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.

CNET are M$ whores.

[crovira]

Unless you want to read ass-kissing, don't go there.

They can even write pap about desktop Video and FireWire without even mentionning Apple existence.

They're strange that way.

Re:I think it's great.

[baldass_newbie]

Absolutely LOVE the tabs.

Er, uh, have you tried Opera [opera.com] yet?
They practically invented tabbed browsing.
Not that I don't like Moz, I've had rc3 since its release and I'll download next week when the pipes have cooled.
I've just always thought Opera was a little better than Netscape 4.7. (And hell, at least you had the good sense to stay away from 6.)

OK, but not all I wanted

[AvitarX]

A while ago (M17?) I decided I was going to wait for 1.0 before I switched over to Mozilla.

Since then I fell in love with Opera's gestures and tabbed browsing. I think that Mozilla handles Tabs Awsomly, but that its gestures are kinda lame.

ex: in Opera I can right click hold and mouse wheel to change windows.

and can go foward and back with just the buttons (no motion). In Mozilla I am stuck with holding a button that has another function and moving the mouse, and with my spazzy hand I fail half the time succeed.

Amyway, I like Mozilla but it won't become my browser of choice anytime soon (I predict).

mentions the good, the bad, but never the ugly

[Schlemphfer]

I suppose these were a couple good first-day reviews. I downloaded 1.0 yesterday and played around with it. My impressions were that for casual use, Mozilla's pretty indistinguishable from IE. But there was one thing that caught my attention that I think is of great importance, but wasn't mentioned in either review.

Not to troll, but the front end of Mozilla is ugly as sin. If this browser's going to catch on, what will matter to most mainstream users isn't pipelining, tabbed browsing, or HTML compliance, but the initial first impression of how good it looks. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they hired some standout designers to make IE look gorgeous.

Now I know that the whole point of Mozilla is the underlying technology. But for it to catch on as a browser, it needs to be every bit as pretty as IE. It'll be interesting to see if the Netscape version of 1.0 incorporates a glossy front end. For now, I know which browser I politically favor, but I also know which one I want to look at several times a day. They aren't the same.

Re:Built for IE!

[stefanlasiewski]

And I've been wondering about Apple. Many web designers still use Macs for web design.

If Apple started to distribute Mozilla as the default browser instead of IE, it would also help Mozilla to gain market share.

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

[Platinum Dragon]

Did you try switching to the Modern theme?

Or take a peek at some of the other available themes [deskmod.com] to find something you like?

Does Mozilla allow users to "Steal" content?

[JustAnotherReader]

>If you're like us, you're not a big fan of pop-up and pop-under ads. Hence, you'll adore the handy Mozilla feature that disables many, though not all, of them.

Uh oh! So Mozilla allows the users to see content without seeing the pop-up and pop-under adds. If we are to believe the Replay TV lawsuit then Mozilla is a tool which allows users to "steal" content. Sounds like a DMCA violation as well.

Let's sit back and watch as the lawsuits start rolling in.

Re:OK, but not all I wanted

[moonbender]

ex: in Opera I can right click hold and mouse wheel to change windows.

Yep, that's what made me stick to Opera, too. But I'm sure Mozilla will be there, eventually, they've ripped most of the other good features of Opera so far. ;)

compare this to two years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

On Suck's July 31, 2000 rant [suck.com], they were crying about all the bloat going into Mozilla.

Mail problem remembering user profile.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they ever fix the problem when run on a Windows XP platform that Mozilla could not seem to remember the user's mail profile.... forcing you to have to re-enter all your setup information each and every time that you started up the mail client, especially when connecting to an IMAP-only mailserver? That is/was the most frustrating bug.

Re:Don't submit

[gambit3]

Thanks for the thought. I appreciate your advice and your honesty.

However, I'm not going to do it because of propaganda. I'm going to do it because my first experience with an Open Source product (Mozilla), has been excellent. Especially the power to customize it to what I want it to do. This is the one thing that absolutely caught me off guard. I don't have to Beat It Into Submission like I've had to do with commercial to mold it to my liking.

From what I've read about Linux users, that it also a strength of Linux, and THAT'S why I'll probably give it a try.

