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Mozilla The Internet

Moving towards Mozilla 1.0 412

Posted by michael from the just-release-it-already dept.
fluedke writes "The latest Mozilla CVS identifies itself as "Mozilla 1.0". It looks like this source will become the official 1.0 within the next days. Read the news posting here." And if you're one of the missing hackers, speak up.
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Moving towards Mozilla 1.0 More

Moving towards Mozilla 1.0

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  • Bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:27PM (#3624833) Journal
    If you feel a sudden urge to help now that the project is entering it's final stages, checkout bugzilla.mozilla.org. You can help troubleshoot other bugs by trying to replicate, and figure out if there are browser problems, or webpage problems. You have to be a member, but the form is short.

    Check out http://bugzilla.mozilla.org

    • Re:Bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:5, Insightful)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:26AM (#3625025) Homepage
      ...and please people, before you report a bug, search through the list of duplicates and most reported.

      The open source community will likely cause the mozilla.org people more work by all reporting 500 versions of the same problem - especially with all the publicity 1.0 will be getting.

      And, if you report a bug, please follow through. There are umpteen bugs in bugzilla that are sitting there with a bug reporter that's MIA.

      • Re:Bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @01:49AM (#3625249) Homepage Journal
        Question: if I submit a bug, will it be taken seriously, or if someone doesn't like what I find, will I get some BS about "must be just YOUR system"?? (Which considering I have a lot of experience as a software tester and bloody well know how to properly document bugs, is pretty annoying when it happens.) Because I know of two FATAL bugs right now, but my experience with the NNTP crowd (see another post I made in a similar thread) did not encourage me to bother pursuing it.

        • Re:Bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:4, Informative)

          by Swaffs ( 470184 ) <swaff@ERDOSfudo.org minus math_god> on Sunday June 02, 2002 @02:02AM (#3625301) Homepage
          My experience has been that those on bugzilla want to correct bugs, not hide or deny them. If you can reproduce it well, and document that well, others will test for it, and assuming its a real bug and not your problem, they will confirm it as a bug. All submissions i've made have been taken seriously.

        • Re:Bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:4, Informative)

          by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @02:10AM (#3625323)
          It depends.

          All the reports I've submitted have been dealt with seriously. Sometimes that means, "sorry, we're not going to fix this for a while." That's understandable, they need to prioritise.

          Sometimes, the report is closed because it's not a bug - a particular thing behaves in a way I'm unhappy with, but which most people would prefer over the alternative I suggest.

          Most times, though, the bugs are just dealt with. I've never submitted a bug report which didn't get a reply of _some_ form within a few days.

          This is just in my experience. But I have to read a lot of bug reports myself (for Debian), and I gotta tell you, there is NOTHING more frustrating than somebody filing a bug report, saying "it doesn't work."

          WHAT doesn't work? In what way does it not work? How would you expect it to work?

          The more serious you are, the more serious you'll be taken.
        • From my experience [mozilla.org] (#114517, if slashdot links are blocked), the maintainers/programmers have been really helpful and professional. But bug reports are almost useless if the person submitting them doesn't take the time to do it right. Reporting bugs is almost an art, and if approached with a humble and helpful attitude can be very helpful.

          --Robert

  • Competition (Score:2, Interesting)

    by prof187 ( 235849 )
    I'm really looking forward to seeing Mozilla becoming a major competitor for IE. I'm actually very surprised that MS doesn't put effort into developing IE for Linux. I'm sure the thought crosses their minds though, probably just afraid that they'd be forced to open source it (and we all know how evil open source is). Go Mozilla.
    • At one time there was IE 4 for solaris available from Microsoft's site. (Not sure if there still is)

      • Re:Competition (Score:3, Interesting)

        by PepsiProgrammer ( 545828 )
        http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp actually it seems they have IE 5 for HP UX and Solaris, interesting isnt it? "We have the way out, but just in case your still stuck...."
        • According to this page [userlocal.org] the IE for solaris/HPUX does actually include bits in the installer script for linux_x86 so it looks like they might be preparing it for a linux release. I couldn't be bothered to download it and check. I don't miss popups that much :)

    • Re:Competition (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 )
      I'm actually very surprised that MS doesn't put effort into developing IE for Linux.

