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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Project Releases New Roadmap 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-already-using-it dept.
Mozilla has released a new roadmap which includes branch, freeze, and release dates from 0.7 up into 1.x. I'm still hoping support for the Xrender gets in there soon, that and encryption are the 2 things lacking for me (and encryption has worked all right for some of recent versions). Anyway good luck to the actual hackers working on this thing.
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Mozilla Project Releases New Roadmap More

Mozilla Project Releases New Roadmap

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  • Does It Really Work? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Could some of you folks out there tell me how well Mozilla really works?

    I've been a skeptic who hasn't tried it yet since I feel it's unfinished. Contrary to my distorted view, some people say it works well.

    What functionality works in Mozilla? What is still lacking or not fully functional?

  • milestones? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is it just me or are there actually no milestones on that page? All I see are a bunch of arbitrary dates and numbers. What exactly would constitute Mozilla 0.9.3? What would be the difference between 0.9.7 released in Q4 2001 and a 0.9.5 release that slipped to Q4 2001?

    If you don't some kind of goal associated with the number and the date I don't see what this roadmap actually tells you.

  • Re:Kinda like GNOME... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Kind of like IE 5.5 --- for those of us who ran the betas since December 7th, 1999 it's been a long hard road, and it's still not the be-all-end-all (but many agree it's closing in on that)

    For Mozilla, they really need to get LDAP, SMIL, SVG, and XSL support. A backwards compatability mode that understands ILAYERs/LAYERs and older javascript would be great too for Netscape 4.x diehards. Hell, why not netscape 4.x plugin backward compatability?!?!

  • Mozilla still sucks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seriously, does anyone who has seen Opera 5.0 still think that Mozilla isn't a complete failure technologically speaking? I had simply assumed that the web with its umpteen standards had become so complex that you just couldn't build a small browser anymore, that Mozilla is as good as it gets. But now...
  • I've been using the December [6th] Build since it was the lastest. It's been really stable(this it's crashed twice) SSL works(I've orderd mose then 3 things using it so far), Netscape's Java plugin and even the flash player plugin works without problems. I've been using the Dec 6th build as well since it came out. It was the first nightly build I downloaded, so my first impression of the nightlies has been very, very good. This thing is rock solid and very nice. It has crashed on me a total of twice since December 6th and one of those times was when I was looking at a page with a Java applet (Navigator 4 on Linux crashes on applets all the time, so crashing only once is actually a leap up). I have, in fact, left Mozilla running for a two week stretch of intense use and only had to restart it at the end because its memory usage was starting to noticably eat into my swap space. I don't use Navigator 4.X anymore (except for email, ssl sites, and sites with embedded real audio that I want to hear). The rendering engine in Mozilla is just so much better, and based on the Dec 6th build it seems like it is at least as stable as Navigator. Most of the plugins I want (Java and Flash) run fine in Mozilla now. Dec 6th was the day that I switched to Mozilla for my primary browser. I can't wait for M19 as all the previous milestones have been giant qualitative leaps ahead of the previous ones (I downloaded the Dec 6th nightly because I thought M18 was so close to being the one to make me switch and I was getting impatient for M19).
  • I have have been using Mozilla daily for months now and the one thing I REALLY want to be worked on is the way it handles JAVA! I wouldn't mind it being a memory hog if it were for a good reason (more features, better stability than 4.7X etc.) but as it is it is worse that 4.7X for JAVA. It renders very nicely, I can log in to most secure sites I have tried, no problems. I have to use IE on NT4 at work and really Mozilla(w/Linux) has been just as stable for me, they both crash but not often. The one other wish item would be printing that works well.


    Insert pithy comment here.

  • Re:v0.6 (Score:1)

    by cymen ( 8178 )
    Try a newer nightly build - the php.net widget renders beatifully on todays build (20001223). As someone else pointed out v0.6 is a branch off from the code right around netscape 6.0 was released. Basically some old stuff you got there (but it does run well).
  • I've found Netscape too buggy on Linux (though strangely, it seems to crash much less, if at all, since I moved from dialup to ADSL...). And Mozilla is horribly slow on some sites, even when using the Back button, on a K6-2/350 with 256 MB of RAM.

    Opera, by contrast, is incredibly fast and has yet to crash in its beta 4 incarnation. It's as fast as IE5 on Windows, where I use Opera as well as my main browser.

    I'm using Opera 4.0b4 as my main Linux browser already. The only thing stopping me using Opera more is the combination of non-standard sites, particularly those with browser detection, and the Opera team's reluctance to do a 'relax standards conformance' option - some sites display nothing at all, though this is quite rare.

    Of course, Opera is commercial on Linux (or ad-supported on Windows if you prefer), but it runs fast even on 486s and has all the features of a modern graphical browser. See http://www.opera.com for a download, and don't forget to report bugs via their online form...

  • Uh?? (Score:1)

    by renoX ( 11677 )
    Well in your experience maybe but in my experience the speed of the GUI goes from:
    - fastest: BeOS
    - then Windows (without its Web-like rendering though)
    - then X11.

    They are usually ranked this way for speed.
    And as for "better advantage of parallelism", I'd like to remind that 99% of home-users have only one CPU now. It may or may not change in the future but for now Linux is disadvantaged by the slowness of its GUI.
    It has many advantages but the speed of all these graphics layers is not an advantage!
  • The biggest problems I've found so far are..

    1. Client side image maps. These didn't work in NS4.x either, but you'd have thought it wouldn't be *that* hard to implement.

    2. They've totally stuffed javascript. Nothing more complex than a simple 'hello world' app runs... This is hard to understand since netscape invented the damned thing.

    Mozilla isn't ready for prime-time yet - granted it's better than NS6 (which should be withdrawn immediately before netscapes' reputation is permanently damaged) but there's loads of work to do before it's in the same ballpark as IE.

    I'm stuck with running IE under VMWare, which is the only option at the moment.
  • I've found Galeon to be really fast on my computer (Pentium 200), but it still requires a lot of RAM (30 megs).

    Galeon uses the Mozilla HTML engine, and it uses Gtk. And it seems really fast (faster than Netscape 4, and about as fast as IE 4 when I boot to Windows). So I have to conclude that Mozilla's HTML rendering is fast, and Gtk is fast. So why is Mozilla so slow? The main difference seems to be the XUL/Javascript based UI in Mozilla, compared to the C based UI in Galeon.

    Be sure to try out Galeon and compare it to Mozilla.
  • I've run the nightly build for a couple of months now and my experience is mostly good.

    It renders quickly and it looks good.

    The builds differ a little bit. Some bugs related to javascript come and go. One build it's ok, the next the bug is bag, the next is ok again.

    Most builds never crash (in one day, remember I always use the last nightly) but now and then I have a few crashes during one day.

