First Reviews of Mozilla 1.0 Roll In 860
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.
Built for IE! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what irks me. The web is supposed to be platform-neutral, not built for IE. Mozilla, IMHO is doing the right thing by not making its browser conform to the skewed standards IE has set. I say let those pages that are "built for IE" look like crap. Sooner or later, Mozilla will gain market share (we hope,) and people will have to begin building web pages that are standards-compliant not IE-compliant. Good job, Mozilla!
Hargun
On first glance.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Truly amazing! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ciryon
It has problems with ads. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is not the browser...but the ad. When will these people wake up? Did you catch that TWO of their few complains centered around use of ads, or features to stop ads? When you turn pop-ups off, it may disable some aspects of cnet.com (news.com?) that you really want to use. Hehe...yeah.
The ads causing a page to be non-function is a good reason to a) stop using the site and b) send the webmaster a poltite message telling them why you will never visit their site again.
-Pete
The (Score:4, Insightful)
For one thing, Mozilla doesn't always render Web pages the same way IE does. Why does that matter? Many Web designers have built sites primarily for IE, and those pages look odd in Mozilla.
This "criticism" seems to me to be rather absentminded. Specifically building sites for IE is a shortcoming on the developer side. And imagine a browser being criticised for rendering ads, of all things, incorrectly! Go figure. Personally I can't wait to update my RCx.
Re:CNET are M$ whores. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that if they considered security as well, Mozilla would beat out IE, but ignoring security and standards (both of which Mozilla beats out IE at) the browsers would be similar.
Maybe it's just me though not wanting to give internet servers capabilities to read my entire hard drive (see jscript.dk).
Reviewer need's a lesson in HTML standards (Score:3, Insightful)
" Beyond its skins and pop-up-killing abilities, however, Mozilla 1.0 doesn't do much more for the average Web surfer than Internet Explorer does. For one thing, Mozilla doesn't always render Web pages the same way IE does. Why does that matter? Many Web designers have built sites primarily for IE, and those pages look odd in Mozilla. For example, we struggled with sites that use a technology called positioning to put ads on their pages. In IE, those ads temporarily hide part of the page, then go away. But in our Mozilla tests, the ads sometimes permanently blocked part of the page, and we had to reload the page until we got a different, regular, nonpositioning ad."
I seriously doubt this has anything to do with Mozilla. More likely, the web designer used the broken standards of IE and never bothered to test it with other browsers.
my faith restored (Score:4, Insightful)
So I took a chance on the posting yesterday and decided to give Mozilla a whirl. First impression wasn't that great due to the cheese splash screen on launch(which I replaced, and it actually listened to me!). However it didn't take long for me to be converted after that.
Right off the bat, I turned off 90% of pop up adds, imported my IE fav's and even gave it a new look using the themes. i was and still am truely impressed by Mozilla. I can search my bookmarks, a huge deal for me. I can tell Mozilla how to behave...and it seems to actually listen!
After realising how much I liked this new browser I suddenly became very aware of how far the 'net in general has gone down hill since IE's dominace. I realized how my work got further and further away from stds, focused on M$ and how they wanted things done. Most of all I was dissapointed how I had forgotten just how good the net as a whole used to be.
Either way, if the Moz. dev team is listening, thank you. I can once again surf in peace.
C-Nut review is narrow minded (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mozilla doesn't always render Web pages the same way IE does. Why does that matter? Many Web designers have built sites primarily for IE, and those pages look odd in Mozilla"
What?!? So because a bunch of lazy web "developers" have written IE specific html, we should not just assume this means IE is the better browser? I think this is a really narrow-minded observation. Granted he may be right about the rendering, but it does not mean that Mozilla is not as good as IE.
Seriously, IE simply renders pages more "correctly" because it dominates the market and lazy "developers" have written IE specific code.
I guess this journalist also believes that Windows is superior to Mac OS X because there is more software available for it. Or maybe he just enjoys BSODs. Get real, this is not a fair way to compare browsers.
