Review of Mozilla's 2002 271
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."
Mozilla's future's so bright (Score:3, Funny)
Long live the bayesian spam filtering!
Chimera (Score:5, Informative)
Chimera provides exactly the features I need, and none more, none less. big kudoos to the chimdevs. If you read this : u guys rock !
Re:Chimera (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't have a file there, make one and put this in it:
// Don't play those animated gifs over and over.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");
Re:Chimera (Score:2)
Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chimera (Score:4, Interesting)
Obvious features I'd like to see though:
more OSXisms, like glowing borders around selected textareas (ala omniweb)
Better theme support, including a theme/preference for 'Textured' (aka brushed metal). This stuff can be done with external apps like InterfaceBuilder, but it should be easier.
UserAgent quick-selects and customization within Preferences, ala Opera
SOME added mail functionality, such as include full webpage as attachment. I like 0.6 adding send link, but I want send page as well to mail copies of 'registration required' pages.
more stability.
better 'threading' behavior: I notice that tabs behave 'blocked' by other tabs' slowness or failure to load pages. Each tab (and browser window obviously) should download and behave independently of any other.
more features, including autofill, more keyboard shortcuts, etc.
better documentation
better interface into 'Helper Application' settings, such as RealPlayer and QuickTime. Ideally Chimera would ask me before it loads something that runs within a helper app whether I want to save or run. This should be configurable and is pretty much a standard item in modern browsers. 0.6 addresses this a bit, but I'd prefer to have an additional option to choose per-click, in order to best avoid rogue code.
Integrate Privoxy :)
Better performance and stability :)
I don't change web habits often, but I have gone from Mozilla web+mail to OS X Mail + Chimera and I'm quite happy with the switch. Chimera should be the only web browser ANY OS X user ever needs, from Grandmas to Geeks. And, of course, being an OS X program, it needs to be pretty, easy to use, and very very powerful. In fact, as it stands now, it IMHO should be the standard OS X browser distributed by Apple, but only when it's a bit more stable (it crashes often on the NYTimes site, and particularly when closing tabs or going from one site to another by cmd-l, typing a new url, and hitting enter when a different page was already loading).
I only hope that moving to the 1.2 (or any other post 1.0) branch won't be too painful or duplicative of work.. I already don't like that the kill-tab behavior is 'backwards' and that throws me when I use Moz..
Re:Chimera (Score:2, Informative)
We frequently ask for graphic designers and documenters and testers for our OSS projects. Positive and constructive feedback such as otis' comments are just as useful because they help developers understand which parts of their app are useful and well received, and where there is room for impovement.
Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)
The Chimera documentation about proxy settings [mozilla.org] states:
Proxy Servers
Some organizations block direct connections to the Internet, for security or other reasons. In these situations, connections are required to go through proxy servers, which are intermediate servers that redirect connections to their final destination.
Chimera normally gets information about yor proxy server settings from the Network System Preferences pane (see the "Proxies" tab there). If you switch network locations, or change the proxy settings, Chimera will pick up those new settings without restarting.
It then goes on to describe how to enable Proxy Auto Config support in Chimera by way of several hidden preferences.
Re:Chimera (Score:2)
In particular:
Re:Chimera (Score:2)
I figure keyworded search makes up for lack of the search integration, I might be using this browser after all.
Re:Chimera (Score:3, Interesting)
Chimera is *SLOW*. Every time I switch back to phoenix I'm awe struke at it's speed. The Chimera team really should fold considerable chunks of the phoenix code into themselves, or something rather drastic.
Alternatively Phoenix should release a version that has "apple look and feel", but I get the impression there might be an under the table deal between Apple and Netscape to leave Chimera as the only viable browser.
I love phonix, I just wish it was about twice as fast.
Re:Chimera screenshots (Score:2)
http://chimera.mozdev.org/screenshots.html
I used IE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I used IE (Score:3, Informative)
If you haven't done it yet, check out Opera as well. Although I find phoenix very alluring, Opera is still king in the low resource / high speed / high efficiency department.
Re:I used IE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Opera (Score:2)
Re:I used IE (Score:2)
Re:I used IE (Score:2, Insightful)
Sadly, I too use IE most of the time. Mostly because my box simply doesn't handle the newer Mozilla based browsers well. (If anyone has any 72-pin chips lying around, you can get in touch with me, seriously).
