Why Mozilla is Alive and Well 266
primetyme writes "There's been a lot of press recently stating that the Mozilla project is a failure, a waste of time, and a failed open source endeavour.
I recently had the chance to talk with Chris Hoffman, one of the lead engineers from Netscape working on the Mozilla project, about why Mozilla is in fact a monumental success for the open source community, Web developers, and end users in general. "
Great! (Score:1)
/.ed ? (Score:2)
Thanks.
Steven Rostedt
We need a browser (Score:1)
Re:/.ed ? (Score:1)
Broken link? (Score:1)
But I doubt many people here thought mozilla was dead in the first place. Considering what they started with, they've worked miracles.
Key point - Strong Encryption (Score:2)
Re:We need a browser (Score:3)
Because that's the naive approach?
That would have been like trying to plug holes in the rotting hull of a ship one at a time, rather than scrapping the whole thing and building a new one. It might take longer, but in the long run, it's the best solution.
Re:We need a browser (Score:3)
Under Windows (at work) I use IE5 because it is a really really good browser and, moreover, it is available now at the same price as Mozilla.
Don't get me wrong; I love Open Source. But I won't sacrifice my ability to use my computer productively at the alter of free software. I need something I can work with. I've got a great OS, I just need a browser to go with it.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Mozilla is great (Score:2)
Well put. (Score:5)
Why does this matter? Because Mozilla is going to fully standards compliant. To wit:
What that means to us is that the days of having to code for 16 different browsers, while not over, are numbered. And the ability for one browser to try to lock out other browsers with little "Netscape Now" icons will be sharply limited. Yes, there will probably be proprietary add-ons, but developers have already been burned by these in the 4.x browsers: I don't think they will use them again.So we come to Mozilla. Yes its buggy. But speaking as a professional developer, that's OK at this stage of development. What's more important is that it is well-crafted.
Instead of a hodge-podge of shoddy code (like the old Netscape source base) it is well crafted, well designed code that is going to be extremely maintainable.
This is kind of like early versions of the Linux kernel (I ran 0.95, FTR): they weren't feature complete, weren't anywhere /near/ bug-free. But they were designed well and had a dedicated team of competent coders working on them. It didn't take long at all for Linux to become something to be reckoned with.
What we need to do is the same thing that early Linux adopters did: focus on the technology and give it time to mature. Marketing is /nothing/, technology is /everything/. Oh yeah: have a little loyalty, because its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.
Re:Mozilla is great (Score:1)
Hey, I'm greatful that it's being worked on at all, but where's the priority?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
PR drama (Score:3)
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
If the shoe fits... (Score:1)
PS: This was a joke :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource ethos (Score:2)
Iain
PS Sorry for the newspaper headline like topic, but it was to fit it all in.
PPS Sorry if this is just stating the obvious.
Re:We need a browser (Score:1)
Re:No DNS ENTRY.. (Score:2)
See, whenever you try to access a site and Netscape can't connect, it'll automaticlly prepend "www." to the address if it isn't already there. (Try accessing localhost when you don't have a web server running. It'll try localhost.com and www.localhost.com. Pretty stupid when you're trying to diagnose problems.)
To make this post almost on-topic, I am very much looking forward to Mozilla, so all this buggy, non-standard behavior will become a thing of the past.
Re:We need a browser (Score:4)
Because nobody, and I mean nobody wants that. Why? You ask? Easy enough. Ever hear that Microsoft requires a compile at the end of the day, no matter how they get it? We have a similar policy where I work, and it really pisses me off. Here we're encouraged to do a slapdash job to meet deadlines.
Here are the disadvantages to such an approach:
I could probably come up with more, but I think you get the idea. It's like either building a pinto or a lamborghini. Sure a pinto is easier to fix (just duct tape and bailing wire, right?) but nobody wants to own one. Why does the software industry continuously ignore the fact that nobody wants a pinto - so why force people to buy them? I'm frankly glad that Mozilla has gotten it into their heads to do it right the first time. God knows we could use more of it.
Re:/.ed ? Yes. (Score:1)
"Connection Refused"
That didn't take long...
Re:We need a browser (Score:1)
Just like Lynx but it lays out frames and tables too, and it has cool functions like being able to click a link with the mouse, and having a right click menu.
Dunno the URL, check it's on Freshmeat somewhere.
iain
I'm gonna get flamed for this... (Score:4)
Now, don't get me wrong. I love Mozilla AND I don't think it is dead (yet). BUT, isn't this a little like asking Bill Gates if Windows 2000 is dead? For crying out loud, what ELSE is the lead developer going to say? "Yeah, it's dead. I'm just playing Solitaire and reading Slashdot all day."
