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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla M12 Released 267

Posted by CmdrTaco from the aint-that-cool dept.
Cyrrin writes "M12 source is up on the Mozilla ftp site. Binary builds should be appearing RSN." I've been playing with the pre12 builds all week and let me just say wow. It's getting faster and more stable. It's really exciting to see it all come together and climb out of the vapor. The preferences dialog is really slow, but progressive page rendering is fast. Good job to everyone involved, and welcome to the home stretch.
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Mozilla M12 Released More

Mozilla M12 Released

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  • > Attempt to understand from someone else's perspective.

    Quid pro quo. I would for once like the MS-bashers see things from a home user's perspective. From an IT manager's perspective. From a non-tech perspective.

    I'll settle for an objective perspective.
  • disclaimer: I already know the USA law bans export of non-trivial crypto, and products with "hooks" for crypto to be installed.

    Is Mozilla's plugin system sufficiently generic and capable to allow a full featured binary crypto plugin to be made? Has it been deliberately crippled to prevent this? Will it be necessary for someone in a sane country to set up a builds-with-crypto system and maintain a set of patches against the main source?

    And what happened to the "cryptozilla" project?
  • I'm not a web designer but aren't there standards out there? Just because Netscape or Microsoft comes out with gee-whizbang custom styles for thier browsers doesn't mean you choose which one to use, don't use either.
  • IE is not "just a COM component", it is a compilation of many COM components which can be reused very easily (that's why the executable is so small for such a large program). Anyone can incorporate a fully featured HTML viewer in their application, and, they can use that same component from several different languagues. This binary reusability is important, because it means a VB developer can use the spell checking from Word or the HTML viewer from IE, both of which are most likely written in C++. Now, the VB developer can do what they do best (drag little boxes around on pretty forms) and the C++ programmers can do the heavy work.

    I'm not saying that Mozilla isn't reusable or anything like that, but you do have to give Microsoft credit for COM, which is really a very nice solution to a difficult problem (OLE and cross language component building).

  • OK, I'll post the URL for adzapper [halcyon.com] since I just looked it up.

    http://www.halcyon.com/adamf/adzapper/ [halcyon.com]

  • Or in VirtualPC on a Mac.

  • At least in lynx keybindings mode, you can use < and > to scroll left and right, respectively. I forget what the "w3m native" binding has for that. Also moving the cursor around off one edge or the other will also scroll.
  • You hate to see a better product succeed just because of your political agenda? Pretty sad if you ask me.

    You're view of only 'the product' is far more sad, if you ask me.

    Would you buy a pair of "better" sneakers if you knew that NIKE was using cheap child labor in a third-world country to build them?
    Would you buy "better" lumber if you knew it was old-growth wood from the rain forest?
    If you were alive 200 years ago, would you buy Plantation cotton from the American south, which was harvested by slaves, or maybe buy slightly less-quality cotton grown by free workers?

    The political agenda behind the product often matters, as you can see. If we aren't willing to stand up for what we believe in, we may as well not be human. Try taking a stand for once, and follow what you believe in. You may feel pretty good about it.

    "In a world without walls, who needs Windows" - Someone from LinuxToday

  • Why is this relevant ? When did you last check the "source code footprint" for the linux kernel ?

    Clue: the size of the binary is what's important. ( though I suspect that Mozilla isn't that small )

  • Answers:

    1. Because diffs are a pain in the ass for a product in continuous development. Perhaps if you volunteer to write a script they can stick in their automated build, they'll support it, otherwise use CVS to get updates.

    2. Crypto is regulated by the stupid US export control laws. It's highly likely that someone familiar with SSLeay or another free crypto library will retrofit it to Mozilla when it's sufficiently stable to do so.
  • So what happens when AOL/Netscape decide to take mozilla and roll it into a big happy Netscape 5?

