching frames. I could see a compromise [mozilla.org] in which Ctrl+tab does both, since then it would have its old behavior in the case where you only have one tab open.
What I don't want to see is for this to be turned into an argument for full keyboard configurability. I like being able to sit down at my friend's computer without having to worry about them having completely different keybindings than I do, and I don't want that to change.
Incredible speed? (Score:2)
Thats only because the browser is part of the OS itself.
Next you will be saying how fast Konq is on KDE.
Loading speed doesnt really matter as people get more ram and faster harddrives, what will matter most will be security, stability, and rendering speed. All which Mozilla have.
Mozilla truely is a next generation browser, most peoples computers arent fast enough to handle it, however if you have over 300mhz and over 128 megs of ram your computer will be just fine.
Since my browser is always open i dont care how fast the program is, but if i did theres galeon
Re:Incredible speed? (Score:2)
I second that. On this Athlon 1.4 GHz box Mozilla is as fast as I want it to be, and even if it were faster I would not need that extra speed anyways.
It is like an expensive purchase: you pay money once (and soon forget about that), but the thing that you bought stays around and serves you all the time.
Opera is a fast browser (Score:2)
Opera's primary problem is it's lack of a complete DOM for the scripting engine. Any page that wants to do anything interesting through the DOM is best off in Mozilla or IE6.
If you're going to take a look at Opera take a stroll through the preferences. The defaults were a bit strange for me, once I adjusted things I felt much more at home with it.
Re:Mouse Gestures rock (Score:2, Interesting)
Here we go:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/index.html
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:3, Informative)
I'm using Galeon (1.0.3) and it takes ~3.5 seconds from when I hit CTRL+N to when the new window is up and my home page is fully loaded.
It takes ~3.0 seconds to open a new tab. Galeon is great... the robustness of Gecko, with a nice lightweight, responsive front-end.
-Erik
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Galeon? Pah! Dillo [sourceforge.net] is the only capable Unix/X browser that could be called 'fast'. You'll need to do some source patching if you want cookies support though (essential for Slashdot).
I'm using Dillo on a P150 right now and opening a new window is imperceptibly fast. That is, there's no perceivable delay between pressing Ctrl-N and the new window popping up. Page up, page down, back and forward are almost as quick. Netscape 4.x looks a real pig in comparison, and as for Mozilla...
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Some people have mentioned tabbed browsing being faster for adding new pages. This is true but you have to get used to tabbed browsing (it drives me berserk).
Of all the things I have heard about IE I personally have had bad experiences with it. I have had to turn off all of the scripting because if I don't then at boot up my windows partition starts asking if I want to continue to run some IE script. Even if I say no it still runs it. I haven't been able to figure out where the hell this damn thing has been residing. There are a couple other things about the way it acts that bother me like the multisecond delay after a right mouse click. Frankly Netscape 6.2 with the preloading is only half a second slower to load up then IE and renders just as fast and I haven't had it crash on me yet.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:5, Informative)
If you like the way that Mozilla works but find that it's too slow, you might want to try one of the browsers that's based on the Gecko rendering engine but does away with the rest of Mozilla's overhead. I use Galeon [sourceforge.net] as my primary browser (which is admittedly easier since I use GNOME as my desktop) and it is great. It pops up windows very quickly, for instance, and its tabbed browsing is actually more mature than Mozilla's. I find that it gives me the parts of Mozilla that I like the most without the weight slowing it down.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
> incredible speed of IE 5x. Say what you will
> about IE security, but it's still the best
> browser out there.
Microsoft seem determined to keep CSS support held back as much as possible, and when they do add new things, they break it in ways that totally destroy the core ideas of CSS as being forward compatible and gracefully degrading.
IE5's CSS box model is broken, meaning any layouts you do using CSS (which has been a W3C rec for about half a decade now) come out too big in IE5. The workarounds include hacks that exploit parser bugs (embed a } in a string somewhere) that also trip up other browsers that get the box model right (like Opera 5), meaning you need to double up your IE5 hackaround with an Opera 5 workaround to restore the original behaviour.