    I have not tried Java nor Flash plugins.

    All in all it's a pretty good browser that I'm happy with. And for the few pages giving my trouble I fire up the old 4.76 (4.73?).

    Some other post said, 'hunt for a stable nighly'. I can support that.
  • People always say, "I don't want all that Mozilla's trying to be. I just want a good web browser." The trouble is, in order to be a good web browser that also works on multiple platforms and is maintainable, you have to do what Mozilla is doing.

    Galeon? Great if you're on Linux and have the GTK libraries installed. What about the Mac and Windows and all of the others?

    Did anyone here download the original codebase released two years ago? If you had, you would know that it wasn't a simple case of "Let's just edit it so that it handles resizing the window better." There were fundamental flaws in the code. It was spaghetti. A simple fix here caused a new bug there.

    They needed to start over and that takes time. They needed a component model so that fixes in one area didn't mess with another and that takes time. They needed to start a cross-language component model even when it was only C++ JavaScript because it can't just be blithely patched on later.

    People are already using the rendering engine and that's great! People who just want their browser, can have just their browser. The Mozilla group doesn't want another browser. Mozilla is striving to be another Emacs; greater than the sum of its parts.

    Netscape released what Moilla considers v0.6. But isn't that what we've all been preaching for on Slashdot for so long? Haven't we been yelling that they need to finally release a browser? Haven't we said that commercial entities also must follow market schedules to the detriment of engineering schedules? This is a textbook case. Netscape, the commercial entity, releases early to get people to use it like most companies do to avoid being forgotten. Mozilla, an open source entity, is working until it's done.

    Mozilla will change the way we write software. It's just taking some people a little longer than others to realize this. It's not about NS vs. IE anymore. It's about making things better. Unfortunately, better takes time. I for one am willing to wait for someone to get it right and not just get it done.
  • Wonderful. Except Mozilla 0.6 and Netscape 6.0 are _exactly_ the same code. See the roadmap.
  • Unfortunatly, it doesn't work that way.

    What would've happened instead was the people who wanted only a browser would be satisfied, but those who wanted a communications suite, opon realizing that it's only a browser, would either stick with thier old versions of communicator, or switch to another communications suite. The communications suite users would still think of NS6 as only a browser, even if a communicator version were released soon after, and would be wondering why NS didn't release the communicator version in the first place. The browser-only users wouldn't be happy for long, they'd still have the same problems that people are having with the browser in NS6!

    Also, don't forget about internet appliance manufactures. For a verity of reasons, using a communications suite is much more advantagious, for that purpose, than using seperate programs. If NS6 was browser-only, the majority of i-net appliance makers wouldn't use it because it wouldn't meet the needs that they're trying to forfill.

    And don't forget about novice users and users who only want to use thier computers. For a majority of these users, a communications suite better serves thier needs as it offers a lower learning curve (the usre only has to deal with one program, he doesn't have to deal with many diffrent programs, and getting them to work and play nice with each other). If you don't believe it, take a look at the success of AOL and MS IE/OE/FP.

    The problems with NS6 were largly due to a management fuckup on Netscape's part. They have nothing to do with NS6 including a mail/news clint, a webpage authoring tool, and other extras; mozilla has these extras, and it doesn't have anywhere near half the problems that NS6 does.

    As it stands, Netscape has a good chance of saving face, if they're smart about it, and make bug-fixing a top priority for thier 6.1 release, and they relaese it without unnecessary deleay. But, making NS6 browser-only wouldn't solve anything, and could've easily given them more problems.
  • Then they would have alianated people who want, or need, a full communations suite. They would never have had a chance of winning over potential converts who curently use MS IE/OE.

    Also, its been said before, but, aparently, it needs repeating, you can choose what extras you install (or not install) with the browser at installion.

    NS6's problems have nothing to do with it being a communations suite. They have everything to do with the fact that it was based off of an out-of-date version of mozilla that had some serious bugs, and the fact that NS's management decided to listen more to it's marketing divsion than to the people who were testing and developing it, and give more priority to adding marketing-driven features (features that, btw, are not found in mozilla, even in it's latest release) than fixing those serious bugs.
  • Agreed. IMO the mailnews code in Netscape 4.7 is pretty good: it's fast, it doesn't crash, it has an operation cache so that you can undo move/delete, and is tested by millions of users every day. So although that code is not part of mozilla I think Netscape could have tied the two together. But the problem is that at primetime mozilla.org had invested much effort in the mailnews thing and Netscape wanted it as well.

    As of Composer: I don't understand at all why it should be in Communicator.
  • All right, I dont understand why this is flaimbait. Because you dont like my opinion? Because everyone should should praise opensource projects no matter how bad they are, or how slow there moving? I dont like Microsoft any more then anyone else here, but they DO have a better web browser the the mozilla team. Its fast, and much more compatible with the different web technologies.

    Of cource if you dont have an agrument, you can always call this post faimbait or something. When you cant ague something make sure you censor it.

  • Give Galeon a try: http://galeon.sourceforge.net/
    <p>
    It uses Mozilla's rendering engine but strips out all the non-browsing cruft.
  • That peice of shit toolkit allows Mozilla to be easily ported to any platform. If it were written in GTK, the toolkit would have to be ported, and that would suck and make ports less common. They use their own version of COM for the same reasons.
  • Don't use Netscape 6 as a metric! NS6 was branched from a pretty old version of Mozilla. Go to mozilla.org [mozilla.org] and download a nightly build before you pass judgement. The Mozilla team has just recently begun the optimization phase, so it should be getting increasingly faster and lighter as time goes on.
  • Mozilla cvs is fine for me but it is never 'put together'. Well, that is sort of how cvs is---one time something works and another time it is broken. For example, right now I can't edit bookmark properties but if i update my cvs and rebuilt, i bet it will work. However, overall the speed is ok and the stability is ok, but i can still crash on demand if i give it a good load. And I don't think it is GTKs fault, I think it would be the whole new toolkit they are using.
  • Mozilla today announced a new roadmap. Team members had described the old roadmap as being "full of loops and dead ends". It is hoped that the new roadmap does actually lead to the much anticipated "final release", but as one team member admitted "it's no highway, that's for sure - we'll probably just get stuck circling a roundabout".

    He noted that things should probably get moving properly "when IE 7 comes out".

  • Perhaps there will be no Mozilla 1.0 at all.
    Maybe Netscape use Mozilla as workhorse
    to develop new code to be released under
    Netscape label. ;)

  • Hell yeah ! Man its exactly this sort of bloat-ware focused - feature heavy attitude that has killed the whole Netscape / Mozilla codebase.

    Everyone knows that software success relies on delivering a good, *minimal*, fast, well engineered feature set ASAP. If you do that right, you can always extend it later.

