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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Will Be Netscape 6.0 404

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-two-skip-a-few dept.
menthos writes "In this story on Cnet, the talk is about the latest speech from an AOL executive. Some of the most interesting things include that they are preparing to launch the Netscape-branded version of Mozilla "this spring", and it will be labeled Netscape Communicator 6.0. "
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Mozilla Will Be Netscape 6.0 More

Mozilla Will Be Netscape 6.0

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  • Well, that sounds all well and good, but I'll not believe it until I see it.

    Why?

    There's no beta. Or even an alpha yet. Sure, Mozilla M-whatever is now considered "alpha", but *that is NOT what Netscape will ship*. Netscape will be adding crypto, java, and whatever other AOL-friendly customizations they decide on, and the simple fact is, these additions warrant a beta cycle. Netscape has never shipped a major release without a several month long beta period. Even if they start *today* we'll likely not see a release until May.

    Now, bear in mind that Netscape is no longer controlled by Netscape. AOL will be deciding what's released when, and if their latest and greatest AOL 5.0 fiasco is any indicator, we could expect to see a bug ridden but colorful Netscape 6.0 released with no beta cycle... I just hope this isn't the case...

    --

  • We're working hard on integrating Jabber [jabber.org] into Mozilla as a native client. Since Jabber is based on XML and Mozilla's own XML functionality is quite advanced, it should be an interesting combination :)

    Unfortunately, it's proven quite challenging to integrate two rapidly developing platforms, so if anyone would like to help and can eat XUL/JS for breakfast, let me know.

    With Jabber and Mozilla, you'll instantly have AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, and others as we progress. Of course, there's no way in hell it will ship w/ the offical Netscape, but it will be part of Mozilla.
  • Ooh.... Are they going to incorporate Mozilla into AOL 6.0, in favor of MSIE?
  • Umm, the UNIX pasting thing needs to be a configurable option - personally I'm a Mac user, and I hate the "select equals copy" thing. If you want it, that's OK for you, but too often I want to select something without copying it - such as, to select a block of text and replace it with the text that I previously copied. With standard UNIX pasting, I have to delete it first, then re-copy the text I want - or copy first, then click and hold down the delete key for awhile.

    UNIX-style pasting works fine for gpm. That's about it.
  • Hmm, maybe the problem is that I'm running KDE?

    This doesn't just affect KDE apps, though.
  • Why not modify an existing OS browser (such as amaya) to suit your needs?

  • This is completely off-topic but the trolls are out of control today. I just changed my comment prefs to +1 threshold and it's like the IQ level here has suddenly been raised 10-fold. I highly recommend it to anyone tired of the spam trolls. Somethimes they're amusing but overall the trolling quality here is just getting pathetic. Someone needs to write a Troll HOWTO for the LDP.
  • Why would my boss care which browser I use? Why should I care which browser he uses?

    --

  • If you use the gratis-but-closed-source PSM daemon, Mozilla will have SSL.

    Just to be clear: The source code [mozilla.org] has already been released for most of the Personal Security Manager and Network Security Services software that will provide SSL support for Mozilla. The only important parts of the Netscape version of PSM that are closed-source are the encryption libraries licensed from RSA Security. Over time I expect those libraries will be replaced (by someone if not by Netscape) with open source encryption libraries, so that Mozilla will have a complete open source SSL implementation unencumbered by patent or other restrictions.

  • "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
    --
    Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
  • Check this download [netscape.com] from Netscape's developer site. It's example code and documentation for you to plug-in third-party mail and/or news systems. I have Netscape launching Pine with the To: line filled in on my machine, and I don't see why you couldn't get it to launch mutt.
  • Password authenticated news works fine in the latest build. It does Java provided you have java 1.3. Most plugins are working via the backward compatibility layer.

    The current problems with Mozilla as I see it for a daily browser are:

    SSL isn't included (won't ever be in Mozilla?)
    There are still dynamic reflow issues.
    It still occasionally locks up with 100% CPU.
    Opening new windows is slow.

    Other than those things, I've been using it for ordinary browsing as much as possible. It makes reading slashdot a breeze, since it reflows as the page is loading.

  • Most OS' don't have robust IPv6, because there are no apps. There are no apps, because most OS' don't have robust IPv6.

    If I sound fed up of this cycle, it's because I am. The developers can step off it any time they choose. Users and admins can't. They're stuck, until the developers get on with it.

  • As soon as I get stable net access at home, you can plan on seeing me submit IPv6 patches and fixes for anything else I have the skill to fix.

    I'm unashamedly a programmer, and you can be sure I will dig in the moment I get a chance. And, no, that's not a put-off. I -do- patch code, as and when I can, according to my ability.

  • Mozilla is good... (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Saturday February 12, 2000 @07:41AM (#1281257) Homepage Journal
    ...VERY good... but is it ready? The last version out the door was very flaky, hideously slow, and not particularly complete, IMHO.

    This -summer-, maybe. But SPRING? AOL must be really into IE to do something =that= fatal to Mozilla.

    It needs -much- more debugging, and (at the very least) testing time with all the new stuff Netscape handed out for it. Rushing isn't going to go anywhere, but down.

