Mozilla Poised for Revival?

MarkedMan writes "An interesting and fairly lengthy CNET article on Mozilla and the pending 1.0 release. Kind of shallow research, making some common mistakes (Like many others, he half implies that AOL picking Mozilla as the default browser automatically puts 35 million users in the Netscape camp.) Good to see this getting some fairly mainline press."

All right

[SomeOtherGuy]

I have to admit that it will be good to be on this side of the fence during a brute force conversion of browsers (AOL to Netscape/Mozilla). I would love for some of these sites that use IE specific features of CSS or DHTML (or god forbid ActiveX) having 35 million screaming AOL users at their doors.

Even if

[geordie]

Even if AOL + Mozilla meant 35 million more Mozilla users and 35 million less IE users... It isn't that big a number when you look at the number of users using IE right now.
Would be nice if you could count on 35 million to just switch at the drop of a hat... but howmany are still using AOL3, 4,5,6 etc...

Just proves Joel's point

[Michael_Jarvis]

Mozilla will be a great product eventually, but unfortunately I agree with Joel Spolsky [joelonsoftware.com] that good software takes ten years to write [joelonsoftware.com], and you should NEVER [joelonsoftware.com] rewrite code from scratch.

I know that as a software developer, I've certainly learned from Netscape's mistake.

Re:Netscape is dead

[IronTek]

Long live IE! Its just a better browser.

While this was actually true to some degree in the early days of the Mozilla project and the later days of the IE project (IE 6 is almost respectable...for a Microsoft project), I believe Mozilla has surpassed Internet explorer in several areas that are important to at least myself. For one, as a sometimes web developer, Mozilla sticks closer to the standards. I've found myself on more than one occasion having to go back and figure out how to crap-up my HTML code to make it look right in IE. That's a waste of time, but because of people like you, and companies like Microsoft, I have to do it. Further, when I used to use IE back in the dark age of my OS use (i.e. Windows...also note that that i.e. has no relation to IE. In fact, even i.e. is embarrased by IE), I used to open up new windows like crazy! With tabbed browsing in Mozilla, I can keep a single instance of Mozilla open and keep all the sites I'm at organized! I'm never using a browser without tabs again!

For these and other reasons, I truly like Mozilla better than IE...even better than Navigator as well, as it seems less bloted than Communicator 6.0. ...but whatever, I guess..

It'll be a victory for standards.

[anser]

What matters about AOL adopting Mozilla is not that IE would somehow lose its majority share, but that a non-IE browser would subtend an important enough fraction of visitors that site designers could ill afford to ignore it. The IE-only travesties of today might give way to something approaching a standards compliant Web.

Some interesting weblogs by mozilla developers

[Tayto]

Check out mpt [phrasewise.com] and hyatt [blogspot.com]'s viewpoints on current and future trends in mozilla development. Some very interesting views there, I think Dave Hyatt's call for hundreds of different browsers to suit different people should be a call to action! Look at how well galeon has done - as long as they all use the gecko engine, we'll all be richer for having different browsers for different occasions.

Mozilla is flexible and everywhere

[stego]

I use Mac OS X. There are atleast 3 Mozilla based browser floating around for OS X. And, for yucks, I _just_ installed a version of Mozilla that uses Xfree to display - I wanted to see how it might look different and I wanted the experience(wow, the text sure looks crappy)(but the code renders the same). The point is that Mozilla is available here and everywhere - certainly one the 'most available' applications that I have experienced. It seems like every permutation of every platform has a Mozilla available.

Mozilla an alternative, not a competitor.

[SurfTheWorld]

Like many other authors, Jim Hu has failed to grasp the larger picture. While Mozilla could be a potential competitor to IE, it's more of an alternative to IE. Most of the people that I know who use Mozilla do so because they are under a platform that doesn't have an IE browser installed by default. (I don't mean to suggest that my colleaques would use an IE browser if it were installed on the box).

I run linux 99% of my uptime. And I use galeon on top of Mozilla. Why? Not because I hate the concept of IE (I hate IE for other reasons) but because it's an alternative. Sure I have a Sun that I could run IE on, but the velocity of the Mozilla and Galeon development is the alternative solution that I'm looking for.

OpenSource developers aren't "let's go give MS a run for their money!" people. They're "let's go make a browser that sucks less." Not everything is a competition - some projects exist just to provide alternatives.

What is Python a competitor to? I dunno... It's just an alternative... Just like Mozilla...