One last thing... can someone please show me a page link to all these pages that don't render correctly in Mozilla? I use Mozilla exclusively and have not come upon any pages in the last few months that do not work correctly with Mozilla.
Re:What a shock.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
Functional, yes. Gorgeous, what?
Regardless, if that's the biggest complaint, try any of the smattering of themes available. Now that 1.0 is out, I imagine they'll start growing in number soon, but at least try out Orbit Moz Theme [mozdev.org]
Who is this clown? (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly, why would anyone want to use IRC in and instant messanger? Chatzilla is an IRC client as it should be.
Re:C-Nut review is narrow minded (Score:5, Insightful)
If the browser shows the site nicely, it is a good browser.
If the browser shows a garbled mess it is a bad browser.
You can argue technical correctness all you want, but all most people care about is if it works as intended. The fact that the site isn't written properly doesn't matter to them, just that IE works and Mozilla doesn't.
yes this could be flamebait, but really that is how people think.
Re:mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
You aren't using the classic theme, are you? In my opinion the modern (view/apply theme/modern) looks quite nice. Anyway, the big deal about 1.0 is that the interfaces used by themes are finally stable, so expect the floodgates to open.
Re:CNET are M$ whores. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla ain't that great. (Score:5, Insightful)
One example of this problem is Mozilla's extremely slow development cycle
Have you compared the relative quality of IE 1.0 to Mozilla 1.0? Many people are comparing IE6.0 to Mozilla 1.0 in a favorable manner...certainly comparing the 1.0 releases of both products would be silly. The "slow" dev cycle is based on an entirely different design philosophy: the code is released when it is ready, not when some arbitrary date arrives.
Mozilla has no paying customer or management to answer to, the browser suffers from innumerable problems. It's a RAM hog [...] Its default user interface emphasizes form over function [...] It does not support the current generation of Web-related standards. It's slow.
On my current machine (Win2K Pro), Mozilla is using 21,272k. I am not worried about this, as I have a gig of ram in this box. However, I have *no* other apps open (even in the tray), and currently 181meg of my memory is being used. How much of that is IE? We will never know. Obviously iexplore.exe is not all of IE, as Microsoft has repeatedly informed us that IE is integrated into the OS. As to the slowness, you would be best to go peruse the reviews linked in the article. All of them show Mozilla being at least as fast as IE. Are you sure you have your l33t Solaris box configured properly? I used Mozilla and IE (where possible) on my 7 machines, which are a mix of Win2K and various flavors of Linux, and Mozilla is the same or better than IE on every single one. As to web standards, you have no idea what you are talking about. Go read some of the info on Mozilla's web site. Mozilla is the most standards-complaint browser on the market. The problems that you see are its incomplete handling of IE-specific extensions to W3C standards.
But I think that the most laughable thing of the farse that is the Mozilla project is that no one said "no" to any feature requests [...] the project is so disorganized that basic web browser functionality was often ignored so that developers could work on their favorite "cool" features. A good example is the mail client [...] development on such a client should not have began until the browser was finished [...] I simply don't understand why Mozilla implements a completely custom widget set...
This long, ranting paragraph basically says that you would have developed Mozilla differently. Apparantly, the people who actually worked on Mozilla (it is pretty obvious that you are not a developer, but merely a whiny user) favored certain features that you do not find useful. Please bear in mind that if you do not like how Mozilla was developed, then you certainly could have lent a hand, rather than criticizing the years of hard work that the devs put into Mozilla. Provided, of course, that you can be dragged away from your "Real UNIX Work" on your "Solaris Box That Cost More Than Slashdot Makes In A Year."
And Windows users have even less reason to be impressed with Mozilla, because most of its "features" seem even more unecessary in a Windows environment. For example, the mail client is absolutely useless, because almost all Windows business users use Outlook or Outlook Express.
Hundreds of virus writers worldwide are alternately laughing or thanking you profusely for your endorsement of Outlook.