    At the VERY VERY LEAST, Mozilla needs to be as fast as Netscape 3, feature-complete as per the current HTML/DHTML specs, be fully capable of SSL 3.0 at 128 bits (with security auditing, to ensure that unencrypted data isn't retained in vulnerable sections of the disk or memory), have ALL the features of Communicator 4.x, AND support IPv6.

    If it's not at that point, it's not ready for shipping.

  • The fact that it is as fast as Netscape 4.7 is one of the problems with it. Dead dog in treacle, remember?
    It also chews a *lot* of memory (I think around 20MB), although not as much as Netscape. Maybe the AOL programmers all have 400 Mhz systems with 64 or 128 megabytes of memory, but not everyone does!
    Daniel
  • I admit I haven't been following too closely, but the build I got last week wouldn't let me drag-n-drop to reorganize my bookmarks -- or for that matter, reorganize them in any way. Am I missing something, or is this not implemented yet? (What I see on bugzilla seems to confirm that it's not there yet.) This is a pretty critical feature!

    --

  • It's at the stage where "the dogfood company is having to test it's own product by eating it themselves." Of course this isn't to be taken literally. It's just that all or most of the employess are now using the product to really hone the debugging to a sharp edge and ferret out every last little bug (theoretically of course.)

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • I don't think the problem is debug code. Rather, there are probably still unoptimized hot-spots in the code. Check out the .performance newsgroup; people will report that profiling shows a method is getting called 2000 times a second, and the function is either optimized or code rearranged to call it less often.
  • Umm, the UNIX pasting thing needs to be a configurable option - personally I'm a Mac user, and I hate the "select equals copy" thing.

    Does Mozilla do "select equals copy"? If so, that's irritating - what many UNIX applications do is "select equals select, and you can paste the current selection with the middle mouse button, but selecting leaves the clipboard alone - copy equals copy, and that copies to the clipboard".

    I.e., if you select something, it becomes the primary selection, but does not automatically get copied to the clipboard; to copy to the clipboard, you have to do, say, control-C (or Alt-C, in Netscape Classic, sigh). The middle mouse button pastes the primary selection at the insertion point; paste, which is typically control-V (or Alt-V in Netscape Classic), pastes the clipboard at the insertion point, or replaces the current selection if there is a current selection.

    (Qt, on UNIX/X, has the irritating habit of "copying" to the primary selection, rather than the clipboard, so this doesn't necessarily work correctly with Qt applications such as those that come with KDE.)

  • My company has standardized on Netscape 3.0 (!) and they have a customized icon...
    ----
  • Mozilla is the only app I've seen that puts a custom icon in the Gnome Tasklist - anyone know how this is done?
    ----
  • Thanks, that code might be a bit easier to browse through. :)
    ----
  • The development roadmap (here) is for M14 (due this month -- the current release is M13) to be the core of a Netscape branded beta. In short, a May final release is highly probable.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • SSL is not supported because its illegal (or was until recently) to export implementations of SSL from the USA. At one point patches existed to fix this developed outside the USA - don't know if they still work.

    Java is "supported" through an interface called OJI. Netscape can't open source the sun implementation they used in the past, and third party Java implementations are a losing battle with Sun's constant updates to the platform.
  • You see Microsoft has a version 5 out there that really isn't better than Netscape 4.7. At least not by much.

    Actually, IE5 is enormously better than Netscape 4.7. Though I prefer Netscape's UI, the fact remains that the Netscape 4.x rendering engine has not seen any significant change since 1997. Netscape 4.x does a miserable job with stylesheets [w3.org], and is utterly clueless about XML [w3.org]. IE, on the other hand, seems to do quite well with these, even if it does not fully conform to the specs. I don't mean to imply that IE is better in every respect, but I am saying that under the hood, IE5 beats Netscape hands down.

    It's a good thing that Mozilla [mozilla.org] will enable Netscape to catch up with and surpass IE5 in terms of under-the-hood excellence. However, I still think that skipping Netscape version 5 is a really bad idea. Although Mozilla is becoming quite capable and usable, it will be months before it is stable and feature-complete enough to release as Netscape 5.0.

    I think that for Netscape to be so brash as to call its next browser version 6.0, the browser should be able to trounce IE 5.x by fully supporting CSS2 [w3.org] and XSL [w3.org], among other things. It's not even close. Calling this well-intentioned-but-underdone browser "Netscape 6.0" will just set it up to be beaten by a superior IE 6.0. Netscape should just cut the crap and be honest about its version number, because otherwise it will just lose more credibility in the long run.

  • Great, so when I go to Nissan's website with iCab, all I see is a black background because it doesn't know what browser I have and uses JavaScript to check for IE or Netscape.
    This is not the fault of there being multiple browsers, it's the fault of boneheads who don't take advantage of features like object detection in their scripts.
    Now a lot of people think Netscape/Mozilla can save us because it's supposedly standards compliant. Well, read the article here. Customized browser versions used to customize conent for the browser.
    We're talking about XUL here, which is a standards-compliant subset of XML. Strictly speaking, this isn't about customizing content as such, it's about customizing the user interface.

    Admittedly, this sort of control over the UI is also one of the driving forces behind Microsoft's integration strategy: the difference is that the Microsoft way means Windows-only, and the XUL way works the same across all supported platforms.

