First Reviews of Mozilla 1.0 Roll In

Since the announcement of Mozilla 1.0's release, at least a few journalists have been quick to turn the beast over and poke its belly. Tina Gasperson's review over at NewsForge makes an interesting contrast to CNET's review; strange how they give a rating that would barely merit a "C-" after describing Mozilla's robustness, standards compliance, speed and convenience features.

Reviewer Wrong?

[_Quinn]

Reviewer: "However, the release notes say you should not use your Netscape profiles, because you could lose your search settings or become the victim of an ever-growing bookmark file that might freeze your system. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 since the release announcement, with my Netscape profile, and haven't experienced these problems. Yet."

Release notes: "Do not share a profile between Netscape and Mozilla builds."

e.g., not in the same directly, not import, yes?

-_Quinn

You would think that CNET had competent authors

[akiaki007]

But...once you are done with the full review and read "The Good, The Bad..." section...take a look at this.

The bad: Incompatible with some sites built for Internet Explorer; chat client doesn't work with the big commercial IM systems, including ICQ, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, and Windows Messenger.

Last time I checked. ChatZilla was a IRC client, not a friggin chat program to be used with AIM, ICQ, etc. While that would be something nice to add, it's already been done and I don't see why the author would mention this. IRC is much cooler than IM anyhow!

it doesn't surprise me that CNET gave a 7

[peteshaw]

Think about it. CNET has never strived to achieve a benchmark for impartial reporting, they collect advertising revenue. So one of there biggest caveats is to not piss off 'the industry' as they see it. So they give all these least common denominator reports that don't have any useful information. They just gave a Netscape a review, and gave it the lowest possible score they could justify given that it was faster, more stable, and more W3C compliant than the big IE.

Think I'm wrong? By contrast, PCWeek, eWeek, and lots of other industry rags tend to be more impartial, and will generally call a turd a turd and a gem a gem, not vice versa.

But then there's audience too to calculate in too. I dare say that if Microsoft were to behave nicely and come out with a superier product that was priced fairly, some one here would find something to bitch about.

why is opera so fast?

[JeanBaptiste]

Not knowing a whole lot about it, it seems that my opera has (speedwise) outperformed both netscape and ie by quite a good margin

Re:mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly

[NullProg]

"Edit"
"Preferences"
"Appearance"
"Themes"
"Get New Themes"

Enjoy.

Re:Funniest line in the Cnet Review

[Jucius Maximus]

"The bad: Incompatible with some sites built for Internet Explorer"

The good: CNET realises that those sites were built using nonstandard markup language for IE and it is not some standards-deviation or bug in Mozilla that is causing the problem.

IE 6 gets a C too

[zmokhtar]

Don't worry to much about the 7 out of 10. They gave IE 6 the same score [cnet.com].

Make Mozilla Cooler in MacOS X 10.1.5

[toupsie]

Mozilla is nice on MacOS X but it does not take advantage of the Quartz type smoothing like OmniWeb or Chimera. However, if you install Unsanity's haxie program called Silk [unsanity.com], it will allow Mozilla (or IE) to use the Quartz text smoothing along with your other Carbon apps. Well worth the download and it doesn't appear to slow down the system -- which I expected. With Quartz text smoothing, MacOS X becomes the most visually appealing, web browsing platform -- which it should be.

Enigmail / MozDev

[E Zimmer]

I personally like the Enigmail plugin for OpenPGP support in the browser. Easy encryption for the masses.

Mozilla did as well as IE in the ratings

[dlevitan]

strange how they give a rating that would barely merit a "C-"

Actually, they gave it the same rating as they gave IE 6, Netscape 7 PR 1, Netscape 6.1, and one more than Opera 6. So in reality, Mozilla ranked as well as the "best" browsers from MS.

SVG support in 1.0 is claimed, but non-existent

[tobi_pinkjuice.com]

Mozilla 1.0 is out, and the release notes say:
"Supported XML W3C Recommendations
SVG"
"The standards Mozilla 1.0 supports include:
SVG"
but there is no SVG support in 1.0. Ze-ro.
Check this post [yahoo.com] for some more info.

Re:it doesn't surprise me that CNET gave a 7

[lak3rs]

CNET's review of IE6 [cnet.com] gave it a score of 7, same as Mozilla 1.0 on XP.

Re:Built for IE!

[gambit3]

IIRC, and I think there was a Slashdot story about this, I remember reading that one of the conditions that M$ put forth as a requirement for them to continue developing Office for the Mac, was that Apple had to stop using Netscape as the default browser, and replace it with IE.

Re:On first glance....

[brsmith4]

it uses 3 times the memory space as IE. I thought it was supposed to be more efficient?

Yes... Do you know why??? Because most of IE is integrated into the explorer UI. Most of the bulk of Internet Explorer lies there. When you fire up mozilla, it has to start everything, the rendering engine, its own UI, etc. If you take that into account, Mozilla is far more efficient. Think of it this way: take the time that it takes the explorer shell to start and add the time that it takes for IE to start. Also, add the memory usage. Then compare to mozilla. Have a nice day.

best thing never mentioned: keywords for bookmarks

[tswinzig]

The coolest thing in mozilla is that I can associate a bookmark with a keyword (even just a letter or two), and go to that bookmark through the URL bar with that keyword, even with search terms.