Gecko violates Windows user interface conventions, making it look more like some college student's "intro to VB let's see all of the cool buttons and colors that I can add to my app" project than an application that is actually intended for use in the real world
If you don't like how Mozilla looks, go grab a different skin. I did (Lo-Fi). I only wish that I could make the rest of Windows look like my Mozilla skin, which I find simple, clear, and easy to use. Sadly, I can't change the look and feel of my Windows machines as easily as I can the Linux ones.
Internet Explorer is superior to Mozilla
Again, I have my opinions, so do many others, but I really think you should do some research before stating them as fact. Go read the reviews linked in the article.
Mozilla has also lost on the UNIX platform. Internet Explorer is faster and more standards compliant
Could you please provide a link to the GNU/Linux binaries for IE? Oh, wait, by UNIX you mean Solaris...and of course, Solaris is taking over the desktop market.
In all honesty, this reply has been a complete waste of my time. You are obviously trolling here, more interested in spewing invectives about Mozilla than any useful discussion. In reality, noone is even going to see your reply, as it will be moderated down below 1. However, I hope that you will indeed take the time to reconsider your opinions and maintain a bit more of an open mind concerning your software.
This is not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Sir, on the one hand, I think it is commendable that you believe so strongly in the platform-independant Internet. That is the way it is supposed to be, and IE's standard skewing is regrettable. That skewing is now the reality, however, and there is no way Joe User will keep Mozilla installed for more than 5 min once he sees that his pages look different - and standards compliance be damned. The average user wants their pages to look pretty. If mozilla doesn't do that, even in the name of standards compliance, most people will not use it. The only way to gain market share is to support the IE standards.
For now.
But if Mozilla does grow more popular, then there's no reason it couldn't take a page from IE's book, and slowly stop supporting IE "Standards" in new releases. Once the user base for Mozilla is large enough - and remember, a period of IE compliance IS needed for this to happen - then if Mozilla starts adopting strict standards compliance, IE might be forced to follow suit. Might.
It worked for microsoft - could it work here?
Neglected to mention security (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true... Mozilla allows for faster turn-around times for security patches and updates. Cookies and images can be disabled in actual Emails, something outlook or outlook express fails to do.
In a security consience world, Mozilla is probably better in security than IE, since Mozilla isn't apart of the OS itself! Granted, Mozilla will have a few security holes, but who would you rather fix them? Microsoft with a 4 week turnaround time, or Mozilla with usually a 1-2 day turnaround.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it doesn't surprise me that CNET gave a 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it.
The problem with M$, besides being convicted monopoly abusers and yadayada, is their refusal to interoperate with as much as they can get away with. They demand complete adherence across your network, and give interoperability only grudgingly, and frequently with lawsuits. To persons with or in control of large, heterogeneous networks, this behavior is rather irksome, as we grow rather risk-averse, where 'risk' is defined as: reinstalling everything in the building and tossing a decade of experience. Not fun, or worthwhile.
Yes, we're a curmudgeonly audience who are almost totally opposed to Microsoft. But quite a few of us have valid, and very expensive, reasons.
Re:Mozilla ain't that great. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can cut down the amount of RAM usage by going to Preferences->Advanced->Cache and then reduce the memory cache. Personally, I find its memory usage quite acceptable (I watch the virtual memory usage as well as the physical memory usage). I've heard that IE hides much of its mem usage. But I guess you're on a Solaris box so this is probably not the case for you.
(You may have noticed that I seem fixated on Mozilla's slowness. [...] I have a Sun workstation that cost more money than Slashdot earns in a year. On this workstation, Internet Explorer takes x seconds to load, Netscape 4 takes 2x seconds to load, and Mozilla takes 15x (!!) seconds to load.
You're comparing browser load times? If so, that's not a really an important issue, though I find Mozilla loads fast even without the preloading feature. What's important is page rendering times. According to the CNET article, Mozilla was faster in 3 or 4 tests (granted they don't go into detail and talk about other tests).
In any case do want you want. Continue to use IE exclusively if you please. But many of us are going to be giving Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers a chance. It has something that IE will most likely never have: it is completely customizable in that we have the source code.
