Suck Says Mozilla Is Dead 449
tetrad writes: "Suck admittedly isn't the most optimistic of sites, but more often than not, it's right on the money. Today's article is more of an obituary. 'Mozilla is dead, or might as well be,' says author Greg Knauss. While some might argue that Mozilla still has breath in it, Suck begs to 'pull the plug,' and points to Mozilla's decreasing market share, feature bloat, and failure to release a marketable product. It also jabs at the techies running the show: 'The Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit.'" With the next MXX right around the corner, I have to disagree: besides that, I use Mozilla frequently and find that with a few minor exceptions, the latest builds are as good or better than Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic).
Re:I use it (Score:2)
Clear to who?
I personally only install Milestone releases, because I don't want to get caught up in incrementals like I did back in the linux 1.1 kernel days :) And it's not at all clear to me that Mozilla is somehow going to eat IE for lunch, or any other meal.
For one thing, IE still has a faster display engine, at least on Win32; I don't run a browser on any other platform. M16 is slower than IE5.5 for everything other than network performance on Windows ME and Windows 2000. I really can't praise the net code enough; It is tight as hell. Whoever the main architects on that project, you are my personal heroes.
Also, IE55 is also immeasurably more stable than Mozilla M16. I'll get back to you when M17 comes out.
What I'm trying to say is that that other crap just complicates the issue. Leave it alone for now. Work on the core components. And all of that other crap should just be plug-ins if it isn't already because I want it out of my browser. The only things I actually want IN it are Navigator and the Mail/News components, whatever the hell those are called today. Everything else can go hang.
Agreed. (Score:2)
"Oh well Mozilla does this and this and has all these cool shit features!"
"Yes, but does it browse better then IE on either platform?"
"Well.. umm... err... uhh... its got its own widgets!"
"But thats not a good thing, I like the widgets that I'm already used to."
"No you don't, we're mozilla, we know whats best for you!"
*Goes and turns on IE*
Is Mozilla relevant? (Score:2)
The world is moving on. Internet appliances are getting in bed with IE, Opera, Netscape or other browsers. These alliances will not shift because Mozilla is finally released.
If web sites continue to support standards sufficiently to be viewed on all modern browsers, Mozilla can be used - the question then is who will use it.
If more and more web sites decide to cater to 90% of the market - that 90% that has IE, then Mozilla is truly dead. Nobody wants a browser that cannot be used to view many sites.
That said... I am writing this on my main PC running Win2k. I am using Opera 4. I hate IE. I hate sites that only work with IE. I complained to news.bbc.co.uk when they changed their site format and it had problems with Opera (me and others). The BBC corrected their site.
lightweight my ass. (Score:3)
Opera 3.62 is 1.5MB and doesn't consume 30MB of ram to load a webpage.
The day mozilla is lightweight is the day they change the meaning of overweight to mean "only programs bigger then Office 2000", or in real life terms, "only people larger then 400 pounds".
Re:Compared to Netscape? Bah. (Score:2)
YES.
Every day.
and MUCH LESS than a PIII. (How about a P133 with 32MB?)
And speed was very acceptable. (Netscape(4.5) under Linux is marginally slower than under Windows, and under Windows, is about the same as IE.)
Mozilla, OTOH is S_L_O_W.
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
Can you imagine if EMACS had worked like Mozilla? A list of milestones dating back to the early '80's, actually documenting the impending introduction of every possible feature? Nope, it just grew as it matured. But the most important thing was that it was a stable, effective text editor before it became a newsreader and e-mail client.
Possible Benefits of NS/Mozilla Dissappearing? (Score:2)
As far as I can see it, here are some of the pros and cons:
Pros:
One Platform Construction -- no longer will web designers have to design two different copies of their pages in order for them to look good to everybody
Standard Feature Integration -- Pages could be coded using the same components. No longer would workarounds have to be created to deal with unsupported tags (iframes/layers)
Faster Version Upgrade -- It seems to me that if everybody is using the same browser, people would update their version more often, so more people would have the latest and most sophisticated version. (why, i don't know, but this is just a feeling i have. Maybe it's because they won't be confused with IE 4.0/5.0/5.5 / NS 4.0/4.6/4.7/4.73 etc)
Possible technological advancements -- This is probably the most uncertain of the pros, but if the manufacturer of the browser had complete freedom they could add new features that would make design and browsing easier, and more fruitful. Of course, this leads immediately to our
Cons:
Complete Monopoly Over Web -- Whatever this company said would be the law for viewing the web. If they didn't put a tag in, it wouldn't exist on the web.
Loss of Innovation -- The usual lack of development that occurs when there are no competitors. We're on top so why do more? (Of course this hasn't really stopped NS from stopping its innovation, but I digress)
What do you guys think? Would having a market that is overwhelmingly dominated by one browser (be it IE or NS or whatever) be a good or a bad thing?
there's a usable kernel right now. (Score:2)
This sort of expansion and feature creep is ok if there is something thats usable out there right now, like if they made a working browser and *then* went to add all the extra stuff. Thats totally different then making all the extra stuff at the expense of the browser.
The comparison isn't really valid, because I have a fully functional and quite happy kernel running right now, so if they want to add more features, why not? The same can't be said of Mozilla, when comparing it to IE isn't a total joke anymore, then maybe.
So what? (Score:2)
Hell people said UNIX was dead a few years ago and now look....
Prime? (Score:2)
I'm not dead yet! (Score:2)
I'm not dead yet.
yeah, but 4.0 is kinda buggy still (Score:2)
Definately worth the money if you want an actual small and fast browser under Windows.
Mozilla's won't die... (Score:5)
AOL needs mozilla and needs all these extra features included. AOL needs the flexibility to rapidly deploy a client on whatever platform comes in the future (set top boxes, web pads, kiosks). They also want to stop supporting MS with the IE integration (limiting the clients to whatever MS supports). When AOL upgrades all their users (how many bajillions now?) no one will be saying that mozilla is dead.
G
Re:I'm not dead yet! (Score:4)
/.: Bring out your dead!
/.: Bring out your dead!
SUCK: Here's one -- ninety thousand banner reads.
MOZILLA: I'm not dead!
/.: What?
SUCK: Nothing -- here's my ninety thousand banner reads.
MOZILLA: I'm not dead!
/.: Here -- he says he's not dead!
SUCK: Yes, he is.
MOZILLA: I'm not!
/.: He isn't.
SUCK: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
MOZILLA: I'm getting better!
SUCK: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
/.: Oh, we can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
MOZILLA: I don't want to go in the cart!
SUCK: Oh, don't be such a baby.
/.: We can't take him...
MOZILLA: I feel fine!
SUCK: Oh, do us a favor...
/.: We can't.
SUCK: Well, can you hang around a couple of months? He won't be long.
........
(thanks to Monthy Python and the makers of the original recording)
Thimo
--
They don't GET IT! (Score:3)
Sure, Mozilla the browser is way, way overdue. It's so far overdue, that I am begining to defend sites writing IE only HTML - IE has 90% of the market, after all. (I don't like it, though)
That's not the point, really. The point is that once Mozilla is stable we will have a truly cross platform, lightweight and fast alternative to the MS Active X architecture.
Sure, Java isn't bad, but for GUI apps... well, even Java evangelists aer concentrating on the server now.
Mozilla/XUL really is cross platform. Applications written using XUL will appear identical on all platforms (even the Mac!).