IE6 still lacks support for anything but the most utterly basic CSS2, and claims to support things like position: fixed when it really doesn't (http://www.w3.org/Style/ is a good example of this; if a browser can't fix the menu to the viewport, it should just fix it in the document, but because IE6 thinks it supports that when it really doesn't, it screws it up and positions it as if it doesn't know any CSS positioning. Argh.)
Fast, it may be, but the UI is horrendously basic (the links bar behaves like it's been written as an afterthought to add various sponsored links to your browser, not as a useful navigational aid, the browser still likes to go busy and lock you out in various operations, blegh), the standards support ranges for reasonable to pathetic and, yes, it has a string of security issues that seem to just keep coming.
For general use, I find Opera is great; the abiliy to turn off style makes it a good browser to deal with badly written sites (blue on black text doesn't always appear on sites you're not interested in reading), the UI is nice and self contained (I love MDI, but you can turn it off and revert back to Mozilla-style tabs-there-only-if-you-explictly-open-them if you want), the CSS support, while not being a patch on Mozilla's, is a great reference implimentation for what you can reasonably expect to seriously use, and the speed is very acceptable.
Mozilla is, unfortunately, held back by trying to be an application platform, with it's slow-ass XUL GUI setup that pushes load times past 10 seconds, even on a 1.2GHz Athlon. Still, with solid HTML, CSS and JS support, and great cross platform compatibility it's an excellent browser, even if it does make you want to punch some of the designers sometimes.
I even use a Mozilla Modern look skin in Opera
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
No, meaning when IE see's "position: fixed;", it should ignore it.
w3.org/Style/ uses "position: absolute;position: fixed;"; when a client that supports absolute positioning, but not fixed, it should accept the first then ignore the second, not accept both and then drop down to default positioning, which is what IE6 does.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Compare:
test
With:
test
With:
test
In all cases, IE6 should see it can't handle the second position attribute and ignore it, as defined at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#forward-compatible-
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Erm, yes, because IE supports relative positioning. Try it with FIXED positioning.
Compare:
test
With:
test
With:
test
In all cases, IE6 should see it can't handle the second position attribute and ignore it, as defined at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#forward-compatible-
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
<div style="top: 100px; left: 100px; position: absolute; position: fixed;">test</div>
<div style="top: 100px; left: 100px; position: absolute;">test</div>
<div style="top: 100px; left: 100px; position: absolute; position: blablabla;">test</div>
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
IE is the fastest browser out there. Speed plays a huge part in any computing experience, and if you're slow, you're overlooked. Unfortunately, IE is fast because it's a tidy little COM object that's intertwined so closely with Windows. (IE on Mac or Solaris isn't nearly as fast as IE for Windows, and that's why.)
So yes, Security is a big factor (bigger for someone like me who works in the security field), but IE security isn't as horrible as say, Outlook security. I know that's not saying much, as Outlook is a mail client and IE is a web browser, but IE does the job and does it well.
I can't say I've used IE6, though. I liked 5.01 just fine.
Just think what would happen if IE came out for Linux. Mozilla/Netscape would be killed. (Maybe that's what Microsoft is waiting for?)
Re: MSIE as the `best browser' (Score:2, Insightful)
On platforms where I have a choice, I avoid MSIE, because it's both amazingly insecure (not just `insecure', but incredibly so. Glaring, stupid bugs coming out at an amazingly high sustained rate. If only MS would spend 10% of the time/money they've invested in claiming in court that MSIE is absolutely essential to their business actually treating it as such...) and also because it's *Annoying*. In those rare situations where I'm forced into using MSIE it generally takes me less than a minute to run across a maddening barrage of flashing, blinking, obscuring ads covering the screen, floating around the background, or whatnot.
If you want speed, try Opera or Omniweb. If you want a good browser with source access, mozilla and konqueror are both good bets. MSIE's advantage is, was, and always will be that it's already built in to your OS.
IE isnt the fastest browser, (Score:2)
Its just the fastest browser for Windows.
Try running IE via Wine and comparing it to Mozilla, Then you'll have an equally fair comparison because neither Mozilla or IE would be native apps.
IE loses all of the sudden.
See Mozilla is slow because XUL is slow, however theres programs like Galeon for Linux and Kmeleon for Windows which use the native Windows Libraries and Classes just likee IE, making Mozilla just as fast as IE.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Has anybody ever backed up that statement with facts?