    The other nice difference, at least for many Web developers, is that we don't have to code in C or Java anymore -- we can use XML and JavaScript instead.

    I hope this helps clear up any confusion caused by the AOL droid's misuse of terminology. :)

    Zontar The Mindless,

  • I have always felt that the value judgements in the moderation system were not a good idea, and that it was better off with straight points up/down. For some reason, "insightful" really makes me twitch ... having a dozen posts marked up as "insightful" just feels too damn touchy-feely, too loose with the term. And "interesting" is as subjective as it gets.

    I imagine "overrated" was supposed to be used to mark down posts that were moderated up for no good reason, as a check against moderation inflation. The one I see abused most often is "redundant", actually.
  • I don't have a Netscape file under app-defaults, so I'm not sure what has to be in it.

    I assume it is like an .Xdefaults file:
    app*attribute: value

    But what attributes are to be set? (Is there a howto on this? ;) Maybe if I can get it figured out, I'll write one.

  • Thanks. (Score:2)

    by Dast ( 10275 )
    .
  • It bothers me that it doesn't support SSL, which is a show-stopper as far as complete browser replacement for me, but here's one thing that really seems odd to me about M13:

    On Windows, it supports an Intellimouse wheel, but you can't use your page-up/page-down keys.

    That's pretty effed up right there, dude.

    And the cut-and-paste from the menu doesn't work, although keystrokes do.

    Little things like that need to be fixed. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't meet the dogfood test as long as it doesn't support SSL, but I know they're working on that and it won't be long.

  • The customizable throbber icon thing first showed up in, of all things, OS/2's WebExplorer.

    It was, at the time, on my 14.4k modem, the most amazingly interminable thing i'd ever seen embedded in a web page, I mean, damn, like 40k at the front of a web page just so the activity indicator would look different.

    WebEx also had a simplified version of IE's browsing history.

  • The RSA patent expires in 6 months.

    it sure will be interesting to see where cryptography goes after that.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @07:36AM (#1281308)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ...is the "over-rated" category. Nowadays, "over-rated" is a synonym for "You weren't trolling or posting flamebait, I just don't like your opinion." I see posts which had freakin' "1" scores get marked down as "over-rated" simply because the moderator wanted the poster to get marked down for his views or because the moderator didn't want other people seeing his viewpoint. Moderators know that nobody ever marks "over-rated" posts as unfair in metamoderation, so it's the safe, coward's way of stifling dissent without risking anything.

    And yeah, this post is off-topic with regards to the Mozilla article (although not to the parent post), so I'm not going to feel ripped off if someone marks it down as such. I just feel the matter needed to be pointed out, though, and that's why I'm posting it with the +1 bonus.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • "The new browser looks similar to Communicator 4.7, with some noticeable differences ... the most notable difference is the way AOL said it will distribute the product ... The company plans to allow Web sites to launch their own branded versions of the browser"

    That tells me it's not Mozilla (which doesn't look that much like 4.7, according to screenshots I've seen.) More likely, it's just good (?) old (!) Communicator, with some little frills, and the ability to distribute branded versions.

    Branded versions of Netscape are nothing new. When AT&T WorldNet Services first launched, we distributed Netscape (2.0 I think) with a "death star" logo in the upper right.
  • First off, I'm sure others will mention that this story is not really true. It isn't certain that it will be called Netscape 6.0 (or 2001, either). Check out http://www.mozillazine.org for more of this discussion.

    But in regard to your post, you're confused about the Mozilla/Netscape seperation. Mozilla will NOT be capable of SSL, due to at the very least the RSA patents. However, since Netscape will be binary, it will be able to do SSL.

    Mozilla is also different from Netscape. Yes, the interface needs tweaking, but Gecko, the layout engine, is effectively finished. It could be that Netscape has a whole different layout (XUL interface) for the branded browser than the Mozilla one, and they could have that in a better state than the Mozilla interface. Who knows?

    As far as people saying that Mozilla is slow, go look into the project a bit. Performance enhancements have not been rigorously done yet, and everyone is also using debug builds. I have been using Mozilla for all my web browsing since M13 came out, and I'm very happy with it.

    We're still fighting the problem of people believing stories in media about Mozilla. Oddly, when the media say the kernel is late, people bitch and moan about how open source projects ship when they're done. When the article is about Mozilla, people blindly believe that Mozilla must be suffering.

    Interestingly enough, many of the people complaining seem like they haven't even tried using Mozilla yet. Go grab M13 from http://www.mozilla.org folks, then give your feedback to the mozilla developers. But it's just silly to comment on a product you've never even used.

  • I have M13, and it doesn't support SSL or Java, two critical technologies that must be supported.

    Also, there are lots and lots of bugs, as it crashes on a regular basis, the forward and back buttons don't always work right and the even some of the new features, like chrome, aren't yet fully functional.

  • These bugs are already well-documented on [mozilla.org]
    Mozilla's Seamonkey release notes page

    As for helping out, I'm sure I could dive in and code, but it seems to me like they've already got this pretty well handled, and I have other projects which need my time right now.