    > To top it off, I expect the Mozilla codebase to last for several years, if not more.

    Arrrgghhh!!! No. Please worry about the future in the *future* for crying out loud - there is no way that Mozilla 1.0 is going to be enuff for the long term - there is no way to know now what is going to be the desirable/hip technology in a couple of years. Just give me an alternative to IE that works, and is fast - and I'll switch in a second. And for my Linux partition - please please please!!

    I just want a decent browser, with dynamic HTML, JavaScript and fast stable loading - thats all.

    God help me, but this drives me nuts. I can't believe this guy (EverCode) is supposedly a mozilla coder - he sounds more like one of my goddam clients.

  • Depends on what part you're talking about. I'm running it under Linux, and I definitely have some issues.

    Import utility is definitely not finished: you get a choice of importing from Text or Eudora (how about Netscape? Anyone?).

    I'm also unable to access 'certified' SSL sites with any kind of consistency. One case in point is our company's web-mail site (Exchange-based).

    Browsing experience is quite brisk, compared to previous versions of Netscape, and it seems to interact well with banner-blocking proxies like Guidescope.

    News reader is decent, but I've noticed some image corruption between the browser and reader on an intermittent basis.

    Overall, it looks better and responds more quickly than previous incarnations of Netscape, but it still has a few warts that preclude it from being pronounced 'finished'...hence the '0.6' designation.

  • I'm just thinking, should not the branches for mozilla releases be just points marked on the main trunk? Netscape's releases are a true branch as they are going their own 'tangent' from the main trunck.
  • Please do not confuse Mozilla with the release from Netscape. I have been using .6 for a week, and it has not crashed once. It renders quickly, and generally kicks ass. This installer is only 6mb! The only thing that doesn't seem to work well is some javascript- Some of the more advanced menuing does not seem to work right...
    Go Mozilla!!!

  • Yikes! This is totally unacceptable. Sorry, I won't be voting for it because it's been over a year now since I've wanted anything to do with Mozilla, an unabashed failure. I do follow news about it casually from time to time, but I do not EVER expect there will be a version/build of Mozilla that I will want to use. I had no idea about the "NO PRINTING" feature, but I'll tell ya, there's no way in hell I'd use a browser if I couldn't print from it.

    Some people don't like to surf or browse the web and when you stumble upon a golden nugget of information that you simply MUST share with others there's no other option but printing.
    BR Ah, that completes the year for me as far as Mozilla goes. Altogether I spent, oh, maybe an hour TOPS on keeping up with Mozilla this year. Most of that hour was wasted IMHO. And please note for whatever it's worth: I won't use IE. The thing I can't stand the most about IE is if something is downloading and you hit STOP it just never stops. It keeps going and going and going...
  • The way it is now, IE 5.5 is *so* far ahead of 4.x that there's no way anyone except those with a serious anti MS handicap and those without a choice would use the Netscape browser for surfing.

    My main workstation runs Linux, so there's no question of using IE. As I'm a network administrator, I sometimes log into to other machines with permissions much greater than normal users. I don't use IE here either, as I'm scared of what new security hole might pop up. Also, when Netscape crashes on Win(whatever), it just tends to crash. IE tends to blow up the OS, too. Features aren't everything!
  • From reading Slashdot comments I had assumed that it was a complete pos.

    I just downloaded 0.6 for windows and I am have to say I am impressed. On my p400 256Meg machine it renders incredibly quickly. Most of the major bugs I saw 6 months ago are fixed. Also, they replaced the old mozilla skin with a netscape 4.0 skin which is a lot nicer to look at.

    I don't know about the linux version, but from what I can tell this thing is ready for prime time. The only pages I could get to break where heavy dhtml sites. Try it, you'll like it!

  • No, I don't miss the point - I am thinking of the real world, the average Joe doesnt care if he's using the geeks choice of browser - he just wants to look at his web sites, if mozilla can't do as good a job as IE then there will be limited uptake of it.
    As I said in my post - I want it to succeed.
  • "if there lucky"...

    If where lucky? Also, who are you quoting?

  • Once again, the Mozilla team demonstrates their fine brush control using a mouse.

    :D
  • Until then, I use NS 4.x and curse and curse and curse, simply because there are no viable alternatives. It's awful.

    Is it really that bad?

    I've used NS 4.x on Linux for years, and I've never found it to be nearly as horrible as everyone says, especially in the last 18 months. I can't even remember the last time I had to rm ~/.netscape/lock. Maybe my current system (LinuxPPC 1999) has a particularly stable build or is missing some conflict?

    Now 4.x on the Mac - that's a different story. If IE 5 didn't fall over so often (the Dilbert page or the Ars Technica forum will knock it over every time), I couldn't ask for anything more. It even has the site-specific cookie policy thatmade me fall in love with konqueror.

  • I agree that the current release of Mozilla (0.6) is much much faster on win32 than on linux. But I don't think that this is because of any inherent 2-D rendering difficulties on linux+X. Xfree has a shared memory extension, so 2-D apps on the local machine do not go through the networking layer (the correspondng extension for 3-D is called direct rendering. Someone correct me if I am wrong). You are confusing 3-D with 2-D. 3-D in linux currently suffers from all the problems that you mentioned. But the reasons why 2-D apps are slower on linux than on win32 are the following:

    1) Most developers optimize their code for win32 and don't bother doing the same for linux.

    2) Win32 compilers produce much faster code than gcc.

    3) Mozilla in particular is severly handicapped by the XPkit -> GTK -> Xlib toolchain. They should rip out the gtk dependency and go from XPkit straight to Xlib.

    Magnus.
  • first ..i used the last mozilla built
    secondt since no one saw whats wrong
    they i doubt anyone saw it acutaly
    the two problems are ...
    1- on the first page there is a table at your left hand with a blue margin ...when you move your mouse over any link in that table the link is supposed to turn blue using a javascript script ..and the white star into a rotating blue star ...that happens perfectly on IE 5 ..but not on any mozilla built or netscape built .. 2- click any link from the damned table above ...you will go to another page ..there is a grey table at the top and the bottom ..that have links to the rest of the tables ...in mozilla there is black spots or space between each td block ...in IE it looks perfect not bad spots
    anyway ...thanks for you interest
    and you also should make a web page that exploit mozilla
  • i once made a small small site
    it was my homework
    this site managed to exploit all HTML and javascript problems in netscape-mozilla vs IE
    please go to http://go.to/musiclight and if you can ..tell me why it look so bad on netscape
    1-the javascript on the first page
    2-the top and bottom table on the rest of the pages
    this is only html and javascript ...not even dhtml
  • Bad luck old chap! In bringing up your reasonable points you were socked one for flamebait.

    I'm not saying I agree entirely though. Yes Mozilla is slow, yes Mozilla is bloated. These are facts.