Where the the profiling of Mozilla which proves that, in the areas it is slow, performance increases could only be gained by using features that only microsoft knows?
Having a thorough understanding of where and why Mozilla is slow may give you
a) insight in how to improve the performance
and/or b) ammunition against microsoft were it proved that IE is indeed pulling tricks that other software writers can't pull.
The more I hear " IE is better because MS are cheating" without proof, the more respect I lose for Mozilla.
Secondly - moving on from the conspiracy theories - MS's browser is implemented as a 'tidy little object'; perhaps, just perhaps, small, efficiently written code runs quickly ???
Yes its fact (Score:2)
ITs a proven fact.
Remember before IE was connected with Windows in 98 how slow and buggy it was? No one used IE3.0. IE 3.0 was absolute crap.
IE4.0 however was where things started changing, they tied it into Windows98, in 5.0 they tied it into WindowsME, Windows2k etc, now IE 6.0 or 7.0 is tied into the new OS's.
Run IE on Windows95 and see for yourself. Its as slow as Mozilla
IE only got fast after it became a part of the OS.
Re:Yes its fact (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're confusing the issues here, the browser integration stunt that MS pulled to try to avoid anti-trust legislation and the fact that they wrote a better browser with IE 4.
Mozilla should be merged into linux kernel (Score:2)
IE is fast partly because of conformance tradeoffs (Score:2, Informative)
The more I hear " IE is better because MS are cheating" without proof
What IE gains in performance, it loses slightly in conformance. IE bends the rules of HTML by not always properly initializing every iframe page's DOM [mozilla.org]. Speed-conformance tradeoffs that the user can't set are nothing new in the world of proprietary software; see also the Quack 3 [slashdot.org] incident.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2)
Here's what I've found:
* If I use IE continuously for 30 minutes (opening and closing windows often), and then launch Mozilla, Mozilla takes a while to launch.
* If I use Mozilla continuously for 30 minutes (with quick launch enabled), and then launch IE, IE takes even longer to launch.
* Both browsers start slowly right after I boot Windows 98.
* The browsers seem to be comparable in new-window speed, with IE making more hard disk noise. It's hard to compare the speeds precisely because both browsers become faster if you use them for a while.
My setup is a 400 Mhz PII with 128MB ram. I've only been using Mozilla as my main browser for a week, but I've reported hundred of bugs over the last few years.
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:5, Interesting)
In my mind, this is the problem. I want to run linux on my shitty computers, not on my box of doom. In my world, a dual p3-850 is more power than I would know what to do with, although if i remember correctly, the 850 is 100 mhz bus speed, the 800 was either,833, and 866 were 133 speed - I have an 800/133. Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web. Some of the nightly build footprints on mandrake have been huge - to the tune of using 100 megs of memory, or something. That's just bad programming for an OS that many people see as being the os for "the other other computer".
Linux community: don't forget that many people looking to switch to linux will want to put it on their 400 mhz boxes that they have recently replaced with the P4-2.2 Ghz box. Don't write code for the latter, write it for the former.
~z
Re:Mozilla as a primary browser (Score:5, Informative)
This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:
- Mozilla [mozilla.org]
- Galeon [sourceforge.net]
- Konqueror [konqueror.org]
- SkipStone [muhri.net]
Note that all of these, with the exception of Konqueror, use the same "Gecko" rendering engine.There are also some proprietary browsers:
- Netscape [netscape.com]. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
- Opera [opera.com]
This only lists the browsers which will give a reasonable browsing experience with the majority of web sites out there. There are some other open-source browsers, too, such as Amaya [w3.org] (still being updated, it may even be usable for normal web browsing), Grail [sourceforge.net], among others [google.com]. And, of course, for the remote ssh or non-X connection, there is Lynx [browser.org], W3M [w3m.org], and Links [sourceforge.net].- Sam
Nice branch graph! (Score:2, Funny)
the proof is NOT in the tree/roadmap (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways, here's my comments about the roadmap attached to the only ontopic comment for this story.
Timothy states that, "The Mozilla project isn't slapped together -- this kind of forethought and explanation is proof."