    Oh well, it will be nice to see IE have some decent competition again.
  • other than the name calling, i agree. most linux users want the most out of the programs on thier box, and they have that ability. "./configure; make; make install" is so easy, and it lets you build it on your own system with your own compiler, most binary releases are 386 optimized for widespread compatibility, a user can say, use pgcc and a pentium class processor and get noticable speed increases using his own home-rolled binary. the use of rpm's has made it easy for users to install binary only stuff, i remember the day when binary only releases were looked down upon, and avoided at all costs!
  • My software engineering textbook (Ian Sommerville)defined an alpha release as the acceptance testing for a bespoke system developed for a single client. Whereas beta testing is a term used for a system marketed as a softare product to be tested by potential users who agree to use the system.... Anyway, any testing release of Mozilla, in my view, would be called a beta not an alpha.

    But that book is entirely about making software to sell, as that definition shows. There's no way to directly apply it to open source, since the lines between users and developers are blurred.

    BTW, that has got to be one of the worst textbooks I've ever been subjected to. I think I gave up on trying to stay awake reading it in about the second week of classes, so I'm focusing on the lecture notes. :)
  • yes, i agree in general. i just thought that this particular ms-bashing was restrained, focussed, and argued (or at least relatively so).


    ______________________(
    // ///#\)

  • Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download [opera.com] the update from the Opera Software [opera.com] website.

    Opera is a great browser for power users. (There are quick keyboard shortcuts for everything, and commands to do things like open pages in the background, or display a window of all the links on a page.) It also has far and away the best style sheet support short of Gecko. However, the Linux/X11 port is still in development.

  • Agreed. Although aside from eesh there isn't a way of starting and stopping e sessions, and I've not seen any multiple session management utilities for e (correct me here?) I like firing up Opera and having effectively three home pages, without worrying about WM sessions. I try and stay away from e session management, preferring gnome-session. Who logs out of X anyway? :)
  • User controlled markup: Opera puts the controls back in the hands of the user, while the other browsers give the content creators absolute power. For example, Opera has the "scaling" ( magnification ) feature , and lets you control the rendering of the logical markup tags ( via a user supplied style sheet ). This together with the small footprint makes it a winner. I've played with the windows version, and will purchase the linux one as soon as it's out ( crossing my fingers that it will be as good as the windows version ).
  • Hmm, I am both home user and IT manager at different times. I am not a programmer. The only argument I ever hear from pro-MSers is that MS offers support. Have you ever called MS for that great support? How's about a $240 per incident charge? Yeah, they've got TechNet, the oversized, overpromoted, underachieving online help database. Come on now, how often can you plug in a problem, actually get a hit, and then find something other than "this is a known issue." Many people seem to have ignored the fact that, starting with IE4, IE became a forced integration into Windows. I cannot say that I like Windows, especially because of the ubiquitous BSOD, but I dislike even more being forced to use somebody's browser to look at the files on my hard drive. How dare they? As an IT manager, I dislike being forced to use one product simply because I purchased another. How would you like to buy a new car that could only be purchased with a 2 ton trailer permanently attached? Would you like to tow that extra weight around? MS should not force me to use their 2 ton trailer with an already sluggish vehicle called Windows. My opposition to MS, even at a more basic level than name calling, is that their products do not perform as advertised. MS only seems to care about getting out the next version, which is always just a prettified and dolled up instance of the old version, so that they can make that next dollar. Yes, that is good capitalism, but at some point they will be burned, and burned severely, for not producing quality. I have managed to crash my Linux boxes a total of twice in the 2+ years I have used Linux. Windows crashed twice in the first hour after I ran setup. I could not even begin to count the number of BSODs, fatal exceptions, and miscellaneous system failures I have seen on Windows PCs. While IE is not quite as unstable as Windows, and I will grant you that IE 5 is less unstable than IE4 and earlier, I have seen IE crash way more times than I would like. I have yet to crash Netscape on Linux. And even if I got sick and tired of using Netscape, here's the real kicker.... I CAN UNINSTALL IT. Many less complaints would be heard if MS would allow people to get rid of IE and not be forced to pay for its development. Instead, MS puts out FUD screaming about how IE is a tightly integrated application that is a fundamental part of the underlying code of the advanced performance blah blah blah. Bullshit. It's a web browser. And yes, I know, if I don't like it, I can buy a Mac, or install Linux, FreeBSD, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. But what if Joe HomeUser is too scared of Linux to install it. He wants his little Windows box so he can sit and go frag crazy playing his little shoot 'em up games, but he doesn't want IE. He prefers Netscape, or Opera, or even NCSA mosaic. Anyone who sticks up for MS on this issue, which they have the right to do, is just wrong. I dislike the DOJ and the federal gov't, but for once, mind you once, they are the lesser of two evils. MS should not be forced to split up, or disband, just to stop cramming IE down the throats of folks who don't want it.