Mozilla is lightweight. Everyone complains about the "huge" download, but lasttime I checked, it was between 6 and 7 megs. That's for the browser, and the entire XUL operating environment. Try getting a JVM and class libraries that small, let alone an IE/Windows download.
Mozilla is fast. Okay.. it's not that fast, but the nightly builds have been getting better, and the HTML rendering is fast.
Anyway, Mozilla isn't dead. I doubt it will ever (with "ever" = the next year or so) suprass IE's market share, but it will begin to make an impression in the application development market very soon, now. I'd say within 6 months there will be more websites on XUL development than development in something like FLTK.
If Mozilla is a total rewrite why do AOL own it?? (Score:2)
I had been using Mozilla nightlies for most browsing, but now I'm posting this with Galeon. At least with Galeon + Gecko I can get reasonable performance on a K6-450 & 196MB RAM. Mozilla was OK as long as I didn't cause the GUI to redraw, like using a menu or multiple windows.
I still hold hope for Mozilla, but if Netscape's NS5 code was tossed out and rewritten starting with Gecko, then I question Netscape's copyright on the whole Mozilla project. It seems a little charitable to contribute to a non-GPL'd or non-BSD type license, owned by a Multinational Corporate Entitity like AOL.
Somebody make a *fast* browser (Score:3)
Here's a quick summary for you new folks:
Mosaic 1.2: "fast" but barely functional web browser.
Mosaic 2.0-2.4: Marginally better than 1.x
Mosaic 2.6/2.7b: Improved, jpeg support but by this time Netscape was out and blew mosaic away.
Netscape 0.99-1.12 Cool as shit compared to Mosaic, talbes, forms, included basic newsreader pretty darn fast on any machine.
Netscape 2.x: Faster than 1.x, Java support, completely redone newsreader some minor improvements
Netscape 3.x: Fastest Netscape ever, table background color support, great newsreader. About the only modern shortcomings are javascript incompatibilities, and lack of IMAP support in messenger.
Netscape 4.x: Slower than any other netscape version, bloated, buggy. Has PNG and IMAP support, and better email client but crappy newsreader.
Mozilla performs for me about as well as Netscape4.x. Why can't they get the performance to match Netscape 3.x? Do we really need all those silly features?
Split? (Score:2)
We'll freeze the feature list right where it's at now. We'll wipe out all the bugs that cause crashes. Then, we'll use a garbage collector to get rid of memory leaks.
Then we release a nice stable browser a year before the other Mozilla is ready.
Feature creep? What feature creep? (Score:4)
If you think that mozilla is wallowing under the problems of feature creep you are doing one of two things. 1) Smoking crack. 2) So uninformed you should be taken out in the streets and beaten with a wet noodle.
In three months of nightlies I have yet to see a new feature come into mozilla. What I have seen is buggy features become working like they should.
Recently skin switching has made its way into mozilla. This feature has been planned for since the beginning of the XPFE [mozilla.org] project with its XUL [mozilla.org] and whatnot. Skin switching is the closest thing to a `feature' that I have seen making it into the tree since M16.
Only a few more of what most people term `features' (you people really should go look at BugZilla [mozilla.org] the bug tracking system for Moz to see what is a new feature and what has been planed for) that are going to make it into moz are proxy auto-config, SVG, MathML and several others that only aren't in the nightlies because the builders don't want to push larger binaries. In fact most of these are almost done, but just have a few bugs to be worked out before they can be released unto the masses.
Remeber, before you open your mouth, keep your facts straight, check out bugzilla to find out what features are `creeping' and what appear to be creeping because you don't bother to adjust your build configuration.
The author is a daily downloader of Moz nighlies and finds it very strange why other people don't think moz is so very cool
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:2)
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
Ask my friend's wife what she thinks about Moz on Linux. She crashes it almost hourly with just plain-jane web browsing.
She visits a lot of Java/JavaScript sites and Moz blows up bigtime on a lot of them. She doesn't use the email/news/etc. parts, just the browser and she has a worse time with Moz than she does with Netscape.
She went to Moz because of Netscape's problems. You're telling me that she wants a browser that has everything, including the kitchen sink, fifth wheel and ottoman? Give me a break. Mozilla started out as a browser. Now it's an OS with a semi-functional browser.
I believe we've tried Galleon, Opera, etc. Yuck. Or doesn't support the basic Java/JScript. Linux needs a decent browser. Moz was supposed to be that.
How's that phrase go? Get it working, then add on. Not the other way around. They have gecko. All they had to do was put in a basic Java/JScript component and a few widgets to operate the browser and 99% of people would be happy. Don't give me the bullshit statement that they are taking the long hard road to make it better. It's already componentized; it does not take much to take the individual components and encapsulate them with XUL or whatever the fuck it is they're doing now. The could have released Moz months ago in a beautiful fast browser and then started the XUL/MozillaOS extensions to make everyone happy. They didn't, and that's why I agree with suck.
Moz is dead. Long live whoever's next. Hopefully those who put so much time and effort into Moz have learned something and if they get another opportunity for such a high-profile project they won't drop the ball again.
Re:Browser only (Score:2)
You think it's ugly ? (Score:2)
---------------------------------------
"crashes a little too often" (Score:2)
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
I though AOL would rejuvenate it (Score:2)
I use Netscape 3.01 (Score:2)
It's obvious that Nyetscape's engineers have neglected stability on UNIX. (This is not just a Linux problem; the IRIX and Digital UNIX versions are just as crash-prone and bug-ridden, only with their own entertaining twists; anyone see the spawn-dozens-of-tiny-windows bug on IRIX?) Then again, they're not alone. Macromedia's Shockwave plug-in for Linux is also extraordinarily sloppy (a plug-in which seizes the audio device when it loads, and locks up your browser if it can't get it, is just not good enough; I don't want to shut down my MP3 player whenever a Flash ad loads on a web site). Which is not to mention the utter lack of a Shockwave plug-in. All in all, browser companies have a beggars-can't-be-choosers attitude to UNIX users.
Had I a faster computer, I'd buy VMWare and run Netscape or IE on Windows under Linux. This would paradoxically be more stable than Nyetscape on Linux, and would also give me access to Shockwave pages like Sissyfight [sissyfight.com].
It's a sad state of affairs when one has to go to such lengths to get a decent web browsing experience.
Its our own fault (Score:2)
As a community we say all we want is a small, fast, compliant browser. I have news for everyone, this is not what we want. If this had been true, when Galeon was announced a hundred Hackers would have jumped on it a two weeks later we would have had a small, fast, stable and compliant browser. Instead everyone yawned and said wake me up when it supports java. The fact of the matter is we have browser evny, we want our browser to support java, activeX, plugins and just for the sake of it we want it skinable as well. If Mozilla is dead it is because we as a community nailed it to a cross and jabbed a spear in its side.
-Numbersyx
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
Re:Painfully, he has a point... (Score:2)
sig:
Boo Fucking Hoo. (Score:2)
Bullshit. This is a project that needs to continue its steady pace of development, which has already yeilded an impressive base of code.
I'm sick of having to use a crappy 3+ year old browser in linux.
Then don't use Linux. Point your fellow ex-linux-users to a local Gateway Country. Or maybe you could stop being a whining pussy and start coding.
If you don't like your operating system, and you're too candy-assed to make it better, you're the one who needs to shit or get off the pot.
-------
Thanks for all your hard work! (Score:2)
Wow, you're going to RALLY behind another browser! Don't do too much "for the cause," you might give yourself a hernia.