Where was i? Oh, yea, I think that Mozilla is a superior browser, it's more (what's that buzzword?) robust than IE and it seemingly does things right. But even phoenix is a little slow to load for me, and although I am about to check out the Beonex Communicator, I don't have much faith it'll run any better.
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post. Developers have always been forgetful of the simple fact that not every one in the world gets a new computer, or even an upgrade, every six months. It's nice to see a "lite" browser, but only if it's really light and not just "requires only a Pentium3/64MB RAM" - that's not light at all for me, or about two-thirds of the people I know. We use older machines because we either love them or can't afford anything new and shiny.
And if none of this makes sense, blame the alcohol my liver's still dealing with.
Red star on that zeppelin (Score:2, Funny)
A red star is painted on that zeppelin! RED STAR - why the hell? Communists in China and Russia are using red star -logos even today. So does this mean that Mozilla is the communist choice?
And the French are using. . . (Score:2)
You had a point in there somewhere, or what?
I'm sorry, but sympathetic magic doesn't work.
KFG
Re:And the French are using. . . (Score:2)
And so do the Russians, for that matter.
Likely explanation... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, there is a "revolutionary" quality to much of the Mozilla work, which the red star also harkens to.
mahlen
I finally dropped IE for Moz this year... (Score:4, Informative)
I just started .... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I just started .... (Score:2)
There's the aforementioned patches, and it does work in K-Meleon out of the box. I take back all my badmouthing of K-Meleon -- it was worth the wait (it is still a hell of an insular cathedral of a development group though)
Re:I just started .... (Score:2)
This is a joke right?
It has been in Bugzilla for as long as I can remember. There is the mozscroll [mozdev.org] project to implement this functionality, but it's progress has been very slow.
I was not satisfied with the time it was taking to bring middle-click scrolling to Phoenix so I wrote Autoscroll [mozdev.org]. It only took about 15 minutes to have a working implementation, although it has progressed since then. There are a few quirks that show up now and then, but as it has already been stated on here, it isn't production quality yet, but is still very usable.
I look forward to seeing what mozscroll brings to the table, but until then Autoscroll fulfills my needs and by the sounds of it, many others.
Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.
No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.
This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.
And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.
This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
That will change everything about distribution.
How much you want to bet that the vast majority of people using Mozilla, downloaded it on a broadband connection?
Limited bandwidth is definitely the biggest "barrier to entry" in this market.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2)
Of course, I'm already hooked on Mozilla. People not hooked may not be willing to spend half an hour downloading a browser, and they certainly won't do it every night.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2, Insightful)
Over five years ago, people were proclaiming that Linux "had failed" to make a dent in the server market.
Don't count the game over until it's really over, and perhaps not even then.
mozilla...jwz...The Fork. Three degrees! (Score:2, Funny)
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
See users switch. Switch, users, switch! See RMS fume. Fume, RMS, fume.
If you have to brainstorm ways of getting users to switch to your very-slightly-different application, the game is already over and you lost.
No popups, no Javascript, no 0wN0RZing. When Mozilla gets better than IE 3.0, call me. And please shut up about the tabs. Hide task bar much?
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
If AOL adopts it, and then within 1 yr 20% of american web surfers are using the gecko engine, then everyone will need to adhere more closely to standards, and life will be grand.
Get worked up over standards, not about achieving global dominance.
ostiguy
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? What will happen if Mozilla stagnates? Will people stop working on it in their free time?
My point is that the beauty of Open Source is that you really don't have any competition. If you're doing it for free, nobody can run you out of business.
This is why when asked about Microsoft, Linus generally responds that he doesn't give a shit what they do.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2)
a) promote Free Software to the world, both to help them (if you believe in FS you'll believe in this), and to help ourselves, as it means more people will provide commercial services for us and more people will get into developing Free Software
b) ensure that we can always use Free Software, i.e. that the hardware vendors don't lock us out (as many already do to some extent, but nowehere near Palladium levels), and that we can inteoperate with others
Now b) becomes more significant with Mozilla, because unless IE sees some serious competition, and lazy web designers start recognising web starndards, web standards problems can only get worse. There's no point in having a great browser if it can't display most web pages properly.
