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Mozilla The Internet

Review of Mozilla's 2002 271

Posted by michael from the everyone-loves-mozilla dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."
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Review of Mozilla's 2002 More

Review of Mozilla's 2002

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  • Mozilla's future's so bright (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @02:49PM (#4994286)
    I gotta wear shades.

    Long live the bayesian spam filtering!

  • Chimera (Score:5, Informative)

    by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @02:52PM (#4994301) Journal
    is hands down the best OSX browser I've ever seen. Fast, light, at least as reliable as IE,moz,icab&omni, and most of all : extremely userfriendly. I don't give a rats ass about 90% of the features in IE or mozilla. I don't need no fsking integrated email client and security bollocks.

    Chimera provides exactly the features I need, and none more, none less. big kudoos to the chimdevs. If you read this : u guys rock !

    • Re:Chimera (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 )
      One feature lacking from Chimera I can't seem to find is to stop animated GIFs. Mozilla has it and I'd like to see it added to Chimera as well. I can't stand reading pages with dozens of animated gifs all going off at the same time. ugh. :-)

      • Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)

        by Shuh ( 13578 )
        One feature lacking from Chimera I can't seem to find is to stop animated GIFs. Mozilla has it and I'd like to see it added to Chimera as well. I can't stand reading pages with dozens of animated gifs all going off at the same time. ugh. :-)
        ~/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/xxxxxxx.slt/user. js

        If you don't have a file there, make one and put this in it:

        // Don't play those animated gifs over and over.

        user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");

    • Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shuh ( 13578 )
      If you're using Chimera now and miss MOUSE GESTURES, there is a freeware "input method" you can install that will give you gesture support in any Cocoa program: Bitart Cocoa Gestures [bitart.com] Highly recommeded by this Chimera/Gestures user....

    • Re:Chimera (Score:4, Interesting)

      by otis wildflower ( 4889 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:46PM (#4994511) Homepage
      I'm also a big fan; there's really no reason to go with OmniWeb anymore as Chim handles pretty much every website I visit better. Chimera also imho handles tabs better than Opera for OS X, and I like that it integrates with OS X proxy settings (though I'd like the developers to make that a little more obvious in the doccys ;)

      Obvious features I'd like to see though:

      more OSXisms, like glowing borders around selected textareas (ala omniweb)

      Better theme support, including a theme/preference for 'Textured' (aka brushed metal). This stuff can be done with external apps like InterfaceBuilder, but it should be easier.

      UserAgent quick-selects and customization within Preferences, ala Opera

      SOME added mail functionality, such as include full webpage as attachment. I like 0.6 adding send link, but I want send page as well to mail copies of 'registration required' pages.

      more stability.

      better 'threading' behavior: I notice that tabs behave 'blocked' by other tabs' slowness or failure to load pages. Each tab (and browser window obviously) should download and behave independently of any other.

      more features, including autofill, more keyboard shortcuts, etc.

      better documentation

      better interface into 'Helper Application' settings, such as RealPlayer and QuickTime. Ideally Chimera would ask me before it loads something that runs within a helper app whether I want to save or run. This should be configurable and is pretty much a standard item in modern browsers. 0.6 addresses this a bit, but I'd prefer to have an additional option to choose per-click, in order to best avoid rogue code.

      Integrate Privoxy :)

      Better performance and stability :)

      I don't change web habits often, but I have gone from Mozilla web+mail to OS X Mail + Chimera and I'm quite happy with the switch. Chimera should be the only web browser ANY OS X user ever needs, from Grandmas to Geeks. And, of course, being an OS X program, it needs to be pretty, easy to use, and very very powerful. In fact, as it stands now, it IMHO should be the standard OS X browser distributed by Apple, but only when it's a bit more stable (it crashes often on the NYTimes site, and particularly when closing tabs or going from one site to another by cmd-l, typing a new url, and hitting enter when a different page was already loading).

      I only hope that moving to the 1.2 (or any other post 1.0) branch won't be too painful or duplicative of work.. I already don't like that the kill-tab behavior is 'backwards' and that throws me when I use Moz..

      • Re:Chimera (Score:2, Informative)

        by unixbob ( 523657 )
        Hopefully you have fed these requests back into the Chimera development team.

        We frequently ask for graphic designers and documenters and testers for our OSS projects. Positive and constructive feedback such as otis' comments are just as useful because they help developers understand which parts of their app are useful and well received, and where there is room for impovement.

      • Re:Chimera (Score:3, Informative)

        by bdash ( 598142 )
        Chimera also imho handles tabs better than Opera for OS X, and I like that it integrates with OS X proxy settings (though I'd like the developers to make that a little more obvious in the doccys ;)

        The Chimera documentation about proxy settings [mozilla.org] states:

        Proxy Servers

        Some organizations block direct connections to the Internet, for security or other reasons. In these situations, connections are required to go through proxy servers, which are intermediate servers that redirect connections to their final destination.