E.g. I have this bookmark for dictionary.com:

http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=% s

For keyword, I have it set to 'd'. I can lookup a word by typing "d " on the url bar, and hitting enter.

I do similar things for Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=%s), for IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/Find?select=All&for=%s), and especially for various customer searches with our database search engine at work.

This feature saves me TONS of time every day. This alone is enough to keep me using Mozilla as long as it remains stable.

Then you add in the oft-mentioned tabbed browsing, popup blocking, standards compliancy, skinnability, programmability, etc., and it just gets better.

And don't forget, the perfect complement to tabbed browsing -- saving a group of bookmarks as one item ! Perfect.

And what about how much more consistently Mozilla handles links for new windows? MSIE has two shitty behaviors to choose from, which drive me crazy. Either you open up a page in a new window each time , or it tries to re-use windows that are already open, usually picking the one I don't want. Even when clicking on bookmarks, it uses this bizarre behavior. I don't know when they added this 'feature', but it drove me bonkerz.

Jeez, I haven't even gotten to the email client! All the things that drive me nuts in Outlook/Outlook Express are fixed in Mozilla's mail client. It only lacks a couple things I like (Eudora's "redirect" ability, for one).

Finally a mail client that lets me use IMAP without constantly reminding me that I'm looking at a remote message. (What's this outlook crap with drawing a line through a deleted message? I like for the message to disappear, and the focus to move to the next message... thanks mozilla.)

Not perfect, but mozilla is getting there.

Re:best thing never mentioned: keywords for bookma

[tswinzig]

For keyword, I have it set to 'd'. I can lookup a word by typing "d " on the url bar, and hitting enter.

Whoops, that should have said "d [word]". You type d, then the word you want to lookup, hit enter.

Re:Does Mozilla allow users to "Steal" content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the majority of those scripts to block right clicking don't work in Mozilla! Gasp. And Mozilla even lets you view source easily!!!

Re:mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly

[cjpez]

Or even . . .

• View
• Apply Themes
• Get New Themes

:)

Re:it doesn't surprise me that CNET gave a 7

[tempest303]

try again, friend. ;)

from the site:

Longer bars indicate better performance, with the fastest browser scoring 100.

The Java test was the only one that IE won!

BBC story

[Brown]

The BBC has a story on the 1.0 release of mozilla [bbc.co.uk], including the background of Mozilla and the principles of OpenSource.

It seems to be a generally favourable overview: "Mozilla is quick, stable, and virtually free of the default links to manufacturers' products that feature so prominently in commercial browsers". Also mentioned is the recent release of OpenOffice. Includes some quotes from Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org.

Chris

Get the latest beta of America Online

[yerricde]

We need to find an ISP willing to distribute Mozilla instead of IE.

Thirty percent of people who connect to the Internet do so through America Online. After AOL's contract with Microsoft (bundling IE in exchange for bundling an AOL icon on the desktop) expired, AOL switched CompuServe to Gecko, and the next version of the AOL client is headed that way as well (AOL keyword: beta).

The thing I really like about Mozilla...

[Trogre]

... is it's standards compliance.
Try the cool demos [mozilla.org], using nothing but fully w3c-compliant HTML/CSS code.

Try that with IE. Honestly, IE still [entropymine.com] won't even support transpartent PNG's, effectively rendering (no pun intended) it useless as a serious web browser. No matter how popular it is.

Re:Make Mozilla Cooler in MacOS X 10.1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. The thing to realize is that up until 10.1.5, the Carbon API's didn't have a, um, "hook" into the Quartz Antialiasing engine. And apps like IE, Moz, and other ports from MacOS 9-ware are all Carbon apps.

However, other apps like Mail, or Omniweb are built with Cocoa API's (taken from NeXTStep), and those API's *do* have the hook into the AA engine.

With 10.1.5, I'm not sure exactly, but I have the impression that Apple finally gave Carbon developers access to that engine - but you have to compile your code to get it - it's not magically given to you.

So, what Silk does is... well, I don't know how it does it, but those developers figured out a way to get existing apps, like Moz and IE, to transparently access the Quartz rendering engine.

Hope that answers your question...

Re:hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

and in prefs.js you can see options to handle other special cases.
obviously this is just an arms race. but work is being done to more easily configure javascript rights, excluding or including sites, allowing limited range of options, and all in the gui.

C|Net review *was* pretty pathetic though.
How do they stay in business?

Re:best thing never mentioned: keywords for bookma

[snake_dad]

I'd like to mention the possibility to create a bookmark for a group of pages, that you have currently open in separate tabs. Just open several tabs, load one of your favourite news sites in each of them, and create a bookmark, and check the "File as group" checkbox to be able to open all of them in one single mouseclick. I love it.

Re:bugs (nope)

[wikkid007]

I really wish people would think/look at source/search bugzilla before saying stuff like this.