    But it doesn't matter a hoot. We are not programming for Commodore 64's anymore - it is far better to write bloated code that works than streamlined, optomised code that doesn't. By the time the Mozilla final release reaches a decent segment of the market, computers will be fast enough to take it anyway, in my opinion.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • People don't realize that Mozilla is built for the future. In a year or so, the 'bloat' won't be an issue anymore because more people will have better hardware.

    I've heard that one before. Just like every time a new Microsoft product comes out, with no apparent changes and twice as big (and slow) - "it doesn't matter now - computers have bigger hard drives and faster processors that they had the time our last version came out, so it's just natural" grrr.

    And, of course, there was Java. Sun claimed that though it is interpreted code, the speed doesn't really matter these days (well, back when it first came out), since the computers are faster and the speed difference between Java applications and natively-compiled applications won't be that noticable. And we all know how unnoticable that speed difference was, right?

    Grr.

    But I guess bloat is a fair price to pay for l33t XML-oriented interface, huh. (grr again).
  • listen asswipe i would like to see you code such a browser! hell, i'm even useing it right now! LONG LIVE MOZILLA!
  • The way it is now, IE 5.5 is *so* far ahead of 4.x that there's no way anyone except those with a serious anti MS handicap and those without a choice would use the Netscape browser for surfing.

    A few reasons why I "choose" Netscape:

    Prints pages without cutting the right side of the page off

    Personally prefer Netscape's toolbars and bookmarking

    Allows for more refined configuration, such as LDAP address book queries

    Main reason I am "forced" to use IE:

    Sites that are designed to work only with MS products

    I see Mozilla offering me what I prefer most about Netscape and more.

  • Then they would have alianated people who want, or need, a full communations suite. They would never have had a chance of winning over potential converts who curently use MS IE/OE.

    And they do now? IMHO if a NS 6.0 browser-only release was a stable product, they would have better chances with those who want or need a full communications suite. The "communicators" would review the quality browser-only product and deduct that the other components would be of a high caliber, when released.

  • Just change the settings for the Internet zone to something that disables java and activeX. Then just add those sites you trust to another zone, and you are very safe from security holes.

    And our network administrator Homebrewed is required to do this on *every* machine that he/she logs into? Sounds like Homebrewed is now required to write and maintain a script that is used for the sole purpose of avoiding MS security holes.

    I wonder if an MS marketing type has ever used a solution such as this to promote the use of IE? Not likely.

  • What would've happened instead was the people who wanted only a browser would be satisfied, but those who wanted a communications suite, opon realizing that it's only a browser, would either stick with thier old versions of communicator, or switch to another communications suite. The communications suite users would still think of NS6 as only a browser, even if a communicator version were released soon after, and would be wondering why NS didn't release the communicator version in the first place.

    Agreed. As a Netscape mail user, I would be wondering if mail finally supported multiple inboxes or not.

    Maybe a compromising solution would be to release, broswer-only 6.0 and Mail/News/Composer PR3. Previous releases would have needed to plan for this and be adjusted accordingly.

    As it stands, Netscape has a good chance of saving face, if they're smart about it, and make bug-fixing a top priority for thier 6.1 release, and they relaese it without unnecessary deleay.

    Users (especially Windows) are getting used to this sort of thing (read: Windows 2000 SP1). It is possible management considered this and saw the current strategy as a way out. Even though it looks like a major screw-up, they may have had little to no other options, given the time frame and resources.

  • mozilla that need to be rectified. LDAP and Roaming access were great in 4.5+. Not to mention the ability to insert vCards in outgoing email and newsgroup postings... Java *works* but it's quite unfortunate that you need to download the entire 20 MB JRE just for a few fun ctions. (So much for their "Small Download" boasts eh? I agree that SSL suppor t is very important as well, but you can't say it's the ONLY think lacking
  • I tried NS 6.0 and I'm more in line with the Mozilla people in that when they say it's 1.0, I'll be happy and finally replace NS 4.7x.

    It's funny, actually. Little things made it impossible to use. All it took was the bookmark functionality to not quite work right, and I couldn't use it. Bookmarks ended up in the wrong folders or would dissapear. I couldn't drag to the sidebar. I was in the middle of browsing job sites and bookmarking promising ones and I got fed up with it. That was all it took for me to hate it and go back to NS4.7.
  • Now, hold up, could someone please explain to me how Mozilla only works well on "new" computers with 128M of RAM? I use a Pentium 266 at work, with 64M of RAM and such other state-of-the-art-1997 stats. Mozilla runs fine. Like a fast race car. Like a smooth, sleek fast race car after a fresh oil bath. Vrooooom, Vrooooooo, Vroooooom...

    Sorry, got carried away there. Anyway, Mozilla (w/talkback & Java & Flash) really does run quite well on that machine, and every machine I've tried it on with similar stats, at least for builds within the past few months. The only place I've *ever* seen Mozilla run slowly is on the computer I'm using right now, my old, dependable, Pentium 166, which runs EVERYTHING slow - admittedly, Mozilla more so than others. Wait, somewhere in all this I have a point. Oh, right, that one. Yes, I'm still wondering what the deal is with people who need hugely gobbly machines to run Mozilla well, or is my P266 a "new" machine that is being referred to?

  • It's not as quick as IE 5.x on a modest Windows platform, but it's running pretty well and rarely crashes. With Mozilla 0.6, I've ceased using Netscape 4.x as my primary browser and mail client. I'm running on a 633 Celeron w/128 megs of RAM. Mozilla's Java was crashing me on startup, so I uninstalled it. In a few days, I'll upgrade my Red Hat distro to 7.0 and see if it makes things better or worse.

    I like Mozilla. It's attractive, renders well, and the mail client does a better job than my old Netscape. Yeah, if your system is robust enough, you might wanna try it. 133 mHz processors need not apply.

  • Is this true for Mozilla 0.6? That's what I've primarily been using... I kind of assumed that at least on the milestones they were doing optimized compiles.

    --

  • Sites that mandate IE or NS are quite rare, but often come from large companies - for example, jamjar.com (UK car buying site from major insurance company) is unusable even with Netscape on Linux, let alone Opera. The website management there can't or won't take out the line of browser detection code that prevents Linux working, despite several complaints.
  • no it is December 3rd....it's build 2000120306 ...it was just a typo
  • I'm waiting for the 5.0 version with the ads. The timeout thing is really old.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • The timebomb no longer exists, and hasn't for a long time. The page which mentions it should have been updated.

    However, I would hope you find a build better than your current one inside 30 days :-)

    Gerv
  • I've found that compiling mozilla yourself, omitting all the debugging stuff, the speed increases tremendously.