        Chimera normally gets information about yor proxy server settings from the Network System Preferences pane (see the "Proxies" tab there). If you switch network locations, or change the proxy settings, Chimera will pick up those new settings without restarting.

        It then goes on to describe how to enable Proxy Auto Config support in Chimera by way of several hidden preferences.
    • I just tried it again...it's pretty nice, but it's missing a couple features that I've made pretty core to my daily browsing (as far as I can tell, anyway).

      In particular:

      • Integrated search in the open bar
      • Keyworded bookmarks
      I also make pretty good use of the privacy menu bars in mozilla (editing cookies, etc...). Being able to limit cookies to n days is a great thing.

    • Re:Chimera (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ealar dlanvuli ( 523604 )
      As a Mac user who uses Chimera as my main browser I can say the following safely.

      Chimera is *SLOW*. Every time I switch back to phoenix I'm awe struke at it's speed. The Chimera team really should fold considerable chunks of the phoenix code into themselves, or something rather drastic.

      Alternatively Phoenix should release a version that has "apple look and feel", but I get the impression there might be an under the table deal between Apple and Netscape to leave Chimera as the only viable browser.

      I love phonix, I just wish it was about twice as fast.

  • I used IE (Score:5, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @02:54PM (#4994309) Homepage Journal
    for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap. I wrote a whole thing about phoenix's amazingness in my journal, so there's no reason to repeat it here. But it has made a significant positive impact on my daily routine.

    • Re:I used IE (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 )
      "for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap."

      If you haven't done it yet, check out Opera as well. Although I find phoenix very alluring, Opera is still king in the low resource / high speed / high efficiency department.

      • Re:I used IE (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Narchie Troll ( 581273 )
        And in the price department, too. A few CPU cycles isn't enough for me to justify spending money at a browser, especially when great software like Galeon and Phoenix exists.
      • I'd recommend sticking with Opera 7 [opera.com], even though it's still in beta, if you want to try Opera. It's way more standards-compliant than previous versions. Opera 7 even has better CSS2 support [xs4all.nl] than any other browser according to some.
      • Phoenix is slightly faster and has a far better rendering engine. Not to mention it's free.

    • Re:I used IE (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mat catastrophe ( 105256 )

      Sadly, I too use IE most of the time. Mostly because my box simply doesn't handle the newer Mozilla based browsers well. (If anyone has any 72-pin chips lying around, you can get in touch with me, seriously).

      Where was i? Oh, yea, I think that Mozilla is a superior browser, it's more (what's that buzzword?) robust than IE and it seemingly does things right. But even phoenix is a little slow to load for me, and although I am about to check out the Beonex Communicator, I don't have much faith it'll run any better.

      Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post. Developers have always been forgetful of the simple fact that not every one in the world gets a new computer, or even an upgrade, every six months. It's nice to see a "lite" browser, but only if it's really light and not just "requires only a Pentium3/64MB RAM" - that's not light at all for me, or about two-thirds of the people I know. We use older machines because we either love them or can't afford anything new and shiny.

      And if none of this makes sense, blame the alcohol my liver's still dealing with.

  • Red star on that zeppelin (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check out the zeppelin logo on Mozillazine www-pages!

    A red star is painted on that zeppelin! RED STAR - why the hell? Communists in China and Russia are using red star -logos even today. So does this mean that Mozilla is the communist choice?

  • I finally dropped IE for Moz this year... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @02:58PM (#4994327) Homepage Journal
    Mozilla is coming along nicely. I've recommended it as an alternative to IE to all my friends and family. No popups and tabbed browing has me hooked :)

  • I just started .... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:00PM (#4994336) Homepage
    Using Mozilla, and I love it. There's only one small problem. I really miss being able to click my mouse wheel and move the mouse up and down to scroll through the page faster.

    • You can! (Score:5, Informative)

      by friedegg ( 96310 ) <.bryan. .at. .wrestlingdb.com.> on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:04PM (#4994357) Homepage
      Autoscroll extension for Mozilla/Phoenix [mozdev.org] as reported by Mozillazine [mozillazine.org].

    • Using Mozilla, and I love it. There's only one small problem. I really miss being able to click my mouse wheel and move the mouse up and down to scroll through the page faster.

      There's the aforementioned patches, and it does work in K-Meleon out of the box. I take back all my badmouthing of K-Meleon -- it was worth the wait (it is still a hell of an insular cathedral of a development group though)

  • Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:07PM (#4994367) Homepage
    I use Mozilla. I mostly like Mozilla.

    But, starting with 1.0, technical advancement just is no longer the issue for Mozilla. Open Source projects have the proven capacity to nominally pace their commerial counterparts' new features and to do so with a much more sane and better-written approach.