Well, I read the page and I still disagree. I've worked on multi-million dollar image recognition software for Lockheed Martin and the USPS and I have generated and worked on many development trees. The one one the Mozilla page is very generic. It doesn't talk about specific features or requirements for the newer versions (1.0.1, 1.1, .etc) it just shows a generic tree with version numbers (no mention of specifics) and dates. I've seen the same tree, sans dates, in many systems engineering and CS textbooks.
One might state that the dates are specific, but if you read lower on the page, they use the last milestone releases as a guide to come up with these new dates. In other words, the current state is determining the future state.
Although I agree with Timothy that Mozilla isn't slapped together (and I love Mozilla), there is no forethought or explanation pertaining to the new roadmap that proves this.
Re:Nice branch graph! (Score:2)
About Mozilla development (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a thought about different open source development methodologies:
Mozilla's leadership appears to have a major goal in trying to use the resources as effeiciently as possible. On the other hand, with the Linux kernel, Linus doesn't seem to care about efficiency, he on the contrary thinks spending time in (seemingly) useless work is beneficial. We all know how stable the kernel is (never crashes) and how stable Mozilla is (crashes hourly), maybe there's something to learn.
Re:About Mozilla development (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, Linus didn't have a big, corporate paid for team right off the top as well
A more fair comparison would be the Linux kernal with the Gekko html rendering engine, which shaped up pretty quickly and is being used as the basis for other brower platforms.
This can only be good. (Score:5, Informative)
I do however wish that they had a tips and tricks section when it comes to building, this:
http://webtools.mozilla.org/build/config.cgi [mozilla.org]
Is overkill IMHO, I just want to know the best practice compile options. Untill I worked out the best compile options for me I was left with a very sluggish browser. Don't make the same mistake, play around with configure a bit and try a few different compiles.
Re:This can only be good. (Score:2)
How "optimized" are the downloadable binaries?
Mozilla vs Godzilla? (Score:5, Funny)
Weight:
Hands down, it is Mozilla. Godzilla may be a 5000pound beast, but to run Mozilla, you need at least 4 mainframes, with a terabyte of RAM. The current weight of the top of the line mainframe is 2000pounds, so therefore Mozilla wins.
Most Sequels:
Godzilla is the true champion here. it seems like as if there is a new godzilla film everyyear (Lets not forget that great one of 1998- Godzilla vs the Teletubbues). Mozilla didnt even stand a chance, it hasnt even reached version one yet.
Enemies:
I think this would be a draw. Both of them had to fight the 5000pound gorilla (king Kong and Microsoft for those who arent hip).
Worst Remakes:
Hollywood's remake of Godzilla was a dismal failure, but not nearly as bad as Netscape's remake of Mozilla. Mozilla 1, Godzilla 0
Most Add-ons:
Godzilla severly lacks in this department. Hell he doesnt even have a wang. Mozilla, on the other hand has every imaginable add-on, including Godzilla's wang. Once again, a clear win by Mozilla.
The final score:
Well, it seems as if Mozilla is in the lead 4:1. Mozilla is the true champion, and shall remain so until Godzilla grows a wang and decides to rematch.
Galeon? (Score:4, Informative)
Give galeon a whirl if you haven't already, you may like it.
Hear hear (Score:2)
It would appear from the little Gnome help menu that I am running Galeon 1.0, presumably because something in 0.9.11 or 0.9.12 pissed me off. Regardless, I don't miss Netscape or Mozilla, and I very rarely miss IE5.5, which is what I use at work (yes, I run the engineering department, and yes, it's my own choice to run Windows + PuTTY).
My girlfriend and I both use Linux at home, and although she finds the occasional JavaScript bug irritating (as do I), it seems that the ability to add GoogleBar-like eBay and weather channel searches to the browser balance out the scorecard, at least in her opinion.
If you haven't tried Galeon yet, it's at 1.0 now, why not give it a whirl? About the only thing I haven't yet got working is anti-aliased fonts using gdk-xft (that appears to be an issue with my Thinkpad's S3 Savage chipset and the RedHat-distributed X driver that came with RH7.2, not a Galeon issue; people with normal monitors may find it an easy transition, and I certainly value IE's AA fonts).