  • Maybe the Slashdot people could help a bit on optimizing and debugging it (there's very few "hackers" working on Mozilla; it's mostly Netscape staff)

    I sincerely hope this become stable enough so I can make a customized version of Mozilla with GPLTrans logos on it :) There's a GTK module called GtkMozilla but Mozilla's too stable to consider something like this at the moment.
  • If I use NS 4.7 for Mac and visit a page with a style sheet link in the <head></head> and then change the style sheet -- add a special attribute for all TD, for example -- Netscape does not reload the style sheet when the page is reloaded. I don't think this really affects the average joe, but when you're testing to see how different attributes look on a page it's very annoying. IE 4.5 DOES reload the style sheet when you click reload.
    ___________________
  • It's possible with netscape: have a look at muttzilla [freshmeat.net].
  • It's not only removing the if (DEBUG) { } parts
    (Yes, I know about #ifdef, that's not the point),
    but also optimizing lots of functions. However, optimized they are very difficult to debug. Optimization is a lot of work, and it's senseless to waste time on it if a lot of things are going to be changed anyway.
  • Hmmm, for some reason /. posted that message as AC there, so I'll repeat:

    In netscape, you can have hjkl motion keys, in case you didn't know:
    have a look at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Netscape

  • No you don't (Score:3)

    by rm -rf /etc/* ( 20237 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @09:29AM (#1281346) Homepage

    You don't want to beat IE. The only thing bad about IE is it's potential to be forced onto consumers. Having one dominant product in an area is bad. So what if Netscape overtakes IE? With AOL/Time Warner/Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/whoever, we have just as dangerous of a situation, a huge company that can force a product on the market. Whether it's netscape or IE, it's still going to hurt the general public.

    Even with two, you can see this "browser war" as the media likes to call it is not beneffiting us. It's creating a bunch of web sites that either customize content to one browser, or maybe both netscape and IE. Great, so when I go to Nissan's website with iCab, all I see is a black background because it doesn't know what browser I have and uses JavaScript to check for IE or Netscape.

    The only way *we* can win is with standards. Unfortunately, no one cares about this stuff. Websites want flash, and they don't seem to mind alienating customers by requiring the latest browser with javascript, flash, etc. Now a lot of people think Netscape/Mozilla can save us because it's supposedly standards compliant. Well, read the article here. Customized browser versions used to customize conent for the browser. Does that sound like an idea from a company who is really commited to open standards?

    No, the web should be accesible to anyone. I'm sorry to say at this point though, it looks like we're all going to loose no matter who wins the browser war.

  • Re:No you don't (Score:3)

    by rm -rf /etc/* ( 20237 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @12:09PM (#1281347) Homepage

    No, www.nissan-usa.com. But that's irrelevant. iCab is just an example, the point isn't browser capability. What I'm worried about is why websites need to alienate users. I email every site I go that requires certain capabilities and ask them why I'm not good enough to access their site because I don't have netscape or ie. To me, that company is just saying "Well, we don't want your business." Hell, what about the blind? What does a web browsers text to speech engine do when it hits a website all done in flash?

    Could you imagine watching a commercial on TV, but only seeing a text message that says "We're sorry, this commercial can only be viewed on a television that is larger than 32 inches." That's basically what all to many websites are doing on the web.

  • Re:Mozilla is good... (Score:3)

    by ywwg ( 20925 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @09:02AM (#1281349) Homepage
    Uh, have you used a nightly build lately? Mozilla is _fast_, at least as fast as Netscape 4.7 in linux. The UI is clean, and no longer are there lots of flashing rectangles as it draws the page.

    Of course there are issues, but that is what bugzilla.mozilla.org is for. I've reported several bugs that have gotten fixed. People should stop complaining about mozilla and start doing what they can to help it. Not a prorgammer?
    Report bugs!

    I don't know what "last version out the door" you were referring to. The current version of Mozilla is complete as far as browsing goes. Complete mail, nearly complete news (there are issues with password-authenticated news), and a functional IRC client (more of a demo). It doesn't do java, AFAIK, and I don't know how plugins work, but otherwise it isn't missing a thing. Go check out <ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly> and download something with today's date.
  • Well you could paste first, then rehighlight the part you want gone then hit delete. But I bet there is a better way, but as I don't use *nix I don't know, anyone out there know the proper way to select an area to delete without destroying what is in your clipboard?
  • I'm using IE 5 right now (note that I'm not the original poster). What I really dislike (apart from the eventual 'an internal error occurred' message box that pops up after program termination) is the fact that sometimes (cannot really say why this happens) I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...

    After a very long period of surfing (> 5 hrs) problems arise that will make opening new instances create new windows that never really render and simply have a sand clock in them.

    RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though ;-) Not that surprising!

    But with all the problems, IE is way better than Netscape (from my personal experience). Opera, for me, doesn't render certain pages properly. But it has a nice zooming feature...

    If Mozilla fulfills only part of what I've heard I will drop every other browser instantaneously...
  • RealPlayer /is/ installed, but most of the time nothing happens when I click on a link. In the few cases where it works there might be some script code that makes sure RealPlayer is invoked, but that's just a guess...

    Frankly, whenever I can choose between Real and ASX I take ASX because it simply works and I have the impression that it looks and sounds better at the same bitrate than Real. Don't know about QuickTime... OTOH, I don't like the fact that ASX becomes predominant although there probably never will be a player for anything but Windows.

