Mozilla 1.0 Officially Here 961
hhg writes "People of the world, rejoice! At last, the long awaited Mozilla 1.0 is released, and has emerged on the ftp.mozilla.org ftp-server. Let the release parties loose!" And there's even an Ann Arbor party now ;) Congratulations
to all the developers that contributed to the mighty lizard. And bahtama writes "The latest IE gopher hole patch is out! :) ... Check the release notes and then grab it from here."
new king (Score:4, Insightful)
Say goodbye, IE! Man am I glad to see you go.
(BTW, I hear in the next (last?) WinXP patch, you'll be able to strip IE from your system entirely? Where can I find detailed information about this?)
PS. I've been using Mozilla for about a month or two, and despite aforementionned rough edges, this thing absolutely blows IE out of the water in all respects except market share.
Re:new king (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm seeing more and more people switch to IE every day. Complete cluelessness of Netscape is to blame for this. Even though Mozilla is a rock solid browser I doubt these people would be willing to run Mozilla after finding out that Netscape 6 is derrived from Mozilla code base.
it doesn't have to beat IE to win (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as Mozilla has its foot in the door with a significant niche of web users, as long as it is Free software that can never disappear simply because a company goes under, as long as it guarantees a viable browsing solution for all the platforms Microsoft would rather you forgot, then it has won. It will prevent Microsoft from completely dictating web standards, from creating a world where only Windows can browse the web.
The problem Microsoft (and others of its ilk) has with Free software is that it doesn't go away. When Mozilla first came out, there was a huge hype, but that hype evaporated and turned (in some quarters) to derision when Mozilla didn't deliver right away. For most MS competitors, that would have been the end. But Mozilla kept plugging along, getting better and better...it never has to go back to square one with a new company and codebase.
...and the longer it holds on with the high quality it has demonstrated so far, the more companies will jump on to its bandwagon. Everyone except for Microsoft benefits from open standards, and almost everyone knows it.
Re:New 1.0 Start Page and User FAQ (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, though in IE6 we needed to use a different tail PNG because IE6 gets the gamma wrong, and IE5's support is so b0rken we just don't put them on the page at all (you'll see a weird slideshow effect).
IE will become the new Netscape 4: the b0rken pizza ship that no-one wants to code for any more, because it's just too painful. I so so so wish we hadn't had to allow for the thing.
The ONLY thing annoying me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I fortunately replaced the splash screen on my copy at work (in Windows, drop a file called mozilla.bmp into the Mozilla directory, and that becomes your splash!) before I showed Mozilla off to my boss. Had he seen the regular splash screen, I don't know if he would have taken it seriously.
Seriously, the browser is professional, the splash screen should be too.
Re:New 1.0 Start Page and User FAQ (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Right on (Score:3, Insightful)
Except they aren't standards are they? They are secrets.
Re:Mirror list - Please don't /. the main site! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have this many mirrors, why don't sites set up a separate secured FTP site that ONLY the mirrors can connect to? That way, the damn mirrors would actually be useful!!!
Re:Not bad at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Talkback packages only (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me an old fart, but "net installers" (aka stubs) annoy me. (This isn't a Mozilla criticism - IE is just as bad.)
If I don't want the email/news/chat cruft (and I don't), but I do want the basic browser on 3 systems, why should I download a 200K .exe three times, click on the same options three times, and download the same few-megabytes browser, three times?
Just gimme a damn URL where I can get the installer that contains everything needed for the basic browser. (That is, tell me where to find the thing the stub's downloading). Then let me download it ONCE. I can then FTP or copy it on my LAN, or even burn it to CD and use SneakerNet to get it to other machines.
General question: I'm seeing stubs more often, and I just don't get the idea. Apart from marketing ("Look! Upgrade your Netscape! Only 200K download!" - conveniently ignoring that it's only the stub, and thereby obfuscating the size of the real download) purposes, what value is added by these "network installer" stubs?
In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?
Re:Not bad at all. (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla should never support the CRAP that IE tries to push as "standard." Might does not make right.
mozilla is an end-user browser (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean to deprecate your efforts, but I think this "Mozilla isn't about producing an end-user product" idea has always been wishful thinking--and is becoming less plausible every day. Mozilla is clearly destined to become the prominent browser in the free software community and the web development community, and a popular browser among computer users at large.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea in principle to separate the development of the engine and the finish; I just don't see how it can happen in this case. The core features and the user interface of a browser are not separable enough. In order for Mozilla to produce a browser for testing purposes going to want it to be a good user interface. The evidence bears this out: users file usability bugs in bugzilla, the developers take them seriously, and as a result, vanilla mozilla has an overall better user interface than any earlier Netscape browser.
The Mozilla developers seem to agree on the value of a reference user interface, in order to prevent excessive variation in the interfaces of derived products. For example, they insist upon limiting the number of user-configurable variables, which would not make sense if they were only about the basic technologies. In order for their reference interface to be credible, they have to invest resources in usability. The way I see it, the "reference interface" position amounts to a committment to an end-user product, even if they don't realize or admit it.
On top of this, Mozilla already has all the visibility in the free software and web development communities. If Mozilla refuses to provide an end-user product, it will mostly create user confusion. Mozilla has all the developers. Mozilla has all the infrastructure. It only makes sense for Mozilla to do the last 10% and provide an end-user product. Maybe someday beonix or galeon or someone else will overcome this barrier (just as GTK and QT have finally displaced athena as free widget sets for X), but it will take a long time.
Of course, in some markets, vanilla Mozilla won't be the king. Among Joe PC, it will a Netscape or AOL branded version. Users of embedded systems will get whatever modified version their manufacturer included. But even the popular computer press reviews Mozilla, so the message that it is not for end-users doesn't seem to have gotten through. And among the slashdot demographic, Mozilla is it. Let's face it: how many of us will download Mozilla 1.0 to "test" it? Most of us want to use it! Mozilla is already a great end-user browser, and will keep getting better.
Re:Talkback packages only (Score:3, Insightful)
For chrissakes, you are replying to a response [slashdot.org] which clearly exemplifies the main reason stubs are provided -- people on slow connections that don't want to install certain parts of the program! Why should they have to download everything?
Mozilla provides a complete download as well.
Sheesh.
Bullshit hypocricy (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod me down, you're proving my point.
Still some quirks (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the things that I would like to say about the access Mozilla project is that they seem to have a clue that assessability is important. The open office group downgraded the complaint that even basic menu functionality is not visible to speech recognition software from a bug to a feature request. However until Mozilla works just as well with existing speech recognition software as Internet Explorer interacts with existing speech recognition software I'm not going to use Mozilla on a regular basis.
Re:new king (Score:2, Insightful)
My whole point is, it hasn't been long that IE has been "browser of choice." And things change so quickly in this area that the popular browser can be Netscape one day, IE the next day, and an onslaught of Mozilla-based browsers the day after that.
The TRUE philanthropists are the Mozilla people. (Score:3, Insightful)
One last note. Moderators may not reply to stories they moderate, so they often only moderate stories in which they have little interest. Because of that, moderators often don't follow the entire discussion threads closely.
Therefore, it is probably necessary to explain that this discussion of Bill Gate's charity is VERY much on topic.
The true philanthropists are those who contributed to Mozilla, and those who contribute to other open source projects.
Someone who annoys the whole world with buggy software, so that he can make money, is not a true philanthropist. It matters little if he gives a small part of that money to a worthy cause.
Re:MARS NEEDS WOMEN! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: from the it's-only-been-how-many-years dept. (Score:2, Insightful)
Archiving such is not an easy thing to do.
I'm very happy to have good a decend browser on linux.