      I've always figured some people in microsoft thought so much of IE, or rather the fact that people wrote pages for IE instead of to w3c compliance that not releasing IE on Linux would keep people from moving to that operating system.

      OK, it's a crazy conspiricy theory. But seeing some of Microsoft's statements about Linux in the past, or their view of themselves as benovlent shepards of the ignorent computing masses I wouldn't put it past them.

  • something tells me ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jms258 ( 569015 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:29PM (#3624840)
    that these missing mozilla hackers are, as we speak, being ruthlessly questioned under a single, dangling lightbulb ... probably in the dark basement of some government facility by various operatives from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, held under the pretense that they have somehow violated the dmca... just a hunch.
    • Quick! somebody dig up McCarthy so we can get the commie hunt in full effect!

    • Re:something tells me ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by farnsworth ( 558449 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:05AM (#3624965)
      that these missing mozilla hackers are, as we speak, being ruthlessly questioned under a single, dangling lightbulb ...[snip]

      romulan interegator: how many bugs do you see?

      missing mozillian: THERE ... ARE ... TWENTY ... THOUSAND ... BUGS!!!!

      romulan interegator: wrong, there are 20,001 bugs.

      • I can't believe nobody has mentioned Microsoft in reponse to this. The drooling Open Source masses must be slipping or something.

        As buggy as Mozilla may be, its still great to see this project hit version 1.0. I've long prefered Mozilla for my Linux web browser (that is until Galeon came along), so lets stop all the whining and arguing for a moment and remember to tip our hats (Red or otherwise) to the Mozilla team!

        Thanks guys!

  • finally (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nilstar ( 412094 )
    Finally, years after promising it, the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late? How can Mozilla & Netscape (not to mention Opera & others) make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world? I think it is too late, but maybe with the 700 pound gorilla of AOL Time Warner behind it, they can fight the 800 pound gorilla of Microsoft. Maybe the new XP service pack will convince some OEMs (that want to cozy up to AOL) to include Netscape.

    • IE monopoly (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 )
      I was just talking to my neighbor. He upgraded his hard disk and reinstalled Windows and all his apps. While he was at it, he switched from Netscape to IE, because people had told him it was "better." Sorry, but I just don't think the average user is up on the whole issue. Anyhow, why should we even care that much about the IE monopoly? IE isn't a product that people pay for, so even if the IE monopoly was broken, it wouldn't have any effect on the MS monopoly.

      What excites me is to see another open-source project that potentially can become a best-of-breed app, like Emacs or Apache. We're getting closer and closer to the day when nobody can object to open source because they need application X, and the open-source alternative isn't as good.

      • Re:IE monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)

        by johnnyb ( 4816 ) <jonathan@bartlettpublishing.com> on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:49PM (#3624914) Homepage
        Anyhow, why should we even care that much about the IE monopoly?

        **********

        Because more and more sites are being written with on ly one standard in mind - the IE standard.

        • Re:IE monopoly (Score:3, Insightful)

          by gfxguy ( 98788 )
          As someone who is using opera more often, I can say the same about a Netscape/IE duopoly.

          I can't tell you how many sites ask me to upgrade to a more "modern" browser, and give links for either Netscape or IE.

          Many of them work just fine when I tell Opera to lie about the identification, but there's certain broken javascript that people use to test cookies in Netscape and IE that doesn't work in Opera (Opera doesn't have this "bug").

          Very annoying that I much switch to a different browser to access my bank and investments, and yes I have complained, and I'm sure my complaints are duly filed in the circular file cabinet.

          • Re:IE monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Da Schmiz ( 300867 )
            Part of the reason why a number of sites look broken in Opera is that Opera breaks sites. I used to be a big Opera fan, and I still use it from time to time, but its support for certain W3C specs (document.createElement() comes to mind) is not only missing, but downright munged.

            Opera fakes document.createElement() and returns true, so sites that identify DOM-compliant browsers by this test will assume all is well, but the method doesn't actually do anything, so the site fails without an error. Last I checked, this was something the Opera programmers were "going to get around to" someday.

            On the flip side, more and more sites are now supporting Mozilla... even my bank, which I could never get to work with any browser but IE, now looks great in Mozilla (or Galeon).