    So did Netscape forget to remove their debug code when they released Netscape 6.0? Mozilla is slower than IE5. Netscape is slower than IE5. The memory footprint of NETSCP60.EXE on Windows 2000 is 3x the footprint of IE5. I don't think you can blame "debug code" for all of Netscape's problems.

  • The single most important feature lacking in Mozilla is speed. It's hard to believe anything would run slower than 4.x (especially on older machines), but it does. I would be much happier if they just released the source for Netscape 3 and let us hack on any necessary features (IMAP, modern javascript).

    I think Mozilla is a great project, but does it really have to run so damn slow?
  • I think Netscape would have done themselves many favours if they had made their first release browser only (no Mail/News or Composer, maybe AIM).

    The browser with it's new rendering engine is the sexy part of the product, the bit that people are interested in playing with. If they could have omitted Mail/News and composer for the first release they'd have a smaller, lighter package, with less to QA that people would be happy to use as a browser.
  • A further point - not only will Mozilla work better in the future because the hardware baseline will be set higher, but also because optimisation is not currently a priority on the project - following most sensible programming guidelines the emphasis is on elegant code, and optimisation will come later. I fully expect the release version of Mozilla (or 1.0, at least) to be a lot easier on system resources in general - once the application is feature complete it's possible to sort out performance issues.
  • AIUI, milestones represent branches from the trunk - development on the trunk continues as code approaches a milestone release, but it doesn't make sense to just finalise the code and release it as-is, warts and all.

  • Define 'as good a job as'. Mozilla does a better job than IE5 at conforming to most HTML and releated standards (HTML, you remember - that thing which browsers are supposed to render, yes?)

    If your definition of compatibility is 'doing everything like IE5 does', then of course Mozilla doesn't do everything as well as IE5. Then again, with this model IE5 has a bit of an unfair advantage. Yes, there's a certain influence on Mozilla to ape IE5 in every respect, right down to supporting the same 'features' (Not bugs. Definitely not bugs...), but if that's the case then it's always destined to play catch-up. The real aim has to be to support the standards laid down by the W3C (which Mozilla already does better than IE5 in most respects, before a release-level version) and provide ease of use and a good set of features - which you may or may not agree that it does - to me in most (but by no means all) cases it already outpaces IE5 on this front as well.

  • Mozilla should be trying to be so good that you start seeing "Mozilla 6 needed" on web sites

    You miss the entire point of the Mozilla project with this statement. The websites shouldn't say "Mozilla 6 needed". They should say "HTML 4.0 required" - it's all about standards, not individual applications. Backwards compatibility is less of an issue because of this - if the aim is to make sure that standards work correctly, then breaking those standards in order to ensure backwards compatibility is a bad thing, not a laudable goal.

  • Nice try. I run Mozilla on a range of operating systems (not being a single-system zealot like yourself). The version I keep most up to date is installed on a Windows 2000 partition - my laptop boots with equal ease to Win2K, Win95 and Linux. On *all* platforms Netscape 6 is inferior to the Mozilla nightly builds at or around the launch date. The fact remains that the NS6 release came before the browser was ready for prime-time, and the feature freeze came even before that. Hence the reliability problems that a lot of people have had with NS6. Note that I have no problem at all with Mozilla, and that I use it in preference to Internet Explorer under Windows. That doesn't make a buggy, advertising-ridden release with a fatally flawed installer any more excusable.
  • "I can't believe this guy (EverCode) is supposedly a mozilla coder" I missed that part. Where does he say heis a Mozilla developer? -Asa
  • Try a nightly build from here [mozilla.org]
    0.6 is quite old. It is a snapshot of the MN6 branch at the time Netscape 6 was released. That branch was cut on 9/22 and development on the branch (lasting about 6 weeks) was slower than it was on the trunk. Nightly trunk builds at the Netscape 6/Mozilla 0.6 release point were significantly better than 0.6 and we've gotten a lot better since then.
    --Asa
  • 2000121306 ^^---checkin # for that day.
    um, actually that 06 is the hour that the pull for that build happened.
    --Asa
  • I don't know.. I don't think this looks too good. It will be months before Mozilla 1.0, and that's if "we're lucky," according to the timeline (which looks a little unprofessional, but hey, whatever.) However, they haven't really gone over what their criteria is for 1.0 - that's supposed to come later.

    I feel the Mozilla project will never yield a great browser. In their quest for market share and compatibility on many platforms, thus prohibiting the use of many useful C++ features, they've ended up with not only a bloated, slow browser on anything but new computers, but, as Galeon proves, the Gecko rendering engine lacks speed as well. Although KDE's Konquerer is looking good, I'm not sure how tied into KDE that is. Hopefully my pessimism will turn out to be unnecessary, but I don't think things look good for the alternative browsers.
  • Yes, that is a valid point but there is not much that could be done about it. We have to move forward on standards support, and even Microsoft is making similar efforts as Mozilla now, from what I have read.

    Basically it took 2 years for people to get their DHTML techniques down so they worked well in both IE and Netscape. Doing this is no joke.

    Soon you will see updated techniques on how to do most of what could be done before while still making Mozilla/Netscape 6 happy.

    However, if you want to go all the way with your DHTML, use Mozilla/Netscape 6. All you have to do it look at the w3 specs, and most of it will work.
    Someday everyone will be using a standards-compliant browser, but unfortunately it will be a couple of years at least. Too bad we have to wait.

    Maybe we should all start putting those old "Netscape Now!" and "Upgrade to Netscape X.X" buttons on our web pages again to get people to upgrade. Way back when those were effective because it really was not that hard to download and upgrade. The same is now here today now that lots of people are getting fast connections so they can install Netscape 6 with ease.
  • damn! yes. i believe that's correct. i guess i'm just a master of irony :)
  • Somewhere you are very confused.

    if you are using Build 2000121306 you are not using the December 3rd build.

    Let's break it down:


    2000121306
    ^^^^---year
    2000121306
    ^^---month
    2000121306
    ^^---day
    2000121306
    ^^---checkin # for that day.


    You're using the December 13th build, not the 3rd.

    Todays build is nice as well, but there is still the canvas bug error that's been hanging around for about a week. Not nice, but if you know what you're doing, easy to work around.
  • you should grab the latest cvs of kdesupport/kdelibs/kdebase and try out konqueror. i'm not really into kde (or any other desktop environment), but konqueror just completely rules. it's fast, it's relatively light in terms of memory footprint (certainly moreso than netscape 6/4), and the html rendering is the best you'll see in a *nix environment (although not perfect yet).

    furthermore, there are lots of nifty features, such as the ability to define domain-based javascript policies, spoof your user-agent string (again, domain-based), and similar functionality for cookies. oh, and it supports netscape plugins if you have lesstif/motif. what more could one want?

    i suggest that you say hello to http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html [kde.org]

    zot!

    tmk

  • Mozilla uses GTK+, which in turn needs to use Xrender, no?