    No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it? Let's not fool ourselves; even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must, and Linux can't really help Mozilla where it needs it.

    This is going to be the key question in the next five years: How do you even distribute better software? How do you even *give away* better products? We've already *seen* the "download and use it" scheme fail when competing against a product which is already on the desktop.

    And don't kid yourself: We can't count on AOL's massive firepower on this one. This is the wrong time to expect AOL to help us; they're not in any position to make big changes. Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.

    This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

    • I have one word for you: Broadband

      That will change everything about distribution.
      How much you want to bet that the vast majority of people using Mozilla, downloaded it on a broadband connection?

      Limited bandwidth is definitely the biggest "barrier to entry" in this market.

      • Well, at college I can download a Mozilla nightly build in about two minutes. At home, it takes half an hour, at least. But no matter where I am, I use the newest nightly build. I just download it overnight, and install in the morning at home.

        Of course, I'm already hooked on Mozilla. People not hooked may not be willing to spend half an hour downloading a browser, and they certainly won't do it every night.

    • Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...even OSS's favorite son (Linux) didn't succeed in the arena that Mozilla must...

      Over five years ago, people were proclaiming that Linux "had failed" to make a dent in the server market.

      Don't count the game over until it's really over, and perhaps not even then.

    • mozilla...jwz...The Fork. Three degrees! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it?

      http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

      See users switch. Switch, users, switch! See RMS fume. Fume, RMS, fume.

      If you have to brainstorm ways of getting users to switch to your very-slightly-different application, the game is already over and you lost.

      No popups, no Javascript, no 0wN0RZing. When Mozilla gets better than IE 3.0, call me. And please shut up about the tabs. Hide task bar much?

    • Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ostiguy ( 63618 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @04:01PM (#4994565)
      Its just software. Its not about global conquest.

      If AOL adopts it, and then within 1 yr 20% of american web surfers are using the gecko engine, then everyone will need to adhere more closely to standards, and life will be grand.

      Get worked up over standards, not about achieving global dominance.

      ostiguy

    • Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @05:01PM (#4994856)
      This is something we have to answer and answer well in the coming year, and I mean the next couple, not the next ten.

      Why? What will happen if Mozilla stagnates? Will people stop working on it in their free time?

      My point is that the beauty of Open Source is that you really don't have any competition. If you're doing it for free, nobody can run you out of business.

      This is why when asked about Microsoft, Linus generally responds that he doesn't give a shit what they do.
      • Well, yes, I'd agree with what you're saying, but you miss something here, which becomes more significant when you mention Linus' ambivalence towards Microsoft and politics. There is more to Free Software than just developing some software for a small community. The idea is to:

        a) promote Free Software to the world, both to help them (if you believe in FS you'll believe in this), and to help ourselves, as it means more people will provide commercial services for us and more people will get into developing Free Software

        b) ensure that we can always use Free Software, i.e. that the hardware vendors don't lock us out (as many already do to some extent, but nowehere near Palladium levels), and that we can inteoperate with others

        Now b) becomes more significant with Mozilla, because unless IE sees some serious competition, and lazy web designers start recognising web starndards, web standards problems can only get worse. There's no point in having a great browser if it can't display most web pages properly.

        So whilst it's not important that Mozilla "dominates", it's important that it remains high-profile enough to promote free software, and the rights of free software users.

    • Re:Technical advancement not the issue. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pyrros ( 324803 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @06:20PM (#4995281)
      No, the problem is really one of adaptation: Once it's build, once it's available, how do you make people come and use it?

      It goes like this:

      x: here's a CD with mozilla
      o: what does it do?
      x: it's an internet browser, like IE, without the pop-up ads, and a mail client like outlook minus the viruses.
      o: cool, i'll try it!

      OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort. I bet that almost half of them are going to WANT to try it once they hear about pop-up blocking, and a good number of them will like tabbed browsing. They might even like type-ahead or gestures or google search in the location bar.

      We are not talking about stuff like standards compatibility, personal data encryption, or being open-sourse that your average windows user could not care less about. Mozilla has cool features, and is reasonably easy to use. Sure, it's a little slow, but that is becoming less and less of a problem, as cpu speeds go up and mozilla gets more optimized/ less bloated (think phoenix).

      Getting people to use linux is not as easy by a long shot: young peolpe who have plenty of free time and a desire to try things are instantly put off by the lack of games (and no, things like winex, don't cut it), while older people are VERY afraid to change their working enviroment (learning windows took them long enough, they sure as hell ain't changing now) no matter how much more stable/fast linux is. Plus, when trying to get people to use linux you probably have to help them back-up their files (think mp3), install linux and get it to a working shape, which takes a LOT of time, both yours and theirs.

      Mozilla on the other hand takes 2 minutes to install, 5 minutes (with mailnews) to configure and one minute to tell people to middle/ ctrl click to open tabs.