            And that's the thing: every killer feature that made me switch from IE to Opera (when I was running Windows) was there in Galeon on Linux. I've got Opera, but these days Galeon is faster, renders more correctly, and has more truly useful features than Opera.

            When I design websites, I'll still keep inserting workarounds for Opera, just as I still keep kludging ugly workarounds for Netscape 4 (icky, icky). Hopefully, though, Opera will eventually become fully standards-compliant, and then we won't have a problem.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:finally (Score:4, Insightful)

      by galaga79 ( 307346 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:43PM (#3624883) Homepage
      Sometimes I get the feeling that even if Netscape/Mozilla were 100 times better than IE the the majority of Windows users would still use IE because it is simply there by default. IE despite all its faults and security holes gets the job done for most users so why would they bother using anything else?

      Now don't get me wrong I reckon Mozilla is a great browser, better than IE ver 5 in my opinion but I think it's in for a hard time making a huge dent in MSIE's monopoly, at least as long they bundle and integrate IE with their operating system.

      • Re:finally (Score:3, Insightful)

        by johnnyb ( 4816 )
        I think it depends on in what way it is better. I do not see the average user downloading a new Netscape, but Mozilla is possible. Why? Because it gets rid of popups, which are universally hated.

        Mozilla has a lot of features that are better than this, but this one feature hits a such known problem area that it could get a large group of people to switch.

        Of course, since Mozilla has no marketing budget, it is unknown whether anyone will ever know this besides us.
      • Wrong. Security issues set aside, I know a lot of people who prefer IE for it's rendering speed and accuracy. Personally, I've been following Opera very closely. It's definitely faster then IE in most cases, but it still doesn't render things (W3C things, not "Microsoft Standard" things) quite right. And the latest version of Netscape (6.2.3?) was not much to call home about on any front. Personally, I love the features in Opera. Actually, from what I've read Mozilla seems to have an even stronger feature set. However, asking the common user you'll find that they could give a crap about the 100's of options - many people don't even care about pop-ups (this I do not understand).

        Of course I have no real data to back any of this up, but in my experience IE has been chosen, not forced. Once/if Opera or another browser comes out significantly ahead, I'll be happy to switch - even if I have to pay for it.

    • Re:finally (Score:3, Interesting)

      by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 )

      It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser. But overall, I'm extremely impressed by RC3. The only major problem I have with it is that plugins are very hard to install (on Win2K) compared to IE. The positives are turning off pop-ups, and turning off Doubleclick BFAs.

      Actually my other problem isn't so much with the product, but with the source code. I wish it would compile without using Visual Studio. Then the fact that it was GPLed would actually mean something to me.

      • Re:finally (Score:2, Informative)

        by sidesinger ( 464398 )
        If you are interesting in getting help for installing plugins goto MozDev's Plugin Documentation [mozdev.org].

      • Re:finally (Score:2, Insightful)

        by rabidcow ( 209019 )

        It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser.

        Really? When was the deadline?

      • Re:finally (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rseuhs ( 322520 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @06:28AM (#3625765)
        It's too late to affect de-facto standards. It's too late to have any chance of becoming the most popular browser.

        What about:

        • 30 million AOL customers?
        • PS3 will use Mozilla and if it is as successful as PS1 (100 Million) or PS2 (30 Million and selling over a million per month), there will be tens of millions new Mozilla-users in the net.
        • Yes, Linux is making inroads into the desktop, like it or not. South Korea's governement has recently decided to convert 1/4 of their desktops (several hundred thousand).
        • Being multiplatform is an advantage. For example people will prefer Mozilla over IE at work if they know it from their PS3 at home.
        • Mozilla has features people want. Modem users want to safe time with HTTP1.1 pipelining, almost all users don't want popups. If you look at browser stats you see that a lot of people are willing to download a new version of IE, why shouldn't they also download a version of Mozilla? Especially because Mozilla isn't entrenched into the OS, so upgrading to Mozilla is certainly not as risky as upgrading IE.
        • Also don't underestimate people's tastes and opinions. It's IMPOSSIBLE to do a product that everybody likes best, so even if Mozilla wouldn't have mroe functionality than IE, SOME people will like the interface/look/feel/whatever better. "With everything being equal", not all 100% will choose IE.