  • It would be interesting to see Gecko embedded in a text-only browser. Lynx is nice and all, but would it be possible to get "real" layout with text, color (on displays that support color), etc? That would rock. Often I just want to skip all the graphics, animations, and other junk and get to the content.

    The Opera for Linux [opera.com] team might have something similar [opera.com] in the works. We'll have to see.

  • Wonderful (Score:2)

    by Gleef ( 86 )
    Considering M11 was almost good enough to replace Netscape 4.61 as my primary browser, M12 should be an impressive sight to see.

    ----

  • Speaking of Opera, a version 3.61 for Windows was released yesterday. There isn't a list of bugs fixed from version 3.60, but one visible change is that there's no toolbar in full screen mode any longer. You can download [opera.com] the update from the Opera Software [opera.com] website.

    Opera is a great browser for power users. It's the fastest browser around, lean enough to fit on a single floppy, has so many keyboard shortcuts you hardly need a mouse, and supports more CSS than anything short of Gecko. You can toggle off images per window, open pages in the background, or call up a window listing all the hyperlinks on a page.

    There are many features of Opera I'd like to see Mozilla adopt. I'm looking forward to the X11 port, which is still in development.

  • The packed-up nightly builds which include all of the .sos for browser (with debugging symbols!), mail, news, etc, plus a lot of images, scripts, and demo pages, are about a 5MB download.

    People need some clues here. Embedded systems have resource constraints and the highest demands are placed on memory use. The memory footprint (code+data) is going to become the bottleneck.

    The original poster is wrong because it is the compiled binary that executes. The source footprint is meaningless and typically grossly overestimates the generated code size. The poster quoted above is also wrong because download size underestimates the actual memory footprint; the distribution is compressed to around 50% of the executable format.

    Finally all of these are only static measures of the code size and they make no indication of how much memory will be used once the program executes: eg size of data structures and allocation patterns.

    BluesPower

  • user ftp
    pass ftp

    Anonymous didn't let me in either. don't know why.

  • I didn't know this. Do you have a reference?

  • If everything works out OK, we get Opera 4.0 beta this week as well, and Konqueror is getting stylesheets last I heard - Q1 2000 is looking good. :)
  • I think it's because artists got involved. HTML had some nice, simple editing functions, but then, over time, appearance became more important than content.. (if you doubt it, go to http://www.compaq.com [compaq.com] and try to find anything....)


  • The recent discussion on what constitutes a Mozilla alpha seems a bit academic now. I've also been trying the recent nightly builds, and stability has been improving rapidly.

    My definition of an alpha is when the product is close to feature complete. Mozilla is almost that, and once the major bug fixes are done it's beta time - possibly with M13? It certainly looks that way.

    I'm looking forward to replacing Communicator with Mozilla once and for all. Then I'll be down to just two applications that rely on Motif - one of which I'm rewriting to use GTK+ (the moxfm file manager), and another that will prbably have to remain a Motif app (NEdit).

    Chris Wareham
  • The XUL language allows you to create/define new buttons and looks as part of Mozilla's theme feature.

    So you can totally overhaul the look of the browser and add buttons that do all kinds of funky things, including what you describe. And it won't require any "real" programming skills-- XUL is a combination of XML, Javascript and CSS.

    Once you create the button, it'll work on all platforms too! Check out http://www3.sympatico.ca/ndeakin/mozilla/xultu/con tents.html for an XUL tutorial on building UIs.

