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."

mozilla rocks!

[yukster]

Though i wish all those boneheads out there would start checking their sites in mozilla before they put them up. Maybe someday more people wil use Mozilla than explorer... ha ha ha...

Re:I used IE

[Narchie Troll]

And in the price department, too. A few CPU cycles isn't enough for me to justify spending money at a browser, especially when great software like Galeon and Phoenix exists.

Re:Chimera

[AKnightCowboy]

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. :-)

Technical advancement not the issue.

[Skyshadow]

I use Mozilla. I mostly like Mozilla.

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.

No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.

This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.

And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.

This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

Re:I used IE

[mat catastrophe]

Sadly, I too use IE most of the time. Mostly because my box simply doesn't handle the newer Mozilla based browsers well. (If anyone has any 72-pin chips lying around, you can get in touch with me, seriously).

Where was i? Oh, yea, I think that Mozilla is a superior browser, it's more (what's that buzzword?) robust than IE and it seemingly does things right. But even phoenix is a little slow to load for me, and although I am about to check out the Beonex Communicator, I don't have much faith it'll run any better.

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post. Developers have always been forgetful of the simple fact that not every one in the world gets a new computer, or even an upgrade, every six months. It's nice to see a "lite" browser, but only if it's really light and not just "requires only a Pentium3/64MB RAM" - that's not light at all for me, or about two-thirds of the people I know. We use older machines because we either love them or can't afford anything new and shiny.

And if none of this makes sense, blame the alcohol my liver's still dealing with.

Re: Validation

[bunratty]

It's so much easier to simply validate against the W3C standards instead of checking to see if your pages work in every browser. If a page validates and works in the earliest version of IE you're trying to support, it should work for almost all visitors you're targetting.

1.7 % Market Share

[zulux]

In the last part of the article, it mentions that Mozilla based browsers have 1.7 % of the market share. I would advise web-sites that depens on internet sales not to discount this share. Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet. Percisely, the best target audience.

The IE crowd is filled with old grandmom who play solitare and who think that the Internet in on their "Hard-Drive" - you know, the "Hard Drive" that sits under their Packard-Bell monitor.

Microsoft can keep those users.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[oscarcar]

I have one word for you: Broadband

That will change everything about distribution.
How much you want to bet that the vast majority of people using Mozilla, downloaded it on a broadband connection?

Limited bandwidth is definitely the biggest "barrier to entry" in this market.

Is the road to success as a standalone?

[budGibson]

To me, the most significant point in the article was Mitchell Baker's note supporting phoenix [mozillazine.org]. In it, he lists one of the reasons for supporting phoenix as an experiment to see whether mozilla can succeed by building core browser functionality that others adapt.

This is where OSS succeeds right now in mainstream implementations, as a base that a value-added integrator can then modify for clients to achieve a lower cost solution. It is hard for OSS to market directly to end-users. OSS is not close enough to end-users to know how to modify interface and other features to suit their needs. However, value-added integrators are.

With microsoft, value-added integrators face high licensing fees and the danger that microsoft will try to eat their lunch. In OSS, this is less an issue.

However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back? In the end, I suspect the interest for contribution to mozilla is with platform providers, e.g., AOL, who do not want access to their platforms controlled by their competitors. Note, a number of OSS projects have moved to corporate sponsorship congruent with this view, e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and even Apache.

So, mozilla might find its real success as a neutral technology that can be adapted across a number of platforms by value-added integrators. It will have to look for support to corporations whose interest is in having neutral access technologies for their platforms.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

...even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must...

Over five years ago, people were proclaiming that Linux "had failed" to make a dent in the server market.

Don't count the game over until it's really over, and perhaps not even then.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[ostiguy]

Its just software. Its not about global conquest.

If AOL adopts it, and then within 1 yr 20% of american web surfers are using the gecko engine, then everyone will need to adhere more closely to standards, and life will be grand.

Get worked up over standards, not about achieving global dominance.

ostiguy

Re: Validation

[Dirtside]

That's not good enough. Even a browser which is supposedly standards-compliant can have bugs which cause wierd display glitches, even if your code is letter-perfect. Mozilla 1.0 (I think, might have been 1.1) had a strange bug where certain combinations of COLSPAN and WIDTH settings would cause the final cell in each row to be wider than it should -- even if the W3C HTML validator said the code was perfect, and the code worked perfectly in every other browser (including pre-1.0 versions of Mozilla) I tested, including three versions of IE, old Netscape 4.7, and so on.

The bug was eventually fixed, but simply writing and testing it once wouldn't have worked.

It's so much easier to simply validate against the W3C standards instead of checking to see if your pages work in every browser.

Yeah, it's so much easier, but you're ignoring reality. Browsers have bugs, and if you don't test it in the browsers that are *actually* in common use, you're asking for trouble. Even if it works in an early version of IE, Microsoft (and even the Mozilla project) have broken things in later versions which worked in earlier versions.

Re:1.7 % Market Share

[NineNine]

Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet.

I disagree. I'd say that the 1.7% (closer to 0.5% on my sites) are mostly college kids who don't buy anything... exactly the kind of sufers I *don't* want.

Re:Konqueror = Deadzilla

[bogie]

No offense to Konq but doesn't really measure up to either Mozilla or Phoenix. For quick and dirty web browsing it may be fine, but only a diehard kde user(and I am one) would think of saying it trumps Moz/Phoenix. Of course to each his own, but I think most people would disagree. I certainly don't feel the need to make a list, but if I did the fact that konq only runs on linux makes it a non-starter for both the majority of home users and of course corporate users who usually have a mix of windows, linux, and Macs.

Re:Technical advancement not the issue.

[ryanvm]

This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

Why? What will happen if Mozilla stagnates? Will people stop working on it in their free time?

My point is that the beauty of Open Source is that you really don't have any competition. If you're doing it for free, nobody can run you out of business.

This is why when asked about Microsoft, Linus generally responds that he doesn't give a shit what they do.

Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead....

[BZ]

Well, lessee...

1) AOL Communicator is a pet project of a AOL VP who hates Netscape and wants the division to disappear. It's not clear to me how he thinks Gecko will get maintained after that.

2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.

The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens in the very near future...

Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead....

[KAMiKAZOW]

2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.

Sorry, but developers of an end-user application (Mozilla/Netscape) should focus on the end user, not other developers.
1.) In some situations (not always, but IMHO too often - when Phoenix/Mozilla displays large images or complex tables) the context menu takes a few seconds to appear. From a user's perspective, this is not acceptable (I hope you don't have simmilar expieriences, because that's very annoying).

2.) If XUL is so great, why are there so many projects to get rid of it? (Geleon, K-Meleon, Chimera,...)
IMO this does only fragment the development of Mozilla. If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.

Personally, I don't care if it's wxWindows or some other toolkit. My point is, that Mozilla should've used a toolkit that looks fammiliar to the user (not like some alien app as Mozilla with the Modern theme) and has good performance.

Question

[ubernostrum]

You don't seem to like XUL. In your original post you praised this new thing for ditching XUL. Yet in the article you linked to, we find the following:

Communicator utilizes the Gecko engine and XUL user interface language found in Mozilla, but it was developed entirely in-house and is not open source, according to AOL.

And you ask people not to mod you down...