So whilst it's not important that Mozilla "dominates", it's important that it remains high-profile enough to promote free software, and the rights of free software users.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
It goes like this:
x: here's a CD with mozilla
o: what does it do?
x: it's an internet browser, like IE, without the pop-up ads, and a mail client like outlook minus the viruses.
o: cool, i'll try it!
OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort. I bet that almost half of them are going to WANT to try it once they hear about pop-up blocking, and a good number of them will like tabbed browsing. They might even like type-ahead or gestures or google search in the location bar.
We are not talking about stuff like standards compatibility, personal data encryption, or being open-sourse that your average windows user could not care less about. Mozilla has cool features, and is reasonably easy to use. Sure, it's a little slow, but that is becoming less and less of a problem, as cpu speeds go up and mozilla gets more optimized/ less bloated (think phoenix).
Getting people to use linux is not as easy by a long shot: young peolpe who have plenty of free time and a desire to try things are instantly put off by the lack of games (and no, things like winex, don't cut it), while older people are VERY afraid to change their working enviroment (learning windows took them long enough, they sure as hell ain't changing now) no matter how much more stable/fast linux is. Plus, when trying to get people to use linux you probably have to help them back-up their files (think mp3), install linux and get it to a working shape, which takes a LOT of time, both yours and theirs.
Mozilla on the other hand takes 2 minutes to install, 5 minutes (with mailnews) to configure and one minute to tell people to middle/ ctrl click to open tabs.
So yes, i do believe that mozilla has an easier job than linux in getting to the end-users desktop.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2)
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:3, Informative)
Netscape and Mozilla are almost the exact same thing--the only real difference is logo and the 50 AOL shortcuts that Netscape installs. Other than that, each version of Netscape is from a Mozilla build, and the programmers working on Netscape are basically the same ones working on Mozilla.
Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2, Interesting)
I know XP has a built-in image viewer, yet most people prefer downloading ACDSee instead.
XP has MSN Msngr in it. Yet people prefer ICQ.
and the MUA functionality is still broken (Score:2)
Mozilla is great for web development (Score:3, Interesting)
Even more so, tabbed web browsing is great for testing various web applications.
Finally, I love the HTML composer... it's great for composing little slashdot messages
Thank you Mozilla for Galeon! (Score:2)
Especially the 1.3.X series of both browsers (using a 1.3 alpha build of Moz with 1.3.1 build of Galeon). You've made my GNOME 2 experience richer, and given me the best combination of tabbed browing and smart toolbar I could ask for.
1.7 % Market Share (Score:4, Insightful)
In the last part of the article, it mentions that Mozilla based browsers have 1.7 % of the market share. I would advise web-sites that depens on internet sales not to discount this share. Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet. Percisely, the best target audience.
The IE crowd is filled with old grandmom who play solitare and who think that the Internet in on their "Hard-Drive" - you know, the "Hard Drive" that sits under their Packard-Bell monitor.
Microsoft can keep those users.
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2)
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2)
$ wc -l access_log
2433667 access_log
$ grep Gecko access_log | wc -l
96362
Almost 4% since yesterday morning!
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2)
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2)
You're wrong on two accounts. Number 1, if you really are some uberintelligent computer expert, you probably also don't make stupid impulse purchases online. Suppose you make triple the purchases of Grandma... no.. better yet...10 times. Do you still even approach the sheer numbers of the herd?
Secondly, why are you being such an elitist jerk?
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. I'd say that the 1.7% (closer to 0.5% on my sites) are mostly college kids who don't buy anything... exactly the kind of sufers I *don't* want.
number is probably wrong anyway (Score:2)
If there is a number at all, I'd say IE usage is probably in the low 80s, with the rest split among Mozilla, embedded browsers, and a few other players. No serious business can design only for IE, and no serious business has to anyway.
Re:1.7 % Market Share (Score:2)
No (obviously) , what I'm saying, is that any web-site that makes their site IE exclusive is pising away a good group of rich customers; The kind of customers that know what they want and won't return half the items after they broke them.