    W
    -------------------

  • Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames. His is worth reading, yours is useless and only points you out to be a child (mentally if not chronologically). Taking 30 seconds to back up your statements would have made a world of difference.

    Just another attempt to increase the signal in Slashdot's daily signal-to-noise battle.
  • On the topic of web browsers, I got a chance to check out Opera [opera.com] the other day, and it is amazing. It doesnt have the same windowing scheme like other browsers, it opens up one big window, and then has smaller windows inside its workspace. The download manageris kind of neat. All of your file downloads open up into a smaller window that shows the status of each. Slashdot loads in under a second, and it likes most HTML - although it has trouble with pages with lots of tables.. I cant wait until the beta comes out for Linux :)

  • footprint (Score:3)

    by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @07:43AM (#1456713) Homepage
    Suprisingly it is pretty small. The packed-up nightly builds which include all of the .sos for browser (with debugging symbols!), mail, news, etc, plus a lot of images, scripts, and demo pages, are about a 5MB download. Do a non-debug build, omit the mailnews libraries (leaving just the browser and some other stuf), and leave out all the demo images/html, and I think you're left with something pretty embeddable.
  • If everything works out OK, we get Opera 4.0 beta this week as well...
    I hope that too, but they just released 3.61 (now available through their download page [opera.com]), so I'm not really sure what they're doing.

    I haven't checked out 3.61 yet though, haven't had the time to install it.

  • The best part about the MDI- bit is Operas ability to optionally save state. I have Freshmeat, /. and Userfriendly.org tiled on startup. I maximize the window that looks most interesting and then ctrl-tab when I'm done. This is of course only on my NT box at work.... At home I'm 100% Linux (except for that FreeBSD firewall). I'm eagerly awaiting Opera for Linux, and wouldn't mind the option of MDI functionality in Mozilla either. Some small wrapper for a Mozilla GTK widget perhaps? mmmm ------- 8-bits of Burning love... 6 For the Atari, and 2 for the C= 64
  • There's a bug report in for that, number 18172. [mozilla.org] It appears to be some weirdness in the XPCOM code, and I've compiled it on my 3.3-S box with the stock gcc and gotten the exact same crash. The code in question is gcc-inlined assembler, though, so it's a bit over my head.

    -lee

  • Isn't this a little premature? (Score:4)

    by Deven ( 13090 ) <deven@ties.org> on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @03:46AM (#1456718) Homepage
    Is it really helpful to post an announcement like this before it's entirely ready? Yes, the M12 source is up, but none of the binaries are yet, much less mirrored to other sites.

    Couldn't this sort of announcement wait until the mozilla.org announcement is made? I don't imagine they'll delay an announcement unnecessarily, and driving traffic to their FTP server prematurely might not be appreciated...
  • I see your point, but many of us continue to visit slashdot because it reports news as it's happening or before anyone else noticed it happened.

    Here's what it sounds like you're saying: Slashdot users are oveloading the ftp servers so that the developers can't get any work done. Please don't announce things before they're ready for to be consumed by the general public.

    Does this mean that slashdot community is no longer the developer community?

    maybe slashdot is now where all the journalists of the world come to get an interesting topic for their next article or news story.
  • (posted with an M13 cycle nightly build from 12/29)

    Wow, now THAT'S cutting edge! You've got a build that won't be out for 8 days! Is time-travel one of the new Mozilla features, or did you do that part on your own?

    (sorry, I had to say it)
    --

  • I'll admit, sometimes it's hard to endure a short-term inconvenience (it's going to be a little while before people stop using NS 4.x and stop complaining about how much your page sucks) for a long-term benefit. I certainly thing decent CSS support is worth biting the bullet for, though.

  • 21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?

    Hate to break it to ya, but an unziped linux-2.2.13 source tarball is about 64MB.

    XFree86 3.3.5 source tarballs added together (X335src-[1-3].tgz) ungziped and added together are, 160megs of source.

    Mozilla is just a light wieght for what it does. :)

  • > So what happens when AOL/Netscape decide to
    > take mozilla and roll it into a big happy
    > Netscape 5?