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Re:(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource et (Score:1)
Much on the contrary, because it does limit contributors to those with sufficient skill, this guarantees that the result will have a very high quality. This automagically filters out people who either aren't skilled enough or people who don't have the time to make significant contributions. So the people who are able to contribute are those who are able to make the most significant contributions. This is not a problem with Open Source; this is its advantage!!
Re:Key point - Strong Encryption (Score:2)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Mozilla is great (Score:2)
So you want graphic artists and interface designers working on the internal code?
*shudder*
Mozilla (Score:1)
Mozilla is dead!! Long live Mozilla!!!
+--
stack. the off
How can you say it's not working? (Score:1)
We all complain to a deafening din that the web browsers are bloated and patchy and leaky and nasty. Then when a team actually is bold enough to say, "Alright, knock it over, burn it, and start over," people bitch, bitch, bitch that it's not ready already.
The fact is-- THE MOZILLA PROJECT *IS* WORKING. I use Mozilla on a daily basis now. It's wonderful. Strangely enough, it works faster and crashes less often for 'checking
Why don't YOU start writing a browser so you can have one NOW and then come back to us and tell us how full of crap the Mozilla team is.
Wrong about acceptable bugginess (Score:1)
The develop/test cycle is out of vogue.
The most succesful software shops are focusing on having something compile every working day, regardless of how minimal that is.
Check out "Extreme Programming Explained" for more info.
Re:We need a browser (Score:1)
Yeah, it's a little greedy, but dammit Microsoft has a browser that does all that. IE5 is a freakin' good browser and right now Netscape/Mozilla can't touch it.
I don't want them to do a crappy job on Mozilla, but I want the job done. If they can't deliver on their promises then forget 'em. I'll end up buying Opera or something...
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Might as well be dead.... (Score:1)
Mozilla better appear soon, or we've seen the last of "Navigator" or whatever it is...... Remember "Internet Time?" Seems those hungry buggers working on Nutscrape 5 forgot about the old days......
You're talking about coding, what about testing... (Score:2)
There's also testing, i.e. running the thing and watching what happens if/when it crashes. I think the Full Circle stuff provides some useful information to them when it crashes. Writing JavaScript test cases, bug reports, making suggestions, etc, etal...
Re:We need a browser (Score:1)
Re:We need a browser (Score:1)
-W
Re:We need a browser - You're missing my point (Score:1)
Re:How can you say it's not working? (Score:2)
That's a horrible attitude. It's not unreasonable to expect that a company like AOL, with the resources that it has, could put together a browser that works reasonably well. I too have used Mozilla M11, and it just doesn't cut the cheese for me -- the interface is cute, but it crashes quite a bit and the dialogs repaint funny, and the text is too small, and it's a little bit slow, and... it's just not ready for consumption yet
So let's hear the bitching - It's not whining, it's criticism, and I think it's rightfully placed. If Mozilla can't give us a browser before the world ends, then we will go somewhere else, but to tell you the truth, I'm starting to feel strung along.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
IE and Mozilla (Score:1)
Re:(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource et (Score:1)
Does Mozilla have proper PNG support? (Score:1)
Re:Mozilla is great (Score:1)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Key point - Strong Encryption (Score:1)
Alas, despite the initial burst of enthusiasm with which a bunch of crazy Ozzies threw strong crypto back into the original codebase (the Cryptzilla project IIRC, moz as he is spoke does not include strong crypto. What's needed is an enterprising ex-US team to incorporate, say, GPG [gnu.org] or some other public domain code.
\a
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Re:We need a browser - You're missing my point (Score:1)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
GIFs (Score:2)
I wouldn't say anything on any other web site (well, maybe GNU or Debian...), but shouldn't
Re:(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource et (Score:5)
Have you looked at the mozilla source? Your argument would some weight if you could cite specific problems with the source--but then, people would only say "Good job, you've found some problems; you're obviously smart enough, so go fix them." If you can't code, then use the nightly builds and report any bugs you find. There are all kinds of ways to help with the development effort. In the Open Source culture, there are complainers and there are contributors (a constructive criticism can be considered a contribution, by the way). Contributors are people who would rather make something happen than just sit back and carp about the state of the project.
Why do you think the mozpeople were so keen on re-designing from the ground up? Ease of maintenance. This means, making it less difficult for developers to dive in and work on the project, among other things like easier cross-platform implementation, i18n, etc. Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
"GIMME A GOOD BROWSER NOW!!!! (WHAAAAA)" (Score:4)
Mozilla is an Open Source project, and was created from the start to be one. Which means the main part of the fun, is actually participating in the team. In some extreme cases, the final product is just a biproduct of the efforts. This means that people uses more time to design, code, redesign, recode and test. Just because they feel like making the best they can - to top their own and others' records. Just like in sports.