What exactly does it mean to rally behind a project, anyway? Does it mean you start bitching about the other open source projects you have not contributed anything towards?
Oh, I guess it does since you already started!
-thomas
AOL is responsible (Score:2)
BUT:
It is not an accident that all these features are being built in Mozilla and appears to be holding up the project. Didnt we already discuss this? Ill save not post my point a second time instead, here is the link [slashdot.org] to my post.
For those without the time to read the other post, here is a synopsis:
#include profiteering _corporatist_pig_UNethics.h
if (AOL_M$_Exploder_Deal_Valid(date()) == TRUE) {
AOL_Propaganda_Machine(stall);
Mozilla_Production(Continue);
else {
AOL_Propaganda_Machine(FirstRelease_PR_Hoopla);
Mozilla_Production(Finish);
}
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:3)
The Mozilla team is building a huge project. They want to get it done and out the door. If you are complaining so much about a light browser then build one your self. You said your self that it is componentized Isn't that is the idea of open source... "If you don't like what is out there fork it!"
The Mozilla team is under the direction of AOL, formally Netscape. They want a huge browser with mail, skins, and widgetX with the kitchen sink. Mozilla is doing an awsome job with that requirement. What is even better as you pointed out is that they have made zillions of componets. All someone needs to do now is glue the components they want together and release a light browser. The Mozilla team has given us an awsome resource to allow for the light browser and give AOL what they want. For that I give the Mozilla team tons of credit!
BTW. I've been learning as much as I can about Mozilla reciently and the gtk+ widget for embedding Gecko so I can hopefully, with my 7 years of C experience, contribute to Galeon [sourceforge.net]. So I know a little about what I am talking about.
Re: smartdownload: Have you checked out XPI? (Score:2)
XPI is mozilla's cross (X) Platform Installer. It uses a combination of zip files with javascript and RDF to keep track of what you have installed so you can easily add and remove pieces of the browser.
What uses XPI? Well, the win32 and linux installers use it to install the application. This means that if you don't want to install ChatZilla (which rocks by the way, full IRC client in a 400k install, IIRC) you don't have to. Same with mail/news. Even the PSM [iplanet.com] comes as an XPI. And skins [themes.org]? Skins are wrappable in XPI.
Want more information about XPI? There's a tutorial written by kerz at MozillaZine [mozillazine.org]
Oh, and by the way, I use Moz full time, and so does most everybody else on #mozillazine (irc.mozilla.org)
--
Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:3)
Hmm.... I guess what you are saying is that Mozilla does not have a goal. You are implying that the hackers think of something and say "gee man that is soooo cool lets put it into mozilla." If you had taken half a second and checked things out Mozilla has a decient plan and there is no feature creep!
The reason Mozilla is taking so long is that they are developing it right! That is the nice thing about open source development. You don't have a manager breathing down your neck!!! They can take the time to develope a tool for doing somthing rather than hard coding it. This give you 2 things... A good implimentation of whatever you are doing and a good tool to do that same thing in a different place or somthing similar. Not to mention offshoot projects like galeon [sourceforge.net]. You want examples here they are...
Now if you want to take a look at the overall plan here is a layout of the Milestones [mozilla.org] As you can see they are at the end of what you call the feature creep, when in actuallity they are at the end of the development cycle and headed into bug/hunting performance tuning.
If Mozilla had done what the other commerical browser companies had done we would have ended up with a semi good browser that would have been hell to improve/upgrade. But Mozilla took the long hard path and when the upgrads come out relatively quick and painless everyone who cried the death/stupidity of Mozilla will be crying its brilliance.
BTW. I am using todays daily build with 5 browser windows open. For the past week that I have been using the daily builds they haven't crashed once. And they do a better job of general browsing than Netscape does!
Amen! (Score:2)
It's what everyone here has been clamoring for - light, fast, standards-compliant browser.
Is it GTK-only, or is it Gnome-ified? It'd be great to see it ported to Windows, to see how that community receives it...
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Re:Follow the closed source lead... (Score:5)
basic, fundamental things are broken in m16. no way can they release this. I wish they would fix these "little" things before implementing Platforms and Skins and Kitchen Sinks.
if only they had released a nice, working standalone browser, they could have had lots of positive press and had plenty of time to implement the rest in version 1.5. Somebody get them a project manager.
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:2)
Check the milestones page [mozilla.org] , I quote: "M16 - Feature complete check point - the annual cinco de mayo checkpoint and party"
looks like they are partying and can't code for at least a week because of a massive hangover.
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Mozilla, the ugly stepchild of Open Source(tm) (Score:2)
I'm sick of having to use a crappy 3+ year old browser in linux. Based of MOTIF no less. The Mozilla project was soposed to bring the best browser of them all to every platform know to man. This was years ago.
Where is Mozilla now? It doesn't even have helper aplication support for Christ's sake. This is the broswer that the zealots scream USE MOZILLA, IE SUCKS! Internet Explorer is buggy? IE has the stability of a linux kernel compared to Mozilla.
This is a project that will never have a stable product. Why? Who the hell needs another crappy IRC client? Unstead of a stable browser, the Mozilla developers would rather work on things like an "application enviroment" and making it's own widgets. Seems like the mozilla project bought into the Mircosoft idea that the browser will be the OS. Like they will be the leaders in some sort of open sourced
Linux needs a decent broswer TODAY. I've already known people that have tried linux, and gave it up because there wasn't a decent broswer. It's hard to use IE 5.5, and then take two steps back and use Netscape 4 on linux.
So the Mozilla project needs to shit or get off the pot. If they aren't going to realse a BROWSER anytime in the near future(and looking at their rodemap, they aren't) We need to rally behind a project(like Konquror, or Nautalis*) and just forget about Mozilla and leave it rot.
*Nautalis using the only decent thing to come out of the whole Mozilla project, Gekko
Re:Feature creep? What feature creep? (Score:2)
I use Mozilla and in fact I am an active participant in bug reporting and triage, and have even contributed code. But I think it is very damning that we have this huge beast and the history (back button) still doesn't work right. This is very basic.
CSS is no solution to XML support (Score:2)
Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
Bad news. XML+CSS has been dead for at least a year. XML is the future of browsers, but it's going to be XSLT that drives it, not CSS. CSS is a pitiful means of delivering XML, even if the CSS rendering engine does work right. There are loads of useful, real-world, right-this-minute, client-side XML uses that CSS can't even begin to address. Mozilla has missed the boat on this one.
Netscape + AOL ? #1 (Score:2)
send flames > /dev/null
It dies when it is no longer relevant (Score:2)
Now, for one thing, what does this mean?
It means that the end-users have waited for so long for a product that meets their needs, they'll go somewhere else (even to *gasp* proprietary software) to get things done.
As an open-source project, Linux got by under everyone else's radar until it was complete enough to meet the needs of end-users. The same goes for Apache; it didn't get big-name recognition until it was already kicking ass in the server world. But Mozilla has the dubious distinction of being a big-name project from the time it was announced and the end-users who were hoping that in a few months' time they'd have a brand-spanking new browser are being clued into reality.
It's like watching the O.J. Simpson trial; everyone expected a quick and easy Perry Mason-style show, and instead they got a real trial -- complete with a real trial ending. The people who pinned their hopes on having a Mozilla-style browser "real soon now" to check the onslaught of MSIE have realized that it's not going to happen, and they feel like they've been let down.