    According to the Xrender document on slashdot a couple days ago, there's no need for support above the toolkit level. In which case, the GTK+ changes just need to be completed and merged with the stable branch- something that the Mozilla developers are not directly responsible for.


  • With an attitude like that with complete disregard of the lack of quality right now, no wonder ....
    You are not being fair to Netscape Corp here. We should all stop complaining on Netscape Comm. Corporation, we should rather thank them because they deserve credits for their massive support of this open source project during the last years. (3 years soon!)

    This kind of support is better to the open source community than support from a company like Corel which promises a lot but fails to deliver. Netscape Corp. contributes to the Internet community and helps advocate the need of open systems, public specs, etc.
  • And to actualy build it you have to have over a gig of diskspace readily available, and to use it you have to allocate it around an eight of gig of RAM.

    To not be enoyed by slowness you'll need an i686 over 500 MHz.

    But if you can satisfy these requirements then it's OK: I use it as my only browser, both at home (900 MHz) and at work (500 MHz), and with mozilla 0.6 I have had only one or two mozilla crashes lost month (using WinNT).
  • I don't want to just slam mozilla. It is a very ambitious project that has tons of resources pulled out from under it. What mozilla is undertaking is huge. I think in another year or so it will be a very, very strong competitor. It's becoming wayy more stable and fast. I find just pure mozilla with netscape loaded only uses about 20megs of ram. (Note: this is just doing Free memory before - Free memory after). It's just the ends that need to be ironed out now, proformance, and the little end stuff, but extremely important, like printing. I think once some of the plugin stuff gets streamlined you're going to see people proclaiming mozilla is really coming around. Loading the JVM at start-up is hardly memory/proformance effecient. Mozilla is the only real hope for advanced new web technologies on UNIX. However, I do think some things like Konqueror and Opera will be very good at rendering "the simple stuff" but it seems to me mozilla is more being designed as a cross-platform enterprise application platform in itsself. I just hope they do iron out all the little stuff.

  • I looked for the Mozilla 0.6 source to try this myself, but they apparently don't have a tarball for it. I'd wager they have 0.6 in CVS, so I'll have to try that some day.
  • This whole thing reminds me of when GNOME came out. All we heard was bitching and whining all around about how it sucked and was buggy, and now that it's a stable project no one seems to have any real problems with it.

    I think the same thing will happen with Mozilla. You've got the core supporters (try a nightly! Or v 0.6!) and the bashers (slow, bloated, sucky) but in the end, when it's released, you'll see a lot of people using it happily with no complaints. We bitch because we're seeing a work in progress and comparing it to a fifth generation product but when we get the final product I think we'll be quite content with it. It'll render fast enough and start fast enough and we really won't care in the end because we'll have a good, modern browser. The bitching is just temporary.

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."

  • The way it is now, IE 5.5 is *so* far ahead of 4.x that there's no way anyone except those with a serious anti MS handicap and those without a choice would use the Netscape browser for surfing. Netscape 6.0 is a step *back* from 4.x.

    While I think you mean in terms of overall useablity, not rendering (obviously) in the "step back" statement for NS6, I use NS 4.x under Linux for exactly two reasons:

    1. NS 6 (and even Moz 0.6), while I love the rendering, are just too slow, and
    2. IE 5 isn't available under Linux.

    It's that simple. I can't WAIT until either NS gets its feature bloat under control, or MS decides to build IE5+ for Linux. Until then, I use NS 4.x and curse and curse and curse, simply because there are no viable alternatives. It's awful.


    TomatoMan

  • v0.6 (Score:2)

    by xant ( 99438 )
    With this release, Moz has finally turned the corner. Everything works the way it's supposed to, and although some stuff doesn't render right (www.php.net being one example - the widgets work, but it's pretty ugly), functionally, Moz is all there now, caught up with IE. Even the desktop integration with Windows works well (not perfectly).

    It's now to the point where it's a browser I can use for everything I used a browser for before, and I pretty much use a browser for everything so that's saying a lot ;). There's still some strides to make in performance, but it's good enough.
    --

  • Well, as a QA geek, and a fairly heavy tester of Mozilla, I think it looks excellent. The #1 thing that drives me batty with most projects is an unrealistic deadline that forces a product out the door before it is ready. (*cough* NS6)

    The Mozilla team is taking the more rigorous stand of 'When it is ready', and ignoring many of the pressures being put upon them by the self-declared generals of the open-source war.

    I say more power to them, and I can't wait until 1.0.

  • Unfortunately, Netscape needs to generate noise now, and has been doing almost nothing for itself or its parent companies until the release of Netscape 6. They really had no choice to release Netscape 6. If they hadn't done it soon, Netscape would have become a company with absolutely no return on investment, a company that just spent wildly on an open-source program that was neither profitable or marketable.

    I guess they were finally able to pull off the "marketable" web browser, although they loaded it up with such a huge amount of crap that many users may be wary of installing it (not to mention the installation problems, slowness in comparision to IE, etc.). I think waiting would have been ideal, but I don't think it would have been releastic for Netscape. I honestly think they waited until they felt they could afford to put their name on the browser without losing face.

    NSParadox

  • If your posts are censored how is it I come to read and respond to them?

    Your post was * critiqued. *

    Because Roger Ebert gives a movie a thumbs down does not in any way make it "censored." I still possess the power and free will to see the movie just as if he had never reviewed it at all. Those who are swayed by such reviews have only themselves to blame for their own thoughts and actions.

    Now, as for the meat of your post, what made it flamebait was not the opinion or any of the content, but rather the crude beligerant tone of the post. Learn to argue a point properly and you'll get far fewer moderations such as the one in question.

    You won't * eliminate* silly moderation though. That will only happen by eliminating all people inclined to such. Now THAT would be censorship.

    The proper way to deal with bad moderation is to shrug it off and write a piece that gets modded up to +5.

    The best revenge is ALWAYS living well.
  • I'm using a nightly build of Moz myself, but in seeing your reply I just had to add one tid bit. You'll need to give the "asswipe" 3-4 years to complete writing it, with no realistic end in site. It's just plain depressing.

  • It's primarily the GUI that's causing Mozilla all sorts of problems. Windows GUI is simple to use (compared to X, and I would argue GTK+ too but I haven't used GTK+ enough to pass judgement), and is much, much faster. The simple reason for this is twofold, the first being that Windows GUI apps talk directly with the GUI system through system calls (USER.DLL anyone?) that go straight to the device, while X requires both a netowrk layer and then a user-space layer (although some also have a kernel-space layer). While buggy device drivers under Linux (minus those with kernel-space drivers) usually won't bring the entire system down (stability) this costs speed. Poor Windows drivers can bring the system down, but you don't have the extra layer (speed).