-c

FWIW

[White Roses]

I've been using Mozilla for a while now on Linux and Mac. The classic Mac version crashed often, and would actually force a reboot. I think it was probably my underlying system (which was very old and had more esoteric non-standard peripherals and extensions hanging off it than, well, anything I can think of at the moment) more than Mozilla. I recently purchased a new iMac running OS X, and promptly installed Mozilla. Two days later I dumped "the browser of choice" from my system entirely - it crashed too often. Mozilla runs like a champ on OS X, on Linux, on just about any platform. IE runs good on Windows, lousy on Mac and not at all on anything else (well, okay, that old Solaris version). The fact that I can go to just about any platform and have the exact same browser interface makes all the difference to me. Of course, I'm a Java programmer, so cross-platform consistency counts for a lot in my book already.

If AOL uses Moz, that'll help it gain acceptance much more quickly. Ask yourself where IE would be if Netscape had played nice with AOL all those years ago. Okay, probably still on every PC, but it'd be sharing much more mindshare with Netscape.

Missing the server

[mgkimsal2]

We're all missing the server equation here - MS is pretty damn big in the server side of things.

Yeah yeah yeah - quote netcraft at me with Apache = 60% and so on. I believe it too, but it doesn't matter. *MANY* commerce site - the things your parents and friends visit - run on IIS (for better or for worse). You can argue percentages all you want, but there's enough of them out there. Heck Macs are about 5% of the computer market, but some people still care about them.

If you even concede that IIS has a 15% share of servers conducting commerce, that's a big number.

My point? If mozilla ever starts to be a credible browser threat, IIS7 (or 8 or whatever) will suddenly either not work with mozilla at all, OR give lower priority treatment to mozilla requests. Or, better yet, just occasionally drop requests, making it even harder to diagnose.

"Works fine when I use IE7.5, but danged if Mozilla 1.01.02RC3 (cause that's about where they'll be) crashes sometimes!"

There's already issues with SSL between IE and Apache servers and non IE browsers and IIS. MS controls too much on both sides - IN BUSINESS/COMMERCE, WHERE IT COUNTS - to ever let anything else ever get too big again.

Responses? :)

Kmeleon comes along?

[Jucius Maximus]

One thing that I think a lot of slashdot users pride themselves on is that they use software which is still relatively "fringe" in comparison to the mainstream software. The best examples of course are Linux vs Windows and Moz/Konq vs IE. The advantage is that msot of the annoying browser parasites and new advertising techniques and aimed at the software that everyone ELSE uses. And we love it.

The "risk" associated with mozilla becoming mainstream is that we would be more subject to spyware attacks and such because the user base has grown so that it is significant. And frankly, as much as we talk about mainstream acceptance, many of us will not like the other side effects of mainstream acceptance that I have mentioned.

If Mozilla does become mainstream, I think that there is a possibility for a K-Meleon [sourceforge.net] revival and a port of the browser to linux. K-Meleon is a gecko based browser with many features similar to mozilla but it is "light" and does not have the news/mail/composer stuff in it.

So am I right about many slashdot users in the idea that they prefer to stay in the obscure corner? Reply to this!

Re:Just proves Joel's point

[MindStalker]

Yea, but Mozilla is an backend architecture for internet applications. While netscape 4.x was just a browser and an email program. YES most of the networking components should have been reused, no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But as the complete underlying API is different, very little of the code could have been reused to create the product that mozilla is today. It may have gotten here faster, but it would just be another browser, the market has enough browsers, mozilla architecture is something innovative and once accepted could truly create innovation in the market place.

Re:All right

[ShawnDoc]

Wishful thinking. These AOL users will still have Internet Explorer on their machines. A good majority of them will just change their AOL options to use IE instead of Netscape once they upgrade to a version that defaults to Netscape. They may not be completely computer literate, but they aren't morons...

I think you are overestimating AOL users. The majority of AOL users use AOL because they don't know how to work a computer. That's AOL's big selling point, that they don't have to think.

At any rate, neither DHTML nor CSS are IE specific features, so you have no idea what you're talking about to begin with..How did your post get moderated up?

How did your post get modded up? IE uses proprietary tags not found in the WC3 standards to implement "features" exclusive to IE. Many web sites use these tags that only work in IE.

This has been going on since the earliest days of web browsers, and in the past both IE and Netscape were just as guilty of inventing proprietary tags to give their browser more "features". That is what is so great about Mozilla, it is the most standards compliant web browser available. Now developers can code to the WC3 standards and know there is a browser capable of displaying the page correctly. Once (if) AOL converts their users to Mozilla it will hopefully force MS to make IE more standards compliant and in return allow developers to finally be able to easily design browser agnostic web sites.