Re:Galeon? (Score:2)
Performance, stability, and correctness (Score:4, Interesting)
-
In that update, I wrote "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness" and not any particular new feature. Just before 2001 began, I wrote that useful and relevant (defined by the community) extensions are always welcome, provided that they don't have a high opportunity cost in terms of contributors who otherwise could and would have helped hack on 1.0. But by the fall of 2001, as noted in the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto, the opportunity costs of features and extensions had grown to the point where such "non-1.0" work jeopardized a 1.0 milestone that fit into any achievable schedule.
That sounds about right. Feature creep has damaged the project.Simple text box editing doesn't work right. Window opening takes too long. Menu popup is slow, and sometimes even breaks. Wierd behavior appears after the browser has opened large numbers of windows. All this stuff is basic, yet it's been botched.
Sometimes I wonder if Mozilla has secretly been sabotaged by Microsoft. Maybe they're paying people to bloat the code, add unwanted features, and make Mozilla unstable. Or maybe there's a secret deal between AOL and Microsoft to make it suck. That's how it looks from the user side.
Re:Performance, stability, and correctness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Performance, stability, and correctness (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Performance, stability, and correctness (Score:2)
Some of the other complaint he has apply to 0.9.8, which is less than two weeks old.
Remember, in a product this complex some people experience bugs others don't. Some people notice things others don't.
Re:Performance, stability, and correctness (Score:2, Informative)
Minor Technicality (Score:4, Funny)
Moz mail (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Moz mail (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Moz mail (Score:3, Informative)
Bug 43015 [mozilla.org] for attaching multiple files with the File dialog
Bug 69528 [mozilla.org] for attaching multiple files with drag-and-drop
Mozilla - how to win back Web Developers (Score:2, Insightful)
Getting tables looking good in Mozilla and IE is not impossible. It is just more difficult than it needs to be. For example, the use of the background colour is different and (correct me if I am wrong) this is not in the W3 standard.
Anyway - Netscape 7 will ROCK!
Re:Mozilla - how to win back Web Developers (Score:2)
if you answered no, you are promoting vaporware based on reputation -- a reputation that isn't that good, really. do you know anyone out there who has a choice that is still using netscape 6? exactly. so far, IE 6 isn't anything special either, although 5.5 was much better than anything else on the horizon, Opera and Moz are going to give it a good run for it's money. (assuming consumbers ever actually learn about the existence of opera or moz.)
Re:Mozilla - how to win back Web Developers (Score:3, Insightful)
They're more correct than tables, and since HTML 4 Strict they've been the recommended way of laying stuff out, but it's still too hard to emulate simple table layouts in CSS, even without taking into account the worrying quantity of workarounds it's gathered in it's short life.
Still, it's worth going a good CSS layout if you can manage it:
http://glish.com/css/
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_
http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/default
About time (Score:2, Insightful)
Beyond that, with the 1.1, 1.2 releases we finally look to be getting something that is a real development scheme rather than the endless series of, what I would call, "technology previews" that earlier versions of mozilla have been. (With the alpha quality that usually goes along with such previews.)
If they stick to this, it seems to me 2002 really could be the year of the lizard.
Mozilla is great! (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at a web-design company, and the web-designers are starting to realise this. Mozilla is the ONLY browser that gets this close to standards compliance, IE6 is still al LONG way behind. NS 4.7 just plain sucks at modern HTML/CSS; Opera doesn't cut it either. Konqueror is pretty impressive, giving IE a run for it's money.
Couple that with the fact that Mozilla is cross-platform, can be embedded and is truly Open Source makes it a really great product.
Re:Mozilla is great! (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla is great! (Score:2)
Is it possible that IE and Netscape are trying to change the standard rahter than using the standard?
It used to be like that (think of horrors like 'frames' and 'font'). These days it is more the other way around; when the spec is thought out and published, there is usually no conforming implementation yet.
This is a Good Thing (TM), because it creates a much cleaner specification. Take a look at the XHTML Strict specification, and you'll see that it has become much cleaner. Some of the old 'cruft' is retained in the Transitional/Frameset DTD's, but the Strict version is nice, clean and simple.