  • I entirely agree with this comment. The same goes for typography: an em-dash is &mdash; for example (that's: —), double quotes are &ldquo; and &rdquo; (like “this”) and so on. My pages are full of things like that: if you see them as funny &mdash; strings and so on, your browser is broken.

  • Mozilla still has many bugs, BUT... (Score:3)

    by David A. Madore ( 30444 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @09:01AM (#1281369) Homepage

    The Bugzilla [mozilla.org] bug-tracking system is sooo cool it makes you want to file bug reports just so you can play with it.

    Why, you can even vote for your favorite bugs to determine which ones should be fixed prioritarily. I voted for bugs 4722 [mozilla.org] and 27505 [mozilla.org]. I encourage Slashdot readers to give the Lizard a try and to file bug reports (or at least to votes for the ones you find more troublesome rather than complain about them here).

  • Wheres Netscape 5.0? (Score:3)

    by thales ( 32660 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @07:46AM (#1281372) Homepage Journal
    A pre-release of 5.0 was the code Netscape opensourced to Mozilla. After the stuff Netscape didn't own was ripped out, what was left was a basket case. After 6 months Mozilla tossed it and started over. Netscape 5.0 existed but wasn't released. So the new browser IS 6.0.
  • Not entirely correct; The Word re-versioning brought all Word versions to the same number; at that point, IIRC, there was Word for DOS 5.2 (because of WP 5.1 ;-), Word for Mac 5.4 (or 4.5?) and finally Word for Windows 2.0. Which was moronic of course, sine WfW was more advanced than the DOS version...


    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
  • The only problem I've had so far is when I get moderator access on /., half of the moderation options are rendered incorrectly or are out of position! Despite being a better browser, it's not good enough for Slahsdot :)

    Well, if you think IE5 is bad, try reading Slashdot with Mozilla M13. You often get black text on a black background: cool, groovy, far out... but not readable. The problem here isn't IE5. I'm extremely hostile to Microsoft generally, but apart from a number of annoying trying-to-be-too-clever gimmicks IE5 is not a bad browser. Mozilla M13 isn't a bad browser either.

    The problem is that Slashdot's HTML is atrocious. It's pretty much tuned to Netscape 4, and consequently looks reasonably alright in Netscape 4; but it's so bad that any reasonable HTML parser is going to have severe trouble with it. Run it through the validator [w3.org] if you don't believe me

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I haven't had any of those problems with IE 5.0 (in Win95, no active desktop customization stuff).

    The only problem I've had so far is when I get moderator access on /., half of the moderation options are rendered incorrectly or are out of position! Despite being a better browser, it's not good enough for Slahsdot :)




    _____________________
    .sig Instructions
    step one: place .sig here
  • I'm getting tired of pointing this out, but you can't say that the final Mozilla will be slow just because the alpha is slow. Prerelease versions are full of debugging code which slow things down but make it easier to spot bugs. When a final version is released, all this will be gone. So wait for a release before you judge Mozilla's speed.
  • I don't know how you managed to get that impression from the poster's comments. He just said "IE had an advantage cos ISPs could customise it". And also that there are things he hates about IE.
  • Yes, M13 (the most recent development release) doesn't reload the page when you resize the window. It also remembers which bit of a page you were up to, when you press the back button.
  • Go on then, what's stopping it? Remember that nearly the whole of Netscape is now using and working on Mozilla (since M12ish) and that bugs can be squashed very rapidly once the program is feature-complete.
  • I think it's silly to care what version number Netscape gets. I believe it is a marketing ploy. But given that it is a marketing ploy, I see nothing wrong with it. The consumer is not being decieved. There really is a big difference between this and Netscape 4.7.

    Windows 98 is very similar to Windows 95, so the differential version numbering is more likely to give a false impression that there's a big difference. But then again, if you're stupid enough to buy something on the basis of its version number, then you're buying the hype and not the product, so you've got what you paid for.
  • Try selling it to your boss as Netscape; you'll find it much easier than as Mozilla.
  • Erm ... hacking IE isn't possible unless you're Microsoft, cos you don't have the source. You can possibly embed the rendering engine in your own app but no more than that. And in future, if MS wish to remove certain functionality from IE for their own reasons (e.g. breaking HTML 4 compliance some more to make it harder for other browsers to compete), then IE users get left high and dry.

    Instead, for the last two years people have been hacking Netscape into something more useable. You will have a good web solid web browser and nobody can stop anybody from adding building on it. Sounds like a much safer future IMO.
  • Seems ok to me ... if you ignore the MS nagger screen saying "get IE" that is. But if there are any problems, then remember that hotmail is MS and that writing a browser which can parse shit in the same way as IE, yet is also standards compliant, is a very difficult and moving target. BTW, at least in Linux, it is *never* necessary for something to have X amount of RAM, though it will run bloody slowly if you don't have a certain amount.
  • Are you saying that it's important to have a web browser which can access hotmail, but it's not important to ensure that other people can't then access your hotmail account? Or reformat your hard disk?
  • Hmmm it just works straight off for me. Maybe it is only partally implemented, so it works on some stuff but not other stuff, or something like that. Where are you having problems?
  • ...VERY good... but is it ready? The last version out the door was very flaky, hideously slow, and not particularly complete,IMHO.
    This -summer-, maybe. But SPRING? AOL must be really into IE to do something =that= fatal to Mozilla.
    Not to sure if that will really matter. What netscape/AOL have the advantage on is that they can merge in their existing Communicator source, replacing anything Mozilla does better with the Mozilla versions, but leaving the original Communicator code for stuff Mozilla is currently shaky at intact.
    --
  • but I've been using the Alpha version of Mozilla and I'm impressed. There is a certain elegance and ease of use that is not present in any other browser. It renders pages beautifully and quickly, even in light of the fact that there is still a lot of debugging code. I think we all owe the developers/testers a huge debt. They are giving us a first class browser and almost as important, they are giving us a choice.