By all means, make plans to standardize on Mozilla. AOL can make all they plans they want to switch their users over Mozilla (though I would point out that they're still using MSIE in the meantime). Just keep in mind that Mozilla, by their own timeline, is at least six months away from a theoretical 1.0 release. Hope developers can hold off their customers for that long...
Jay (=
Re:Should write it in Java (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Too many times, however, we let those who repute themselves as "experts" say something is dead. We hear and don't look at the product or item in question (because we don't have the time, familiarity, or what-not), but instead give them the very credence they want but may not yet have by walking away from it, thus essentially starving it to death.
We have also done the very same by allowing the same "experts" to say this or that will be the next "big thing." Flocking to it, we thus made it indeed the next "big thing" to flirt across the stage. It was only afterwards that we the users looked upon it in the daylight of honest evaluation, to find it was not as hyped, but instead lacking, only to find that it had pushed its inroads in deeply enough that we could no longer easily remove it.
In doing thus, we have also increased the strength of the so-called "expert"'s word, making it more likely that the next thing they pronounce dead does indeed die, and the next thing they pronounce the "big thing" is indeed that. What we have done most of all, however, is to let slip a little further away one more freedom-the freedom to choose.
Re:Memory Use? (Score:2)
One Word Rebuttal (Score:5)
According to Suck's logic, Unreal [s/Unreal/Daikatana/] should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold {s/sold/wished it sold/] a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Daikatana
Re:not fud (Score:2)
Re:Suck dead too. (Score:2)
(posted from Mozilla. Which I support fully as it is the only hope I have for a good surfing experience under Linux)
--
Re:One Word Rebuttal (Score:2)
Sorry, but Daikatana failed because of a massive, legendary example of mismanagement, clashing egos, fleeing developers, and various other reasons.
It did *not* fail because of feature creep, which is obvious from it being 1997 technology released in 2000.
Re:Its only dead in the mass market. (Score:2)
In which case you would have said you don't need to switch from IE5 86% marketshare to yet another browser.
Mozilla is *extremely* important because:
* There is no open-source featurefull browser. Try to execute IE5 on an ARM. This means that one of the biggest market (internet appliances) for Mozilla IS NOT HERE YET.
* Mozilla is cross-platform. IE5 mac and windows are very different beasts. Other platform have no browsers. There is a market for the bnrowser used by all those extra platform, from linux to beOs, via MacOS X (because Ie5 in classic is hardly clean), Hurd or OS/2.
* Mozilla is standard compliant (or will be). How can you expect standard emerging if the only implementation is proprietary and have no incentive to become standard compliant (quite the opposite in fact). Do you like de-facto closed standard ?
* Mozilla is a platform. This have far reaching implications. Very very very far reaching ones. Thin client/fat server made more powerfull and portable. Internet apps would shine in Mozilla browser. Expect corporation to use it for internal business apps. It is a credible alternative to java that enable to deploy very powerfull server-based applications, with little client logic.
Cheers,
--fred
I use it (Score:4)
As for dead...
Waning in popularity. Remember last year? It was HOT. EVERYBODY was grabbing a copy of Mozilla. What happened? Mozilla was pretty much Netscape, and everybody was like, I already have Netscape, look, it's just a different Netscape, who cares, I'm keeping Netscape. Also, people went on to diffent projects. I'd say that the real hardcore computer science population are the ones who, for the most part, don't give a shit about the "World Wide Waste of time/bandwidth," and would prefer to use different, more useful programs over the internet. After all, who wants to use a java chatroom when you can use IRC and have more actual usefulness and more actual conversation, who wants to "surf?" People don't read well written novels, you want to randomly browse through shoddy webpages? The thing about the Mozilla project is that out of the actual "geek" population, the actual slice that is REALLY REALLY REALLY concerned with a feature laden webrowser, enough to spend serious time on that rather than other projects, is slightly fewer than that of other projects in relation to the number of people that the project was really looking for.
That said.
The Mozilla project is significant in many ways, especially the scale and type of project that it tried to be, as well as the product that it outputs (a good browser is a good thing, I DO use SOME webpages). Also, it's not necessarily dead. A lot of people don't want to see it die. A lot of people would contribute if they think that it needs help and if they think that they can actually shape it in some way. In short, people love Mozilla, and they will at least try to save it.
Re:I use it (Score:2)
Yeah, that's pretty much what happened. Never mind that Mozilla's net code is a million times better than netscape's these days.
The problem, as noted, really is that they went for too much cutesy shit rather than work on stability. I don't know if this is normal, but my Win32 Mozilla won't even let me unsubscribe from newsgroups. This is what we call stupid, and I'm sorry Mozilla team folks, but it's true. Then again, there's whatever bug that makes it crash about every other time I start it. If I were using a real OS (ha ha) I'd end up writing a wrapper to make sure it was still running five seconds later and start it again. Or then there's the one where if I leave it running long enough it decides to allocate all the memory in my machine.
In short, it acts much like Netscape Communicator.
I use Mozilla for mail at work because it's faster than Communicator. If it crashed less, I'd like it even more. If it starts crashing more with any MXX release, then I'll dump it and just use communicator for mail, which I also have installed. I only pop one account anyway.
So what happens if the next release is "1.0" ? (Score:3)
Every tech journalist, web site, and semi-interested geek would download it and check it out. They're going to compare it to two things: the previous Netscape Communicator and to MS's Internet Explorer (the more dedicated might also do a sidebar on Opera, Lynx, or some platform-specic browser but this is really a two-horse race between Mozilla & MS IE.)
So how does Mozilla compare? Not well - yet. It's almost baked but it honestly isn't there. It crashes a little too often. It still chokes on the odd bit of HTML. It's interface is butt-ugly (though that can be changed pretty easily.) Some features only work erratically. In short it's gonna look like a well-intentioned failure next to IE.
Sure Mozilla has more potential but 99% of those reading the reviews and trying it out for themselves don't give a fig for 'potential'. Yeah it will adhere better to web-standards (though not nearly as completely as many had hoped.) Yeah it's much smaller then IE. Yeah it's potentially much faster. Yeah it's nicely componentized so parts of it can get reused into many, many other applications. Yeah it has many included tools like chat/irc/ldap/etc. that are better then their MS equivalents (if MS even has equivalents - conversely none of the included tools are really as good as the dedicated tools already out there.) But when it comes to that crucial all-important 'first impression' - well, it's gonna get it's tires kicked but they'll drive out of thew showroom with their good-ole MS IE.
Why? Because Mozilla still isn't done. Sure if you're the first in the market you can toss out bad code and the market will lap it up but then they've no other choice. In todays market there is another choice - a massive, mature, ubiquitious, free, no-risk (well, excepting security-wise) choice. It runs well on the #1 & #2 consumer & corporate desktops (Win & Mac.) Up against that Mozilla better look good, run good, feel good. It had better do all of that on all of the platforms it's released on (and "sucks less then NS on linux" isn't gonna get you much.)
The last thing Mozilla needs to is a premature release and to look like a looser next to MS IE. Sure under the hood it may not be a looser, and in six months it may not be a looser, but why take the hit for releasing something not ready when they can wait a bit more and really knock everyones' socks off.
Just hope that it's not too late and that it really does knock everyone's socks off.
What are Mozilla's project goals? (Score:2)
Mozilla needs a short list of goals. They need to focus on a strict set of features for it and get those working without bugs. Even if it has the same features as Netscape 4.74, at least it's stable, it's open source, and it's done. All the extra stuff like chat clients, skins, and gaming platforms(!!!) can wait until the basic foundation is laid. There's something wrong when Mozilla's developers are spending their time working on "cool shit" and their email client deletes mail from the POP server but doesn't bother to fetch it first (or fetches it and sends it nowhere...