      So yes, i do believe that mozilla has an easier job than linux in getting to the end-users desktop.
    • We could try the AOL approach, give out free CD's full of software... That would be really cool! Like browsers, games etc... It won't make much money, but it'll really raise awareness.
    • Besides, Netscape is not Mozilla.

      Netscape and Mozilla are almost the exact same thing--the only real difference is logo and the 50 AOL shortcuts that Netscape installs. Other than that, each version of Netscape is from a Mozilla build, and the programmers working on Netscape are basically the same ones working on Mozilla.
  • AMAZING! Still doesn't sort headers properly when you change mailboxes etc. etc. ...

  • Mozilla is great for web development (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gortbusters.org ( 637314 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:17PM (#4994413) Homepage Journal
    I like the sample demos that the 1.0 start page used to show for mozilla.

    Even more so, tabbed web browsing is great for testing various web applications.

    Finally, I love the HTML composer... it's great for composing little slashdot messages ;)

  • Especially the 1.3.X series of both browsers (using a 1.3 alpha build of Moz with 1.3.1 build of Galeon). You've made my GNOME 2 experience richer, and given me the best combination of tabbed browing and smart toolbar I could ask for.

  • 1.7 % Market Share (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:27PM (#4994449) Homepage Journal

    In the last part of the article, it mentions that Mozilla based browsers have 1.7 % of the market share. I would advise web-sites that depens on internet sales not to discount this share. Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet. Percisely, the best target audience.

    The IE crowd is filled with old grandmom who play solitare and who think that the Internet in on their "Hard-Drive" - you know, the "Hard Drive" that sits under their Packard-Bell monitor.

    Microsoft can keep those users.
    • I just checked our site stats for 2003 and "Mozilla 5" has rocketed up to 5.7%! ;-)
    • And "free" zealots can keep you.

      You're wrong on two accounts. Number 1, if you really are some uberintelligent computer expert, you probably also don't make stupid impulse purchases online. Suppose you make triple the purchases of Grandma... no.. better yet...10 times. Do you still even approach the sheer numbers of the herd?

      Secondly, why are you being such an elitist jerk?
    • Most of these people, represented in the 1.7 % are rich people in the computer field , web-savy and spend time on the internet.

      I disagree. I'd say that the 1.7% (closer to 0.5% on my sites) are mostly college kids who don't buy anything... exactly the kind of sufers I *don't* want.
    • It's very hard to figure out what browser "market share" is anyway. In fact, it's not even clear that it is a well-defined number. Many users probably have access to multiple browsers. If you make your site work only with IE, they may shop there, but less frequently than they otherwise would. Maybe they'll be able to access it from their home PC but not their wireless PDA, etc.

      If there is a number at all, I'd say IE usage is probably in the low 80s, with the rest split among Mozilla, embedded browsers, and a few other players. No serious business can design only for IE, and no serious business has to anyway.

  • a year ago (Score:5, Interesting)

    by re-Verse ( 121709 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:31PM (#4994461) Homepage Journal
    I could tell people "I use Mozilla" and most people would look at me like i was speaking greek (except the greeks, they'd look at me like i was speaking inuit).

    Now I tell people i use Mozilla, and Some of them actually know what it is, or have heard of it. Not to mention that since there is a 1.X release out, i can confidently install it on a friends or clients machine without a lot of worry of weird crashes and bugs.

    Once Mozillas spam filtering becomes easy and useful, I can see myself converting a LOT more people a lot more easily than i already have. So far i've converted about 25 diehard IE users... and i wonder how many they have converted.

    • Re:a year ago (Score:5, Informative)

      by PovRayMan ( 31900 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @05:21PM (#4994915) Homepage
      My greatest accomplishment was converting my Dad to Mozilla from Outlook and IE. To easily sum up the story here are a few key points.

      1.) He was able to import his Outlook stuff into Mozilla Mail no problem.
      2.) All he needed was a spelling checker plugin for the mail client (Got one from Mozdev) and it was 100% perfect for him.
      3.) Mozilla "Imported" his many hundreds of bookmarks which he definatly needed.
      4.) The built in popup blocker has worked wonders for him.
      5.) He has Mozilla sit in the system tray so he doesn't notice any load up delays.

      When I was converting my Dad to Mozilla I showed him how much better it is and he definatly agreed. He asked a few questions about how to make some things work and I got him up and running no sweat. Ever since he got klez because of Outlook (Partially his fault, yadda yadda yadda..) he believes that Mozilla Mail is greater since he now doesn't worry (for the most part) about mail viruses.

      So if you wanna convert someone, start with a family member.

      • Just wanted to say "Kudos" to you! I've done the same with my family. Once at a time, getting IE out of the box is nice. Once person at a time using open source to browse the web. Sweet!

        Happy new year.