        In the short term, Mozilla/Netscape7 will almost certainly destroy the de-facto IE-standard (even with only 10% marketshare, webmasters can't afford to ignore Mozilla), in the long term (5 to 10 years) I'd say it has good chances to overtake IE.

        • Sorry, to reply to my own post, but I've forgot:

          • people using Win95? MS doesn't allow them IE-upgrades, so what choices do they have? According to Google [google.com] 5% use Win95 right now, which may sound not much, but it adds up. Of course the real exodus will start as soon as MS bannes updates for Win98.
          • Addition to people's tastes & optinions: I know a lot of Windows-users who don't like Microsoft, actually I know more who don't like MS than who do like MS. Of course most of them use IE because they don't want to have hassles about "browser not supported", etc. But as soon as Mozilla reaches a point where it can't be ignored anymore (because of AOL switching) and websites have to support it, IE and Mozilla will look the same for those people and most of them will switch in a heartbeat.

          If we make some quick guesses for the next 2 years: (yes, purely speculative)

          AOL/Compuserve users: ~20%

          People who hate popups/love tabbed browsing/modem users loving http1.1/pipelining: ~10%

          People not liking Microsoft/People liking Mozilla-interface better - so much that they are willing to switch: ~20%

          If we sort out multiple hits (people using http1.1 AND not liking Microsoft, etc.), we maybe get about 40% of people leaning over to Mozilla.

          Of course people don't like switching, so maybe only 20 or 30% switch, still a huge number.

          Add PS3 and Linux-desktop penetration coming in the next 4 or 5 years and you might get over 50% marketshare.

    • well the ability to turn off javascript popup windows and such (stuff you will never see IE or Netscape do)....is a big enough reason for some of the IE diehards I work around....And I have yet to see tabbed browsing on IE. Face it -- there are some "killer" features that will send the cocky IE packing...
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Yes they could make these changes. Will they - no. Reason -- They do not want to piss off the commercial interests that rely on pop-up ads to make money. Same reason netscape will never do it. This is why Mozilla will become the standard for people who want a better browsong experience.

    • Re:finally (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:59PM (#3624951) Homepage
      > make a dent in MSIE's monopoly in the windows browser world?

      And I retort, who fricking cares?

      Mozilla is open source, freely available, and heavily cross platform. Even if AOL mothballs netscape and lays off everyone that can't be changed.

      Why's it always gotta be about "conquering microsoft"? Can't people just USE the software and get on with their life? Let the dominance, or obscurity, come naturally. Long as you get software that does it's job well for you, it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using.
      • ...it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using.

        Reality check! If everyone else except you are using IE, then what is the chance that anyone will bother fixing their web-pages so that they're viewable by your Mozilla browser?

        Mats

        • If everyone else except you are using IE, then what is the chance that anyone will bother fixing their web-pages so that they're viewable by your Mozilla browser?

          I would, and I'm likely not alone. Mozilla isn't asking anyone to code to a special set of Web specs. If Mozilla is asking anything, it's asking that people code to a common set of specs, or at least the set most closely approximating that dream [W3C Standards]. And designers can freely ignore that request (of sorts), whether that's a wise choice depends on how many people one wants to turn away at the door before they really see what is offered in terms of content.

          And I wouldn't do it for Mozilla alone, I'd do it for all the other "fringe" browsers out there: iCab, Omniweb, Lynx, Links, Opera, WebTV, etc. Again, I don't think I'm alone in trying to serve as many user agents as much usable content as reasonably possible.

          Xzzy is right, it shouldn't matter one iota what other people are using insofar as caring about the particular branding of a user agent accessing the contact you deploy. Focus on capabilities and standards. It's not about IE or Mozilla, it's about the reality you seem to ignore: people will use what they have in front of them to view your work. That could be anything. Be prepared.

      • Hello, do you have a job? If your entire company uses Software X and your boss is giving you assignments using Software X and you say "geez, I will only use open-source Software Y and it isn't compatible with your Software X" -- you'll be out the door.