Re:hahaha

[CynicTheHedgehog]

It does too discriminate (or can). You can disable all popups or only "unrequested" (for instance, onLoad) popups. You can also diable moving or resizing windows (take that hollywood.com!). It's granular and configurable, as the C|Net reviewer would have discovered had he done his job.

I would have liked to see...

[Dixie_Flatline]

...the help documentation filled out before release. A 1.0 release shouldn't have vast gaping holes in the docs that say "Information to be filled in". There are actual things I'd like to know. For instance, is there a way to switch between tabs, using the keyboard? If I can't, it's arguably faster to have multiple windows open and cycle through them that way.

It's all well and good that the browser has lots of features. They're pretty useless if I can't figure out how to use them.

Mod parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Embrace and extend.

We support their craptastic 'standards'. People switch to Mozilla, because, "It can do everything IE can do, and better!"

Without a majority of market share, IE can no longer be the basis for bastard 'standards'.

CNET reviewer is not that professional

[Frag-A-Muffin]

First off, I don't use Chatzilla, but from what I read, it gave me no info. on Chatzilla itself.

The editor reviews Chatzilla as a IM client? You can't really compare. That's like saying, "Computers suck, they don't cut my lawn well". It would have been wiser to perhaps compare Chatzilla to say, BitchX (my IRC client of choice), or XChat or *another IRC client* ??? :)

Mozilla: useless for the intranet

[gblues]

At work, web access is controlled by a Microsoft proxy server. The MS proxy server requires NTLM authentication support. Guess how many browsers support NTLM? (See also: how many Internet browsers has Microsoft released?)

Given that there is and has been PLENTY of information on the NTLM-over-HTTP authentication process, it is inexcusable for a 1.0 browser to not have support for this protocol.

Nathan

Re:Reviewer Wrong?

[nil_null]

Who uses bookmarks anymore? It's easier to use auto complete for the sites I visit most (i.e. sl = slashdot.org) and Google [google.com] is good usually good enough to find whatever other information I need.

Bookmarks are good for keeping track of sites you might want to go back to but wouldn't remember to otherwise. And a lot of times URLs alone are not descriptive enough. I use bookmarks quite frequently and I imagine many other people do the same (especially when doing research). There are times when even Google won't help me find that page I came across but didn't bookmark.

Of course as you can imagine I have a heap of bookmarks with only the most important ones organized. But it gives me something to do when I just want to randomly surf and can't think of anything to go to.

Sometimes this is not IE's fault

[Sycraft-fu]

Now I haven't used Mozilla 1.0 extensively yet, what with it just having come out, but I can tell you that Netscape 6 and espically 4 have problems of just rendering HTML WRONG. Some examples:

I was designing a site and, as I'm won't to do, doing the whole thing in a text editor and using IE to look at it. Now because my intention was compatibility, I strictly adhered to the HTML spec (using the W3's validator to check myself) and used only tags I knew that both IE and Netscape implemented. The result was broken in Netscape. It was a 3 column, expanding design somewhat similar to Slashdot's. The code was 100% compliant and rendered properly in IE 4, IE 5 and Opera (don't remember what the current version was then). In Netscape 4.7, half the right hand column failed ot display. It to a real hack ofa workaround to make it display properly on Netscape and still maintain standards compliance.

Or another time, I was messing around with CSS and managed to create a neat little script that did text dropshadows. It took the length of the text based on font type and size (it only worked with one font) and calculated the correct offset for the top text. It worked really nice. Now I figured a neat trick like this was bound to be broken on anything but IE 6 since that was what I designed it for. To my plesant supprise it wasn't, it rendered great on IE 5 and 6 for both Mac and PC. Not on Netscape 4.7 or 6, however. The alignment was all off. Worse, it was off by different amounts on different platforms. I ended up just canning the idea.

The problem I've had with Netscape up to this point is that many of the standard they impliment, they impliment WRONG. Now since I haven't used Mozilla much for design checking (I quit doing web design) I can't speak for it's release, but NEtscape 6 which was based form it's code still had some massive problems.

Re:I think it's great.

[Asprin]

Er, uh, have you tried Opera [opera.com] yet? They practically invented tabbed browsing.

I love Opera, too, but the first browser *I* ever saw with tabs was the bundled browser from (IIRC***) the now-defunct GNN internet service.... in 1996!

