Mozilla.org Relaunched

mpeach writes "Mozilla Organization has launched its new Web site and it's looking a fair bit sleeker than it used to. No new product releases to go with the new look unfortunately, but, according to the Firefox 1.0 Roadmap, release candidates of the latest browser are getting closer by the day."

Great new look! Same old shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

So /. renders really poorly in Gecko, as do a myriad of other sites.

Is that Firefox's problem for not gracefully accepting broken HTML? Or is it those web developers who write the broken HTML?

Woot

[Commander Trollco]

Nice.

Sorta OT, is anyone else irritated with how they are hiding the zipped binaries for windows now? You used to be able to get them as easily as the installer, and before that there was no installer. I just don't trust it...

Camino?

[wtmcgee]

camino is barely mentioned on this site...

sad.

Web design to match browser

[usefool]

Is there anything significant in this relaunch? Are they designing (show-casing) a site that utilises every feature in Firefox, for instance?

Interesting...

[InternationalCow]

how Firefox is being plugged. It's pretty obvious IMHO from the site that Firefox has the wind in its sails so to speak, as it's offered for download (geared to your OS, nice) with a biggo font. If you want Mozilla, you have some more clicks to go. Does that mean that Mozilla will be superseded at some point by Firefox??

Re:Great UI Improvements

[Lispy]

Try Firefox and you'll know.

Honestly. Mozilla includes everything and the kitchen sink. That's overkill for most users. As the Gnome folks learned the hard way a few good options are much more welcome than every little tidbit of configurability.

Firefox is lean, fast forward, and one tool for the job. Just what mom needs. And what I need. The features can be added with extensions, if you really have to. Most people love Firefox from day one because they "get it".

Mozillas default interface also resembles the old Netscape Navigator interface wich feels kinda old to the people that switched over to IE back in 1996.

Not Even The Half Of It!

[ackthpt]

how Firefox is being plugged. It's pretty obvious IMHO from the site that Firefox has the wind in its sails

Let's talk understatement here. You don't offer this kind of thing [mozillastore.com] without a significant commitment to the package.

Sunbird

[Feneric]

It's a pity that Sunbird isn't given any sort of prominence along with Thunderbird... it's already very usable and fills its niche nicely.

Qute

[r.jimenezz]

My only gripe with Firefox was when they stopped shipping Qute as the default theme. Mind you, the screenshot on the new home page clearly shows that it was taken using Qute :)

This of course is not a big deal. I still get Qute whenever I have to install Firefox.

Firefox PR1

[eegad]

This roadmap indicates the PR1 for 8/30. Where is it? Hmm...

Firefox is more popular

[jeti]

It looks like the start page for Firefox is accessed nearly eight times as often as the start page for Mozilla.

Re:Interesting...

[Mprx]

Downloads geared to your user agent is a stupid idea. Any Linux user probably already has Firefox, so the only reason they'd be going to the website would be to download the Windows version for family/friends.

It takes 4 clicks for a Linux user to download the Windows version from the front page now, compared to 1 click for the old version. Generally everything has been dumbed down, and is more ugly looking. This new design sucks.

Extensions vs. plug-ins

[Allen Varney]

I wish the Firefox page had easy front-page links to both the Extensions list [texturizer.net] and the Plug-ins list [mozdev.org]. Maybe I missed the link, but the most convenient way I know to find the plug-ins is through a search engine. Does anyone know why extensions and plug-ins have to have separate pages?

Bring back the Quickies

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't agree with most of your post, I do agree that this item didn't really deserve its own article. The problem is that we don't get Quickies anymore. Remember those? One article that referred to several small items, all worthy of a nerd's attention but not important enough to warrant their own separate articles. For some reason, we don't see those anymore. I thought they were quite fun. A lot of fun's been taken out of /. lately... :(

Re:Firefox

[anakog]

Frankly, I am not much worried about that, because I am sure the distros will take care of packaging it nicely to avoid these kinds of problems.

What worries me though is that very old and critical bugs like Bug 115174 are not considered important enough as to be release blockers. For the lazy to look this up, this bug manifests in realoading a dynamically generated page in certain cases, which may result in double-charging your credit card when you have just made a purchase and simply want to save your receipt. This bug is present in both Mozilla and Firefox and has been an issue since 2002!