To read hundreds of comments about Mozilla being too unstable and we-need-a-workable-system-NOW!-mentality, STRONGLY reminds me of childishness. Good qualities in humans that relates to other human beings:
1) be respectful, patient, understanding and forgiving
2) don't take anything for granted
3) don't be disappointed
4) be thankful for what you get, both the good and the bad lessons
Of course you can rant and shout out your rage and frustration. But please don't do it at people actually working towards a solution.
It's very much like shooting yourself in the foot.
- Steeltoe
Why Mozilla is Paramount to Linux, OSS, and AntiMS (Score:2)
Mozilla, open-source, et al [even more OT] (Score:2)
Much on the contrary, because it does limit contributors to those with sufficient skill, this guarantees that the result will have a very high quality.
Not always necessarily true. The second part of the poster's statement was "and have the time to figure it out". I imagine there are quite a few highly skilled people out there who would contribute to [Open Source project of choice] but don't have time because they've all got full-time jobs working for a software house producing closed-source software.
Also, companies generally do not pay for software developers who don't have a clue, at least if they can help it, so the full-time employees of a software house are not necessarily any less skilled than the contributors to an open-source project - and often they've been hired because they have the specific skills required to do the job. (I.T. skill shortage notwithstanding.)
So to suggest that having maybe several hundred skilled volunteers poring over code is necessarily going to produce a better result than having a couple of dozen skilled full-time employees who are being paid to do it is a little naïve.
It worries me that there are some fundamental skills that still appear to be very rare in the open-source community - the two biggies that spring to mind are user-interface design and documentation. It is probably the nature of the beast, of course, that none of us can draw for toffee and we all hate writing documentation, of course
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"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Re:Well put. (Score:2)
For the whole world to abandon the current non standard HTML versions will take years. As long as that doesn't happen we'll be coding for more than one version of HTML. Unless you are prepared to dump the majority of your potentially visitors of course.
One way of solving this is to automate the process of supporting multiple versions of HTML instead of handcoding them. For that to be possible the server would have to be able to make a distinction between the different browsers and apply the right transformations (XSL?) to a page.
Re:Does Mozilla have proper PNG support? (Score:2)
I asked the same question. The layout engine for Mozilla is set to have alpha channel blending -- meaning that it has the potential to properly support alpha channel transparency in png's.
> The person who owns PNG in Mozilla is
> newt@pobox.com, who was one of the
> creators of PNG. I suggest you contact him.
> There is currently no 8-bit alpha support,
> but he's working on that.
This is a response I got on one of the mozilla usenet forums about the png issue. There's the man to ask.
Mozilla M11 - This is the one (Score:5)
This is the one, guys. This is the first mozilla named "mozilla" instead of "apprunner". This is a fully functional browser, with all the trimmings (plus more), and it just could be good enough to browse with. If not, we can make it that way. The source code is only 20~ something meg - it's a reasonable sized project. It's ours. This is the time to jump in and help.
Guys, this is our last chance to claw back the client side of the net from Microsoft.
real time work on mozilla (Score:3)
I agree (Score:5)
CmdrTaco, please note. Netscape aren't the only people who could benefit from more eyes. Almost certainly everyone on Slashdot would be -more- than happy to help clean tarballs, debug code, and tweak capabilities in the Slash code, but we really can't, unless you put even a rough-cut tarball up. I am very grateful for the code that -is- there, and I wish there was some way of repaying you for your efforts in creating and maintaining the Slashdot code and site. Donating bug-fixes, speed-ups or possible refinements might be one way to do exactly that. All I need, to do so, is fresh code.
Re:We need a browser - You're missing my point (Score:2)
With todays technology why can't they build the beast so that it's modular, if you want all of the bloat..okay... just plug it in. Whatever happened to the basic Unix philosophy of making small programs that WORK and can be used as building blocks to do larger tasks. WHY MUST I BE OPPRESSED WITH BLOAT ?????
Remember back in old days when America was building these horrifically large inefficient cars? Then some companies from Japan called Toyota and Honda came out with these little efficient cars that weren't the most attractive things on the road.. but they just worked. That was the start of a revolution. HEY HONDA.. BUILD ME A FRIGGIN BROWSER DAMMIT.
Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this... (Score:2)
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Score:3)
Mozilla is one of the best examples of mixing the two styles successfully, but they definitely need more developers helping in the Bazaar.
Sometimes you need to look beyond your wallet (Score:4)
You mean you pay the same amount of money for both products.
Price? What price is giving a single company (any single company) control of the future of the information age? A lot more then money, I would say.
RE: automate support for multiple versions of HTML (Score:2)
Been there done that, and it's just not that hard. Part of the HTTP request header includes the name of the browser making the request, so it is common for sites that make use of templating engines and database back ends to serve a different page based on which browser is making the call, and whether various modules are installed.