Personally, Netscape 4.7 works fine for me. I use the browser and the email/news client. If Mozilla just had a standards compliant web browser and a simple mail/news client, it would do me just fine. Finish that part, release it, and add the "cool shit" later.
Mozilla is not dead. It just needs some Aderall.
+++
Re:blow it out your... (Score:2)
Did you delete ~/.mozilla??
*** ToughLove regards Anonomous troll with bemused and slightly scornful expression.
--
Do us a favor... (Score:2)
Less features -- more standards adherence!
--
If not dead maybe it SHOULD be! (Score:2)
It's mega-bloat and buggy to boot. I can't even get one online session complete without it crashing. On top of which it's as ugly as hell.
Oh, and the coffee-perculator client is not functional yet either. But I'm sure they will delay the project by another year or so until it is.....
The banner ad that accompanies the article is for (Score:2)
Re:Painfully, he has a point... (Score:2)
Actually, nearly every real live commercial site is designed for both Netscape and IE on both PC and Mac. No one much cares about UNIX though, for an obvious reason; Browser market share. Let's face it, there are more people running netscape on Macintosh than anything on UNIX when they surf most of these sites. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that's the way it is.
Of course, Netscape makes most of the same mistakes on UNIX as it does on other platforms, which are mostly stupid things it does while rendering content, so making something work for Netscape on PC usually means it works on Mac and UNIX as well, making it less of a crisis.
For Mozilla to be specifically supported (Rather than just hoping your netscape-specific fixes carry over) it will have to have as much share as Netscape, or more. Browsers are like console systems; There's only really room for first and second place. Third place might as well be Honorable Mention.
Mosaic vs. Mozilla (Score:2)
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
Re:Cool shit? (Score:3)
The world does not need another HTML editor, and you don't need markup to fill out web based forms.
The world DOES need a mail client that doesn't suck. The mail client they're working on doesn't fit that criteria. To be fair, neither does any other mail client you can get, but it's fluff that could be cut. Probably should be cut. If you want to write a mail client, start a mail client project.
XML is cool and stuff. If I set up some XML and CSS for my web page, the Mozilla users will be able to view it, but I'm afraid the IE people and the old Netscape people will be out of luck. So if I want to be cool and use XML, I need to set up some server-side translation stuff to translate it to HTML. Likewise mathml etc. I had an XML web page up here for a while while I was playing with CSS. Everyone was like "Why did you do that? No one can view it." At that point, you could view it with one of the milestones, but it would render differently with the nightly builds.
And even if they do get XML working, I'll only be able to manipulate it with Javascript. Oh joy.
Death of our innocence... (Score:3)
As I sit here writing this, netscape under linux crashes, so I grab my girlfriend's winblows 98 box.. though winblows doesn't blow nearly as much when it comes to a web browser. Netscape under linux crashes when a page has too much java script, java period, too many frames, too many frames with lots of graphics, too many graphics,
Now what choices do we have? I love linux, I've been working as a systems administrator in linux for 4 years. How the HELL is Linux ever going to catch up without a decent web browser? What are admins going to do? Servers run linux, but browsers run netscape? I hate to say it, linux needs IE.. or netscape needs to split from aol and get funding from a company that gives a flying fuck, because aol certainly doesn't.
Oh where, oh where have all the browsers gone?
Clinically dead? (Score:2)
-={(Astynax)}=-
Re:Should write it in Java (Score:2)
---
Re:Cool shit? (Score:3)
There are already other cross-platform widget sets. Spending six months reinventing the wheel is foolish and bloats the code.
One can write cross platform network apps quickly
Great. This could be done before Mozilla, too. The only cross-platform network app the Mozilla team needs to worry about is a browser.
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
No, it doesn't. Mail is plain text (yes, it is), and web-based forms should definitely be plain text as well. If the user wants to edit HTML, put in a hook that fires up an arbitrary editor to do it (such as rxvt -e vi).
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
What's the point? Neither has any place in the browser. If you hit an irc://... URL, run an arbitrary program (such as rxvt -r irc). If I want an IRC client or an "Instant Messaging" client (such as rxvt -e talk), I'll get them elsewhere.
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
Probably. This actually belongs in a browser at least.
Done by outside developers.
No excuse for feature bloat. Linus gets hundreds of patches a day. He applies maybe 10 of them. The fact that the core team didn't have to do the work doesn't mean they should just accept any old patch that comes their way.
The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works.
So would the rest of the world. Nobody's ever made one, and the Mozilla team won't either. Mozilla is trying to combine an OS, a windowing system, a widget set, a database, a layout engine, and a game console all into one. Somewhere along the line a browser was considered but it was boring and nobody wanted to do it.
But for what platform?
All of them. Very simple, really. If it doesn't build or work on any one platform, it's as broken as if it didn't build or work on all platforms. [Of course, this is not quite true. The farther from standards a platform is, the more excusable it is that it not work on that platform.]
pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use
My turn to ask "what platform?" I can assure you that it compiles infrequently and works never on sparc-sun-linux. Which is intriguing given that it works considerably better (though still poorly) on i386-peecee-linux. Since the platforms look exactly the same to non-kernel developers writing portable code, it is obvious that, despite the "cross-platform" promise of Mozilla, they aren't bothering to write portable code. Of course, it's hard to blame them really: since most of them work for AOL, they've been told that portability means "it compiles on windows 95 AND windows NT." As for footprint, I find that a 12 MB dynamically linked binary is absurd. Especially when 90+% of it is code I'll never use.
Since I'm being fairly brutal, I feel I should provide an alternative. So here are my rules for developing a web browser that works (for that matter, anything that works):
The Mozilla team has broken every single one of those rules, with predicatable results. Guys, I'll ask my doctor to cure cancer; you just write a browser.
They Should Know (Score:5)
Re:Feature creep? What feature creep? (Score:2)
Netscape is working on it, only outside developers. For me, and
plenty of other users working in an academic environment, it makes
Mozilla a must-have: currently the only browser that supports MathML
is the W3C's Amaya browser.
Not dead, just stupid (Score:4)
However, to the extent that the goal of the current Mozilla project (funded by Netscape) was to defeat IE, it is failing. This is because the people running the show are apparently living on another planet.
What a BUSINESS would do: Optimize for income. Cut the feature creep, fix the bugs, ship, start on the next version.
What an Open Souce project would do: Optimize for usability. Cut the feature creep, fix the bugs, ship, start on the next version.
What Mozilla is doing: Optimize for number of features. Accelerate the feature creep, fix the bugs, don't ship.
Don't get me wrong: I have not been a Mozilla nay-sayer in the past. But this has GOT TO STOP. I've used the last 4 milestones, and they were all "pretty good". Always "not quite as good" as Netscape. Sweet Creeping Zombie Jesus, those 4 milestones cover a span of 5 months. What are they DOING over there??
--
The author has a point (Score:4)
Mozilla's not dead, nor is it dying, but really... Who in their right mind is going to use the built in IRC client?
Ship a working browser, with a built in (and better than SmartDownload) upgrading facility and then you can add in all the stupid useless modules, including mail and news, that you like in the future.
Truly, an easy upgrade is all they need. Look at Windows Update - a great many people check it on a daily basis, installing every last thing on the page that shows up, even if they don't need an input method editor in Korean, Japanese, Chinese...