  • Interesting that they're now allowing ISPs and others to make customized versions, with their own title bars, throbber icons, and the like... this is one thing that Microsoft did that really got them in good with ISPs, and probably has a lot to do with why that piece of crap browser is gaining so much ground in the Windows arena.

    List of why I think IE is a piece of my shit is available upon request.
  • Damn, didn't expect so many people to actually want a list =)

    Well, here's just some things off the top of my head.

    The FTP client is crap. With netscape, I can do
    ftp://user@host, it'll prompt me for a password. Up until IE5, I had to use ftp://user:password@host, or it wouldn't work. Not only that, but it would stay there, password and all, in the history bar.

    As of IE5, it seems that it can prompt you for a password, but it saves the password until you end the session, which is still a might insecure (Communicator does that one also, sadly).

    When downloading files, 9 times out of 10, I get "File Size: Unknown" for no apparent reason (Netscape doesn't have that trouble). So, I have no way to know when the bloody thing is going to finish unless I check the file size in some external way. Furthermore, when it does get the file size, the estimated finish time is grossly inaccurate... how many times have you seen this ? It says ETA: 15 seconds, ticks down to zero, then restarts at 20 seconds. Bah...

    And it doesn't fscking close the download window when it finishes, by default >:-| And there doesn't seem to be anyway to MAKE this the automatic behaviour !

    The configurations for IE are cumbersome, IMHO. Netscape has it all in one place, Edit->Preferences. In IE, it's either in the menus, or an entirely redundant control panel applet... blah... and of course you get bitchslapped by your IE Favorites in umpteen different places including the fscking root menu. All part of the integration process, I presume.

    Java seems to run slower for me in the IE virtual machine, but that's just an impression. What's not just an impression is that it crashes if I look at it cross-eyed... one particularly futile task is trying to use the Java VNC viewer in Internet Explorer... it is slow as balls, doesn't refresh the virtual display properly, and crashes with such regularity as to render it utterly useless.

    That's all I have for now, when I get back to work on Monday and have IE in front of me again, I'm sure I can come up with more. =)
  • > In my experience NS is prone to crashing far more often then IE and loves reloading pages from the server even if you so much as sneeze.

    That reminds me of another thing. IE doesn't display images until it's completely finished downloading them, whereas netscape displays them as it's getting them. Where I work, I monitor a security webcam, and the software we have is a little odd... what it does is it serves off a continuous stream in the format of an animated GIF... the idea being that your web browser will display it frame by frame as it comes in. It will never move in IE.
  • Interesting. I've had precisely the same problems with IE 5. Except for, when the "menu not coming up" problem occurs, I just switch focus to another window, then back to the original, and the menus will then work properly.
  • That's not a better way at all. Since each drop down box has it's own properties. You can't seriously suggest that the properties for each box should be persisted and unpersisted as it appears and dissapears? Just cause something isn't visible doesn't mean it's not important. Printing will require them to be there, and scripts will need to be able to access all the controls to do whatever they want. And the fact that it requres a window handle is irrelevant, almost everything visible in windows requires a window handle. What does take up some space is the fact it's an ActiveX control. It's no where near how much a java applet or class would take up tho.
  • IE isn't tied into NT4. Anyway, it has nothing to do with the tying, it has to do with the fact that IE works and Netscape doesn't. Who the hell could serious use Linux as a desktop machine when it doesn't have a working webbrowser?
  • Yeah whatever. As if that would happen. You prolly loved netscape do death even before the made a desperate 'open source' dive. The fact is IE does rendering proprly, supporting HTML and DHTML and CSS and XML and VML etc very well. Well wait until it does happen before you start claiming netscape is better cause you have the source. Remember when the 4.x source got release? Everyone goes "wow, netscape are such good coders", this is going to help us heaps. A month the code was dumped because of how CRAP it was and the new mozilla source tree was created, componentization based on what else but COM.
  • I was thinking that too. When I hear "Netscape" or "Communicator" I just shudder now. Such bad bad bad experiences.