I'd take an Apple/Unix customer any day over a Dell user - Dell people are concerned with cost, Apple/Unix people are concerned with value.
There is a theory that one the reasons that Honda trumps GM in reliability, is that a typical Honda customer is college educted and will take care of the vehicle, while the typical GM bubba runs the car into the ground and only adds oil when the idiot light comes on.
I own a GM vehicle, and it's been extremly reliable, (190,000 miles of worry-free driving) possibly because I've taken care of it the way a typical Honda owner does.
Sites that piss away the Mozilla crowd are just a stupid as an airline that pisses away the Business crowd.
dangerous mistake in reasoning (Score:2)
Does that mean that they should have just ignored Mozilla? Quite to the contrary. Instead of the several thousand dollars I would have spent on books over that period, I only spent a few hundred--on books I couldn't easily get on another web site. When I did need to order from them, I'd drag myself over to my Windows laptop after looking long and hard elsewhere. And I still don't trust their web site and avoid it when I can.
a year ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I tell people i use Mozilla, and Some of them actually know what it is, or have heard of it. Not to mention that since there is a 1.X release out, i can confidently install it on a friends or clients machine without a lot of worry of weird crashes and bugs.
Once Mozillas spam filtering becomes easy and useful, I can see myself converting a LOT more people a lot more easily than i already have. So far i've converted about 25 diehard IE users... and i wonder how many they have converted.
Re:a year ago (Score:5, Informative)
1.) He was able to import his Outlook stuff into Mozilla Mail no problem.
2.) All he needed was a spelling checker plugin for the mail client (Got one from Mozdev) and it was 100% perfect for him.
3.) Mozilla "Imported" his many hundreds of bookmarks which he definatly needed.
4.) The built in popup blocker has worked wonders for him.
5.) He has Mozilla sit in the system tray so he doesn't notice any load up delays.
When I was converting my Dad to Mozilla I showed him how much better it is and he definatly agreed. He asked a few questions about how to make some things work and I got him up and running no sweat. Ever since he got klez because of Outlook (Partially his fault, yadda yadda yadda..) he believes that Mozilla Mail is greater since he now doesn't worry (for the most part) about mail viruses.
So if you wanna convert someone, start with a family member.
That's the ticket! (Score:2)
Happy new year.
Is the road to success as a standalone? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is where OSS succeeds right now in mainstream implementations, as a base that a value-added integrator can then modify for clients to achieve a lower cost solution. It is hard for OSS to market directly to end-users. OSS is not close enough to end-users to know how to modify interface and other features to suit their needs. However, value-added integrators are.
With microsoft, value-added integrators face high licensing fees and the danger that microsoft will try to eat their lunch. In OSS, this is less an issue.
However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back? In the end, I suspect the interest for contribution to mozilla is with platform providers, e.g., AOL, who do not want access to their platforms controlled by their competitors. Note, a number of OSS projects have moved to corporate sponsorship congruent with this view, e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and even Apache.
So, mozilla might find its real success as a neutral technology that can be adapted across a number of platforms by value-added integrators. It will have to look for support to corporations whose interest is in having neutral access technologies for their platforms.
Re:Is the road to success as a standalone? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is the road to success as a standalone? (Score:2)
Browser good, Mail/News not so good (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla also has tabbed browsing, a popup blocker, etc. etc. The only area I have noticed where Mozilla still lags is in some DHTML (JavaScript/DOM) stuff. For example, pages that implement animation using DHTML can be much slower than IE.
The Mozilla Mail/News client, on the other hand, has not been so successful, in my opinion. For example, the last time I tried to use it, it would do strange things when I tried to insert blank lines between quoted lines in a reply.
Re:Browser good, Mail/News not so good (Score:2)
If I use Outlook and click a link in an email it launches Phoenix to that particular URL. I simply had to set Phoenix as my default browser for this to work.
I do however experience an issue similar to yours in using the MSN Messenger, where it launches IE, default browser be damned, for checking my hotmail account or sending new emails using hotmail.