This would also get rid of the problem they have with dozens of versions existing. I mean - 4.0 - 4.08, 4.50 - 4.53, 4.60 - 4.62, 4.70 - 4.73. Nevermind the people who are still hapily using Navigator 3.x.
Just get a *good* browser out the door that people can use full time and throw the rest of the stuff in later.
------
Re:Follow the closed source lead... (Score:2)
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:2)
Late.
Every software development project that I have been on has been late and over budget, that also goes for 90% of all software development projects in general. Software development is still a science, nothing like engenering. Until software development transends the state of being a science it will never be, consistantly, on time or on budget. Please stop trying to attribute engineering standards to a science!
BTW. Quite a few engineering projects also run late and over budget. Engineering still has not been perfected.
BTW2. I just installed todays nightly build on a windows machine a P166 32MB RAM. It is a little slow but kicks IE's butt for rendering speed. Now I say that is a quite a feet for software that has not been optimised and still has debugging routiness in the code, I'm not referring to debug info in the binaries I'm referring to code put in by the developers to help in the debugging process, which takes up CPU cycles and RAM.
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
Even if people had wanted that, they could have used an existing cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows, FLTK, or Tcl/Tk. Even supporting the cross-platform GTK efforts would have been faster. But ultimately, egos apparently got in the way, and the Mozilla team thought they could do better in a year or two with no track record of doing a cross-platform GUI as a group, even though those other groups had been working on cross-platform GUIs for years and delievered several versions, and even though the Mozilla group also had a browser to deliver at the same time.
As for Mozilla needs an editor to do mail, I think it should do neither. Maybe there should be a loosely coupled Mozilla-branded mail client and a loosely coupled Mozilla-branded editor, together with a simple mechanisms for them to exchange data (open a pipe/socket/...). The fact that Netscape comes with an integrated, preferred E-mail client and editor is a disadvantage, not an advantage, because people have their own mailers already.
Mozilla suffers from the typical second system effect and the not-invented-here syndrome. Let's hope that the useful bits and pieces it actually contains will survive in better designed systems like Galeon or TkZilla.
Hmm (Score:4)
Originally targeted as a Quake 1(!) killer, Tim Sweeney and Epic started this game during the times when 6 degrees of freedom was still cool. Do you want to talk about feature creep? How about 16 bpp textures, colored lighting, volumetric fog and halos? I seriously doubt any of those were even in design consideration in 1996. And didn't it set quite a few records in missed milestones? A four-year development cycle might as well be a few millenia for a game, I'm surprised (and glad) that they stuck it out.
According to Suck's logic, Unreal should have been dead, buried and dirt by the time it's release date finally came out. But instead, it just sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. Go figure.
Was Unreal buggy when released. Yes. Did multiplayer and non-Glide acceleration blow back then? Yes. Was Unreal continually worked on after release, as no doubt Mozilla will be? Hell yes. I use the Epic / Mozilla team analogy carefully, as both groups obviously love what they do, as opposed to just programming for a steady paycheck, and were/are underdogs in their respective market niches. Hopefully, Mozilla will turn out just as well.
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
platforms simaltaneously..."
In other words, a feature. WWLD? (What Would Linux Do?) Concentrate on
one platform (either OS or hardware). Don't do anything platform
specific to lock the other out, but don't make everyone wait for the slowest member
Writing your applications from the ground in a cross platform
manner saves you a horrednous refactoring problem later, when you
want to port your code to another platform. WWLD here is in direct
contradiction to good software engineering practice, and stupid as
well.
This isn't a feature, it's good development practice.
Re:If not dead maybe it SHOULD be! (Score:2)
On my system, Mozilla seems to use even more resources than Navigator 4.x. The whole UI is ugly (No matter what people scream about "customisable", it's just a skinable UI.) It's also slow. Oh, and Java still crashes the whole thing.
It really does seem to me that the developers spent more time on "cool" additions to the code, than making it functional and stable. Maybe if someone took the rendering engine, striped out all of the cruft, and worked on optimising the code, something usable could come from the whole thing.
Oh but, please, for gods sake, get rid of that damn UI!
Re:Green Screen Luddites (Score:2)
If you need blinking red text in a javascipt rollover image on top of an animated gif tiled in the background to distract me while your embedded java applet plays music JUST so you can communicate with me via email, you shouldn't be communicating with me via email.
You probably shouldn't be communicating with me at all.
--
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
And I think we can ALL agree that HTML mail is a bug, not a feature.
Maybe you and the other dinosaurs want to live in the dark ages, but as far as I'm concerned HTML mail is a standard, not a bug. And HTML postings to Usenet is a standard, not a bug.
If you don't want formatting, then use a mail/news reader that strips it out. Technology should not be held back by green-screen luddites.
--
Another Way of Looking at it (Score:2)
It could be that the Mozilla Porject, without anyone realizing it has turned into a modern day Xerox PARC. It is now an R&D team with no commercial aspirations and it is up to Netscape or AOL to take the Gecko engine, debug it, merge it with the best parts of Communicator 4.x, and call that Communicator 5.0. Then people will stop whining for them to release a new browser and they can wait for Mozilla to produce something else for them to use.
I personally am happy with Netscape's mail client, could live with its Usenet client, and like having my bookmarks in one html file that I can take anywhere and use in any browser. All that really needs fixing in my mind is the aging rendering engine -- and Gecko is there for the taking. If Neoplanet can take the Gecko engine and try to shoehorn it into their browser, why can't Netscape?
And if Netscape doesn't do it, somebody should steal the Gecko code and build a lightweight browser around it. It is GPL after all, and at least one person is already trying to do just that. I say forget about Mozilla! Release Gecko now!
thats the whole point, it doesn't! (Score:2)
Mozilla's problem is that they don't have any marketing people. Someone in marketing with half a brain would be able to tell them "stop adding crap that 95% of the market doesn't give a rats ass about and release the fucking browser". Do you think most of the people they want to win over care if the browser comes with stuff that other programs already do better or that they can rewrite the Interface? No. They care if it browses better then what they have now and if the interface it ships with looks nice.
And the answers are No and No when you compare it to IE. So far as memory goes I agree, you can't easily measure just what IE is using. That doesn't give Mozilla much execuse for using more then Frontpage 2k, Word 2k, and Winamp combined.
I've found Opera to be usable on most if not virtually all sites I visit, because I don't frequent sites that are entirely eye candy. On those sites, it won't work at all, thats not what its designed to do.
Re:The author has a point (Score:2)
Re:C being Unsafe [OT] (Score:2)
int *iptr = malloc(sizeof(int) * 2), i;
for(i = 2; i>0 ; i--)
iptr[i] = i;
Maybe I'm a C zealot then, or maybe I've become cynical enough to realize that computers do exactly what you tell them. :-)
Zero is a number. That was the hardest lesson I've ever learned with computers. Zero Is A Number; All Things Start With Zero.
I assume you know why that code doesn't work, but it all comes down to that premise. You told malloc() to give you enough mem to hold two ints. Then you only use 1/2 your allocated memory and write to memory beyond what you allocated because you forgot that All Things Start At Zero.
That error will bite you in the ass in Assembly and perl too, will it not? You don't need to C to have logical errors. C may not be "safe" but I'd rather have a language which allows you to shoot your head off than one which won't let you try.
Re:Boo Fucking Hoo. (Score:2)
Classic Linux response. And people wonder why it's seen as "for nerds only".
