Mozilla RC3 Released 555
pjdepasq was one of many reader to submit the news that "Those fine folks at Mozilla.org rolled out RC3 on Thursday I noted. They say it's the last planned release before 1.0, which I'm guessing is right around the corner. As a fan of the project (I'm using it on 3 platforms!), kudos to all of you!" Here are the release notes.
In other news... (Score:1, Insightful)
Netscape 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't start saying "hey, I don't need Netscape, I want plain Mozilla!". You're right, but Netscape is for (l)users. If Netscape 7 has success, you'll also have more luck surfing the internet with your Mozilla browser.
By the way, MozillaZine [mozillazine.org] is also a great source of information for Mozilla-fans.
Building a great barn door after horses are gone (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm very interested in Mozilla's progress (and by extension, Netscape 7.x's progress), but I can't help but think that I'm part of a very small minority of the web-browsing world. (Once again, yes I know that as a Mac user I'm already part of a small minority, but bear with me here). It's great to see that Mozilla is finally nearing the magical 1.0 release, but I can't help but feel that all the time it's taken to get there has made the upcoming blessed event moot for the vast majority of web users.
Regardless of how circumstances have changed in the meantime, we should remember that the Mozilla project was launched at the height of the browser wars, with the objectives of 1.) developing a supremely standards-friendly next-generation browser, and 2.) being an IE-killer. It's pretty clear now that while they superlatively achieved goal #1, they also miserably failed at goal #2 (marketshare figures for any mainstream [especially business] website will attest to this).
As a web designer, I certainly applauded the demise of Netscape 4.x. But I also noticed the lack of adoption for Netscape >=6 and Mozilla, and found (much to my disappointment) that instead of standardizing on standardization, I instead needed to standardize on IE (for Win and Mac; between the two, that's all my company's bosses cared about).
I'd love it if this was really a widely-awaited release along the lines of a new Windows or MacOS version, a new release of Office or Photoshop, or even a new major-number Linux kernel. Instead, this looks like an unfortunately vocal-minority-based event, like a new release of Opera or KDE.
So, I guess my question for other Slashdotters to answer is: how much do we think that the world at large cares about this? Should Mozilla have turned out an inferior product before the larger, non-geek world stopped caring?
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Insightful)
Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, are you guys constantly loading multi-megabytes of HTML into your browsers? I think the biggest problem by far is compatibility and not speed (thanks to lame IE-only sites).
Re:Building a great barn door after horses are gon (Score:5, Insightful)
If this will force the web towards real standards (instead of MS defacto standards of the week) it will be a good thing.
Besides that, I think that a lot of applications which are being developed in Moz. are waiting the 1.0 release before comming out. As I understood, the api's haven't been stable until now.
Re:Building a great barn door after horses are gon (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should they but the truth is that it's the engine that people will care about. The truth is that all the IE browsers AREN'T IE. Some of them are infact custom browers like NeoPlanet [neoplanet.com] that use the IE API. The same goes for a lot of ebooks, Info Terminals(At Malls etc), AOL (an all the other ISP that come with a custom browser) use the IE api.
Most mum's and dad's will never change the browser or upgrade it. Most of them still probable use IE 4 or 5(depending on when they bought there computer)
Mobile phones are getting browsers and while this is a small market currently it will get bigger and mozilla will most likely get a larger slice of it than IE.
Basically the point I am trying to make is that Mozilla isn't really going to make a big splash as a browser but then again it was never supposed to(One of the first things you read at the web site is for "testing purposes only"). What mozilla does have is alot of partners = other companies that use the rendering engine in there product and this is where I expect mozilla to go well. After all there is nothing worse than to have to say "for my pogram to work you have to first download someone else program which I can't provide legally" or "to fix X bug in my custom browser go to Y site and download the patch to fix there broser which will fix there bug"
The biggest problem is that MS won't fix IE bugs to make it standard becuse that will a)make other browsers work better. b)break either the current IE or the older versions IE. This means that MS is actually encouraged to stay non-standard complient.
Re:Heres the post everyone should read first (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously you would not want to write code that breaks on your target audience's web browser, no matter what the standard says.
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP (Score:5, Insightful)
You are, however, correct in that Mozilla on XP inherits the visual style of XP's interface (anything Luna or Classic). But that's all. Mozilla does not inherit the accessibility features in XP. Should XP suddenly support a new input device for navigating sheets (or similar), Mozilla wouldn't have any part of it. The Mozilla team has had many a debate on how to mimic the keyboard shortcuts in Windows since none of the interface is native. For the majority of Windows users, however technical ye are, this is a moot point, because it just looks the same and does its job. This argument is most apparent in Mac OS X, an environment associated with pretty colors and UI guidelines provided by Apple. Many, many OS X users have not used Mozilla because it looks and functions like nothing on OS X. And of course, Linux users either don't care or don't have enough time/energy to choose a standard interface and then care. =)
Mozilla, in all of its open source and standards-compliant glory, will always be a second-rate browser if not native to each platform of operation. Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla to no end... I'd just like a native version. (See Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Lynx, etc.)