What might not be obvious is that what we're really talking about is different levels of HTML compliance more than which browser. Yes, it takes a little more work, but it's not rocket science, and these techniques widen the audience for any given site.
Mozilla is looking good (Score:2)
I can build and *run* from CVS now, and the only thing I needed to do was update libIDL. It's still a *little* crashy, but really not that bad. They do still have some memory usage issues, though.
The page rendering is great, and forms work better than they did before.
I think they'll be able to have a decent beta by the end of the year.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
Sort of (Score:2)
The idea is that, with a fully standards compliant browser supporting HTML, CSS, and DOM, you won't be coding another version of your page for yet another browser. You will be coding another version of your page for the last time. Because if NS5 and IE6 are both standards compliant, you can write one set of code that works for both.
I agree that backwards compatability will continue to be a pain. It always is.
Mozilla will be yet another not fully backwards compatible browser.
That is (unintentional, I think) FUD. Mozilla will not be backwards compataible with non-standard extensions. However, if you code your pages to use standards only, like I do, it won't be a problem at all. HTML and CSS are very forwards-compatible, by design.
Re:Sometimes you need to look beyond your wallet (Score:2)
Using IE5 gives one company control over the information age? That's the stupidest thing I've heard all day (it's only 11, don't feel too insulted).
It's not like you have to use any obscure, proprietary systems to get a page to display (and correctly) on IE5 and Netscape. The author of a page chooses what standards to adhere to, not MS. I take it then that you would not trust any browser that came from a company. Well believe me, if AOL dropped the mozilla project right now, it would die. There's only a couple of outside developers right now, and I seriously doubt that anyone would be willing to pick it up (maybe another company, but then you're back to square one).
So don't kid yourself -- MS isn't always the enemy. They've written a [damned] good browser and I think the Mozilla team would do well to try to match it,
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Some of the "Monumental Failure" theory can't hold (Score:4)
What other open source project would you expect Netscape Communications Corp (or AOL) to be involved with?
The fact that it has taken a whopping long time for the (marginally usable) M10 release to arrive is not a clear example of failure; the project has had to labour under several significant constraints:
This left gaping holes in the source code tree, things that had to be reimplemented.
What with the above gaping holes, and other things that had grown into being ill-designed, it made huge sense to rebuild a whole lot of the functionality from scratch.
If a version that is of "production quality" is released in the next 4 months, which is not inconceivable, that essentially means that Mozilla has been recreated in two years, which is certainly not a monumental failure.
Re:Key point - Strong Encryption (Score:2)
Re:I agree (Score:2)
Re:Sometimes you need to look beyond your wallet (Score:2)
Very true, but MS does their damndest to make sure everyone uses their propriatary extensions and not standards.
I take it then that you would not trust any browser that came from a company.
No, I was simply saying that any one company controling the browser market would be a Very Bad Thing. The popular analogy is, what if a single company owned the patents on the printing press?
if AOL dropped the mozilla project right now, it would die.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. One of the nice things about Open Source is that a company dropping a product does not necessarily mean the product will drop out of existance.
I Just Wish... (Score:3)
Mozilla's Only Dead If You Read Old News (Score:3)
Very few Bazaar projects start as Bazaars - usually a rudimentary but working product is gotten out the door in "Cathedral" style, after which outside contributors join up because there's something useful that they can contribute to. In contrast, at the start Mozilla was not anything that even developers could use, and thus the project didn't have much outside participation at that point. It's well beyond that now, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
Thanks
Bruce
I'd expect them to release it (Score:2)
If linux gets consumer market share, expect IE to be released for it simply to block netscape.
hawk, esq.
Mirror (Score:4)
http://browsers.evolt.org/mozilla.html [evolt.org]
The box that got
Thanks for all the comments so far. Hopefully this gets moderated up so some people can actually read it
.djc.
Case Study (Score:2)
Then, after the 3.0 release, the hack C coders who created it decided to rewrite the whole thing in C++. This was going to take "6 months." None of them had any OO development background, BTW.
Two years later, the company was bleeding money badly and laying off developers. Designer 4.0 still hadn't shipped. Meanwhile, Corel Draw had gone through two major revisions.
Lessons learned:
- Never be arrogant about market lead. That can be lost in a single release cycle.
- Don't release buggy crap.
In a closed-source, commercial project, these two bullets compete fiercely. Open source means never having to say, "Release it or we'll lose revenue!"Re:Sort of (Score:3)
- the stuff that w3c poors out: the formal standard
- that what people actually use: the practical standard.