The W3C has done a good job removing the presentational aspects out of the HTML spec and into CSS. Mozilla follows the spec quite closely, in fact so closely that they sometimes get into a heated discussion with web-developers who don't understand the CSS2 spec.(for instance, this 'little' gem http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22274 [mozilla.org])
Make IE-Compatible mode? (Score:2, Interesting)
Leave this new "Mozilla" mode for experimentating web developers, for the rest of us -- give us IE-Compatible browser
Or you will see "Made for IE" buttons all over again
Re:Make IE-Compatible mode? (Score:4, Informative)
So that ALL of the parsing/paining logic (as well as javascript) would behave EXACTLY as IE
With what IE specification?
Mozilla is shooting for the W3C specs, which have the virtue that they do exist. Mozilla actually does have a 'broken HTML compatibility mode', which it will use if a given HTML page doesn't specify a modern HTML DTD.
Re:Make IE-Compatible mode? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's downright dangerous. I'll give an example. I took VB programming course in college (I was forced), and the professor posted the grades on the web. The grades were listed next to the last four digits of our student ID, at least in IE, mostly anonymous. Apparently though, he just did some sort of "embed database" command in Frontpage, because in Opera, I could see a major error. Everyone's home address, phone number, SSN, etc was included with thier grades! On the web!
Frontpage put the whole database into the web page, and because you could only see the field they actually wanted to show in IE, he went ahead and put it up! One quick glance at the HTML would have been enough for him to see the mistake.
So everyone always asks "What has MS ever done to you?" Well, I think I have a good story to tell them, and also a good reason people should not target browsers for "IE compatibility". We have standards for a reason, follow them.
Re:Make IE-Compatible mode? (Score:2)
I agree with the poster who speaks of the ability to "use the W3C specs as a manual" -- I've been enjoying that experience myself -- tremendously, in fact. It's such a breath of fresh air, it truly is. It's a hell of a lot quicker and easier to use the W3C spec for, say, CSS, than it is to spend 3 hours rooting through that marketspeak-muddled morass masquerading as a "developer resource" known as MSDN. Not to mention trying to figure out why something that IE allegedly supports, isn't -- only to discover (once again) that somebody at Microsoft decided, "Well, okay, we'll support this much of the standard, but we'll ignore this part." At least IE 5.5+ is actually supporting something resembling W3C-DOM now, something that Moz has done (barring a bug or two, which can be and has been reported and fixed) since its inception.
So you really want to hand over the ability to dictate Web standards to Redmond carte blanche? (Admittedly innerHTML wasn't such a bad idea, but enough's enough!) You really want to enshrine "That's not a bug, it's a feature" for all time? What a truly horrid idea. Blarg.
Galeon? (Score:5, Informative)
I was a hardcore IE addict. Been using linux for years, but was so sucked into browsing with IE I was sickening myself. I attempted to use Mozilla over the span of the project and for sure it got better and better over time, but I do agree with folks who say: "why not just a browser?"
This is one of the strengths of IE if you ask me. IE is just a browser the other tools are moved into the mess, and IE (IMHO) has a feeling of transparancy in this way.
I never got that from Netscape, and Mozilla felt that was more and more, but it just has too many 'features' I can get elsewhere.
So anyway, I ended up getting really paranoid about IE and was searching. I realized that if I had complaints about moz then I should use it and use bugzilla. I was doing this under windows as well as linux. I found myself (like a junkie) slipping over to IE again and again.
But then I found Galeon, it has saved me from this terrible addiction. I have not missed IE in the least bit. In fact, I am completly in love with it as a browser. Mozilla is cool too, but Galeon is the one that people who complain that Mozilla should have just been a browser, galeon is this.
Galeon is what it is all about.
What really gets to me.... (Score:4, Funny)
You would think that I would be irate about seeing yet another time that they're saying 1.0 is going to be out and knowing that it'll slip past it's deadline; but in reality that doesn't bother me.
What bothers me the most is that the roadmaps have grown up. No longer are they the the roadmaps no longer look like they were drawn by a 5 year old [mozilla.org]. It appears that the marketdroids, or at least someone with a shred of artistic talent produced this latest roadmap.