    The second problem really isn't a Linux problem, it's poor vendor documentation and Windows-only device drivers. Most manufactorers work hard to create fast, speedy, Windows drivers. Most Linux drivers are reverse-engineered. This costs Linux some speed.

    Until someone creates a GUI system under UNIX that doesn't require a network layer, UNIX GUIs will always be slower than Windows GUIs. This network layer is simple overhead, and will always slow down a Linux GUI - even on a loopback device. As computers get faster, it might be less noticable, but the network layer always will slow it down.

  • I really want mozilla to succeed but I'm worried. I am disappointed in the DHTML support mostly - its a step backwards. Sure supporting standards is good but backward compatibility would be very nice.
    Mozilla should be trying to be so good that you start seeing "Mozilla 6 needed" on web sites rather than the current "you must have Internet Explorer to view this site".
  • For my money Mozilla 0.6 is a much more stable and usable snapshot than M18 was. The milestone release really had me wondering about how well it was ever going to work. 0.6 is pretty stable and works pretty well. It's got some annoying rough spots (links not changing colour is the most glaring) and it occasionally has a crash, but it's my everyday browser now. That's something that previous milestones couldn't claim because the bugs were too glaring and constant.
  • It looks fine under Netscape 6, and it looks horrible under IE 2.0. QED, Netscape must rule and IE suck, right? Because comparing a current release brower to an obsolete one is what we do on Slashdot, right?

  • Re:Mozilla for UNIX vs. Win32 (Score:3)

    by Mawbid ( 3993 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @11:27AM (#542074)
    GTK can be fast or slow depending on the theme. But the thing is, Mozilla isn't just using GTK, it's using its own XPFE toolkit and the GTK/XPFE interaction is strange. Try this exercise: Click Mozilla's file menu and move the mouse quickly across the menu bar to the QA menu. Now drag a corner of the Mozilla window to make the window small and then large again. In both cases you'll see that when Mozilla redraws its interface, it doesn't do it onece, but twice. First with the gtk theme, then with the XPFE chrome (try it using a garish gradient or pixmap gtk theme if you don't see it). I haven't used the Windows version in a while, but I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is avoided there.

    I don't know why it has to be done like this. I'm pretty sure GTK apps can specify their own theme and have GTK draw (once!) using that rather than drawing on top of what GTK has already drawn. Perhaps someone can offer an explanation.

    You might want to checkout some browsers that use Mozilla's rendering engine and straight GTK for the interface instead of Mozilla's XPFE. Galeon [sourceforge.net] and SkipStone [muhri.net] are two examples, but unfortunately I find they crash a lot more than Mozilla.
    --

  • Re:Mozilla for UNIX vs. Win32 (Score:3)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @08:06AM (#542075) Homepage
    I've found that compiling mozilla yourself, omitting all the debugging stuff, the speed increases tremendously. As for stability, there are _huge_ differences depending on exactly what nightly build (or cvs timestamp) you use; it can go from unusable to "why don't they just release this version?" in a day (and back).

  • use the December 3rd Build (Score:3)

    by HomerJ ( 11142 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:40AM (#542076)
    I've been using the December 3rd Build since it was the lastest. It's been really stable(this it's crashed twice) SSL works(I've orderd mose then 3 things using it so far), Netscape's Java plugin and even the flash player plugin works without problems.

    It's also pretty speedy. At least as fast as Netscape 4, and it renders pages alot faster.I also use the mail and news client. It's a little slow when you have a alot of e-mail(200+ messages in a folder), but I think it's a really nice e-mail program.

    To really use mozilla, you just have to find a good nightly, and stick with it. The 2000121306 build is what I've been using as it's worked great. The only thing I hope doesn't happen is that it timebombs in 30 days, because I'll have to hunt for another nightly that works as well as this one. :-/

  • Mozilla 1.0 2002 (Score:3)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:28AM (#542077) Journal
    I think we'll probably be unlucky and not see mozilla 1.0 till 2002. Oh well it can only get better. Someone mentioned to me the other day that Mozilla has over 2Million lines of code. FYI that is as many as there are the the Linux kernel tree. It was a 63 meg cvs checkout.

    WOW. I like what the browser does, but it would be real nice if it was not so big.

    konqueror crashes to much or it does not render allpages corectly.

    Netscape 4.. well lets not go there.

    It will be so nice to see a good browser for UNIX. On that will run fast on a low spped pentium (133 or so) with a little memory footprint (32Meg even though I have more). One that renders HTML 4.0, CSS 1 & 2, DOM, ECMA Script. You know it would be nice to visit sites like CNeT TV and be able to use a newer browser to view the video, neither moizilla, netscape nor konqueror work! I still HAVE to use Netscape 4.x.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Re:milestones? (Score:3)

    by ppanon ( 16583 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @11:18AM (#542078) Homepage Journal
    If you don't some kind of goal associated with the number and the date I don't see what this roadmap actually tells you.


    The goals are really pretty clear:

    The previous roadmap charted Mozilla's path through the release of Netscape 6 and beyond, toward the goal of releasing a Mozilla 1.0 milestone. In that update, I wrote "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness" and not any particular new feature. I want to make clear here 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.

    Ever since Netscape 6.0 was released, the focus has been performance improvements and bug fixes. The rest of the roadmap describes how to nominate bugs for the following releases. The goals of the releases will be to fix the bugs that have been most nominated for fixing in those releases. You can't get more democratic than that.

    Unlike the misleading statements of Evercode up above, the targets also involve decreasing the footprint of Mozilla. The Mozilla developers aren't just waiting for systems to get faster to hide the bloat. Now that Mozilla is basically feature complete, they are actively working on decreasing the resource footprint and increasing performance. Mozilla (and Netscape) releases will just get faster from here onwards, and not because it's expected that you will upgrade to a 1.7GHz processor in 2001.

  • Re:Netscape 6.0 release vs Mozilla 1.0 release (Score:3)

    by iapetus ( 24050 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @09:29AM (#542079) Homepage
    The problem is that the Netscape 6 release is the worst possible publicity that Mozilla could receive - it's buggy, and as the original poster suggests it shows a complete disregard for quality issues. While Mozilla is a perfectly competent browser (for those who are willing to accept it as a *pre-release* piece of software) and has replaced IE on my machine entirely, a lot of people are only seeing the NS release, which is giving them a bad impression, and thus reflecting negatively on Mozilla, and on open-source applications in general.

    Yes, NS have done a good thing in supporting the open-source approach to Mozilla. But they have done *nobody* (including themselves) any favours by conceding to the pressure and releasing a product for the scrutiny of the general public before it's ready.