Suck has a valid point (Score:5)
Other than the gloomy predictions of doom, I initially shared the same attitude towards the Mozilla project. Creating a "platform" seemed a little misconceived, almost hubristic, and I was very unconvinced that it is the right way to go. After all, the Unix mindset is one of small, flexible tools, and Mozilla is definitely not "small".
After having investigated the project a little more, I have to say that I still agree with my initial reaction. The Mozilla project is trying to do too much. Yeah, most of it is "cool shit" (actually, all of it that I've seen is very cool), but they seem to have lost sight of the fact that, ultimately, what they need to produce is a functional, stable, usable browser. The platform and all that goes along with it are nice, and arguably necessary, but what is wrong with releasing them as version 2.0?
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
Assuming there is such a thing, that might be true except that no two compilers do c++ the same way, and no compiler at all properly implements all of the recently announced ISO standard. So no matter what you think of the features of the language, using it is guaranteed to give you portability headaches for at least another 3-5 years, when compilers should be implementing a uniform set of language and ABI standards.
As for bloat, consider the following two programs. Both are minimally trivial programs with identical functionality. I strongly suspect that using more of the c++ features will increase the bloat, but this isn't meant to be a comprehensive comparison, just a simple test with one minimal program on one compiler.
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
printf ("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
}
#include <iostream>
int main (void) {
cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
Compile both with gcc 2.95.2 on i386-peecee-linux with default (ie no) options. Strip them. Result:
text data bss dec hex filename
847 224 24 1095 447 hw
1488 304 68 1860 744 hwcc
C++ loses in every segment. So much for no bloat.
If you like c++, fine. Say you like it because it has feature [foo]. But don't pretend you aren't trading away code size and speed, to say nothing of portability, for [foo], because that's just dishonest.
Re:Another Way of Looking at it (Score:2)
No, it's MPL [mozilla.org].
Re:What about "The King" ?? (Score:2)
Yeah! (Score:2)
1) Global settings -- Disable or enable javascript by default, likewise Java, animated GIFs, cookies, etc. And then let the user disable or enable them on a site-by-site basis. Having an easily accessible button to toggle these on and off would be nice (If we got rid of search, my netscape, security and shop on the old netscape panel, there'd be plenty of room for icons someone would actually use.)
2) Ability to turn crap from specific sites off. I'd like to be able to tell my browser not to load anything from doubleclick.net.
Hmm. Those are the only ones I can think of at the moment, though I'm sure there were a few more. The browser needs to give the user a lot more control over his web browsing experience, and no corporate-affiliated browser is ever going to do that.
Appliances (Score:2)
Interesting thing about Microsoft's wins/losses (Score:3)
On the flip side, whenever Microsoft does win a market battle, the industry seems to accept that they have won it forever. Thereafter they cease to contest that piece of turf.
The sideline to this is that Microsoft can now put that piece of turf into 'maintenance mode', and concentrate their efforts on the next acquisition.
IMHO, Linux has been one of the few counters to this phenomenon.
Re:Not dead, just stupid (Score:3)
You're right; Moz can't completely die, unless nobody ever hacks on it again. I'd wager that won't happen.
What I do see happening, largely because of the repeated Mozilla obituaries in the less-informed press, but also because of growing impatience among developers is this:
Keep in mind, though, that just as the press has never reviewed a high-profile free software project before, they also have never pronounced one "dead" before. Even if Steve Case reads the press and abandons Moz tomorrow (which would indeed be a devestating blow), parts of the code can still live on (think Galeon [sourceforge.net]). And I, for one, think XUL and its ilk have a tremendous potential in the applications server market that everyone keeps talking about.
In short, the Suck article raises some interesting points, but is generally clueless (though a tad more clueful than many other Moz obituaries I've seen).
Re:Cool shit? (Score:2)
Suck dead too. (Score:3)
"Page views were down 50% last month what are we going to do?"
"We need slashdotted, that will keep us alive"
"How? What can we write about that will get our article on
"How about we kill Mozilla."
"Perfect!"
Painfully, he has a point... (Score:5)
What browser is on virtually all X86 PC's (since over 90% of them run Windows)? Internet Explorer. What is the standard browser on all Macs? Internet Explorer. And what browser do pretty much all the big commercial websites design for the quirks of? Internet Explorer. I don't see a Mozilla that's still not ready for a 1.0 designation making any significant dent in that reality anymore.
Maybe a year ago there was still room. Today, if anything's going to happen to give Mozilla a toehold, it'll be the rise of Linux as a mainstream desktop OS. That won't knock Windows off its perch anytime soon, but could eventually happen, and if it does, there's your Mozilla market.
The thing is, even if Mozilla shipped a commercial-quality release tomorrow, Microsoft isn't going to provide it except at the point of a gun, and Apple won't provide it now since they've got a deal with Microsoft to provide IE as the default, and they now push Earthlink over AOL (which would be the other channel to get Apple to include Mozilla). There's your consumer market right there (Microsoft and Apple) - no Mozilla included.
And people like us are about the only people who install browsers for fun and change them on a whim. The masses use what comes with the computer, and only install the upgrades that the computer's automatic update software tell them to.
Ergo, Mozilla is toast. That sucks, don't it?
- -Josh Turiel
Compare it to Netscape? Now that's useless. (Score:3)
What is more interesting is to see how well it will do against MSIE and Opera under Windows and Konqueror and Opera under Linux.
I predict it won't die since it does have "cool shit" others don't have and it is very very *very* multi-platform. But I also predict that their progress has been too slow to have a major impact. Perhaps a stripped-down Gecko based browser, but not the Mozilla beast.
Cool shit? (Score:5)
Because this allows developers to make Mozilla on at least 3 platforms simaltaneously (BeOS, OS2, ect, ports are pretty far along). It's not just that one can make the GUI look different, though. One can write cross platform network apps quickly (like XMLTerm, ChatZilla, Aphodite, and Zope).
"Does the world need another HTML editor?"
Mozilla needs to have editing capabilities for 1) mail composition, and 2) filling out web-based forms.
"Chat and instant messaging?"
The Chat client was developed by an independent programmer. The AIM client is being developed by AOL in a proprietarty way.
"Vector graphics?
ww3c recomendations. Lots of work being done by outside developers. Mozilla allows Cascading Style sheet to format XML (and soon, XSLT). This is more than cool. This is the future.
"MathML?
Done by outside developers.
Personally, I'm excited about Mozilla. Contrary to this Sucky writer, I see strong planning from the ground up: Cross platorm; extensable; standards compliant; component-based; pretty well documented...The Suck guy would rather just have a browser that works. But for what platform? With what level of compatability with other products/standards? There are a tremendous number of outside developers who have caught the bug and are seriously hacking away here. Why should anyone stop?
At this point, there are native-looking Windows and Mac widgets (and "plain" gtk widgets), skin-switching is in, fairly good image and cookie managing, pretty good stability, speed, and footprint, and hardly anything that blocks regular, daily use.
MathML, XSLT, and SVG are not yet in the daily compiled binaries.
Its only dead in the mass market. (Score:4)
I find it very hard to explain to somebody why they should use Mozilla... I mean yes, the rendering engine is good. But, I don't need another mail/news client, I already have more then enough. I don't need an IRC client, you will *never* make MozillaIRC better then mIRC, I'm sorry to tell you. An HTML editor? Umm... sorry, there's lots of those already too. Chromes? Well, yeah, maybe if you made the widgets look anything even remotely like those in every *other* program inside the OS it would matter. (excluding monstrosities like Media player 7 and Quicktime 4 of course, which are great examples of what not to do) But you can't tell me that the ability to make the browser look different is more important then having a browser at all.