IE should not be followed. (Score:2, Insightful)
MS has not implemented them, which is their right, they don't have to. Trying to emulate them will only cause their stranglehold to increase, not decrease. Mozilla is a better browser, but not because it renders HTML faster, but because it actaully does MORE then IE does.
WARNING: Heresy proposed within (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just downlaoded it (Score:2, Insightful)
there are numerous wierd little bugs in every browser that might occur on a specific platform under certain conditions -- Mozilla relies on people who find such bugs to report them so thay can be fixed...
if you found a bug in a pre-release version of the browser and didn't report it - you have no right to complain!
Re:Newspeak (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but thanks for playing. The debugger window is not really part of the browser...It's a debugger. Quit would logicaly quit the debugger, and not the whole browser. They shouldn't really have a quit button on there if they consider it part of the browser, just close. A child of the parent window shouldn't have command that can affect the parent in such a durastic way.
This is where programmers tend to make the biggest mistakes. They that their way is right (I'm sure someone will tell me that I'm full of shit). But the fact is, the user clicked the wrong button. Given that the Cnet people aren't totaly newbies, it's the programmers fault that the user clicked the wrong button....They have misslead the user in some way.
Re:Mozilla: useless for the intranet (Score:5, Insightful)
And it is unexcusable for Opera, Konquor, lynx, wget, and every other http-based tool?
MS Proxy server supports other authentication methods. The manager for the proxy server has chosen to only support NTLM authentication. I would consider *THAT* to be unexcusable, myself...
If you REALLY must use NTLM authentication, there are installable local proxy servers that can fake out the NTLM authentication for you, like this [geocities.com] one.
jf
(who manages proxy servers for a living...among other things.)
Re:This is not realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible, yes, that some users won't use Mozilla because it doesn't render their favorite site. These people are a lost cause until those sites become compatible with the standards that exist for web sites. But for the majority of the people, I suspect they will either not notice any problems with Mozilla, or they'll not care much that the odd site does not render perfectly (because it uses IE extensions) when they consider all the added benefits that Mozilla does provide them over IE.
Jason.
Re:Mozilla ain't that great. (Score:1, Insightful)
My thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
I've gone through a whole series of different web browsers on Windows, OS X and Linux over the years. On Linux, I'd choose Mozilla 1.0 without hesitation, clearly the best.
On Mac OS X, I stick with IE5. Omniweb, despite everybody saying it's brilliant, just doesn't do it for me. All the fonts are overly anti-aliased, and if you switch off anti-aliasing, they look rough. It also does strange things with simple tables and images on some pages. Chimera is almost there, fast, but still lacking a lot of features. Once it gets there, it'll be great. IE5 is slow, but it renders pages correctly, and 10.1.5 of X really helps with it's scroll speed on my Powerbook.
Windows 2000, IE6 is the no-brainer. And even with Moz out, it still is I'm afraid. The fact is, IE6 never crashes for me. Neither did IE5, on any of the Win2K machines I use. It never appears slow, renders every page I visit perfectly, gives me the font sizes I like, doesn't overly anti-alias text and for our internal office systems lets me do fun things with <div> tags. Where's the reason not to use it, other than for those who hate MS? I've never found any IE security hole to be a problem (how many people are going to be using Gopher links these days?) so I don't see that as a major selling point (and neither will the rest of the general public). And Moz's open-source status won't make it free from issues like that either, despite what people might think, just go look for known open-source security holes. There are lots. Apache, mySQL, PHP and more have all had them.
But in the end, Moz does a lot of things right, tabbed browsing is great (Opera may have had it first, but Opera never rendered pages for me as well as Moz does), the page rendering is almost always on par with IE6, as is the speed. I'm not a fan of the interface and I hate skins (pointless, useless things, just design an interface that looks good and works in the first place), but generally I was very impressed with it. Stupid things like forgetting the section I was last in when I go back to the Preferences, or continuously adding my shacknews password details to the store every time I posted, resulting in it asking me to keep selecting which username I wanted to use marred the experience somewhat.
What the Moz developers need to do now is stop copying every other browser out there, so they're not missing features, and start changing people's perception of how a browser should work to start with. Give people a reason to change. Think outside of the box. There's not been much change in the way a browser works since TBL created the web, even if HTML and the way people use the web has changed significantly. I'm interested to see if Apple do indeed produce an iWeb application (as is currently rumoured) because they would probably try something different.
Mozilla is still on my machine, but for now, I don't see much reason to switch.
not as biased as you think? (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted, the comment about rendering differently than IE was just dumb, as anyone who knows anything about standards would tell you. And anyone with intelligence will see through his pandering News.com comment anyway.
But I'm not sure I'm seeing the "C-" grade. Could it be you're all just a little too close to it, like an artist having his painting criticized? I think it seemed like he liked it for a 1.0 release and he'd like to see some usability improvements so the general public could get down and dirty with it. Maybe it's not fair to compare it to IE6, but that's life. Anyone who's looking for a different browser or just open-minded will get the feeling that this is a viable alternative, and at least you don't have to pay for it like Opera, while getting similar features.
Bottom line: I downloaded it and I'll check it out.
Re:Sometimes this is not IE's fault (Score:3, Insightful)
It is possible to abuse a standard and still have a valid CSS. If your effect relies on a certain font, how is it going to look on a text-only browser like lynx, or a system for the visually impaired? What if the user is using IE, but doesn't have that font installed?
The purpose of CSS is to separate the formatting of the document from the appearance. The style sheets cascade, meaning that a user could attach his own style sheet to your document to adjust for a disability, or lack of technology.
You may have written valid CSS, but you abused the standard and tried to do womething it was not intended to do. So, from a certain point of view, you were not "standards compliant" at all.
Re:Make Mozilla Cooler in MacOS X 10.1.5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Omniweb's support for modern standards is well below-par, especially when it comes to CSS selectors, and the CSS2 box-model. This causes it to render CSS2-based sites really, really badly. It may render the majority of the web correctly, but that's because the majority of the web has been painstakingly designed to render correctly in Netscape 4.
Even worse, Omniweb _pretends_ that it understands CSS, causing it to not degrade gracefully when it meets markup that it either doesn't understand, or misinterprets. Which makes a lot of pages that have perfectly good HTML unreadable.
The more we support browsers with crappy standards support, the more we force web designers to make stupid concessions for dumb browsers.
Charles Miller
Re:Mozilla ain't that great. (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny, I use a unix box (linux and solaris) to "do real work" and I find mozilla to be a damn fine browser. I've been using it since the first public release days (.7.x?) when I had to compile it myself to use it under solaris. Even then, when it had far less features and wasn't super stable, I preferred to to IE.
Mozilla has also lost on the UNIX platform. Internet Explorer is faster and more standards compliant. Ironically, it's also a much better UNIX application. By the way, did you know that Microsoft includes CDE icons with the IE/UNIX distribution? That's class.
Bwah ha ha! IE under Solaris is one of the most unstable apps I've ever seen under solaris. It's one of the few apps that can be counted on to take down an X session or just hang the whole session. We had several people trying it under several different solaris versions (from 2.5.1 from way back in the day to 8 these days) and everyone that tries it hates it!
Better unix app? My ass! Sure, and NT is a better unix than unix.
Fuck you all.
Thanks but no thanks.
Re:Sometimes this is not IE's fault (Score:3, Insightful)
> but I can tell you that Netscape 6 and espically 4 have problems of just rendering
> HTML WRONG.
Netscape 6 came out a *year and a half* ago. The excuse of "Mozilla 1.0 just came out" is totally bogus - Netscape 6.1 and 6.2 have been released since then, and are much better than 6.0. If you really wanted to keep an eye on Mozilla's progress, you could have downloaded nightly builds or stable milestone builds every few weeks, or months. The downloadable installers have been out there, 1 click away from www.mozilla.org, all along. Mozilla 1.0 RC1 has been out for over a month.
Why not do this:
1) download Mozilla 1.0 and see how your stuff works
2) post a comment describing how good or bad Mozilla 1.0 is
Nobody really cares how Mozilla 0.6 stacks up against IE 6 anymore.