Right now the practical standard is a mixture of HTML 3.0 and HTML 4.0 with lots of propietary extensions. Mozilla will be fully HTML 4.0 compliant, that's different from the current practical standard. So that means more work for web developers. If it's backward compatible with some extensions, that means even less motivation to abandon them.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible. For me that would be when I could use XML, XSL and stylesheets. Then I could use XSL to provide backwards compatibility. Unfortunately MS is doing everything to let XML, XSL and stylesheets go the same way as HTML: they are providing propietary extensions. So again the practical standard will deviate from the formal standard. The only hope for preventing this is a quick (within months) acceptation of mozilla by a large share of the web community (I'm thinking 40% or more of the web users here). Just looking at the figures of usage of the latest generation of browsers will show you that that is not going to happen (sorry don't have those figures readily available so please post them if you have them).
I hope I'm not right but fear that I am.
Re:Mozilla M11 - This is the one (Score:2)
Re:(OT)Mozilla hi-lites a problem in Opensource et (Score:2)
Unless the mozilla team have gone braindead, reasonably skilled developers should be able to break off small, digestible chunks of the code and work on them without having to grok the whole enchilada.
This is indeed the case. Both myself and the other MathML developers were able to get right into the guts of the Mozilla layout engine with very little effort. I had some basic frame manipilation code up and running with only a few hours of work. Roger Sidje (head MathML honcho) has managed to single handedly get large amounts of the MAthML spec running with only a couple of thousand lines of code... the basic system is incredibly modular and fairly easy to understand.
Mozilla is an exemplary Open Source project, particularly when it comes to software Engineering quality. The existing team are really helpful *and* ethusiastic (unlike FSF projects for example) when it comes to "outsiders". The systems they have in place for maintaining the schedule(bugzilla), system quality(bugzilla, tinderbox, bonsai), etc are some of the best I have seen anywhere at keeping problems in check.
A note on timescales.. somebody said that it had taken 2 years to get to the point we are at right now. I think that that needs to be broken down a bit. The original Raptor(new layout engine) team (circa 5 folk) started in October 97 AFAIK, the Raptor source was released a month after the Classic Mozilla source in April 98...no sizable team was working on the code until October 98 (!!). Essentially Mozilla has been built in a little over 12 months... for a 1.5+ million line (Open or closed source) program that's bloody amazing!
I think that everyone (especially dorks like Jesse Berst [zdnet.com]) should give the Mozilla team a big hand instead of shooting them down. Hats of to guys like Mike Shaver, Chris Hoffmann, Rick Gessner, Kipp Hickman, etc, etc, etc
My experience with Mozilla... (Score:3)
People, never could I have expressed this more strongly... try it out! I tried it out, and the bugs were quite obvious for the large part. However, the engine is quite nice, it loaded Slashdot very fast on my connection. But the real nifty part was when I was designing a web site... I kept trying to use CSS and transparent PNG images, but Netscape won't view them right. Interestingly enough though, Mozilla parsed it all perfectly! Even the transparent PNG, it all looked great!
Right off, I realized that the people who are making Mozilla aren't screwing around. These people are serious, and they are making a serious browser, one that seems to have its standards straight for once! If I could code, I would be doing all I could to help these guys, as they are working on an application that will be a cornerstone of Linux in the future! Please, people, just give the damn thing a chance, it might crash but it won't bite, and you just might be surprised!
Microsoft Access Error (Score:2)
Error Diagnostic Information
ODBC Error Code = S1001 (Memory allocation error)
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access 97 Driver] Too many client tasks.
Date/Time: 11/12/99 12:07:52
Browser: Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; I)
Remote Address: ---.---.---.---
Template: C:\INETPUB\WWWROOT\EVOLT\SHOWART.CFM
Query String: menu=8&cid=562&catid=25
DOH! Memory allocation error?...too many client tasks?...who would put an Access database into production...dum...
Re:IE for Linux (Score:2)
The compatability library that the Solaris IE
is based on, from Mainsoft [mainsoft.com], hasn't yet been ported to Linux yet. It has been
annouced, but not completed.
I have serious doubts that MS ported it to WINE
or any other win32-on-unix system. You might ask your 'informants' just what this port was based on.
Once Mainsoft has completed the Linux version of their product, then we might see Internet Explorer for Linux. At least, at that point, it's no more than a recompile, so they have no good technical reason -not- to release a Linux version. The decision they make, to or not to, will be purely strategic (undermine Linux as a viable platform by withholding MS products vs. hold the browser market and control of the de-facto web APIs... tough call... )
--Parity
Mirror of the article (Score:2)
Mozillazine speedily got permission to post a mirror of the article:
http://www.mozillazine.org/evolt_mirror/ [mozillazine.org]
Dave
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Re:Open Source weblogs (Score:2)
That's ok. Software doesn't get written in a day (well, other than some of the projects I did for University, but that's another story. :)
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
fetching pages for perl to munch on (lynx -source
Q&D downloads of files when I don't know the URL (if I DO know the URL, wget is much better fot this)
I'm telnetted into someone else's box over a modem, and running a GUI browser is truly rude
many other uses which I can't think of right now
(1) You call perl progress? Even basic has a more readable syntax. Anyway, downloading stuff is something is not a unique feature of lynx.
(2)I don't see how lynx helps you find something that you forgot the URL of unless it has an integrated search engine. In any case you're probably better of with a ftp client.
(3) Try running your browser locally, the idea of thin client is not that you remotely run a network client.
(4) I can't think of any useful uses either.
I think the only real situation where lynx would offer any advatages over a GUI browser would be if you were on a computer to slow to run a GUI. I noticed surfing the web is not in your list.
Also you mentioned progress in relation to a lot of technology that lynx doesn't support. We can discuss them in great length but I don't feel like it right now. I'll simply conclude with stating that lynx doesn't offer any replacements and is definitely not something that can be qualified as progress.
Lynx is just a gopher client with some addons. Gopher is as good as dead, the world moved on about five years ago.
Now would the biased person who moderated me down please restore my karma, I think his moderation skills are a bit 'overrated'. I think moderation is slipping anyway, I noticed a lot less postings actually are moderated. Perhaps it would help if more moderation points were given to people. I only get 5 or so every few weeks.
Getting Mozilla to 60% browser share (Score:2)
Let's not ask if it's going to happen. Let's ask how it's going to happen. The best figures I know of are in the recent findings of fact [uscourts.gov]. These by the way have been found as fact. (duh) So you can treat them as more reliable than normal statistics. What they clearly show is that AOL by itself can tip the balance back to 50%+ for Mozilla. Let alone Compuserve (which happens to be a subsidiary). And all the other online service providers that were forced by Microsoft to push IE.
There are a couple things that have to happen before AOL and the other online services to unilaterally change the face of browser market share: Both these things are going to happen. I'm beginning to feel better already.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible
Ok, you abandon it and I'll keep using it. I happen to use it on a daily basis - having switched from writing all my technical documents in HTML, whereas formerly we used to use Word 6 format. This works marvelously - our docs are all internally hyperlinked now, they look great when you email them, they're a fraction of the size, everybody can read them, just using their browser. Ah, HTML is obviously here to stay. You're not just FUDding are you? WTF, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Well, maybe (Score:2)
And how's the ActiveX support? Crappy security model? Yeah. IT manager's nightmare? Yeah. Only really supported on Win32? Yeah. Integral part of MSIE, which they're shooting for compatibility with? Big yeah.
And unless they work really hard on making their icky dynamic-update module installation system usable by normal people (and SmartUpdate sure wasn't), they're still going to be way behind IE5 when they ship. Sure, Mozilla's cross-platform, but can it go on being a year behind in standards implementation and ease of use?
Re:I Just Wish... (Score:2)
That's your opinion. Me, I get along fine using Netscape Navigator (sans mail and news). I have a good mail program, and I don't read news anyway. I don't want Netscape/AOL locking me into which mail program or newsreader I use any more than I want Microsoft to do so.
Worse, I'm worried that those of us who want "Netscape Navigator 5.0" are going to have to either wait until Communicator 5.0 is done for them to do the "lite" version, or have to hope that someone uses NGLayout in their own standalone product to be released around the same time.
Jay (=
Re:I'm gonna get flamed for this... (Score:3)
Oh, and Linux has absolutely no one engaging in spin control... Bloody hell, at least Windows only insults my intelligence, unlike the blistering verbiage I get whenever I say anything negative about Linux. M$ Whore, Tool, FUDmeister, on and on.
Know what Steve Jobs said to the crowd that booed Bill Gates when he appeared on the screen? "Grow up". I'd pay good money to hear Linus say the same thing.
Re:I agree (Score:2)
I want a browser that works. I used to get PAID to hunt bugs. I've had enough of being an unpaid QA drone by using Microsoft products.
Look, when my browser crashes with an Invalid Page Fault, that's sloppy code. That's not stub code that isn't written yet, that's not a failed assertion, that's a mistake. And mozilla is ridden with them.
Re:Tech documentation (Score:2)
We find it very useful, since it can produce
i) well-formatted, hyperlinked and indexed HTML suitable for online documentation
ii) from the same files, indexed and numbered cross referenced well-formatted LaTeX pages suitable for conversion to postscript and pdf for downloadable documentation, and for printed manuals
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
Microsoft operates on a daily build basis. If you break the tree, you tend to get a lot of blame heaped on you, so last-minute kludges tend to be made to get the thing to compile. It's far from "no matter how you did it" because eventually your kludge will break it again.
Guess what: Mozilla operates on daily builds too. Sure would be nice if gnome would -- on a virgin system, gnome out of CVS won't even begin to compile. Now it dies with some nonsense about ORBit in automake macros. Been broken in some fashion for months.