    Not that much; Mozilla will still continue to exist/be developed in its own right (AOL couldn't stop it if they wanted to).

  • One thing I like a lot right off -- I often avoid slashdot discussions because once they get above 150 postings or so, they take forever to load, and under NS4 you can't see them until the last </table> has been. Now with the progressive display, I can get randomly flipped around parts of the discussion as tables render and the vertical size of the page jumps around. Which is actually a significant improvement.

    I like it. It's coming along great. We're going to owe the Mozilla coders beer for pretty much the rest of their natural lives if they get this thing out the door.

  • User controlled markup: Opera puts the controls back in the hands of the user, while the other browsers give the content creators absolute power.

    I agree that the user should always be able to override styles set by the content author, but it is worth noting that other browsers can do the same or similar.

    In Netscape 4.x, it is under Edit -> Preferences, go to "Fonts" and "Colors", and set to "Use my settings/Override document".

    In Mozilla, you will find similar options under the "View" menu.

    Under MSIE, the settings are scattered through out the "Internet Options" dialog.

    Nothing currently in production is as easy or as complete as Opera's settings are, though.

  • An old FidoNet tagline put to new use... (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @08:03AM (#1456737) Homepage Journal
    That's all that IE is anyways. An up-to-date crutch to use while waiting for Mozilla.

    "MSIE is great! I used it to download Mozilla!"

    Ah, I eagerly await the day. :-)
  • Could someone statically link M12 against glib2.1 and make it available? I still run glibc2.0 and would not like to break all my applications by upgrading.

    Download and install glibc 2.1 binaries in some out-of-the-way place (/usr/local/lib/glibc-2.1/ for example).

    Then use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to add said directory to the path the dynamic loader will use, before running Mozilla.
  • MS didn't have time to get a browser to market, so they contracted with Spyglass. But when MS "bundled" the browser, they screwed Spyglass out of their share of what they expected to be large royalties.
    Spyglass is so put off by what MS did, they don't even list IE as one of their accomplishments.

    Source: http://www.kmfms.com/

    Digital Wokan, Tribal mage of the electronics age
  • I don't think reading the RFCs is very important here. All that work has been done by the OpenSSL folk already. It should simply be a matter of making a new protocol handler, based on http://, that uses a different port and wraps the network socket with SSL.

  • With a 21 Meg source code footprint I serriously doubt that Mozilla will compete on the embeded market any time soon.

    I would like to say -- "Get a clue" :)

    Although the complete source code package has a size of 21 meg, this includes a lot of stuff. It includes all the OS specific trees, e-mail, editor, newsreader, front-ends. Embedded applications won't need nearly all that code. Probably only need gecko, and a few other modules, and gecko is under 2 meg.

    So, what do you think *does* compete in the embedded market now? If you say IE, I'll scream...

    -Brent

  • Maybe we'll see FreeBSD binaries again now :-) (Score:4)

    by Zigg ( 64962 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @03:48AM (#1456779)

    It seems that one great side effect Mozilla has had is pushing lots of open source OS's hard to fix various problems that they've had. A few months ago we saw a problem with threads and glibc on Linux that Mozilla exposed hardest and best.

    Now, according to bug #14676 [mozilla.org], Mozilla has exposed some trouble in FreeBSD's dlopen() which has subsequently been fixed, making FreeBSD a better OS.

    Mozilla is a Good Thing(R). :-)

  • Let me guess, your a real man. You code in emacs or vi. Well under X I'd rather use NEdit anyday. Rather than having to learn the archane syntax and multi keypress commands of emacs I'll stick with an editor that lets me get real work done quickly.

    And on the console I'll stick to vim. Loads up fast on the overloaded servers I telnet to. Doesn't require ridiculous amounts of resources and disk space like emacs does.

    When I want to learn another Lisp variant (I already know Scheme thank you very much), I may give emacs another chance. Until then ...