  • Re:milestones? (Score:3)

    by macpeep ( 36699 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:33AM (#542080)
    As of M18, there are no more Mx milestones. Instead, we have what you see now: Mozilla x.y.z.

  • One bug that keeps me from recommending (Score:3)

    by z4ce ( 67861 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @10:45AM (#542081)
    There is only one bug that keeps me from recommending mozilla to friends. That is, bug 7201 The fact that Mozilla cannot print is absolutely terrible. If you try to print a weather forecast at intellicast.com you get 9 pages! Even each gets printed out on a separate page. It's quite crazy. Please vote for it.

    Ian

  • it may be necessary... (Score:3)

    by =trott= ( 94164 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:38AM (#542082) Homepage
    To give up after all...
    Well, maybe not to give up upon creating a good browser, but does anyone feel, like me, that this is going a bit too far?
    Linux on the desktop may not be there yet, but at least until some time ago we had a usable browser. However, with the many changes in web technology (yeah, standards, well let me tell you: standards are what most people use, not what's dictated) I too must now admit for some time that compared to IE on windows (and it must be stresses: yes, on windows only, but that's another matter) netscape 4 is bloated and featureless...
    So what did I recommend a friend lately for use on his LInux desktop? Indeed...Mozilla...Boy, what a disappointment it was...
    I mean, plugins either don't load or are a b*tch to install, some web sites do not display correctly, startup time is slow (after all this time...debugging code or not...), ssl requires a separate download, the mail client is pure shit, still no LDAP support, you get the picture.
    Then Netscape killed the little reputation mozilla managed to make for itself by releasing NS6 release while it's somewhere more along the lines of pre-beta...
    Doesn't anyone else feel that mozilla's development compared to what it achieved shows a rather low success ratio?
    Is there really anyone out there, despite the zealotry, that would recommend deploying mozilla or NS6 to a few hundred workstations to his boss? How about within a few months? Not me...
    I keep thinking that if all these unnecessary 'features' had been left out...We're getting into a dangerous situation here...This is yet one more open-source project that looks like it will fail miserably and with a high profile. And what the hell will we use as our browser in the future? Sure, it displays pure html code mostly fine, but what about those other 80 percent of the web that use plugins or extra features?

  • that's uninformed guesswork (Score:3)

    by q000921 ( 235076 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @09:46PM (#542083)
    Windows GUI is simple to use (compared to X, and I would argue GTK+ too but I haven't used GTK+ enough to pass judgement), and is much, much faster. The simple reason for this is twofold, the first being that Windows GUI apps talk directly with the GUI system through system calls (USER.DLL anyone?) that go straight to the device, while X requires both a netowrk layer and then a user-space layer (although some also have a kernel-space layer).

    I wish people would stop engaging in this kind of uniformed guesswork. X11 is plenty fast for rendering HTML; people have used it for much more demanding applications. If Mozilla has a slow GUI, then it's because it isn't written right. If Mozilla runs fast on Windows and slow on Linux, then perhaps its toolkit makes assumptions about the underlying Window system that apply to Windows and don't apply to X11. That doesn't make X11 slow, it makes Mozilla poorly written.

    Until someone creates a GUI system under UNIX that doesn't require a network layer, UNIX GUIs will always be slower than Windows GUIs.

    That isn't really relevant to building a fast browser--both GUIs are plenty responsive and fast for that. But it is also not true in general. The X11 protocol can have a lot of advantages over the procedure-call-based approach in Win32, and it is far from clear which one ought to perform better in general. The matter gets even more complex in the presence of graphics co-processors, multiprocessors, or a networked display, where X11 can often take advantage of parallelism and asynchronous processing much better. In any case, in practice, in my experience, X11 is often as fast or faster than Win32.

  • Mozilla for UNIX vs. Win32 (Score:4)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:55AM (#542084) Homepage
    Long story, but I run Mozilla on both my Linux (Redhat 7) box and on Win32. It is really quite acceptable on Windows NT -- performs *adequately* (but not fantastically) and doesn't crash much.

    On Linux is another story. It is just plain *slow*, buggy and crashes a lot. I would love to hear comments -- is this a result of using GTK? GTK doesn't exactly have a reputation for being blindingly fast. Or is it something else? Is it just that Netscape engineers have put more effort into tuning the Windows version?

    Anyone who can comment I would be interested. I've been tempted to break out my profiler and see if I could speed things up a bit on Linux, but haven't been sure where the problem really was.

    --

  • Netscape 6.0 release vs Mozilla 1.0 release (Score:4)

    by macpeep ( 36699 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:16AM (#542085)
    What I find interesting is how Mozilla (the guys working on the browser) doesn't consider the code to be release worthy until in about six months. Netscape on the other hand considers it ok enough to ship. With an attitude like that with complete disregard of the lack of quality right now, no wonder IE is stomping all over them and no wonder 4.0 sucked as bad as it did.

    I was one of those who was all-out for XPFE and Raptor (also known as NG layout, also known as Gecko) becoming the base for the new browser back when that was an issue. Now I'm starting to think that maybe the optimized table-rendering + some other tweaks (like not re-loading from the cache when a window is resized) would have been a better strategy for a 5.0 release. A slightly improved rendering engine from 4.x and what was then known as Aurora (now re-appearing as the sidebar) would have been enough to push Netscape to the point where many people could have used it as the #1 browser until 6.0 came with the new technology.

    The way it is now, IE 5.5 is *so* far ahead of 4.x that there's no way anyone except those with a serious anti MS handicap and those without a choice would use the Netscape browser for surfing. Netscape 6.0 is a step *back* from 4.x. Opera and a couple of other products are showing promise but the "best viewed with xxxxx" attitude the web has (which is not quite as bad anymore, compared to two years ago) kind of rules them out because so many sites are broken for them due to JavaScript and similar breakage.

    Here's hoping that Mozilla 1.0 will not be released until it's ready, stable, performs well and looks good!

  • Re:Does It Really Work? (Score:4)

    by EverCode ( 60025 ) on Saturday December 23, 2000 @07:45AM (#542086) Homepage
    The only way to find out is to download it and give it a try yourself. Of course it works, but it may or may not appeal to you.

    In my opinion, it works better then Netscape 4.x, so if you have used that, you should expect more. There is one exceptions, Mozilla will run poorly on machines with not very much memory. Realistically, you should have 128 meg.

    People don't realize that Mozilla is built for the future. In a year or so, the 'bloat' won't be an issue anymore because more people will have better hardware. In a couple of years, Mozilla will probably launch as fast as Netscape 1 did.

    To top it off, I expect the Mozilla codebase to last for several years, if not more. No joke because we are reaching the peak of HTML, XML, DOM feature saturation for web browsers. There is only so much more we can add, therefore Mozilla will never really get outdated.

    Yes, it really works, and will be working well for a long time.

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