I have been using Mozilla and Firefox exclusively for the past couple of years and have to say that this is a PITA. I got used to it and know which sites I regularly visit are problematic and how to get around it (save as text or print to file). But a lot of users might get hit by this bug if Firefox becomes more widespread and they would rightfully be pissed.

Another problem I have is that since about version 1.3 (or earlier?), Mozilla, and later Firefox, have been unstable and crashing a lot (e.g. once or twice a week under heavy load). I don't know is this is a Linux-only issue (I only use Red Hat 9 and Fedora core 2), but they seem to have a memory leak and that's not good if it creeps into the 1.0 release. I would gladly submit a bug report for this if I only knew how to reproduce it...

Nitpicking

[faust2097]

The tabs need an selected state, right now if I click on 'Products" it takes me there but when I go into a subpage there's no indication that I'm still in the Products section.

Also, a lot of pages like Module Owners are still pretty nasty.

Nice work though, it's always nice to see more standards compliant websites that actually look good.

Re:Slate

[Fenris Ulf]

Hit reload, it's only one of many (I got The Onion the first time)

Re:LOL

[GrimReality]

Site not accessible with Firefox.

...

That's why I always refer to the Mozilla suite as ... Perhaps Netscape could provide them with their newest code instead of letting them just reuse their obsolete Netscape 4.x code. Who knows.

I agree that Firefox is a heading in new avenues of user friendliness, but there is nothing wrong with the Mozilla Suite for its target audience.

Furthermore, there are some serious issues with Firefox (not the browser itself, but the whole movement/its existence itself):

• It is on its way, but currently, it is not yet ready.
• From what can be seen, it seems to be encouraging separate applications that duplicate Mozilla stuff. e.g. consider Thunderbird.

  Why can't Mozilla Mail, Mozilla Addressbook, Mozilla Composer etc. be available as simple extensions? There seems to be tonnes of nifty new extensions, but making these extensions would be great.

  Also, there should be a proper way to manage extensions, which should not rely solely on the profile, which can easily be lost (at least for the stuff that are installed in the installation tree and not the profile.) I admit Mozilla Suite doesn't have it, but everyone says it sucks, so one doesn't expect anything good from it, right ;-)

• The non-Windows versions seem to be neglected in relation to the Windows version (Note: This is a relative thing.)
• Some configuration options are missing (I appreciate the necessity of that) which should be available in an 'Advanced' section or something.

Ending my dumb views. Thanks for reading.

Re:Great UI Improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

I am unsure what a stock installation of Firefox can't do that IE can do though?

How about a sane interface to set up a user stylesheet? Relying on the user to know a magic file path and making them restart the browser every time it is changed is hideously user-unfriendly (and it's the same in the normal Mozilla suite as well).

Re:Thunderbird integration?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm well aware of the "total package"; my gripe is that many non-geek users who are used to tight browser/email integration are getting themselves into a pickle when they download Firefox and all the sudden their mail program is missing.

I've been plugging Mozilla to clients for a couple years now, and have gotten a number of people to convert. And as it turns out, most of them have converted for the *email client*, not the browser (this is in small offices that are sick of getting hit by OE viruses).

This worked well, and most of these people eventually started using the Mozilla browser as well. I was elated to see non-techie people switching over so easily, and even moreso when they were going to the mozilla.org website and upgrading on their own inititive.

But over the past two months I've had a few of these clients go to the site and end up downloading *Firefox* because of how much prominence Firefox is given. Not knowing any better, they install it right over mozilla (it replaces the icons), and I've had to start fielding calls about why the mail program suddenly disappeared.

This is really irritating. Mozilla.org started as a place to go to get a suite, and now, without any warning, the primary download is just a browser. Ok, so maybe it's all explained in the roadmap, but this really needs be printed in a big bold yellow caution banner across the top of the screen: "Firefox is NOT Mozilla -- if you have been using Mozilla for email, DO NOT DOWNLOAD FIREFOX OR YOU'LL BE SCREWED.