    Chris Wareham

  • Re:This is definieltly alpha material (Score:3)

    by Gurlia ( 110988 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @03:49AM (#1456782)

    I'm looking forward to replacing Communicator too... Communicator is just too unstable and has too many bugs.

    Well, I hope Mozilla delivers on its promises (looks like it's going to, it's looking pretty good so far). We really need a standards-compliant browser out there ASAP so that web designers will stop producing pages that are compatible only with IE. Netscape has (or used to have; I hope still has) a large enough customer base that if Mozilla becomes popular among them, they will not be an insignificant percentage which web designers can ignore.

    Not that I care that much about sites that use IE-specific code -- most of them are just useless fluff anyway. But the average Joe user likes all that fluffy eye-candy, and we certainly don't want the Web to become proprietarized because of this.

  • About the MDI thing. Can MDI haters such as myself just run a bunch of copies of the browser or does that not work for some reason (like bookmark/cache problems or whatever)?
    --
  • The Mozilla build team is experienced enough to figure out for themselves when to post the source - copies of the build probably went out to the mirrors before being posted on the mozilla site. By the time binaries are available the slashdot effect for the sources will have subsided. They know what they're doing.

    Don't count on it. This morning when I checked, ftp.mozilla.org had 9 different binary distributions online, and the mozilla.org [mozilla.org] website does indeed have an announcement [mozilla.org] about it. Now it is appropriate to consider announcing this on Slashdot.

    Nevertheless, don't just assume all mirrors are up-to-date immediately; not all mirrors have any special access. When I checked this morning, the following mirrors appeared to be up-to-date:

    So, I found 4 current mirrors. But the other 7 mirrors sites I reached were out of date. (And many listed mirror sites no longer appear to have mirrors -- the mirror list needs to be updated, it would seem.)

    The moral of the story is that mirrors don't magically have the data, sometimes you have to give them some time -- and if you don't drive the load to the original source, the mirrors will work better for everyone...
  • > Next time you decide to post, remember the difference between your totally content-free post and the one above by Nerds. Nerds' post has actual information in it, yours is just flames.

    His was also wrong
    Off the top of my head, I can think of several components that make up IE, all of which can operate independently. There's the renderer and the HTML/XML parser, to name two, then there's the container. COM components themselves don't even *have* titlebars, that's still a MFC Application thing.

    But in Slashdotland, it's not about being right, it's about having information. Any information, right or wrong, as long as it bashes MS. It's not one bit different from the mass media trough all you god damn phonies look down on.

    News for nerds indeed. I'm going to have to look into calling myself something other than a nerd.
  • One thing that has to change in Netscape / Mozilla, is the speed. Go to freshmeat with netscape, and witness with pain the slowness with which the page is rendered. MUCH faster in IE.

    Netscape is also TOO unstable, it can be made to crash just by switching between different netscape windows while loading them fast enough. I still like netscape better than IE, but I can certainly see why lots of people prefer IE under Windows.

    Hopefully, and this is my belief, all this will change with Mozilla (once ready). With a fast, stable, clean and small (well..) browser, the free OS'es will have gone a long way towards the desktops.

    // Simon
  • I know nothing about IE so I don't know who's right or wrong. The point is that he put information in his post, you didn't even try. If you had put the info in the post I'm responding to in the other one, everybody would have been better off. The best thing about forums like this is that many people put in different bits of information and then others pick it apart, add new information, etc, to add to the whole.

    I think you're right about some people in the Linux/geek/whatever community that it's all about bashing MS but that's not true for everybody. Some of us actually want to learn and while I might not like IE, I'm all for learning about how it works from people like yourself that do know. It might take a second longer to add something to the conversation rather than just flaming but it makes everybody better overall.
  • I hear on the grapevine (actually at www.nedit.org) that NEdit 5.1 will be GPL'd and the next step is to make it a GTK application instead of Motif. Fantastic news if you ask me - nedit is the most kick-ass text editor on Unix IMHO.