      • The Big Picture (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Fragmented_Datagram ( 233743 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @05:08AM (#3625644) Homepage
        Trying looking beyond simple web browsing. If MS controls the means of accessing the Internet that 99% of users use, then they control the Internet. Repeat after me, then they control the Internet. Now, let's look at how:

        1) Any future technological advancements (or 3rd party plugins) for the web are subject to Microsoft's approval. If it's not in their financial interest, it doesn't get included in the browser.
        2) msn.com is the default page for IE. Most users don't change their default page. Microsoft can then charge lots of money for people to place their ads on msn.com. Secondly, Microsoft can use msn.com to promote their own products by either placing ads for them, writing "news articles" that promote them, or simply because they control the search engine results.
        3) Microsoft's Media Player could be integrated into the browser and IE could more simply and easily play WMA files. If most people use WMA to encode their media files and it becomes the "standard", Microsoft can charge money for encoding music in that format.
        4) Microsoft can gradually change HTML (or add a completely new proprietary web format) in their favor so that other browsers (and other operating systems) don't work properly.

        And on and on and on...
        Why do you think Microsoft wanted to "choke off Netscape's air supply"? Controlling the way people access the Internet gives them almost complete control of the Internet and allows them to further stifle competition as well as become very wealthy.

    • Re:finally (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:06AM (#3624969)
      the Netscape led group has (or will officially) release Mozilla... but is it too late?

      Too late to become the dominant browser on Windows? Probably. But too late to help Linux continue its march into mainstream operating system land? No way! And the fact that it runs on Windows is a definite help there.

      Also not too late to put a stop to Microsoft's attempts to privatize web standards, not to mention put a serious kink in attempts to force .NET down everybody's throat by way of the browser.

      Also, not too late to make all those surfers who like to kill popup ads very happy.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • You've got that right.

        Places that run multiply operating system platforms, such as Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Mac (just to name a few) will love Mozilla.

        Same great browser, same great features, runs on all of them.

        IMO this is the real value of Mozilla. Its available on just about anything you would want it on.

  • Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aglassis ( 10161 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:48PM (#3624904)
    I think we owe a lot of thanks to Netscape and AOL for sticking with an open source project for so long (as well as other companies and developers). Dropping NS 5.0 just prior to beta was a couragous move even though it cost them 2 years of not having a new product. It was proof that open source works. Everyone saw that it was bloated and not the Right Thing. They moved on.

    Good job Mozilla! Mozilla is proof that a very large open source project can exist and still do the Right Thing (i.e. attempt to be standards complient). Mozilla 1.0 is an amazing piece of software and 2 years from now everyone will realize this. This is probably one of the most important software projects in history.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:48AM (#3625090)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • And thats the rub. If the browser is commoditized there will never be a reason to switch.

        For me, it's enough that there's no security hole of the day. Not being "integral" part of OS has plenty of advantages, too. I stopped using IE in development environment last year. Mozilla just doesn't let everyone snoop around in my desktop's files.

      • Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sydneyfong ( 410107 )
        Yes IE might continue to have a monopoly on the browser market, but i forsee that mozilla will continue to eat up some of IE's market share. On the technical side, Mozilla is at least on par with IE's and renders almost all pages perfectly except for some highly IE specific scripts. While this alone does not motivate people to switch, mozilla has the following extra advantages:

        1. It's cross platform. Yes it might not directly make windows users to switch, but when you've got a project that requires cross platform compatibility, mozilla is the choice browser.

        2. It's alive and kicking. While IE has seemingly run out of innovative ideas for a new browser, Mozilla has implemented some kick ass features, eg. tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc.

        3. It's open source. We know open source is the way to go, don't we? ;-)

        4. It's (supposedly) more secure than IE. (although it can be argued that security problems were not found because less number of people use it so less try to exploit it)

        • Re:Open Source (Score:3, Informative)

          by No_Weak_Heart ( 444982 )

          And it works on Win95, something that versions of IE after 5.5 can't do. This faux pas on Microsoft's part will cost it dearly.


          The next version of IE probably won't work on Win 95/98 due to Microsoft's end of life policies. This creates a large market of users who are unable/unwilling to upgrade their OS who will be looking elsewhere for a modern browser.

      • Its only a web browser.

        That is about uninformed as saying "Emacs is only a text editor." Mozilla is a complete platform for development.