  • Is the road to success as a standalone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by budGibson ( 18631 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:34PM (#4994470)
    To me, the most significant point in the article was Mitchell Baker's note supporting phoenix [mozillazine.org]. In it, he lists one of the reasons for supporting phoenix as an experiment to see whether mozilla can succeed by building core browser functionality that others adapt.

    This is where OSS succeeds right now in mainstream implementations, as a base that a value-added integrator can then modify for clients to achieve a lower cost solution. It is hard for OSS to market directly to end-users. OSS is not close enough to end-users to know how to modify interface and other features to suit their needs. However, value-added integrators are.

    With microsoft, value-added integrators face high licensing fees and the danger that microsoft will try to eat their lunch. In OSS, this is less an issue.

    However, there is one problem with this view. There's plenty of reason for value-added integrators to use mozilla. What is the reason to contribute back? In the end, I suspect the interest for contribution to mozilla is with platform providers, e.g., AOL, who do not want access to their platforms controlled by their competitors. Note, a number of OSS projects have moved to corporate sponsorship congruent with this view, e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and even Apache.

    So, mozilla might find its real success as a neutral technology that can be adapted across a number of platforms by value-added integrators. It will have to look for support to corporations whose interest is in having neutral access technologies for their platforms.

  • Browser good, Mail/News not so good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tradervik ( 462791 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:46PM (#4994510)
    The browser is excellent. At work, I use both IE and Mozilla (mainly because Windows launches IE when I click on a URL link in Outlook and I haven't been able to find out how to change that). Mozilla does a better job rendering complex pages. Take a page with a big table that uses CSS to control the layout. Mozilla is able to display the table progressively (i.e. display the rows as the data arrives at the browser) while IE seems to need to wait for the entire table to arrive. IE also crashes trying to print out that page if the table is big enough to take more than 2 or 3 paper pages.

    Mozilla also has tabbed browsing, a popup blocker, etc. etc. The only area I have noticed where Mozilla still lags is in some DHTML (JavaScript/DOM) stuff. For example, pages that implement animation using DHTML can be much slower than IE.

    The Mozilla Mail/News client, on the other hand, has not been so successful, in my opinion. For example, the last time I tried to use it, it would do strange things when I tried to insert blank lines between quoted lines in a reply.
    • ... because Windows launches IE when I click on a URL link in Outlook and I haven't been able to find out how to change that)...

      If I use Outlook and click a link in an email it launches Phoenix to that particular URL. I simply had to set Phoenix as my default browser for this to work.

      I do however experience an issue similar to yours in using the MSN Messenger, where it launches IE, default browser be damned, for checking my hotmail account or sending new emails using hotmail.
    • Netscape 7.01, which is based on Mozilla technology, is actually a very nice browser.

      Well there is one problem though: it has a bad habit of expiring "cookies" in only a few days. Whenever I save settings for online message boards under Netscape 7.01 it would stop saving that cookie after at most 4-5 days; does anyone know how to stamp out that problem? =(
    • The Mozilla Mail/News client, on the other hand, has not been so successful, in my opinion. For example, the last time I tried to use it, it would do strange things when I tried to insert blank lines between quoted lines in a reply.

      Yeah, replying to e-mails using the Mozilla mail client is painful. Not enough to stop me from using it, but enough to get me to swear occasionally. Most of the problems involve working with blockquotes: adding reply lines in the middle of them, merging them, moving text in and out of them. A quick bugzilla search brought up 178899,155609,144998,115498.

  • Mozilla and Mac OS X (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Glory of Witty ( 636939 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @03:50PM (#4994527)
    Mozilla for Mac OS X is a nice browser and it gets better everyday, but I still think that in terms of speed it lags behind Internet Explorer. Chimera on the other hand is the fastest web browser I've ever used and it renders websites just about as well as IE. Its light, its fast, its cocoa, if you are using OS X you owe it to yourself to at least check out this amazing browser. I feel that its the most exciting thing happening on the OS X platform right now. Now all we need is for Chimera to reach a final version so Apple can bundle it with OS X and new Macs that are sold. Think about it: Apple's license with Microsoft has expired, so they don't even need to ship IE anymore, although I'm sure they will continue just because IE is the standard. Chimera is a cocoa product which is exactly what Apple has been emphasizing for its speed and usability. Whatever the case is, the future looks bright for this amazing browser!