I'm just shocked it took that long to catch on, it was a pretty cool feature even in a time when IE didn't fully support TABLE!



*** NOTE: It might have been SPRYnet, not GNN - it *was* six years ago, after all...

Re:my faith restored

[Anonymous Coward]

>I can search my bookmarks, a huge deal for me.

If so many people think that IE is the greatest fucking browser to every exist, why does it not have this basic functionality? Yes i know you can so a search on the favorites directory but this is a hack.

This basic ability and the ability to ditch pop-up adds are reason enough to switch.

This is getting really old

[fondue]

"Incompatible with some sites built for Internet Explorer"

It's strange that I've not managed to find a site that Mozilla can't render correctly for the last six months or so. Do C|Net's reviews get to use a different version or something?

Any commercial website that does not operate correctly on non-IE browsers is cutting a swathe out of its customer base. This is why you will be hard pushed to find any. It really is that simple.

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.

A strange complaint, when these two features alone massively enhance the usability of the product. I simply cannot use IE anymore, rather like the majority of apps that last had any new meaningful features added circa 1996. The Mozilla Organisation at least seems to value the end user over the Spam/Web-advertising lobby, unlike some.

As for CNET: It's sad that these people call themselves journalists. Oh well.

Pseudo-compatibility woes

[brsmith4]

People speak of incompatibilities with IE-specific sites and mozilla. I don't know about the rest of you, but would you mind giving me some sites that wont render correctly? I have failed to find any sites that do not render adaquately (by adaquately, I mean sites that get the job done... i.e. microsoft.com, when viewed in Mozilla, doesn't show those drop-down menus, yet it doesn't hinder my ability to traverse the site and find what I am looking for. The same applies to nvidia's site.) Since most of the sites that I encounter use PHP, as any good site should, I never have any problems. Because of this, I feel that negative judgement on mozilla, based on the fact that some reviewer visits totally obscure pages that idiots wrote to save time, is simply unwarrented and misguided. This judgement should not be passed on Mozilla nor on Microsoft or IE. It should be passed on the 'developers' who write code that is browser-specific, non-standards compliant, and to be simply put, garbage.

Re:Here's a question...

[sconest]

You could try this [mozillazine.org]

Dubious Statistic

[grinwell]

I'm surprised that after 473 comments, no one has brought up the extremely dubious statistic that:

Because since IE browsers now hold around around 97 percent of the browser market, many developers design sites that cater to IE's various standards.

Cnet kindly provides a link to a tiny blurb promoting a net-metric site which gives that dubious figure.

Seems like a convenient FUD.

Re:This is not realistic

[JamieF]

Seriously, have you never heard of the Web Standards Project?
http://www.webstandards.org/

Web developers are sick of coding HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for one browser, and then debugging it for every other browser they have to support. Netscape 4.x and 6.0 are definitely high on the list of sucky browsers to have to support, but IE 5, 5.5, and 6 aren't perfect. Also, IE 5, 5.5, and 6 differ greatly, not to mention the Mac versions of IE which also differ. You can't just target one IE version and get 100% compatibility with the others.

So, rather than looking at the ridiculous statistics that say stuff like "97% of browser users use MSIE" (which I just don't believe), start looking at stats about which browser AND VERSION your users are using. Surprise, chances are there are a hell of a lot of IE 5 and 5.5 users. Chances are there is no one browser+version that covers the majority of your site's users. Doh! So much for just targeting "one" browser.

So, forget about this silly notion of "IE won, all web sites will be IE sites from now on." That's not financially viable, since IE is actually serveral products which must be QA'd for separately. The solution that web designers are rallying around is "code to the standard, and debug for supported browsers from there." Screw IE 5, make people upgrade to IE 6. Screw Netscape 4.x, make them upgrade to 6.2, 7.x, or Mozilla 1.0.

Otherwise, why even bother with HTML at all? If you're going to target Windows only, you're wasting your time trying to get a good GUI user experience and robust application functionality implemented with tools as crappy as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The only reason to use them is to get thin-client, cross-platform, cross-browser functionality with zero download time. Use Delphi or Visual C++ or Java or something if you want total control over the user experience and you don't care about porting.