      • You're probably right about it's importance as a web browser, but I can definately see Mozilla making a big impact as an applications platform, just see MozDev [mozdev.org] for some examples. I for one am planning to write my next (commercial) app using the framework - and we're not talking about a Java/.NET clone here, it's actually pretty unique - gasp, even .. innovative? Check out its use of XML/RDF to see what I'm talking about.

      • But please, do not over estimate the reach of it. Its only a web browser. The dreadful irony of it all is that since its so well engineered, and follows the standards so closely the product won't gain the type of acceptance that a proprietary, highly marketed, closed, and unstable product (like Navigator 3/4) did.

        .. there is one noticable difference. Mozilla puts the USER in the driver seat, giving power to the USER of choices concerning cookie control, javascript abuse and image squashing that IE will never have; because IE is market driven, not user driven.

        This is Mozilla's added value, and to my mind is one of its biggest selling points.

        Macka

  • "1.0" might not mean "1.0" (Score:3, Informative)

    by Aqua OS X ( 458522 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:50PM (#3624916)
    The folks over at mozilla.org have a tendancy to tag builds and source code with the version numbers of -upcoming- releases. So, "1.0" might really not mean "1.0." Heck, two weeks before RC3 was released nightly builds had "RC3" in the about box, even though they were not technically "RC3"

    Those dated build numbers are much more important to look at. When those freeze up there is either a huge bug or a new milestone coming out.

    • Re:"1.0" might not mean "1.0" (Score:4, Informative)

      by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @01:54AM (#3625267)
      According to this newsgroup post [google.com], this will be the 1.0 release unless something major pops up.
    • The tag the story is talking about is a release tag (MOZILLA_1_0_RELEASE) that "cuts" the 1.0 branch (that was branched with the MOZILLA_1_0_BRANCH tag). This means that it actually *IS* the very version of the source code that will become 1.0. The only thing that stands in the way for this to be 1.0 is some last minute checks that no mistakes were made or serious bugs overlooked so we're talking about a few hours to a few days at most until 1.0 is released. My guess would be that before tuesday, we'll have a Mozilla 1.0 release.
    • The 1.0.0 build has been tagged from what is now the Mozilla 1.0.x branch. Barring any unforseen last minute fixes, these tagged files will be the source that Mozilla 1.0.0 is built from. If new fixes need to go in, the touched files to be retagged. In parallel, the Mozilla 1.0.0 branch has now become the Mozilla 1.0.x branch and is currently accepting fixes for 1.0.1 and presumably Netscape 7.0 as well.
  • One of the problems that *I* have with Mozilla is the way they handle bugs. I used to submit a lot of bugs to BugZilla, participate in testing, etc. I can no longer be arsed to. I know it's "their program to develop", but it's very depressing when you find a bug that you find serious and notice it getting pushed from M18 to 0.9.1 to 0.9.5 to 1.0 to post 1.1...

    After similar things happened to about 20 of my bugs reports I just thought I had enough of it. I still submit bugs from time to time, but I am not that interested anymore. I would rather spend my time developing and testing ebuilds for the Gentoo Linux portage system.
    • Personally I've been led to wonder about Moz's bug-fixing myself. Frex, I can't be the only person to notice the horrendous resource leak it causes on Win9*, just from viewing a large local directory tree. Sometimes up to 75% of resources in a few seconds flat. Or that it crashes 100% of the time when exposed to certain commonly-accessed pages. (Both are consistent and reproducible.)

      Gave up on the idea of submitting bugs after being flamed on (and then apparently banned from) the NNTP server just for arguing (as civilly as this post) that removing certain features was highly undesirable from a user's POV. :(

      A shame since I would really love to be able to embrace and endorse Mozilla with no reservations.

      • Re:My problem with Moz. is the way they handle bug (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kiwi ( 5214 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @04:27AM (#3625570) Homepage Journal
        Gave up on the idea of submitting bugs after being flamed on (and then apparently banned from) the NNTP server just for arguing (as civilly as this post) that removing certain features was highly undesirable from a user's POV.

        As someone who has banned people from the software devlopment list from my own open-source project, I think it may help you to understand why open-source developers sometimes do this.

        People often times fail to understand that an open source project is different from a commercial project. In any releation where one person is paying another person, there is an implied releationship where the person paying the money does not have to respect the person whom they are paying. The person with the money can be pretty irrespectable and still act in a socially acceptable manner. The recipient, after all, is getting paid.