  • A trick to speed up Mozilla v1.2.1 and previous... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @04:09PM (#4994607) Homepage Journal
    Paint Timeout is too high in the current stable versions. This is why Phoenix works so fast in rendering. Hopefully, the next stable version will have this fix. Here's the copy of Mozilla thread in newsgroup:

    -------- Original Message --------
    Subject: Re: Great performance tuning pref setting
    Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 18:16:37 +0100
    From: Markus Hübner
    Organization: Another Netscape Collabra Server User
    Newsgroups:
    netscape.public.mozilla.win32,n etscape.public.mozi lla.performance
    References:

    Olaf Dietsche wrote:
    > Markus Hübner writes:
    >
    >
    >>Jonathan Arnold wrote:
    >>
    >>>>>http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_ bug.cgi?id=1 80241
    >>>>>is highly interesting!
    >>>>
    >>>>Can't wait for the pref additions to try it out, looks interesting.
    >>>
    >>>It's in Moztweak.
    >>>
    >>
    >>cool - but it would be really needed to tune the default value.
    >>the "standard mozilla user" doesn't have Moztweak nor does the typical
    >>Netscape (Gecko embedded browser) user.
    >
    >
    > Well, every user has an editor. You can put the following line
    > into prefs.js or user.js:
    >
    > user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 500);
    >
    > I tested this with various values, but couldn't see any difference
    > until I tried:
    >
    > user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
    >
    > This is in sync with:
    >
    >
    > Regards, Olaf.

    Thx for the pointer to mozillazine, Olaf! :: markus

  • And no Mozilla in Playboy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by DCowern ( 182668 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @04:15PM (#4994646) Homepage

    Mozillazine had a blurb [mozillazine.org] about it. Here's the full text:

    MOZILLA'S MO BETTA

    [Mozilla.org Logo]

    Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the most popular web browser in the world. But it's not the best. That title belongs to Mozilla, a volunteer-built browser that offers everything Explorer has going for it, plus a bunch of great features. Here are three reasons to switch. One: You can set a preference to prevent pop-up windows. Two: You can right-click on any banner ad and select a menu item that prevents the originating site from sending images to your browser. Three: You can open links as "tabs" that appear along the top of your browser window. Don't be fooled by the new Netscape 7.0. It lacks a built-in pop-up killer and will fire a barrage of AOL ads every chance that it gets.

    Playboy, January 2003, p.36

    This _has_ to be good for mainstream acceptance when such non-tech-oriented magazines like Playboy laud Mozilla so greatly. Maybe if other general living and style magazines adopt such a positive attitude, we'll see a surge in Mozilla adoption. Hey, maybe its wishful thinking but if nothing else, it's increasing awareness.

    P.S. -- Consider this proof that I *DO* read the articles. :-P

    • Playzilla (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jack Zombie ( 637548 )
      Youre not understanding the Playboy article: its promoting Mozillas qualities as a porn browser, not as a general use browser; just notice the features they highlight in the article and consider what kind of audience Playboy has. I guess we can assume you wont ever read in a general living, or style, magazine about how great Mozilla is when you want to jerk off to pictures of scantily dressed girls.

      Oh, and heres a link to the Pornzilla project [netscape.com] -- theyre the ones whove been putting pressure on the developers (and contributing some code too) to make Mozilla a wonderful browser for all the perverts out there.

  • I often need to research several topics at the same time. For example, when a customer calls I may need to open a new topic. I open several instances of Mozilla, each with several tabs on one topic.

    However, when Mozilla crashes, all instances of Mozilla browser and all instances of Mozilla mail disappear.

    It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting the computer.

  • This is not a troll post!

    2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... at least of Mozilla's current form.
    The reason? AOL Communicator [betanews.com]! I downloaded a beta version from www.datakill.com [datakill.com] and I think, it has a bright future.
    The reasons:

    1. It seems that AOL is finally going to push Gecko to the masses (It's branded as AOL product, not Netscape)
    2. AOL Communicator is split up in single applications (ac_mail.exe, ac_im.exe,...) - no ''all in one'' like Mozilla or Netscape.
    3. (And that's my peronal favourite, 'cause that's what I prayed for since ages) AOL Communictor is written using wxWindows [wxwindows.org]!
      Yes it's true. Finally they got rid of the sluggish XUL interface and still being multi-plattform.
      Phoenix (or whatever the future name will be) has helped, but Phoenix' interface is still somewhat slow compared to native Windows apps. Phoenix' GUI toolkit is also not fully aware of Visual Styles (skins for WinXP) - the menus look ''old school'', while the other apps have flat/skinned menus.
      AOL Communicator (thanks to wxWindows) uses native widgets everywhere.
      Quote from the included copyright-notice.txt:

      AOL Communicator uses the following libraries and modules:

      wxWindows libraries Copyright (c) 1998 Julian Smart, Robert
      Roebling. The wxWindows source code, available under the
      wxWindows Library License, Version 3, can be found at
      http://www.wxwindows.org [wxwindows.org].

    While the beta version does only consist of an eMail app and the Instant Messenger (compatible with AIM and ICQ), AOL is also developing a browser component.
    If you have a look into the file ''AOL Communicator\locale\cat\ac_help.mo'', you can find the following strings (BTW, ''Photon'' is the codename for the Communicator):

    About Photon Browser

    Photon Browser is not currently your default browser.
    Would you like to make it your default browser?