Obviously you don't have much experience dealing with either end users or web page design issues.

Dumb question - is Mozilla worth it?

[WillSeattle]

I recently upgraded a Win box (yes, the shame) from Netscape 4.75 to 6.11 and it's a dog.

Slow as molasses. Tuned it a bit, but it's still dog slow.

I hate IE - but I need something that uses my DSL and doesn't take 60 seconds to render an email or bring up a page.

Is there much difference between the Mozilla 1.0 build and the Netscape 6.11? Should I have chosen native Win code during the install instead of "generic" code?

Are there any useful sites to help with this - and what are their URLs? And does anyone know how much of a difference (stats, URLs, basic ratio) there is between the Netscape build and the Mozilla build?

Yes, I tried Google - and it helped a bit in tuning some things. But I've got a Qwest DSL line, and it's dog slow now.

-

funny browser compatibility experience

[Acoustic_Nowhere]

I connected to my Credit Union's site to do an online transfer. It looked like it was going to work, but when it asked to verify the transaction I got an error. I was running Netscape 4.7.

I emailed their customer service and they said "Netscape does tend to be a little quirky. We suggest using Internet Explorer or the most updated version of Netscape."

It just so happens that I had IE5 and Netscape 6 on my machine so I tried doing the transfer with both app's and got the same error. I emailed customer service again, and here is the response (word for word):

"Have you tried Internet Explorer 6, as that is the most recent and should solve your problem. That is actually what 95% of our Customer's use who access our website. Thank you."

Can you imagine that? Think they were blowing me off?

I can only imagine the kinds of reponses from customer service folks who have never heard of Mozilla:) btw-Downloaded Mozilla for my home computer the other day, running on OSX and have been very pleased so far!

Mozilla is awful... and not (Chimera)

[sjonke]

Mozilla itself is pretty awful, IMHO, due to it not looking or working like any other Mac OS X (or OS 9 for that matter) application. The weird differences aren't beneficial either. However, Chimera [mozdev.org], based on Mozilla but sporting a Mac OS X Quartz UI and page rendering is looking to be a really great thing. I'm very excited about what happens with Chimera but don't forsee installing another version of Mozilla itself.

Is it just me...

[Nomad7674]

...or was that not a very flattering article. The post makes it sound like this was a victory for Mozila - being recognized by CNET. But my reading was that they basically said:
1. It is not really a "real" 1.0 release
2. It has always been buggy and not useable
3. It is not as mature as IE
4. AOL might switch to it, but only because of sour grapes
5. Its history shows it is unreliable
6. No one in their right mind would trust their future in Mozilla.

Maybe I read too much into it, but that was the sense I got. As someone who has been using Mozilla on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux since 0.8 or so, none of this has been my experience. It is more solid than IE, faster, and very reliable. It now has at least as many features as IE and crashes almost never on any of the platforms I have used it on.

W3C Validator

[hendridm]

> Good Web Developers hit up w3.org's validators for testing compliance.

I don't know, that thing is awefully picky. It doesn't even validate with the Mozilla [w3.org] web site (although it is possible [w3.org]). Are the Mozilla developers bad at web development? Perhaps. More acurately, I think a good web site doesn't necessarily have to follow all the W3C standards (although it is nice, I suppose).

I've seen countless web sites that display very well in Mozilla that get torn apart by the validator. I know, by ensuring W3C compiance you can be sure it will work in almost all browsers, but I don't necessarily care. I only worry about Mozilla and Internet Explorer. (Sorry Opera users, but it's bad enough dealing with two browsers on 3 different operating systems.)

I guess that's not why I'm not a web development professional...

Re:W3C Validator

[garett_spencley]

I know I'm a little late for this discussion but I thought I'd post this anyway.

The whole ideal behind standards is so that you (theoretically) shouldn't have to care about all the browsers.

From my point of view, if I design a web page and follow the standards to the "t" and verify it for compliance after every single minor change, then if a browser doesn't render my page properly the browser is at fault and I don't give a shit. It's not my problem.

Now from a more practical standpoint. If my web page is going to be making me money and 90%+ of my users are IE users then I better make sure it renders properly in IE. However, that's still no reason not to follow standards. Because if I make a concerted effort to follow the standards then I can be reasonably sure that any other browsers (that I haven't tested it with) stand a good chance of rendering it properly.

With the above stated there's absolutely no reason not to verify your pages for standards compliance with the exception of pure lazyness.

--
Garett