    So naming the browser Netscape Communicator 6.0 is very bad IMHO.
  • ROFLMAO What total FUD. Care to bet with me that Netscape on Linux is more stable than IE on NT?
  • IE parses HTML, and predicts where missing tags should me. IE is stricter with XML and eventually XHTML. The option to type part of the address you don't remember? As in intellisense? That's been in IE for ages. Uh, I'm not suggesting IE be the only browser, I'm just talking about which is better technically.
  • LOL IE take out a machine? What a ridiculous thing to say. As if. I wasn't talking about it taking down the OS anyway (wtf kind of OS is that?). I'm talking about the browser CRASHING.
  • Dunno when the last time you tried a Mozilla build was, but for a kick, try the latest nightly Linux build, and go to Edit->Preferences->Debug and turn off gfx scrollbars (dunno why they are enabled by default, they are causing some bugginess and slowness still). Then browse around a bit. I won't claim that Mozilla is perfect yet, but it's gotten VERY usable in terms of speed -- still hogging memory a bit more than it should, but now that most of the MAJOR bugs are getting worked out, there will be more time for speed optimization and memory leak fixing and the like. I find Mozilla comparable in speed for most browsing now to Netscape 4.7 on my Celeron 300a box, and it's not slow enough to be frustrating for day-to-day browsing at all.
    If you are using gfx widgets, you might wanna try ViewManager2 in debug settings, too.
  • I agree wholeheartedly. The devlopers and hackers who read bugzilla are quite responsive, in general (to bug reports... quite a bit less to to feature requests at this point, since they're trying to squash the dogfood bugs right now). Voting on bugs *Does* help, it lets developers know which bugs are important to users to get fixed immediately. Performance issues in Linux have been addressed, and they are a priority of one of the developers.

    My understanding of serious performance issues is that they were mostly the result of a couple of choke points that had to be tracked down, not just debug code. In any case, they are being worked on currently, and if you check out the latest builds you will notice pretty darned good speed and rendering, and general functionality (some UI issues remain, IMHO, but those will be dealt with by release).

    Also make sure to look in bugzilla if you find problems, as there are sometimes workarounds posted there (for example, DON'T leave gfx widgets on in Edit->Preferences->Debug without changing to ViewManager2... in fact, I recommend turning them off for the time being, as there are some major rendering problems introduced by them, which are being debugged currently).

  • Is this an assumption you're making, or have the developers actually stated "expect 100-300% improvement in speed once we remove the debugging code"?

    If this is just an assumption, it would take a lot of debug code to slow it down to where people complain about the speed.

    Not to mention that if turning off debugging code really made a huge difference, don't you think many people would turn it off and recompile to see how well it ran without it? Have you seen any reports of this? I haven't, and this tells me that it's not debugging code that's the problem.


    --

  • Umm... maybe if it didn't take 900 megs of free space and several hours to build, you might see more "evidence" of the type you are looking for.

    Several hours is not that long a time. Considering the number of complaints about the speed, someone would compile up a version.

    FYI, any program compiled with debug symbols (from the largest to the smallest) gets speeded up quite a bit when those are removed (300% is probably ridiculous, but a doubling isn't completely out of the question.)

    On every Unix I have used, symbols only make the binary file larger, not slower due to the way debuggers work. Think about it: What would change in the assembly language for symbols? (hint: assembly language doesn't use alphanumeric symbols).

    But just to make sure Linux wasn't weird in some way, I performed the following test using an associative array library [behrendsen.com] I wrote. Including the little test subroutine, it's about 800 lines of code (not that big, but should have an effect if symbols are a factor). The test subroutine basically creates an AA, adds a bunch of symbols, reads them back, destroys it, and repeats a few thousands times:

    $ gcc speed.c aa.c -o speed
    $ time speed
    2.14user 0.01system 0:02.14elapsed 100%CPU

    $ gcc -g speed.c aa.c -o speed
    $ time speed
    2.15user 0.00system 0:02.14elapsed 100%CPU

    $ gcc -g -O speed.c aa.c -o speed
    $ time speed
    2.00user 0.00system 0:02.00elapsed 99%CPU

    $ gcc -O speed.c aa.c -o speed
    $ time speed
    2.01user 0.00system 0:02.00elapsed 100%CPU

    In any case, you can prove it for yourself via the "strip" command, which strips the symbols from an executable.

    Learn a little bit about the subject at hand before you flame away...

    This space intentionally left without comment.


    --

  • Yes, the interface needs tweaking, but Gecko, the layout engine, is effectively finished. ...and then later... As far as people saying that Mozilla is slow, go look into the project a bit. Performance enhancements have not been rigorously done yet, and everyone is also using debug builds.

    But the layout engine is where the performance problems would be! If that's already done, then where are these performance improvements supposed to come from?


    --

  • Actually, believe it or not, the symbols make zero different in start-up time (at least in most Unixes, don't know about Linux). The way it usually works is that an executable is mapped into virtual memory, not real memory. Then as each part of the executable is run, the page is swapped into memory.

    Note that this allows the side benefit of only one copy of an executable in memory if multiple people are running the same program.

    The upshot is that if the symbols aren't used, they won't be swapped into real memory. At least on most Unixes; don't know about Linux, but I would imagine they did it the "right way".

    Again, try it for yourself by doing a "strip" on the binary.

    The problem with the start-up time is probably that no one has optimized how Netscape/Mozilla interacts with X11. Unfortunately, I think they don't have anyone to sit down and analyze the stream of X11 commands to optimize it. I've done it, and you can make a HUGE difference by minimizing the X11 round trips.


    --

  • Actually, I think I know why... try going into your IE settings, and turn off "use smooth scrolling". You need a fast processor and fast video card for that not to be obnoxious.