PS - I don't recall any version of Office using Windows's UI controls... Office always shipped with some new, bleeding edge control of its own, often to be reincarnated into the controls of the next version of Windows. Even Office XP, of all things, has no correlation to native Windows XP controls.
Could Mozilla beat IE if Netscape can't? (Score:3, Insightful)
Add one part Mozilla and shake.
The sort of people who would use IE over Netscape because they had a bad experience with Netscape around 4.77 will be impressed with Mozilla, and they don't even need to know that it is based on Netscape! I installed Netscape 7 preview yesterday, which for most people may as well have been a Mozilla skin. Additions: IM, which closes when the browser closes and isn't important in a business environment, and no menu option to remove all those AOL popups.
We don't need to wait for Mozilla 1.0 so Netscape 7 can come out and compete with IE; when Moz hits 1.0, we should be pitting Mozilla against IE. It doesn't feel signifigantly different, but there are improvements that grow on you quickly - tabbed browsing, being able to selectively disable Javascript - which make people stand up and watch. Netscape will have as many ads and links to AOL in it as IE has to Micrsoft. Mozilla is infinitely more pure! And when the last few bugs are ironed out, I'll look forward to seeing what new innovations the crew have in store. (Remember, as far as most people are concerned, all that changed between IE4 and IE6 was the loading logo and the widgets if you're using XP.)
That, and maybe Mozilla could end up being the application that make people think "Wow, that open source community aren't so bad after all."
Re:Wow.. Still no AA font support!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why bother.. Its pointless to even try. AA "support" for Mozilla already exists, on an "experimental" branch of the CVS tree. You're looking at a group of developers who think that anti-aliasing the friggin fonts should be relegated to an "experimental" branch!
Now, stop and realize what that means. A feature that every mainstream browser has had, out of the box, since the mid 1990s...and the Mozilla doesnt want to bother to include it. Its like nobody can go the last fucking mile anymore and make something that actually looks good. Personally, I could care less if Mozilla goes 1.0 or not. Without AA font support, people are going to forget about it. Then what will all the work be worth? You guessed it--nothing.
Why is it so hard for Mozilla, a project that has been going since 1998, to have AA font support, when other browser projects (like Konqueror, for example) took only a month or two to add it? You guessed it -- Retarded leadership. Theyre building a browser for programmers, not for end users. And, until they realize that, and fucking DO SOMETHING about it, people will continue to ignore their work. Then, in the end, itll all be pointless. Theyve built a 5-story catapult for a war that already ended.
Cheers,
Re:Netscape 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla and acceptance (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to get sites to fix little problems (Score:2, Insightful)
The other site I just had a big fight with was Ofoto.com. They print digital photos etc. There site works perfectly in Mozilla except for a little JavaScript dropdown menu that allows you to edit your photo albums. I sent them the code to fix it and they refused to resolve the issue. I told them that I was running Mozilla on Linux and they responded by saying that they don't support Linux. Seeing that it isn't a Linux issue, the fact is that they don't want to fix their site. I could view the page source, get the URL for the link I wanted on the menu and the page would subsequently work.
Be vigillant people and complain everytime you see little or big bugs.
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP (Score:4, Insightful)
- You can't apply CSS to native widgets. (border colors and sizes, onHover and onFocus styles, etc)
- You can't control the z-order; native widgets will always be on top of all rendered content.
That's why mozilla and IE render their own controls, and I'm sure Opera will some day, too. (I've never used OmniWeb, so I can't say anything about that)SVG (Score:2, Insightful)
The most needed feature in Mozilla/Netscape is the SVG support. It's quite terrible that it can't be exist yet in the regular binary builds due to only its license, even that there is "other" SVG plugins.
Until now, I saw none of sites with SVG support (not including the SVG demos, SVG tutorials, etc.), which move people to think that "SVG is a bloated SWF clone for wimps", which is completly wrong way of thinking. SWF (Macromedia Flash) is good, but still, it's closed source software, dislike HTML, XML, JPEG, PNG, and others. If sites/companies will have SVG support instead of SWF, which is not a big thing to deal with (I guess there are even today SWF2SVG convertors, with full support for SWF timeline), the web will be much more happier place.
Let's hope for SVG support in the offical 1.O, it's still possible...