This flys in the face of conventional wisdom that says good [nethack.org] coders [real-time.com] don't [vim.org] make [gnu.org] pretty [gnome.org] graphics [apache.org] and bad [microsoft.com] coders [atg.com] do [ibm.com]. (opinions are my own...duh)
Re:What really gets to me.... (Score:2)
User Acceptance (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't read the roadmap (Score:2, Interesting)
If I shut down the
Re:Can't read the roadmap (Score:2)
20% of french linux fans are using Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost 20% of readers of this site are using mozilla.
These statistics are extract from a panel of 15000 visits a day.
If you have other statistics, just post a response...
Mozilla a failure? (Score:2)
Every time I reference people to webstandards.org because their Netscape 4.x browser doesn't render properly, and suggest they upgrade to Netscape 6.x...
Every single one of them comes back and says Netscape 6.x is too slow and buggy.
It seems to me that the target audience of Mozilla is the current users of Netscape, and they can't even convince them to upgrade.
Then again it might have something to do with AOL still pushing Netscape 4.x over 6.x.
Getting better, but seriously... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but Mozilla just hasn't grown up, look at the latest milestone. Hit add bookmark and it won't give the current page as default values. That's so basic broken as can be.
Mozilla needs to work more on it's core features, way more. The latest flashy standard people use 5% of the time isn't that important if users grow tired of it doing what they do 95% of the time, and that's how it is now.
Best of luck,
Kjella
They're going to 1.0 with Java broken! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been watching this situation for some time, wondering if it would improve.
When the Mozilla people started talking about 1.0, I dug up the email of the Java integration maintainer. Not easy; the OJI page on Mozilla.org is incredibly stale (April 2001!):
http://www.mozilla.org/oji/
I sent him an "are you the guy?" email - he responded, "yes, that's me." Then I sent him an email asking if I could help with efforts to get Applet support up to spec by 1.0. He never wrote back.
As of now, Java is a massive hole in Mozilla. Going to any page with an applet shows the infamous Netscape puzzle piece; clicking on it starts a process to download and install a Java runtime (whether you have one installed or not) which is exceptionally crude even by Netscape standards. You get a popup window with HTML form buttons to select your JVM - one for each "supported" platform (how hard is it to detect OS?) and an extra big empty window with [object Object] popping up above it...
For some time, and continuing in 0.9.8, if you are brave enough to get that far, once you complete the install your browser will crash, and you will still have no Java support when you restart it. This is probably preferable to one previous failure mode, which was an instant application crash every time a page contained Java.
Laugh all you want about applets - this affects a lot of web pages.
If Mozilla for some assinine reason wants to kill Applet support, they need to at least cauterize the wound. As it is now, this is a huge problem that IMNSHO undermines any credibility their 1.0 designation might have.
Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken! (Score:4, Informative)
Currently Mozilla needs work in the area of finding the Java Plugin and setting up the connection between the two. Until then, copy the file 'NPOJI610.DLL' from your JRE's bin directory to the plugin folder for Mozilla and restart Mozilla.
This is documented in the relase notes [mozilla.org]
Re:They're going to 1.0 with Java broken! (Score:4, Informative)
You have to enable Java support by dropping:
user_pref("plugin.do_JRE_Plugin_Scan", true);
into user.js in the appropriate directory (c:\windows\application data\mozilla\profiles\default\${something_stupid}
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true)
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true)
... which disables popups.
Non-Commercial View of the Web (Score:2, Insightful)
Enter a wrong URL in the Address bar? By default, Microsoft gets to see where you were tring to go and even presents their search engine which promotes their affliates and advertisers. With it's built in media player, IE is also a key part of Microsofts Digital Rights Management stratagy.
The ablity to customize my browsing experience is important to me. Compeition is also critical for a product to keep growing. If one company owns the browser market, users are the ones who will loose out in the end.
As a developer, features such as 'View this image', 'Open frame in new window', 'View frame source' and tools like the new Javscript Debugger and DOM Viewer make Mozilla my browser of choice when developing web sites.
Sure, Mozilla has a ways to go, but it's getting there, slowly but surely. And at the moment, it's good enough for me to use on a daily basis.