Lets take a quick look at the marketplace and at just what we need and don't need from Mozilla:
- Mail: don't need it, there is pleanty of other mail clients out there that are dedicated to doing mail.
- News: ditto
- IRC: ditto again
- Instant Messaging: umm, yeah, thanks but I've got no shortage of these either, I don't need a special version of AIM.
- HTML Editing: nope, no shortage here either
- Chromes: Well technically this doesn't exist, however considering the number of alternate UI's out there for Internet Explorer already (Neoplanet, Enigma, ), this is not going to win people over en masse.
- A fast and functional browser: Oh my god! I found it! We have a severe lack of these!
Now of course, why are they working on all the other stuff instead of simply releasing a browser?
I think the Manager who originally screwed up Netscape is still there, because he's doing it again. I mean come on, during IE setup I can tell it I don't want mail, use "Program X", I can tell it I don't want News, use "Program Y", I can tell it I don't want Frontpage Express, use "Editor Z". Hell, I can even tell it I don't want all the language support, VBScript, and Java.
You people were supposed to make a browser. For the love of god, actually make a fucking browser!
Until somebody at Mozilla does that, Suck and the WaSP are right, Mozilla is dead in the mainstream market, and thats where the marketshare is.
Rumours of my decease ... (Score:5)
Yet more FUD from the rumour mill and yet more misinformation from those who really haven't got a clue. Myth killing time.
Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be.
This must be why I'm using it. In fact this must be why I'm using a build labelled 25th July 2000. This must be the reason why it has replaced Netscape on my machine. And there still appears to be very active signs of life on the mailing lists, on the status pages and the steady reduction in '+' bugs.
Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.
This is a more interesting comment. Yes - the original code released from Netscape was hobbled, and eventually a near-complete restart was opted for. Often when a project gets too big for it's boots (i.e. Netscape 4.x) a rewrite is the only clean way to continue. It hurts, it takes time and there is a long period of absence while the core functionality gets moving but it does result in a better codebase in almost all cases - you learn from the mistakes of the previous generation of code.
The second part of this comment on the "unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants" is also intriguing. As far as I can see, the basic consumer wants a browser which works on all the pages in existence. Beyond that they want it to be stable, easy to use and reasonably straightforward to configure and integrate into their setup. I don't see any fundamental problems in the Mozilla approach - it aims for full standards compliance, it has a configurable interface so that it can be wrapped in as simple or as complex an interface as wished, and its configuration uses the same UI approach as most other programs out there. Yes - it would be nice to have had it two years ago to butress against MS IE 5.5 (Windows version - the Mac version is pretty standards compliant) with its foibles and 'reworking' of the HTML and CSS renderings, but sometimes life is like that.
Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight
Late? Possibly, although I never saw a timeline laid down for the completion of the project.
Fat? Certainly there is a lot of code, and it's memory requirements up until recently have been large, partly due to memory leaks. Things seem to have been getting better - the memory usage on this browser is at 33MB after several days of uptime, so I think there is still some way to go. But I am running the memory cache in there as well.
Ugly? You make not like the default appearance, but it is changeable. In fact it is a lot more than simply skinable - most of the GUI can be stripped, reimplemented and changed according to your whim. And there are signs of sanity on the GUI front too - the skins on Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] are looking good, and there are drop in replacements to coax the GUI back towards the OS standard you might be used to (Classic -> Windows Netscape, Sullivan -> MacOS style UI).
No end in sight? Obviously someone not familiar with the Milestones for Mozilla. We're approaching Milestone 17. 19 is performance tuning, and 20 is, if I remember correctly, the first full v1.0 release. We may be quite a few months away from that (9+) but it's not quite the long unending tunnel...
Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster.
I see this one bandied around a lot. "They should have written just a browser". What often happens when you go for a code re-write (see above) is that the code gets a lot more modular. And so the Gecko engine (the rendering engine) is separable from the rest and yes, someone has already made a cut down browser-only version. It's called Galeon [sourceforge.net].
The other thing that bothers me is that the competition (i.e. MS) has built a platform too on Internet explorer. Quite frankly, if Mozilla had just been a browser we'd have had a bunch of whining suckers moaning about how Mozilla can't compete with IE because it is wasn't a platform. The idea of a portable broswer-integrated platform has not been missed by MS - they recognise the importance of it for building web applications and services. Having Mozilla available for most OS's under the Sun might go some way towards providing a base for a similar hegemony of applications on an open source base.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
MozillaZine response (Score:3)
----------------- Greg has gone about cataloging all of the extraneous features that are unnecessary to a modern day, competitive browser. Mail. News. XML. XSLT. MathML. In response to XUL, he writes, "Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature."
Why? Let's see. Could it be because at its heart is the ability to write the application to work on platforms other than just Windows? The ability to customize the application so that people like you can easily have "just a browser"? The ability to be prepared for the future by creating an application that's extensible and robust? The necessity of having a codebase that's easily ported onto emerging platforms? The ability to compete against a company who has turned their own browser product into a platform?
No, couldn't be any of those things. They're all just "cool shit", apparently. They're not important relative to having a browser that runs only on Windows that alienates 50% of the entire Netscape user-base because it doesn't have a Mail/News reader nor half the feature-set necessary to be a "just-a-browser" competitor.
Apparently cross-platform technologies such as XPCOM are a wasted effort; maybe coding the same browser independently for four or more platforms would be less of a waste of resources, Greg? Apparently cross-platform support isn't a sensible marketing strategy in today's monopoly-driven marketplace.
Greg indiscriminantly lumps third-party coders' work on such projects as XSLT, MathML and ColorSync [you must have delved into the archives to find ColorSync!] with the work of the main development effort, in an effort to prove his point that they're bogging down the process. Wrong. Those efforts are independent, and they'll only go into the first release if they're completed before the ship date. If you had been paying attention, Greg, you may have realized that.
The piece ends with a curious paragraph that begins, "Theater owes its advantageous position to picking its spots, exploiting its audience and making slow, purposeful strides, even if every step is second-guessed for its cost."
They don't call it Suck for nothing, I guess.
Maybe I should just give up on Mozilla. Maybe I should resign myself to a life of banality and security breaches using IE and Outlook the rest of my days.
I think I'll stick with it. I hold the Mozilla developers in higher esteem than I do any of their sniping critics.
Mozilla is getting better. (Score:3)
This morning (before this article was posted) I downloaded the most recent nightly build and it passed my smoketest. For the first time I was able to visit all the sites I visit on a daily basis (about a dozen of them) without a single crash.
There are still some things that need to be fixed before I throw away netscape:
Find in page does not work with frames. [mozilla.org]
Still a bit crashy including some on animated gifs [mozilla.org]
A much shorter list than the 10 or so things that I had on it about 2 months ago.
Re:Cool shit? (Score:5)
Calling that "cool shit" is just plain clueless. The current recommendation for HTML is the XHTML one. 'Classic' HTML is dying.
It's the joy of XML, that it can be easily and unambiguously parsed. It is not an option. It's out there now. If you believe me look at the W3C home page [w3c.org] source.
Galeon can save the day (Score:3)
Right now, cookies aren't working, and I can't do a right-click to open a link in a new window. After that's done, galeon will be my solution.
Mozilla does have a great engine. It's a shame to see them be idiots with it.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto