Review of Mozilla's 2002

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."

Chimera

[selderrr]

is hands down the best OSX browser I've ever seen. Fast, light, at least as reliable as IE,moz,icab&omni, and most of all : extremely userfriendly. I don't give a rats ass about 90% of the features in IE or mozilla. I don't need no fsking integrated email client and security bollocks.

Chimera provides exactly the features I need, and none more, none less. big kudoos to the chimdevs. If you read this : u guys rock !

I used IE

[Apreche]

for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap. I wrote a whole thing about phoenix's amazingness in my journal, so there's no reason to repeat it here. But it has made a significant positive impact on my daily routine.

Re:I used IE

[Jucius Maximus]

"for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap."

If you haven't done it yet, check out Opera as well. Although I find phoenix very alluring, Opera is still king in the low resource / high speed / high efficiency department.

I finally dropped IE for Moz this year...

[Kethinov]

Mozilla is coming along nicely. I've recommended it as an alternative to IE to all my friends and family. No popups and tabbed browing has me hooked :)

You can!

[friedegg]

Autoscroll extension for Mozilla/Phoenix [mozdev.org] as reported by Mozillazine [mozillazine.org].

Re:Chimera

[Shuh]

If you're using Chimera now and miss MOUSE GESTURES, there is a freeware "input method" you can install that will give you gesture support in any Cocoa program: Bitart Cocoa Gestures [bitart.com] Highly recommeded by this Chimera/Gestures user....

Not Mozilla's problem

[Moderator]

But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.

The main focus of the Mozilla project is and always will be software development. It's up to the Mozilla based distributions (Chimera, KMeleon, Phoenix, Netscape, Beonex, etc.) to worry about marketing and distribution.

Re:Chimera

[Shuh]

One feature lacking from Chimera I can't seem to find is to stop animated GIFs. Mozilla has it and I'd like to see it added to Chimera as well. I can't stand reading pages with dozens of animated gifs all going off at the same time. ugh. :-)

~/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/xxxxxxx.slt/user. js

If you don't have a file there, make one and put this in it:

// Don't play those animated gifs over and over.

user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");

Re:1.7 % Market Share

[tradervik]

I just checked our site stats for 2003 and "Mozilla 5" has rocketed up to 5.7%! ;-)

Re:Is the road to success as a standalone?

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, the most significant point in the article was Mitchell Baker's note supporting phoenix [mozillazine.org]. In it, he

Mitchell's a she!

Re: Validation

[Dave2 Wickham]

Except - of course - where IE acts retarded. For example, with CSS text sizing - without a doctype it's one size too big, and on IE5 it's too big with a doctype.

Re:No Chimera?

[goneaway]

That's something different and still maintained (at least in Debian) although it's nothing to write home about. The current version is 2.x and still has some rendering problems that need to be resolved.

Wrong direction, guys

[Tablizer]

From O'reilly's, "Creating Applications with Mozilla", Page 326:

"Currently, remote Mozilla applications are not prevalent because development focuses on making the client applications as stable and efficient as possible. Therefore, this area of Mozilla development is largely speculatative. This chapter argues that remote applications are worth looking at more closely."

The Mozilla developers are focused on making another VB instead of providing remote HTTP-friendly GUI apps. That is where the real need is. The developers are getting away from webbiness, but that *should* be the focus of a browser.

I don't get it.

Re:a year ago

[PovRayMan]

My greatest accomplishment was converting my Dad to Mozilla from Outlook and IE. To easily sum up the story here are a few key points.

1.) He was able to import his Outlook stuff into Mozilla Mail no problem.
2.) All he needed was a spelling checker plugin for the mail client (Got one from Mozdev) and it was 100% perfect for him.
3.) Mozilla "Imported" his many hundreds of bookmarks which he definatly needed.
4.) The built in popup blocker has worked wonders for him.
5.) He has Mozilla sit in the system tray so he doesn't notice any load up delays.

When I was converting my Dad to Mozilla I showed him how much better it is and he definatly agreed. He asked a few questions about how to make some things work and I got him up and running no sweat. Ever since he got klez because of Outlook (Partially his fault, yadda yadda yadda..) he believes that Mozilla Mail is greater since he now doesn't worry (for the most part) about mail viruses.

So if you wanna convert someone, start with a family member.

Re: Validation

[dbaron]

It seems like you're suggesting that validation assures standards-compliance. Validation does not ensure standards-compliance.

HTML Validation [w3.org] only ensures that you've met certain constraints of syntax and containment, but it doesn't ensure that you're following the standard. If you're using one of the Transitional doctype declarations, it doesn't ensure that you're avoiding deprecated features. More importantly, it doesn't show if you're depending on a bug in the browsers you're testing in. For example, a browser that doesn't implement section 14.3 of the HTML 4.0 spec [w3.org] correctly (pretty much any browser other than Mozilla, right now) might load stylesheets that the HTML spec says shouldn't be loaded. Thus you'll have valid markup, and your browser will load your stylesheets, but any standards-compliant browser will treat some of your stylesheets as alternate stylesheets and not load them. (This happens if you specify different title attributes on the LINK element linking to the stylesheets, since it makes some of the stylesheets alternate stylesheets.) Similar traps can happen in other ways and allow you to write perfectly valid markup that means something other than what you think it does and what you intended it to do.

CSS validation [w3.org] has similar problems. (It also has the problem that the validators themselves have rather significant bugs, since there aren't any mature implementations of CSS parsers using which one can build validators like the SGML parsers on which HTML validators are based.) For example, MSIE for Windows treats the height property on block-level elements incorrectly: it treats it as min-height and allows the height of the block to be larger if the contents overflow. This is incorrect, so there are pages that are displayed nicely on MSIE for Windows but have lots of overlapping text on any CSS-compliant browser. Likewise, you could be writing pages that work fine at your default font size or window width but display very badly at others.

In other words, validation tools for HTML and CSS are nowhere near smart enough to be a substitute for really knowing what you're doing. (Does anyone rely on lint to verify that their C programs are bug-free?)

(I actually wrote this post before on slashdot, but way too late in the thread for anyone to notice it. I'm afraid I'm doing the same thing again, though...)

Re:Chimera

[unixbob]

Hopefully you have fed these requests back into the Chimera development team.

We frequently ask for graphic designers and documenters and testers for our OSS projects. Positive and constructive feedback such as otis' comments are just as useful because they help developers understand which parts of their app are useful and well received, and where there is room for impovement.

My Mozilla Experience in 2002

[f0rt0r]

First, I started using Mozilla when I did my first experiment with migrating to alternate OS's last July ( FreeBSD was the OS ), and I when I found there was a Windows version of it, I was hooked. Here are my list of pluses and minuses that stand out in my mind: 1. Tabbed Browsing - I do a lot of research on the web, mostly because I have yet to find a highly portable electronic reference that I can take with me anywhere on any computer I happen to be using. What I do is open a 1-2 Google windows, run my searches, and then examine the hits to see if any of them have what I am looking for. I am pretty sure this is how I 'accidently' found slashdot :). Having the resulting 8-12 web sites I am referencing in a tabbed interface is VERY convenient. 2. Privacy Control - The control over stored passwords, cookie storage, javascripts, popup windows, etc. replaces multiple applications I used to use for these features. These are nothing short of outstanding features IMHO. 3. Miscellaneous - I am discovering more cool features as I go along. 2-3 weeks ago I discovered image-blocking, which kills most ads except for the flash ones, but then again. I have not and do not plan on installing flash anyhow. Minuses: 1. Data portability - I have a dual-boot workstaion at home (in addition to my servers ), and my work's laptop that I try to keep the bookmarks and email in sync so I can access the same information wherever I am at. Note: I am looking at researching a web interface for my qpopper server, that would help with the email sync.). So far this has been a total pain in Mozilla. First, I have yet to find any email import/export tools, and the "Manage Bookmarks" tool doesn't work the way I would like it to. What I mean is when I import bookmarks, I would like it to do a differential import. For example, say I have a bookmark folder called "java" on two computers. They start off in sync with the same too url's in the folder. If I add a url to the folder on computer A, export it, and then import it to computer B, I would expect computer B's corresponding folder to now have the original 2 url's plus the 3rd one I added to A. Instead, Mozilla (1.2.1 even ) will add a horizontal divider to the bookmark list, create a copy of the 'java' folder and the 3 url's I imported. I can fix this manually, but why should I have to? To be safe Mozilla could let me choose how it handles the import, to give user to get the desired results. I could copy bookmark files between them, but this could potentially erase bookmarks that I put on computer B that were not one computer A at the time I was importing bookmarks from computer A to computer B. 2.Support Forums - To tell you the truth, I can't tell if these even exist or not. I was looking for help on the email import problem and followed the Mozilla's web site link to it's newgroups forums. I shouldn't have wasted it my time. None of the forums looked to be end user support ( Q&A ) related, and when I posted to one that seemed to be the closest thing to this ( after searching it to see if the question had already been asked ) I got flamed for posting in a developer-only group even though there was no indication that that is what it was for ( i.e. the word 'developer' or similiar were not in the newgroup name. What is worse yet is that not one of the flames said "YOu idiot, you should have know tech support questions get posted here !", so after all the time they spent flaming me, I still have no idea where I should have posted my question. How about they put up a nice web-based searchable and archivable set of Mozilla forums with each forums focus clearly identified by the title ( or the forum description text ). Sorry newgroup-lovers, nothing against newsgroups, but my experience with them has been nothing but negative. 3. Bookmark Sorting - Why can't I have all my Bookmarks sorted in alphanumeric order? Inside of bookmark manager I can do this, but once I leave the manager window my bookmarks go back to being unsorted. Maybe there is a big sign on the toolbar saying "click here to sort your bookmarks", but I am not seeing it. 4. Memory Hog ( Windows Version ) - This has been mentioned before, but I would like to note that it seems to have been fixed now that I am using version 1.1 on my work laptop, older version seem to get unresponsive after being open for extended periods of time and when I checked resources in use, it averaged about 32MB. I have not experienced any lagginess with the Linux versions, but then again that may be because Linux is such a zippy( fast ) OS anyhow. In conclusion, I could have included a list of things I would like to have added to the browser, but the topic is 'experience', and there you have it. Where I disgressed by saying "fix this, add that" was me just clarifying why I thought the problem was a problem. So please, no "off topic" flames. Also, this is my second post on slashdot...ever. Hopefully you find this post informative. I expect that by my sixth post to have graduated to " In Russia, Mozilla Browses You!", but I am not quite there yet. Peace.