  • Slices, dices, chops, cores! (Score:5)

    by Jikes ( 123986 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:00AM (#1456799)
    I guarantee on my small insignificant life that you will be delighted with the new functionality, stability, and efficiency in M12. It still eats RAM like a mother, isn't luxuriant-feeling like IE, and falls over every once in a while, but it's well behaved, significantly more responsive-feeling, and handles far more page/frame/ecmascript/java issues... As an added bonus, the Win32 version can find and use all your old plugins, like Flash!

    For the uninitiated, let's run down a few facts.

    *************************

    Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.

    Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.

    Mozilla is quite modular.

    Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.

    Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.

    Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.

    Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.

    The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.

    Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.

    Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.

    Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.

    Report any and all bugs to bugzilla.mozilla.com. Please follow the bug submission guidelines. A shitty bug report is worse than none at all, and wastes developer time.

    If you wish, you can do hourly downloads of binaries, weekly downloads of tarballs, or up-to-the-minute CVS of mozilla.

    You will be delighted with mozilla. If not, use something else.



  • Although previously, the linux version seemed to be lagging behind the win32 one, it has improved greatly between M11, and M12.

    1. It is way, way, way more stable, and is reaching the point where I can go for around 1.5-2 hours without a crash.

    2. The speed of the rendering is much faster, the incremental reflow is much better, and can be tuned with some pref editing, and the scrolling no longer has that ugly grey! :-).

    I'm happy to say, that the day the stable Mozilla is released, it'll make us all proud. The amount of fixes and speed increases seem to be accelerating quite quickly.

    Congrats to the mozilla team.

    Please remember to post bug reports too =]. They say on the page, that finding and documenting the bug is half the work.

    Lucas

  • A late reply, so it might nat get read :)

    CSS is a big thing - it has the ability to define EXACTLY how things are layed out on a page, etc. This is where the problems lie, becasue current browsers don't support this precision.

    That being said, CSS is still GREAT for defining fonts, body colors, etc. All it requires to make changes across an antire site (that might be 200+ html files) is changing it in a single place. CSS also has the ability to do relative font sizes based on the user defined prefered size - That is great becasue it still allows people to control their text so that people with bad eyesite can still read the web page.

    So, you're right - I could make webpages that are totally unreadable by people who use browsers that don't support the STANDARD. But, they can be used in a controlled manner to make the maintanence of sites much easier and not impede people whose browsers don't support them.
  • Could someone statically link M12 against glib2.1 and make it available? I still run glibc2.0 and would not like to break all my applications by upgrading. Thanks

  • Re:Mozilla speed (Score:3)

    by Matts ( 1628 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:04AM (#1456810) Homepage
    I have to say that mozilla already beat your comment. I've been using the pre-12's for a few days now, and it rocks. Barring a few scrolling problems, freshmeat and slashdot render instantly. The only issue now is waiting for the cache to be plugged in (apparently Intel is working on an advanced cache for Mozilla) and for a few stability issues to be fixed. Otherwise it's looking really great. Kudos to the developers.

  • Re:This is definieltly alpha material (Score:3)

    by yist ( 100285 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:15AM (#1456817)
    I'm looking forward to replacing Communicator too... Communicator is just too unstable and has too many bugs.

    I hope everyone out there is doing the Right Thing (tm) and reporting any bugs they find. There really is no use in saying "Hey this program is full of bugs" and not doing anything about it, whilst you can.
    Found a communicator bug?:

    -

    Help make a better product!
  • The memory cache has already landed. It's disabled by default due to some outstanding bugs, but you can turn it on by editing your prefs:

    user_pref("browser.cache.enable", true);

    It works well for me (Win32).

  • Source code size (Score:3)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:20AM (#1456820) Homepage Journal
    21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel? Should my browser really be bigger than my windowing system?

    I have a lot of respect for Mozilla, but I have to say: isn't it about time to fork the code-based into several smaller projects?

    It would be nice, for example, if the mail handler were a separate program so that any mailer could (ab)use the same API in order to replace Mozilla's default. Or, is this already possible with the plug-in API?

  • But hasn't Netscape/AOL shown a complete lack of interest in fixing bugs in Communicator? Haven't a lot of the same bugs persisted from 4.5 to 4.6 to 4.7? I believe a lot of people have given up on them.