I like Netscape 7.01 but there's one problem (Score:2)
Well there is one problem though: it has a bad habit of expiring "cookies" in only a few days. Whenever I save settings for online message boards under Netscape 7.01 it would stop saving that cookie after at most 4-5 days; does anyone know how to stamp out that problem? =(
Re:Browser good, Mail/News not so good (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, replying to e-mails using the Mozilla mail client is painful. Not enough to stop me from using it, but enough to get me to swear occasionally. Most of the problems involve working with blockquotes: adding reply lines in the middle of them, merging them, moving text in and out of them. A quick bugzilla search brought up 178899,155609,144998,115498.
Mozilla and Mac OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
A trick to speed up Mozilla v1.2.1 and previous... (Score:4, Interesting)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Great performance tuning pref setting
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 18:16:37 +0100
From: Markus Hübner
Organization: Another Netscape Collabra Server User
Newsgroups:
netscape.public.mozilla.win32,
References:
Olaf Dietsche wrote:
> Markus Hübner writes:
>
>
>>Jonathan Arnold wrote:
>>
>>>>>http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show
>>>>>is highly interesting!
>>>>
>>>>Can't wait for the pref additions to try it out, looks interesting.
>>>
>>>It's in Moztweak.
>>>
>>
>>cool - but it would be really needed to tune the default value.
>>the "standard mozilla user" doesn't have Moztweak nor does the typical
>>Netscape (Gecko embedded browser) user.
>
>
> Well, every user has an editor. You can put the following line
> into prefs.js or user.js:
>
> user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 500);
>
> I tested this with various values, but couldn't see any difference
> until I tried:
>
> user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
>
> This is in sync with:
>
>
> Regards, Olaf.
Thx for the pointer to mozillazine, Olaf!
And no Mozilla in Playboy! (Score:5, Funny)
Mozillazine had a blurb [mozillazine.org] about it. Here's the full text:
This _has_ to be good for mainstream acceptance when such non-tech-oriented magazines like Playboy laud Mozilla so greatly. Maybe if other general living and style magazines adopt such a positive attitude, we'll see a surge in Mozilla adoption. Hey, maybe its wishful thinking but if nothing else, it's increasing awareness.
P.S. -- Consider this proof that I *DO* read the articles. :-P
Playzilla (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and heres a link to the Pornzilla project [netscape.com] -- theyre the ones whove been putting pressure on the developers (and contributing some code too) to make Mozilla a wonderful browser for all the perverts out there.
Mozilla should save its state. Mozilla crashes all (Score:2)
I often need to research several topics at the same time. For example, when a customer calls I may need to open a new topic. I open several instances of Mozilla, each with several tabs on one topic.
However, when Mozilla crashes, all instances of Mozilla browser and all instances of Mozilla mail disappear.
It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting the computer.
Re:Mozilla should save its state. Mozilla crashes (Score:2)
Crashing caused by buffer or virtual memory probs? (Score:2)
Mozilla doesn't often crash, as you say. It crashes (for me) only when there are a lot of instances of Mozilla running with a lot of tabs and I am typing rapidly or choosing menu operations rapidly. The crash problem seems to be caused by a buffer of operations being overrun.
The crashing may be associated with the known problems of Windows XP when the OS is operating close to the limits of installed memory, and it beginning to use virtual memory.
2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is not a troll post!
2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... at least of Mozilla's current form.
The reason? AOL Communicator [betanews.com]! I downloaded a beta version from www.datakill.com [datakill.com] and I think, it has a bright future.
The reasons:
Yes it's true. Finally they got rid of the sluggish XUL interface and still being multi-plattform.
Phoenix (or whatever the future name will be) has helped, but Phoenix' interface is still somewhat slow compared to native Windows apps. Phoenix' GUI toolkit is also not fully aware of Visual Styles (skins for WinXP) - the menus look ''old school'', while the other apps have flat/skinned menus.
AOL Communicator (thanks to wxWindows) uses native widgets everywhere.
Quote from the included copyright-notice.txt:
AOL Communicator uses the following libraries and modules:
wxWindows libraries Copyright (c) 1998 Julian Smart, Robert
Roebling. The wxWindows source code, available under the
wxWindows Library License, Version 3, can be found at
http://www.wxwindows.org [wxwindows.org].
While the beta version does only consist of an eMail app and the Instant Messenger (compatible with AIM and ICQ), AOL is also developing a browser component.