Yes I really wish people would look at the source too... if anyone took a look at the source of the example URL [tweak3d.net] for the bug you mention [mozilla.org], they might realize that the list item tag was opened and then closed, before the content.

You can't blame the browser for incompetent web design. IE has always been more forgiving in regard to poorly formed html, but that's not necessarily a good thing -- it's just a thumbs up to writing sloppy html.

Re:Mozilla: useless for the intranet

[jonabbey]

They are still working on NTLM. Look up bugzilla bug 23679 for details. Or copy the following URL and enter it into your browser (to work around bugzilla's slashdot referer filter): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23679

Re:I think it's great.

[Futurepower(R)]

Opera is not nearly as good. Apparently, you can start only one instance of Opera. You can start several instances of Mozilla. Each instance can have several tabs. You can save all the tabs in an instance in one bookmark (group bookmarking). That is an extremely useful feature.

For example, suppose you are doing research on backup systems. You may load 10 or 20 tabs that show backup software reviews and manufacturer web pages. You can save them all and shut down your system. Ten days and many other research projects later, you can bring the backup research pages back by loading that bookmark.

You can save multiple Opera windows to a file, but the interface is quirky, and the system is not nearly as useful.

Here's how one person uses group bookmarks:

When you have several tabs open, go to Bookmarks|File Bookmark... and check the box that says "file as group". Name your bookmark, and each time you open that bookmark all the tabs you had open will reopen. You can even later add bookmarks to the group as if it were a folder. I love that to read my daily comics I don't have to select endless bookmarks or cycle through a list, I just click on the item labeled "Comix" and a dozen tabs open up.

IE memory usage isn't hidden that way

[ZeekWatson]

Yes... Do you know why??? Because most of IE is integrated into the explorer UI. Most of the bulk of Internet Explorer lies there

IE will run fine without the explorer.exe shell running dumbass. Lower memory usage and faster performance comes from moving certain functions/objects right into the Win32 API.

Mozilla is basically an OS running on top of an OS. It has its own native widget set, its own Cross-platform Component Object Model (XPCOM), god knows what else (check the source) and people wonder why it is dog slow?

Mozilla is FATware. That is what you get for re-inventing the wheel.

I use it for my email :)

Re:Built for IE!

[Elwood P Dowd]

That used to be the case.

They made a deal that expired. There is now no deal, and no contract requiring Microsoft to produce Office:Mac. Kevin Browne of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit keeps telling people that there's no reason MS is going to stop making Office:Mac. There doesn't need to be a contract. There just needs to be goodwill between the companies.

Interview [newsfactor.com]
Keynote [microsoft.com]

Of course, Apple switching to Mozilla might easily count as an end to the goodwill between the companies.

Don't forget the Managers!

[joelpt]

Virtually the sole reason I've moved from the wonderful Opera browser to Mozilla: the 'Managers'. All these are found in the Tools dropdown menu.

Form Manager: store all your personal information in Mozilla (name, address, cc#, etc.) -- all password protected if you so desire (also very configurable) -- then when you have to fill a form in, click Edit->Fill In Form. Ahhh.. finally :)

Password Manager: like the form manager, but remembers your login/password(s) on a per-site basis, and auto-fills them in for you when you return next. Also protected by a (master) password if you see fit.

Cookie Manager and Image Manager: browse and edit your cookie list, and restrict which images are shown in your browser as you see fit.

Download Manager: not quite as cool as Opera's transfer window, but keeps all of your downloads in one convenient window -- enough with the zillion individual download popups, I say!!

Mozilla is almost everything I want in a browser. The only thing I'm still wanting is the "remember where I was browsing" feature of Opera. While Moz does tabs, it doesn't remember which were open for you and reopen them upon your next session (and it also has a known issue with the preference which makes new windows open new tabs instead). Here's to hoping such features get implemented in the near future! :)

Re:Newspeak

[rifter]

Microsoft has, indeed admitted in open court that:

1) There are hidden API's

2) They refuse to disclose them as they feel it will negate a competitive advantage such nondisclosures afford them.

As for URL's, for starters, /. had an article [slashdot.org] on this recently, though salon seems to have broken the referenced link and it has been tough tracking it down. I believe it is cached here [216.239.35.100].

The fact MS API's are not documented is better documented than that, however. One should probably peruse the findings of fact [usdoj.gov]. There was also an article on ZDnet [zdnet.com] (surprisingly) on this as well.

I found a Microsoft KB Article [microsoft.com] on undocumented API's as well as a perl tool [panix.com] pertaining to them with just a cursory google [google.com].

For the paranoid, I am sure a little more diligence would indeed turn up the very court documents in which the quotes were made, but really, the fact Microsoft hides code from developers has been discussed ad nauseum in the press ever since DOS, and has not only never been contested by Microsoft, rather the reverse, Microsoft has always said this is a necessary part of its business strategy.

Re:Built for IE!

[Gerv]

(usually spacing in tables where there should be none).

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.ht ml

Question 2.

Gerv