Why Mozilla Needs To Pick a New Fight 351
nk497 writes "Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features. So what's the point of Firefox, then, wonders Stuart Turton. He suggests it could turn its community of developers to better use than battling it out for browser market share. 'I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn't it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?' And where better to start than the stagnant office suite arena: 'Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?'"
Re:office suite? (Score:1, Informative)
slow, buggy, ugly.
Re:Firefox is good .... plus makes money (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox is generally very reliable at handling things that were written for IE, and it still seems faster to me.
Plus, Chrome's bookmark situation is convoluted and dumb.
Re:Mozilla Office (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It Hurts (Score:3, Informative)
Somebody needs to point this guy to Mozilla Labs [mozillalabs.com] and tell him to join the community and start working on his own dreams instead of proposing/forcing them on the community.
This is my biggest complaint with many Open Source "lusers" and it happens all the time. I often see bug reports which look like, "Please fix ABC or add new feature XYZ ASAP. It shouldn't be too hard to fix. This ticket is priority important because I need this feature yesterday." People seem to think that Open Source means that programmers will magically write the software they need for free.
Re:Firefox is good .... plus makes money (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. Chrome's rendering, display and scrolling are significantly slower on messy, complicated HTML than Firefox. There was a big advantage on Javascript-heavy pages, but with Firefox 4 that's gone since the browsers are now roughly on par in Javascript performance. And Firefox 4 has GPU-accelerated rendering now which speeds up certain types of intense rendering quite a bit too.
Given all the advantage of Firefox in terms of extension-availability, there's no particularly strong argument in favor of Chrome. And don't you dare say "Firefox leaks memory" - this is the most tired meme at this point. If you have issues on your PC configuration, just try adjusting the caching settings mentioned here [mozillazine.org]. There haven't been any real issues with Firefox memory usage since FF 2, for your average use case user (people who open 30-40 tabs simultaneously may conceivably have some legitimate gripes, but their usage patterns are definitely not typical).
Re:Less FF Bloat please (Score:2, Informative)
You're a bit confused. Netscape ditched COMMUNICATOR because it had become bloated (and slow). Mozilla Browser was the from-scratch code that was their solution. It eventually became the lean, efficient core for Netscape 6-9, Firefox, and SeaMonkey.
Netscape is retired.
Firefox continues.
SeaMonkey is similar to netscape 4 in appearance, but has all the features of firefox, minus the bloat.
You're the confused one, Nursie was correct. /. users!)
* Netscape did ditch Communicator, and the Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey) was indeed written from scratch
* With the demise of Netscape, Mozilla took over Mozilla Suite
* Firefox was created, in part, to get rid of Mozilla Suite's bloat, which included a webpage editor, email client, chat client, and about 10 million unnecessary features and options added to scratch every dev's itch (though that may be appealing to
I don't buy that Firefox is bloated. In fact, I think they've done a fantastic job of keeping a mature product simple and elegant. The UI is clean and intuitive, and the whole thing is only 8 MB! Can you name other programs that are 8 MB?!
Re:I have two words: Adblock Plus (Score:2, Informative)
Um, Check your sources please. Recent versions of adblock for chrome does block elements from downloading now.
Re:Less FF Bloat please (Score:3, Informative)
Seamonkey and Firefox share code, but not, I think, to the extent you are saying. Firefox ditched much of Seamonkey's options and features. I haven't used Seamonkey since around FF1.0, so I don't know it's current state.
Another feature seamonkey has which I love: The ability to resize this damn edit window so it's not so small. ;-) Just grab the corner and drag.
That's in FF4, which I'm using. You can also find that in extensions.
Re:What are they talking about? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It Hurts (Score:3, Informative)
According to http://www.arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com], they're beating Chrome in Sunspider. That, plus their graphically accelerated rendering + compositing makes their Windows builds quite speedy.
Re:Less FF Bloat please (Score:5, Informative)
The Mozilla project was started as a from-scratch rewrite of Netscape Communicator (Netscape Browser, Netscape Mail & News, Netscape Composer) in an open source fashion. Actually that's not entirely accurate: When the project started they started with the Netscape 4.x source code and only decided to throw it out and start over a few months later, probably after the project leaders had been drinking, but this is incidental.
As the project progressed Mozilla-the-project added all of the Communicator apps on top of a common core. Eventually Netscape the company took a pre-1.0 version of this and released it as "Netscape Communicator 6", which was commonly understood to be "As slow as molasses," meanwhile Mozilla continued to release Mozilla-the-suite (Mozilla Browser, Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, and the new kid on the block: Chatzilla). Eventually some developers in Mozilla started up a guerrilla project to make "Just a browser" and released Mozilla Browser with a few UI tweaks as Phoenix, which was too bad because Phoenix-the-bios-vendor had a browser in some of their product and didn't like that, so they renamed it to Firebird, which was too bad because the Firebird database guys were there first, so they renamed it to Firefox, which made no sense to anybody but at least wasn't trademarked yet. Netscape-the-company, in a last gasp of breath, released a Netscape browser based on Firefox, called Netscape 8, which contained a brand new sidebar! But nobody cared. Once Firefox had stolen enough thunder and press Mozilla-the-project refocused its efforts on that and formally discontinued Mozilla-the-Suite, which pissed off a lot of people who said "But we like the all-in-one suite!" These people went on to rebrand Mozilla Suite as Seamonkey, after an old code name that somebody liked. Meanwhile Mozilla Mail & News was spun off of the Suite as Thunderbird and (eventually) the calendar component, which had never quite made it in to the suite, was spun off as Sunbird (after a few false starts) and then kind of re-integrated into Thunderbird with the catchy name "Lightning" when somebody realized that few people actually used a standalone calendar and sometimes bundling makes sense after all (which just proves the point us Seamonkey fans have been making).
Chatzilla, meanwhile, got more or less forgotten, languishing as a Firefox extension, and Composer saw some life as Nvu, stagnated, then became KompoZer (because Z makes everything better).
I think the point here is that Firefox is the bloat-free version of Mozilla Browser, in that you didn't have to get the rest of the communicator suite with it. Since that suite *is* Seamonkey and still shares a large majority of code with Firefox (common core and the Browser component) it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
Not correct: http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org]
Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.
What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.
There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.
Re:Wow just how wrong can one be. (Score:3, Informative)
I have looked at it and it does look interesting. The problem is that Zimbra doesn't really replace exchange unless you pay for the enterprise version.
http://www.zimbra.com/products/compare_products.html [zimbra.com]
The Community version is not feature complete.
While close not really a FOSS solution for an Exchange replacement.
Re:It Hurts (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.conceivablytech.com/2784/products/mozilla-firefox-4-is-twice-as-fast-chrome-7/ [conceivablytech.com]
But, honestly, most of the pages that I go to do not have tons of javascript all over them, especially with noscript. Firefox 4, Chrome 7, Chromium 8, Opera 11, and heck, even IE 9 all render my pages in an instant. I have the "exact" same addons on both firefox on chrome (as close as I could get). However, on certain websites, chrome takes a bit to load all of the pages, and it is because some of the addons that I use are poorly implemented in Chrome (without addons, it loads instantly). I have all of the browsers on, but right now I'm sticking to firefox 4 (the UI is customizable and slimmer. I'm only on either 1440x900 or 1024x600--I need to treasure my vertical pixels).
Re:It Hurts (Score:2, Informative)
Hmmm, I believe Firefox is able to 'tear out' tabs into their own window (right-click on the tab and select 'Open in new window'. You can get them back again with drag-and-drop...