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? (Score:2)
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever you find such a site, check bugzilla [mozilla.org] for it, and if it's not listed, report it for Tech Evangelsim.
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about? Its already better than Netscape, Its also better than IE at loading pages, its more secure than IE, its more stable than IE, the only thing IE has left is the program loads faster and thats mainly due to it being tied into windows itself.
Mozilla in 4 years, has surpassed IE, a program which has been in development for 8 years.
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? Nope (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Close to a complete Netscape replacement? Nope (Score:2)
Not there.
ldap addressing
It's in there and working quite nicely. Just in a slightly different place to accomodate multiple profiles.
composer usability (like publishing)
The "publishing" feature in Communicator stunk. I suppose it was okay if all you ever worked on was a single site.
Moz's composer looks to be leaps and bounds above what was in 4.7x feature wise. There are some major stability issues with it from what I've seen though.
similar pages button
It's in there, as one of the side panel options. Works nicer than the drop down button from 4.7x, and it pulls from the same source.
refresh bookmarks
Haven't a clue what that is. I do know that Moz's bookmark manager is a good bit more functional than what NS 4.7x had. Unfortunately, it is WAY slower.
Ya might try clicking around Moz a bit. Seems that you're missing some of those key things that really in there.
Roaming user solution in sight. (Score:3, Informative)
Looks very promising -- if you want this feature, consider throwing in a few dollars. If this kind of development model turns out to work well, it could be a revolution for large Open Source / Free Software projects.
Re:Mozilla vs Oprah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*lol* (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mozilla vs Oprah (Score:3, Funny)
Are you willing to lend support to a system you know is currupt for the sake of a little convenience? In general I understand that the US population says yes, but to hear this sad opinion voiced here is nothing short of dissapointing.
When will people learn? doing nothing isn't just a tacit voice for the status quo, but an active opposition of change, and as Morpheus says in the matrix "many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares..... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's great having a browser that looks and behaves the same on multiple platforms. It provides a familiar base everywhere one goes. It kind of harks back to the days when there was talk of the browser being the platform, not the OS, which would of course render MS Windows irrelevant.
Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares..... (Score:5, Insightful)
However the speed issue was put on the back burner once I started using a small fraction of the features. Tabbed browsing, disabled onload popups, javascript console/debugger, etc, etc...
I still kept thinking, jeez, its just a browser people, it can't be _that_ hard to make something that renders HTML. However once I downloaded Komodo ( here [activestate.com] )
and used it for a couple days, I saw the light. Mozilla isn't just a browser, its a platform. Komodo still suffers from Mozilla's slowness, but the amount of useful features included with it easily makes up for any speed issues. Mozilla will start to speed up once it matures more, so thats something I can wait patiently for.
Kudos to the Mozilla team, keep up the good work!
Re:ZZZZZZZZZz who cares..... (Score:3, Interesting)
The core of UNIX is based on small reusable components, but I don't think that's generally true for the userland tools, anymore. Just look at Perl, Emacs (no jokes please :-), X, KDE and GNOME, and (of course) Mozilla.
Unix was originally implemented on machines with very little memory, so it made sense to obey the "Unix philosophy" strictly. Nowadays, there's room for a little more flexibility.
For example, I occasionally see posts on Slashdot from "Unix purists", complaining that the GNU tools are way too bloated compared to their Unix counterparts. I find this amusing. In my experience, fractional improvements in performance and memory use are far outweighed by having more useful features. Like any other philosophy, the Unix philosophy taken to the extreme is bad for one's health.
Opera bug db (Score:2)
http://bugs.opera.com/
17 percent is not bad. (Score:4, Informative)
Its in second place
Netscape is Mozilla. Mozilla is netscape.
Re:17 percent is not bad. (Score:5, Informative)
IE has an illegal monopoly (Score:2)
When IE comes with the OS why download a browser?
Re:17 percent is not bad. (Score:2)
There wont be native games without proof that theres a market to sell them to
Re:mozilla is dying (Score:2)
Interesting my ass.
Re:Just curious (Score:2, Informative)
When Microsoft released IE, complete with support for most of the Netscape extensions, they used "Mozilla" in IE's headers in order to trick sites into thinking it was Netscape. That way, IE users could also see enhanced pages.