It's frustrating. Mozilla.org should have remained the website for the Mozilla suite, and Firefox should have gotten it's own website or something.

Errors when viewed in IE

[TravisWatkins]

Like the topic says, in IE I get 'Error: Object Expected'. If the site is broken in the browser people are going to be using to look at the site for the first time, what are people going to think about the browser Mozilla wants you to use?

Re:The Previous Design

[aka.Daniel'Z]

Not that I care, but did anyone notice that they're using some mozilla-only CSS stuff?

So when an IE user goes to the site, some stuff appear to be broken (like the green box that says "Free Download" doesn't have rounded corners on IE)... Small details, but still...

On the other hand, looks very good on mozilla. :D

Re:Great new look! Same old shit...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

My experience as a web developer since 1997 and Mozilla/Firefox user since 1999 suggests that the /. rendering problem is caused by the browser rendering an incomplete page. Whether this is caused by the server terminating the connection early, or the browser stopping rendering before the transmission is incomplete, I do not know.

However, the problem did begin until sometime in 2003. So I would be more inclined to blame the /. server, than the Gecko rendering engine.

Re:Latest nightly is already called

[samhalliday]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows

why is the latest version of firefox so hard to find for windows? all the download links are for gnu/linux! (or is this new page so "smart" that it detects what OS you are on and only print a link for that?)

Re:Great new look! Same old shit...

[damiam]

From what I've heard, it's a problem with Slashdot's noncompliant HTML, not a Firefox problem. However, since /. seems unwilling to actually do anything about it (apparently the editors don't use the actual site enough to care), the Mozilla people are trying to work around it.

Re:Latest nightly is already called

[Hooded One]

It looks like they do check your system to provide the relevant download link. Interestingly, changing your UA doesn't affect this. The relevant code is this:

function getPlatform()
{
if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Win32") != -1)
return "Windows";
else if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Linux") != -1)
return "Linux";
else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mac OS X") != -1)
return "MacOSX";
else if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Mac") != -1)
return "Mac";
return "Other";
}

I guess navigator.platform is independent of UA string. What doesn't make sense is why they use userAgent for OSX.

What also doesn't make sense is why they used client-side Javascript for the rotating screenshot image, when they're already doing server-side scripting to include the latest RSS information, or why they have the screenshot as the background image for a DIV instead of an inline IMG.

It's still a lovely layout though.

Re:Latest nightly is already called

[mini me]

What doesn't make sense is why they use userAgent for OSX.

OSX returns "Mac" I assume. So that code allos them to identify between OSX and OS<=9.

What also doesn't make sense is why they used client-side Javascript for the rotating screenshot image, when they're already doing server-side scripting to include the latest RSS information, or why they have the screenshot as the background image for a DIV instead of an inline IMG.

Perhaps the page is generated by a cronjob so it wouldn't be random until the next time the page is updated. And the image is a background image because you can't insert inline images with CSS. If you look at the page without style-sheets you'll see why you'd want that image in the CSS file as opposed to the HTML.

Well... it started as a reply, before the rant...

[FLEB]

I'd say HTML coding's gone up in quality, not down. Aside from a few errant copies of FrontPage floating around (you know who you are), the introduction of the stricter-formatted XHTML has given quality-concious designers something they can put faith in.

Instead of malformed tables possibly breaking the whole page, XHTML means that the page HAS to be formatted correctly, and with that, it damned well better work with all the browsers out there. The more strict standard makes less guesswork for HTML tool developers, by making them share a well-defined (enforced, even) common expectation of the language.

I'll grant that there are quite a few strays still out there making half-baked HTML 4 pages with MSIE "fudgingly compliant" features, but most web designers worth their professional (or cred-bearing amateur) salt know they have to code to standards. The others, well... the web is open and free... and they will either get by on other merits or wither in mediocraty.

My big wish: I'd just like to see a new, widely-supported extension of CSS that actually has some layout tools, and doesn't involve convoluted and counterintuitive "hacks" to get by. Sure, a lot of people say "let the browser, not the creator, determine the layout", but on the modern Web, let's face it: Design can be content. Give us tools for (even strict, my-way-or-highway) layout, for those who want it.