        People who are used to using commercial software approach open source software in the same manner. They join a NNTP server or a mailing list for the project in question. They start ordering around the open source software devlopers, tell them what features the program must have. They don't say "please"; they certaintly don't give the open source devloper an ounce of respect. They act as if they were paying the free software developer. But they aren't.

        This kind of person gets rather flustered when they realize that the releationship between an open source devloper and a user is different than the one between a customer and a company. The open source developer is, in the hierarchy of computer geeks, higher up on the ladder than an end user who can't code is. The sooner the end user understands this, the sooner they can treat the developer in a way which will not result in them getting flamed and banned.

        People write software and give it away for a number of reasons, of course; but one main motivation is to obtain respect. The more open source projects one has worked on and finished, the higher the person is in the strange pecking order of the world of free software. Make enough code, and you too can be a demigod like Larry Wall, RMS, Linus Torvalds, or Dan Bernstein. Even if you are not a demigod, saying "I am a developer for this project" where the project is well known will cause you to commanded more respect.

        It's simple. Respect the developer, and they will respect you. Don't respect them, and they will not respect you. Once you understand this, you are on your way to having your bug reports being acted on. Pretty soon, you will be patching; if the patch is good, you will gain more respect from the developers. Eventually, an open-source project will call you and you will respond to the call.

        Good luck in your journey.

        - Sam

        • I'm not a coder, but I'm an *experienced* beta tester and I've worked on longterm volunteer projects that involved a pack of professional programmers with a dedicated testing team. IOW I'm not a beginner at this. I *do* know how to recognise and document bugs (in tedious detail :) Frex, on one project, 75% of bugs and performance issues listed in the changelog were those I'd found (and there were 8 core testers in that group).

          But turn it around -- the problem I see, with Mozilla and too often elsewhere, is that testers get no respect, no matter how good they are at that job (IMO, itself as necessary as coding! What use is beautiful code that doesn't work right?) Coders too often consider testers a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst ("how dare those scum break my perfect code!")

          Coders need to respect testers' work as well, but all too often the tester is treated as a second-class worker who has no right to a viewpoint on how the program should behave, at least if the coder doesn't feel like fixing the issue at hand. How does a coder expect to get and keep respect from testers if they don't feel they need to respect their testers in return? I realise bugs need to be prioritized and all that, but there's a difference between marking one "low priority" and entirely blowing it off as being too much of a PITA, or "not what *I* want" even when users are clamouring for it. (Ooops, I forgot, Mozilla is for *developers*, not for lowly users!)

          And *that* is the problem I've observed with Mozilla. There are open issues that have hundreds of "votes" to fix, which remain unfixed because the coder doesn't LIKE that feature. (Check out some of the context-menu issues for examples.) Not part of the coding group? Then your opinions, and your bug reports, don't count.

    • depressing when you find a bug that you find serious and notice it getting pushed from M18 to 0.9.1 to 0.9.5 to 1.0 to post 1.1

      dnaumov, please post some Bugzilla numbers so we can see what you're talking about. I've submitted lots of bugs, and 90% of them have been resolved acceptably, even if it wasn't the answer I wanted.

      For all we know, you could be asking for stuff like "I want to be able to dragdrop a picture of my face onto the toolbar and use it as the throbber".
  • Obviously, everybody saying "yaay for Netscape" isn't a real web developer. Netscape went out of their way to *not* include any kind of backwards compatibility for any DHTML. 90% of all DHTML written in the past 3 years or so simply doesn't work in NS 6+ because although NS conforms to the W3C specs (as does IE), unlike IE, there's no support for older scripting. I've tested lots of various DHTML, and virtually none of it works with NS. Sure, it'd be nice to see a new browser, but the developers' incredible idealism (the W3C "standards" and none others, whatsoever) is gonna prevent NS from going mainstream.