    --

  • ...for them to make their sites workable for the lowest common denominator, they would. It is not, so they do not. Don't get righteous, this is just greed as usual. I'm not saying it's a good thing--I certainly wish they were more adaptive--but keep in mind that it takes a lot of extra effort to make sure that a site works for the blind, with Lynx, with Netscape, with IE, with Opera... not to mention all the different versions of those browsers that all do things differently.

  • Mozilla verion 7.62 (Score:3)

    by Crixus ( 97721 ) on Saturday February 12, 2000 @10:21AM (#1281460)
    I just grabbed the latest Mozilla source, compiled it, and decided to call it version 7.62.

    My version is higher than your version! (my dad can beat your dad, etc...)

    I have the highest version number, so I win, right?

    :-)

  • I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...

    I put all my menus on one row, so there isn't enough space for the entire menu bar to appear. So IE displays a >> which pops up the hidden menu options when clicked upon. When the file menu gets stuck, click on >> and everything will be ok.

    IE has its problems, but it's still way better than Netscape.
  • I know I can't put up with it. I just installed Linux recently and most annoying thing is to have to use Netscape. I'm back with NT now.
  • I've tried mozilla (m13), and it is slow. It'll probably get better, but it's not really suitable for use now
  • OK - the key difference isn't the debug symbols - it's the other compile-time things that configure turns on if it's doing debugging stuff - printing traces to the console, using -O0, avoiding x shared memory. However, the milestones *are* built optimized (at least, the person who explained to me how to package the PowerPC milestone told me to optimize), so you must be seeing poor performance that I'm not from the release builds. Are you using it on Linux or Windows?

    Do a build with ./configure --enable-x11-shm --disable-test --enable-optimize --disable-debug to get a realease build.

    When I did this for the PowerPC M13 build I got a binary that only took 300 megs to build (not 900) and ran *significantly* faster than any other browser I've ever used (except lynx, but...), espescially on table-heavy pages like slashdot. Overall, IE 4.5 (macos) has a UI that feels a little snappier, but the total rendering speed on mozilla blows it away. My only remaining performance complaint is that reflows are not done in a threaded manner, so the reflow of a huge page (say, slashdot with 500+ comments, or the 2.5 megs of raw text in the build logs from mozilla's tinderbox) can freeze the UI for too long. I suspect that this, on a smaller scale, is also the source of my feeling that IE was snappier (since everything is done through the layout engine).

  • List them.
    In all my experience with IE, especially with 4 & 5, it has been solid.
    It's quick, hardly *ever* goes down, and if it does, just kill the process.

    Netscape, in my book, took a crap with their first release of Communicator 4.0. They tried to add too much functionality in a catch up game with MS.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-
    This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.

  • First, a note on Solaris.

    Rumour has it that Sun changed Solaris 2.7 to 7 because they wanted to beat out the upcoming NT5.
    It was less than a week later that MS announced NT5 would be renamed to Windows2000.

    *sigh*

    Also, there's lots of precedent in the free (and relatively noncommercial) world. Consider BIND that went from 4.9 to 8.

  • Hey, go wild with the style sheets. As long as you adhere to the HTML standards, it's up to the browsers to interpret them correctly. In fact, it's worth putting a disclaimer on your page to that effect: "This page rigidly adheres to all official HTML standards. If you are not seeing it properly, please complain to your browser vendor, and demand that they fix their software."

    Come to think of it, everyone writing web pages could start doing that. I'm sick of web browsers that support their own silly extensions but don't adhere to the standards.

  • Well, they're playing the version numbers game, which will look good for everyone who doesn't know any better. (insert same reasons given by Slackware here...)

    As for AIM being integrated, that is not at all surprising; it was already pretty much forcibly bundled with the previous version of Netscape (under Windows, anyway; even if you told it "No, I don't want anything to do with AIM, go away", it would prompt you AGAIN every so often, and the option would always be there in the menu system. Now that I'm not using Windows, I don't have to think about that :) Since AOL controls ICQ as well, it would be interesting to see one of the "universal IM" clients integrated instead. Also, why not integrate WinAmp?

    To now contradict myself, anothing thing I'd really like to see is some modularity. I will NEVER user the mail client (mutt), news reader (don't), or HTML editor (vim), and I'd like Netscape to give me the option, as w3m does, of launching mutt for mailto: tags.

  • It says so on their page. There's a good reason, of course, and that's the RSA patent...right now SSL technology is proprietary in the US, and so can't really be included with something like Mozilla.

    I'm sure, however, that Netscape 5 or 6 or 2001 or whatever it is will still have SSL in it, but don't expect SSL in Mozilla until after September.

    As for me, I've been using Mozilla for everything under Linux except SSL stuff, and I'm much happier with it than Netscape. I only want 3 things:

    1. Let me use button 2 as "open in new window"...that's what makes Netscape better under Linux than under Windows, 3 buttons.
    2. Let me do UNIX pasting! I can paste something _to_ mozilla with "highlight, button 2", but not _from_ mozilla. I REFUSE to submit to the Windows retardation of "copy and paste". Don't be StarOffice!
    3. Let me define my own text shortcuts (the first thing I would do is to set hjkl to be motion keys :)

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