'course, just getting something to compile isn't terribly meaningful, but at least it keeps integration testing going, whereas a broken tree brings it to a screeching halt.
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
And of course YOU are the authority on what is frivolous. Why this country would be in an artistic golden age if they only painted art I liked, right?
I defy you to even tell me what ActiveX is, BTW, and the similarities to plugins.
Mozilla won't make it up the steps if it doesn't work with Shockwave. end of story.
Re:Mozilla M11 - This is the one (Score:2)
Who said "three bugs"? You did. One of the list items is this one [mozilla.org] which the "Release Notes scratchpad", which IMHO is about as definitive as it gets.
Re:Mozilla M11 - This is the one (Score:2)
Who said "three bugs"? You did. One of the list items is this one [mozilla.org] which is the "Release Notes scratchpad", which IMHO is about as definitive as it gets. Did you read the list, or just count the items??? By any measure, M11 is obviously nearly here.
BTW, who besides me thinks that Bugzilla is infinitely cool, yet could be made even better?
Who is setting the agenda? (Score:2)
The complexity of those standards makes it clearly hard for anyone other than a large software development organization to implement them, something that is surely desirable from Microsoft's point of view. Many of those standards are of little or no benefit to end users, but simply allow marketers to push content at consumers that is ever more flashy. There is little widespread practical experience with components like style sheets, and the experience we have with components like JavaScript tell us that it's pretty much the worst scripting language in existence.
Furthermore, the complexity of those new standards also makes it hard for authors to produce web pages, at least unless they buy an bunch of expensive tools from Microsoft or other vendors. To me, that takes away from the original mission of the Web.
So, I'm wondering who is actually setting the agenda and why Mozilla is struggling so hard trying to keep up with an agenda that other people are setting. Is IE5/NS5 really where we want to go? Whatever happened to making it easy to share information and giving everybody access?
Re:Sort of (Score:2)
I think we need to focus on the word standard here. From my point of view there are two standards:
- the stuff that w3c poors out: the formal standard
- that what people actually use: the practical standard.
Agreed so far.
Right now the practical standard is a mixture of HTML 3.0 and HTML 4.0 with lots of propietary extensions. Mozilla will be fully HTML 4.0 compliant, that's different from the current practical standard.
First off, proprietary extensions are not in the practical standard. The practical standard currently is what can be reasonably expected to look good on Netscape 4.x, IE4 and IE5 (ambitious developers include Netscape 3.x, IE3 and Opera). Proprietary extensions don't fit that criteria, it's just HTML 3.0 with some of the new stuff from 4.0. Mozilla will be fully 4.0 compliant, which works just fine with HTML 3.0 and earlier sites.
So that means more work for web developers.
How? If they've been developing their sites right, leaving them alone will work just fine with Mozilla. All that should happen is that Mozilla will get added to the list of browsers that define the defacto standard, and eventually Netscape 4.x and IE4 will join Nescape 3.x and IE3.
If it's backward compatible with some extensions, that means even less motivation to abandon them.
Which extensions are you talking about here?
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible. For me that would be when I could use XML, XSL and stylesheets.
Agreed, but "XSL and stylesheets" is redundant, unless you meant XSL and CSS. Gecko probably won't support [mozilla.org] XSL out of the box, since there are still wrinkles in the XSL specification. I'd expect XSL support to come soon though.
Then I could use XSL to provide backwards compatibility.
XSL does nothing to provide backwards compatibility, unless you're talking about server side XSL (i.e. the server takes an XML document, an XSL style, and renders it into HTML, which it feeds to the browser client). This is very server and bandwidth intensive, I'd rather see good XSL support in all major browsers and the clients doing the processing.
Unfortunately MS is doing everything to let XML, XSL and stylesheets go the same way as HTML: they are providing propietary extensions. So again the practical standard will deviate from the formal standard.
No, because using any MS-proprietary XSL tricks wouldn't work on any of the "standard" browsers other than IE5, so it won't be in the practical standard.
The only hope for preventing this is a quick (within months) acceptation of mozilla by a large share of the web community (I'm thinking 40% or more of the web users here). Just looking at the figures of usage of the latest generation of browsers will show you that that is not going to happen (sorry don't have those figures readily available so please post them if you have them).
It's not the only hope, and yes 40% in the first few months isn't likely, but I suspect that Mozilla based browsers will spread faster than you think. I think people other than Netscape are planning to distribute based on M11 or later pre-release versions. The Gecko engine (which is the important part, standards-wize) will have a noticable percentage of the market before Communicator 5.0 is released.