    • Re:NS is the worst thing for web developers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Aanallein ( 556209 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @08:15AM (#3625955)
      Obviously, everybody saying "yaay for Netscape" isn't a real web developer.
      Obviously your definition of a "real web developer" is somewhat skewed. Beyond the extremely useful tools like the javascript console and the DOM inspector *drools*, if anyone understands the need for official standards, it should be web developers. Not if you're someone who has no real idea about the standards and only learned to develop by looking at Dreamweaver output, but definitely if you're in this for the long run, and want to someday not have to include additional if statements for various browsers anymore. And the only way that can come about is if browser-vendors will stop pushing their own proprietary extensions. Netscape was at least as bad as IE, but now they've been turned. IE somewhat supports most basic functionality from the standards, even though still horribly broken at various points. If this improves, the day comes very near where you only have to write scripts once, and then have them perform flawlessly forever on all browsers that come after.
      You've tested "lots of various DHTML - I want to bet they all failed because of the same two or three issues. If you're a "real web developer", fixing them is a matter of minutes. Don't complain about Mozilla just because you are incapable...
    • People like you are the reason the web mostly sucks sweaty balls these days.

      I'm just glad I don't work with people as unprofessional as you...

    • Re:NS is the worst thing for web developers (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, speaking as a 'real' web developer, who has to develop web-applications that must work across platforms, DHTML could go away now and I would be very happy, and my applications wouldn't suffer a bit for it. DHTML is a client-side toy that 'real' web developers should never use for application-dependent functionality. It's nice for simple effects and short-term oohs and ahhs, but you're missing the point of web-development if your applications contain tons of client-dependent code.
    • Shut up. Your a troll damnit. I can smell a troll from a mile away. Just in case you were serious:

      I'm sorry thay our www.mydogfluffy.com dynamic floating text widgets only work on antique browsers but the truth is, most major websites DO actually follow the standards (which are simpler and make more sense).

      It's a standard. Tough. Deal with it. Everyone else has. "DHTML" in the sense that microsoft defined it, isn't a standard. And before you say another word, IE 5.5+ also supports the w3c DOM standard... making it quite a good standard in my book.

  • The one where upgrading from Netscape to Mozilla silently corrupts your preferences?
  • Such as: Bug 82534 - Cannot type in URL/address/loaction bar or text boxes - no caret/cursor. (Keyboard locks/freezes up / no input)

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8253 4

  • Forum for Mozilla users (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nicopa ( 87617 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [reiamthcil.ocin]> on Sunday June 02, 2002 @03:33AM (#3625485)
    There's a newgroup for user discussion and questions. You can get support there, please don't use the developer forums. This the users' group:

    snews://secnews.netscape.com:563/netscape.mozilla. user.general [secnewsnet...sergeneral]
  • Congrats on the upcoming 1.0. I've been with you guys since 0.93 or so. Am also using Netscape 7PR1 (as my default on OS X, in fact). These are great browsers, full-featured and stable. No need to use IE anymore, and I enjoy using the same browser across all my platforms. Thanks for all the long nights and great code.

  • Best thing of all is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jack William Bell ( 84469 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @04:25AM (#3625564) Homepage Journal
    hmm... I just read all the +1 and higher responses and no one has mentioned the thing I personally think is the best thing of all about Moz going 1.0 -- It means they finally freeze the API's.

    I don't know how many of you have checked out XUL and the Moz extension API's, but with them you have the ability to write literally any kind of application with an Open Source, Cross Platform, UI built using Moz via XML, HTML and a little javascript. This, I believe, is the most revolutionary thing about Moz! Using it for a UI surface, I can encapsulate routines that require speed in a C or C++ module (or even Python, Java and some other languages) and do the rest in not too much a different way than creating a DHTML web page. And the resulting UI code is portable...

    And the end result is fairly fast as well. All of the browser itself, all of the built-tools like the mail manager, the calendar, the IRC chat and so on are implemented this way. The potential of Moz as a UI development API is huge, assuming anyone creates a decent IDE for it. Nonetheless you can do things right now without an IDE, and (because the API's are frozen) you can be confident it will work with bug fix releases until they do a major update.

    During development many projects demonstrating these capabilities were obsoleted when the API's changed out from under them, causing the developers to stop work until the API froze. With this at an end I fully expect to see some really cool stuff fairly soon. Check http://www.mozdev.org for some example projects (most of which probably won't go anywhere soon, but some of which are the kinds of thing I am talking about).

    Jack William Bell
  • In the words of many anxious web surfers... also repeated often by kids...

    Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

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