Re: Validation

[bunratty]

Yes, of course, all programs have bugs. Notice I never said that validating the web page guarantees that the pages work on all browsers. I said that after your page validates, it generally will work mostly correctly on the browsers people use most. If a browser has a bad bug, many people will avoid it, making it less likely that your users will see the glitch caused by the bug.

In my experience, I have removed serious structural errors from web pages, in pages that I wrote as well as in pages that other wrote, far more easily by validating the HTML instead of trying to check in different browsers. After validating, you can always go the extra mile and check the page in other browsers, but usually you don't even need to.

Tired of IE users.

[DeadSea]

I got tired of folks visiting my website using IE. I use Mozilla when develop and I code to standards. There have been numerous cases when I've had to regress something because IE doesn't do it right. In any case, I did a popunder ad for Mozilla [ostermiller.org] for those that are using IE.

From this I found a few interesting things. The first, which is encouraging, is that it seem to be working. The percentage of people who visit my site using Mozilla started rising sharply. I went from about 1% to almost 5%. The second thing, which is curious, is that a lot less people are actually using IE than you might think. My server logs show that about 80% of my visitors use IE, but only about 40% get the popunder. My conclusion is that there are a lot of browsers out there that fake the user agent, or many people have found a way to disable popunders in IE. (have javascript disabled, or some such).

If you want the code to do the popunder so you can advertise mozilla on your site, its easy to grab the Javascript from my home page, just view source.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[Hobobo]

Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.

Netscape and Mozilla are almost the exact same thing--the only real difference is logo and the 50 AOL shortcuts that Netscape installs. Other than that, each version of Netscape is from a Mozilla build, and the programmers working on Netscape are basically the same ones working on Mozilla.

Re:Chimera

[bdash]

Chimera also imho handles tabs better than Opera for OS X, and I like that it integrates with OS X proxy settings (though I'd like the developers to make that a little more obvious in the doccys ;)

The Chimera documentation about proxy settings [mozilla.org] states:

Proxy Servers

Some organizations block direct connections to the Internet, for security or other reasons. In these situations, connections are required to go through proxy servers, which are intermediate servers that redirect connections to their final destination.

Chimera normally gets information about yor proxy server settings from the Network System Preferences pane (see the "Proxies" tab there). If you switch network locations, or change the proxy settings, Chimera will pick up those new settings without restarting.

It then goes on to describe how to enable Proxy Auto Config support in Chimera by way of several hidden preferences.

Slightly different approach

[ThinkingGuy]

I'm doing something similar on my webpage: a simple Javascript that will display a friendly warning message to IE users:

var strBrowser = navigator.userAgent;
if (strBrowser.indexOf("MSIE")> 0) {
document.write("<p><strong>");
document.write("Warning: you appear to be viewing this page with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which has numerous bugs and ");
document.write('<a href="http://www.nwnetworks.com/iesc.html"> security holes.</a>');
document.write(" It is recommended that you upgrade to a more secure browser, ");
document.write('such as <a href="http://www.mozilla.org">Mozilla,</a&gt ; ');
document.write('<a href="http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/ ">Netscape,</a> ');
document.write('or <a href="http://www.opera.com">Opera.</a>');
document.write("</strong></p>");
}