    Oh yes, I can't wait for the final release. I hope there will be an open source version of it (without the AOL specific stuff like AOL Mail or the Instant Messenger - called Mozilla 2.0 or something like that), to allow porting it to other platforms.

    Oh, BTW... I did an experiment and it worked: You can move the mail folder from Mozilla's profile directory to AOL Communicator's profile directory. All your mails stay intact.

    Honestly, I don't know why the Mozilla/Netscape developers waste their time in creating a new toolkit (the one that Phoenix uses), if they should better convince their bosses from AOL to open the source of the Communicator.

    PS: Thanks for reading this post and (hopefully) not modding me down as ''Troll'' :)

    • Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BZ ( 40346 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @05:31PM (#4994983)
      Well, lessee...

      1) AOL Communicator is a pet project of a AOL VP who hates Netscape and wants the division to disappear. It's not clear to me how he thinks Gecko will get maintained after that.

      2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.

      The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens in the very near future...
      • 2) Mozilla developers developed XUL because it makes UI development a lot faster and easier than using WxWindows.

        Sorry, but developers of an end-user application (Mozilla/Netscape) should focus on the end user, not other developers.
        1.) In some situations (not always, but IMHO too often - when Phoenix/Mozilla displays large images or complex tables) the context menu takes a few seconds to appear. From a user's perspective, this is not acceptable (I hope you don't have simmilar expieriences, because that's very annoying).

        2.) If XUL is so great, why are there so many projects to get rid of it? (Geleon, K-Meleon, Chimera,...)
        IMO this does only fragment the development of Mozilla. If Mozilla used a GUI toolkit with good performance from the beginning, those projects wouldn't be neccessary.

        Personally, I don't care if it's wxWindows or some other toolkit. My point is, that Mozilla should've used a toolkit that looks fammiliar to the user (not like some alien app as Mozilla with the Modern theme) and has good performance.

        • Question (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ubernostrum ( 219442 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @07:11PM (#4995563) Homepage
          You don't seem to like XUL. In your original post you praised this new thing for ditching XUL. Yet in the article you linked to, we find the following:
          Communicator utilizes the Gecko engine and XUL user interface language found in Mozilla, but it was developed entirely in-house and is not open source, according to AOL.
          And you ask people not to mod you down...

      • Re:2003 is the year of Mozilla's dead.... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The real problem Mozilla is facing right now, imo, is not the UI toolkit but the fact that Gecko is likely to be very much obsolete in 2-3 years unless a good deal of major work happens...

        May I ask why?
  • " By the end of the month, some industry researchers were reporting that Mozilla 1.0 had already achieved a 0.4 percent market share."

    Anyone knows what is the market share for Mozilla and/or phoenix now a days?

  • Wrong direction, guys (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @04:52PM (#4994822) Journal
    From O'reilly's, "Creating Applications with Mozilla", Page 326:

    "Currently, remote Mozilla applications are not prevalent because development focuses on making the client applications as stable and efficient as possible. Therefore, this area of Mozilla development is largely speculatative. This chapter argues that remote applications are worth looking at more closely."

    The Mozilla developers are focused on making another VB instead of providing remote HTTP-friendly GUI apps. That is where the real need is. The developers are getting away from webbiness, but that *should* be the focus of a browser.

    I don't get it.

  • My Mozilla Experience in 2002 (Score:3, Informative)