If you have a look into the file ''AOL Communicator\locale\cat\ac_help.mo'', you can find the following strings (BTW, ''Photon'' is the codename for the Communicator):
About Photon Browser
Photon Browser is not currently your default browser.
Would you like to make it your default browser?
Oh yes, I can't wait for the final release. I hope there will be an open source version of it (without the AOL specific stuff like AOL Mail or the Instant Messenger - called Mozilla 2.0 or something like that), to allow porting it to other platforms.
Oh, BTW... I did an experiment and it worked: You can move the mail folder from Mozilla's profile directory to AOL Communicator's profile directory. All your mails stay intact.
Honestly, I don't know why the Mozilla/Netscape developers waste their time in creating a new toolkit (the one that Phoenix uses), if they should better convince their bosses from AOL to open the source of the Communicator.
PS: Thanks for reading this post and (hopefully) not modding me down as ''Troll'' :)
Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) AOL Communicator is a pet project of a AOL VP who hates Netscape and wants the division to disappear. It's not clear to me how he thinks Gecko will get maintained after that.
2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.
The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens in the very near future...
Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but developers of an end-user application (Mozilla/Netscape) should focus on the end user, not other developers.
1.) In some situations (not always, but IMHO too often - when Phoenix/Mozilla displays large images or complex tables) the context menu takes a few seconds to appear. From a user's perspective, this is not acceptable (I hope you don't have simmilar expieriences, because that's very annoying).
2.) If XUL is so great, why are there so many projects to get rid of it? (Geleon, K-Meleon, Chimera,...)
IMO this does only fragment the development of Mozilla. If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.
Personally, I don't care if it's wxWindows or some other toolkit. My point is, that Mozilla should've used a toolkit that looks fammiliar to the user (not like some alien app as Mozilla with the Modern theme) and has good performance.
Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:2, Interesting)
May I ask why?
Market Share (Score:2)
Anyone knows what is the market share for Mozilla and/or phoenix now a days?
Re:Market Share (Score:2)
Wrong direction, guys (Score:4, Informative)
"Currently, remote Mozilla applications are not prevalent because development focuses on making the client applications as stable and efficient as possible. Therefore, this area of Mozilla development is largely speculatative. This chapter argues that remote applications are worth looking at more closely."
The Mozilla developers are focused on making another VB instead of providing remote HTTP-friendly GUI apps. That is where the real need is. The developers are getting away from webbiness, but that *should* be the focus of a browser.
I don't get it.
Re:Wrong direction, guys (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe they mean a server-centric application where the client is Mozilla. It would not be conceptually much different than a web app, but you would be allowed to use XUL's GUI widgets and have GUI-like functionality like not having to redraw the entire page just to change one item on it.
The server may have nothing to do with Mozilla, other than sending Mozilla-recognized commands or markup to the client. But the server could be runing PHP, Java, ASP, ColdFusion, or whatever.
Re:Wrong direction, guys (Score:2)
Unfortunately, there are some bugs to be worked out. I was going to create a new app I'm working on in XUL, partly to have a "better" interface and partly to thumb my nose at Microsoft and hopefully get more people to try Mozilla. But I ran into some problems and it's back to standard HTML/CSS.
Re:Wrong direction, guys (Score:2)
For one thing, I got excited about using the HTML composer to allow people to write messages. But apparently that is only available in chrome apps (which are installed locally, not fetched via HTTP). When I reverted to plain-text boxes, I discovered that I could not even get XUL to do the equivelant of wrap=soft in HTML -- the user had to press a hard Enter at the end of every line! That is probably the biggest "killer", for now anyway, for this particular application. Making it look and feel nice to users is of utmost importance.
Also, Mozilla seems to have fairly unstable support for changing some properties dynamically. Some things that worked great in Mozilla 1.0.1 don't work right at all in any recent build (since last August I think). Here [yoderdev.com] is a test page that I put up. When you move the mouse over the image, it's supposed to increase/decrease the opacity. Works great in 1.0.1, but in recent builds it just works the first time the mouse touches it, then the opacity just stays the same. I filed a bug on this -- Bugzilla #185432. Not an issue for my afformentioned application, but I believe Mozilla+XUL could be huge in the edutainment market, and this kind of thing makes it almost worthless for that. They need to get this kind of thing working reliably in all builds.