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You miss the entire point of daily builds. (Score:2)
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
--GnrcMan--
Re:How can you say it's not working? (Score:2)
Netscape 4.7 is usuable. It doesn't crash on me (90% of the time) and all of it's functionality works. I can't say that for M11 yet. It crashes at least once per session and a lot of the functionality is missing. The UI is also a little kludgey. It has a lot going for it, but I think they should stick with something a little less flashy until they're off the ground. i.e. Lesstif. I compiled Mozilla with lesstif on my OpenBSD machine and it was pretty close to going toe-to-toe with Netscape.
They're almost there... Soon now, I think.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Mozilla's modularity (Score:2)
Actually, Mozilla is very modular. The loader itself (apprunner) is less than 20KB. Everything else is done with shared libraries, this biggest of which is less than 500KB.
That's not to say I disagree with everyone's main point here--that the developers should have first focused their energies on the HTML/browser component instead of the Java/email/NNTP cruft. If they had, we might not have got into this silly debate about Mozilla being a "failure" in the first place.
Re:only letting the "big two" in. (Score:2)
May I make a polite suggestion to ANY person who writes or is learning to write HTML? First go to the web site at http://www.anybrowser.org [anybrowser.org] and read why it makes sense and how to code for the greatest variety of browsers out there.
Re:Getting Mozilla to 60% browser share (Score:2)
That is under the assumption that all their users (who are notoriously clueless) are going to install the new browser.
Re:Tech documentation (Score:2)
LaTex is useless as an output format (you don't want to edit the output anyway). Lets go straight to postscript/pdf.
Otherwise I agree that SGML is very useful for some purposes. But basically the domain you mentioned (technical documentation) is the only domain it is really used.
Stylesheets separate structure from presentation (Score:2)
The great thing about the WWW Consortium standards is that they do 'em the right way. Separate presentation from content is key.
I love stylesheets. I'll have to try the w3/emacs browser cause I guess it does nifty things with stylesheets, I think.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
Re:Sort of (Score:2)
Yes and no, most serious webdevelopers maintain browser specific versions of their sites and those contain the propietary stuff.
"How? If they've been developing their sites right, leaving them alone will work just fine with Mozilla."
The right way would be to stick to HTML 3.0 (as far as I know that's the only thing supported by all browsers in a reasonably consistent way). Many webdevelopers don't wish to restrict themselves that much.
"No, because using any MS-proprietary XSL tricks wouldn't work on any of the "standard" browsers other than IE5, so it won't be in the practical standard."
IE's marketshare is going to convince a lot of developers to use those features, or rather it will be hard to convince the developers using these features now to stop using them.
"but I suspect that Mozilla based browsers will spread faster than you think."
I hope so, but I don't think it will survive on just its technical merits. Most users are hardly aware of what they are running, they sure aint going to worry about some 'standard' compatible browser.
Still I think MS has one disadvantage: ie only is stable on their OS. Basically their weakspot is the embedded machines. According to many marketing research those things are going to make the PC obsolete. Mozilla can operate on these things, IE can't (not yet).
Re:We need a browser (Score:2)
Proponents of both languages claim it gets their job done quickly. Opponents of both languages claim that programming in them results in very messy code.
"Sorry... I meant "when I'm too lazy to use the command-line ftp to get files"
You're weird. On the one hand you choose to use an archaic and primitive tool like lynx and on the other hand you are too lazy to use a commandline tool.
"lynx doesn't really have to progress, in the usual sense of the word, in order to remain functional."
Well I just pointed out that it lacks functionality (your list of technologies) so that makes it less functional. But I got the answer I wanted: even you don't actually use lynx what it was made for: browse the web.
Re:Linus:"Grow up" (Score:2)
Here it is (Linus talking about the state of Linux): and (like most good things in life it's free :) [technetcast.com]
a quote from the transcript reads:
Linus T.:" Suddenly I could understand what Scott was all about... There's a teaching there and I'll call it "the Sun disease" but it's true of others too. You start really hating your competition to the point that instead of doing the right thing for your customers, you try to screw over your competitors any which way you can... and then you come up with bad licenses for your new programming languages... Completely hypothetical example [laughter and clapping]. I was almost in a situation where I was thinking, "Okay, how can I screw Microsoft?" You start not thinking clearly.
Re:Stylesheets separate structure from presentatio (Score:2)
I don't think CSS can work the way you describe. All browsers I know have compliant or incomplete CSS support. The biggest plus about CSS is that it degrades gracefully. The HTML itself is very standard: P, TABLE, IMG, EM, BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, H@, etc. So if you view the page with a browser with CSS, you get nice looking web page. Without CSS support the page looks like nothing less than regular boring HTML with all content (which a lot of people prefer).
I must digress that the pixel-based layout in CSS does scare me. I think pixel-based anything is a bad idea... limits the resolution people can view the page in.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!