    by f0rt0r ( 636600 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @06:18PM (#4995263)
    First, I started using Mozilla when I did my first experiment with migrating to alternate OS's last July ( FreeBSD was the OS ), and I when I found there was a Windows version of it, I was hooked. Here are my list of pluses and minuses that stand out in my mind: 1. Tabbed Browsing - I do a lot of research on the web, mostly because I have yet to find a highly portable electronic reference that I can take with me anywhere on any computer I happen to be using. What I do is open a 1-2 Google windows, run my searches, and then examine the hits to see if any of them have what I am looking for. I am pretty sure this is how I 'accidently' found slashdot :). Having the resulting 8-12 web sites I am referencing in a tabbed interface is VERY convenient. 2. Privacy Control - The control over stored passwords, cookie storage, javascripts, popup windows, etc. replaces multiple applications I used to use for these features. These are nothing short of outstanding features IMHO. 3. Miscellaneous - I am discovering more cool features as I go along. 2-3 weeks ago I discovered image-blocking, which kills most ads except for the flash ones, but then again. I have not and do not plan on installing flash anyhow. Minuses: 1. Data portability - I have a dual-boot workstaion at home (in addition to my servers ), and my work's laptop that I try to keep the bookmarks and email in sync so I can access the same information wherever I am at. Note: I am looking at researching a web interface for my qpopper server, that would help with the email sync.). So far this has been a total pain in Mozilla. First, I have yet to find any email import/export tools, and the "Manage Bookmarks" tool doesn't work the way I would like it to. What I mean is when I import bookmarks, I would like it to do a differential import. For example, say I have a bookmark folder called "java" on two computers. They start off in sync with the same too url's in the folder. If I add a url to the folder on computer A, export it, and then import it to computer B, I would expect computer B's corresponding folder to now have the original 2 url's plus the 3rd one I added to A. Instead, Mozilla (1.2.1 even ) will add a horizontal divider to the bookmark list, create a copy of the 'java' folder and the 3 url's I imported. I can fix this manually, but why should I have to? To be safe Mozilla could let me choose how it handles the import, to give user to get the desired results. I could copy bookmark files between them, but this could potentially erase bookmarks that I put on computer B that were not one computer A at the time I was importing bookmarks from computer A to computer B. 2.Support Forums - To tell you the truth, I can't tell if these even exist or not. I was looking for help on the email import problem and followed the Mozilla's web site link to it's newgroups forums. I shouldn't have wasted it my time. None of the forums looked to be end user support ( Q&A ) related, and when I posted to one that seemed to be the closest thing to this ( after searching it to see if the question had already been asked ) I got flamed for posting in a developer-only group even though there was no indication that that is what it was for ( i.e. the word 'developer' or similiar were not in the newgroup name. What is worse yet is that not one of the flames said "YOu idiot, you should have know tech support questions get posted here !", so after all the time they spent flaming me, I still have no idea where I should have posted my question. How about they put up a nice web-based searchable and archivable set of Mozilla forums with each forums focus clearly identified by the title ( or the forum description text ). Sorry newgroup-lovers, nothing against newsgroups, but my experience with them has been nothing but negative. 3. Bookmark Sorting - Why can't I have all my Bookmarks sorted in alphanumeric order? Inside of bookmark manager I can do this, but once I leave the manager window my bookmarks go back to being unsorted. Maybe there is a big sign on the toolbar saying "click here to sort your bookmarks", but I am not seeing it. 4. Memory Hog ( Windows Version ) - This has been mentioned before, but I would like to note that it seems to have been fixed now that I am using version 1.1 on my work laptop, older version seem to get unresponsive after being open for extended periods of time and when I checked resources in use, it averaged about 32MB. I have not experienced any lagginess with the Linux versions, but then again that may be because Linux is such a zippy( fast ) OS anyhow. In conclusion, I could have included a list of things I would like to have added to the browser, but the topic is 'experience', and there you have it. Where I disgressed by saying "fix this, add that" was me just clarifying why I thought the problem was a problem. So please, no "off topic" flames. Also, this is my second post on slashdot...ever. Hopefully you find this post informative. I expect that by my sixth post to have graduated to " In Russia, Mozilla Browses You!", but I am not quite there yet. Peace.

  • Tired of IE users. (Score:5, Informative)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2003 @06:37PM (#4995380) Homepage Journal
    I got tired of folks visiting my website using IE. I use Mozilla when develop and I code to standards. There have been numerous cases when I've had to regress something because IE doesn't do it right. In any case, I did a popunder ad for Mozilla [ostermiller.org] for those that are using IE.

    From this I found a few interesting things. The first, which is encouraging, is that it seem to be working. The percentage of people who visit my site using Mozilla started rising sharply. I went from about 1% to almost 5%. The second thing, which is curious, is that a lot less people are actually using IE than you might think. My server logs show that about 80% of my visitors use IE, but only about 40% get the popunder. My conclusion is that there are a lot of browsers out there that fake the user agent, or many people have found a way to disable popunders in IE. (have javascript disabled, or some such).

    If you want the code to do the popunder so you can advertise mozilla on your site, its easy to grab the Javascript from my home page, just view source.

    • Hey cool, that's great! I think I might use a similar technique for a new web app I'm developing, which will NOT have mostly tech-savvy users.

      And off-topic, but gotta ask... you're a Miller in the Conestoga area of PA, so I suppose you have Mennonite connections?
    • I'm doing something similar on my webpage: a simple Javascript that will display a friendly warning message to IE users:

      var strBrowser = navigator.userAgent;
      if (strBrowser.indexOf("MSIE")> 0) {
      document.write("<p><strong>");
      document.write("Warning: you appear to be viewing this page with Microsoft Internet Explorer, which has numerous bugs and ");
      document.write('<a href="http://www.nwnetworks.com/iesc.html"> security holes.</a>');
      document.write(" It is recommended that you upgrade to a more secure browser, ");
      document.write('such as <a href="http://www.mozilla.org">Mozilla,</a&gt ; ');
      document.write('<a href="http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/ ">Netscape,</a> ');
      document.write('or <a href="http://www.opera.com">Opera.</a>');
      document.write("</strong></p>");
      }

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