Re:Wrong direction, guys (Score:2)
Still, for now, I'm thinking it's probably wisest to stick to HTML/CSS. BUT... I think I'll keep looking at XUL, and maybe use it to provide an alternate interface to the same site, as soon as I can. That may be the best of both worlds! Still encourage Mozilla use, but don't limit yourself to a small fraction of the Internet's users (though hopefully it will be a large fraction by the end of this year).
My Mozilla Experience in 2002 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My Bad, this post has zero formatting (Score:2)
Tired of IE users. (Score:5, Informative)
From this I found a few interesting things. The first, which is encouraging, is that it seem to be working. The percentage of people who visit my site using Mozilla started rising sharply. I went from about 1% to almost 5%. The second thing, which is curious, is that a lot less people are actually using IE than you might think. My server logs show that about 80% of my visitors use IE, but only about 40% get the popunder. My conclusion is that there are a lot of browsers out there that fake the user agent, or many people have found a way to disable popunders in IE. (have javascript disabled, or some such).
If you want the code to do the popunder so you can advertise mozilla on your site, its easy to grab the Javascript from my home page, just view source.
Re:Tired of IE users. (Score:2)
And off-topic, but gotta ask... you're a Miller in the Conestoga area of PA, so I suppose you have Mennonite connections?
Slightly different approach (Score:3, Informative)
var strBrowser = navigator.userAgent;
if (strBrowser.indexOf("MSIE")> 0) {
document.write("<p><strong>");
document.write("Warning: you appear to be viewing this page with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which has numerous bugs and ");
document.write('<a href="http://www.nwnetworks.com/iesc.html"> security holes.</a>');
document.write(" It is recommended that you upgrade to a more secure browser, ");
document.write('such as <a href="http://www.mozilla.org">Mozilla,</a> ; ');
document.write('<a href="http://home.netscape.com/computing/download
document.write('or <a href="http://www.opera.com">Opera.</a>');
document.write("</strong></p>");
}
Re:Tired of IE users. (Score:2)
Re: Validation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Validation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Validation (Score:5, Insightful)
The bug was eventually fixed, but simply writing and testing it once wouldn't have worked.
Yeah, it's so much easier, but you're ignoring reality. Browsers have bugs, and if you don't test it in the browsers that are *actually* in common use, you're asking for trouble. Even if it works in an early version of IE, Microsoft (and even the Mozilla project) have broken things in later versions which worked in earlier versions.Re: Validation (Score:3, Informative)
In my experience, I have removed serious structural errors from web pages, in pages that I wrote as well as in pages that other wrote, far more easily by validating the HTML instead of trying to check in different browsers. After validating, you can always go the extra mile and check the page in other browsers, but usually you don't even need to.
Re: Validation (Score:2)
Re: Validation (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Validation (Score:2)
Re: Validation (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.
HTML Validation [w3.org] only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec [w3.org] correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.
CSS validation [w3.org] has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.
In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)
(I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)
Re: Validation (Score:2)
Re:Konqueror = Deadzilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No Chimera? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:moron the NYT (Score:2)
In other words, friendly_fire, you've linked to one of your own pro-MS posts at the NYT?
This is just as I've suspected all along -- you're nothing more than a ringer, trying to make pro-OSS people look bad by association.
Back on topic: I think Moz rocks, the only time I use MSIE anymore is to see what's broken in it that I have to do workarounds for after creating standards-compliant pages. Pretty ironic considering that MS was first to market with a CSS implementation back in '96, and now there's huge chunks of the CSS-2 spec they don't even implement that make CSS really powerful.
For example, say you want to make all text inputs and textareas have a background colour of light yellow, but you want submit and reset buttons to be silver-grey. Using attribute selectors in Mozilla (see the CSS-2 spec), you can accomplish this with 2 lines of CSS only, with no additions to your markup required: In MSIE, you have to do this with class selectors and then assign class attributes to all your input and textarea tags.
And yes, tabbed browsing is da bomb -- it's completely changed how I use the Web (for the better).