  • Having one big window just makes it harder to click quickly to other programs. The taskbar in Windows or the Mac's Finder menu help, but don't make up for the waste of screen real-estate by non-essential backing store.
    Alt-Tab has always been my friend. I rarely drop the cursor down on the taskbar to switch applications.
    The biggest problem with Opera is that it doesn't to table background colours (not even with stylesheets).
    Have you got a URL that shows this? Through testing here w/3.61, reading Opera's supported CSS documentation [opera.com], and checking webreview.com's CSS Master support list [webreview.com] I haven't found any mentioning of this.
  • For some reason I seem to remember around the time they were first working on Gecko that there was talk of the entire browser fitting on a floppy. It was supposed to be incredibly fast, small, and stable. Now all I hear about it is that it's slow and bloated.

  • I compiled it this morning. It rocks.

    The announcement was a little quick off the mark - binaries are due to be posted within the next couple of hours - but Mozillazine (great site) has news of M12 binaries for Solaris and RPMs for Red Hat [mozillazine.org]

    The speed at which Mozilla has come along recently is something else. If this isn't alpha, then it is damn close. Download, enjoy, and report those bugs!

    Dave

    --

  • First of all, kudos to the developers!.

    second, a litte offtopic:

    There is on feature I want in a browser and still haven't seen anywhere.
    I want a button that goes to the main page of the website.
    e.g. when I'm browsing http://www.foobar.org/foo/bar.html and I press this button the browser has to go to http://www.foobar.org/
    does anyone know if there is feature like this in Mozilla ?
    this would save me a lot of time re-typing the adress in the location bar or searching for the 'home' button on a website.
    ---
  • I installed KRASH and noticed that konqueror has an Up arrow that brings you up one directory in the hierarchy. Pretty nifty.

  • Re:Slices, dices, chops, cores! (Score:3)

    by aeonek ( 73537 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:50AM (#1456847)
    Comments:

    Mozilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, which is certified Open Source.

    True for a significant part of it, but some of it is Netscape Public License. Although it doesn't restrict the use of the source code, it includes som clause that gives Netscape special privilegies.

    Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape whatsoever, except for a majority of the authors, the backwards-plugin functionality, and the fact that Mozilla will be incorporated into Netscape 5.

    Oh, come on! Mozilla has a LOT to do with Netscape. Everybody knows that.

    Mozilla is quite modular.

    True.

    Mozilla is completely cross platform. If the OS exists, Mozilla will probably have no problems running on it.

    You have to port it, and it's not trivial. Granted, 97% of mozilla is completely platform-independent.

    Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.

    True.

    Mozilla will do to-the-standard CSS1, HTML4.0, DOM Level 1, XML, a great majority of CSS2 (although this is not promised), and the latest bastard variant of Javascript.

    IIRC, it will do ECMAScript, which is the standardized version.

    Mozilla will not have crypo. That's for binary-only vendors, or your own project.

    True.

    The entire UI (ENTIRE) will be themeable. So if you don't care for the UI, don't bitch, because theme support is coming soon, and you will be able to write your own.

    It has been themable for ages.

    Mozilla is going to be large because that is how it is. Don't bitch about bloat, because none of the weekend-project HTML widgets your favorite toolkit sports are able to do everything Mozilla does yet.

    It's not going to be large compared to IE or NS, but maybe if you compare to lynx...

    Mozilla is not going to force any particular Java Virtual Machine, HTML editor, or mailer on you. Although the comes-with editor and mailer are extremely nice this time around.

    Well, those components are in the binaries, so you have to download them. Not the JVM, but messenger and composer. However, they don't get loaded before you use them, and you can compile your own version without them if you want.

    Mozilla will be a compile-it-yourself type thing if you so desire.

    True.

  • 21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel?
    Absolutely!

    Or, more precisely, the kernel should be as small as possible while maintaining the desired abstractions. Same for the windowing system (X11) - you want it to be small, tight, and fast.

    And remember, there's lots of un-merged and non-mainstream kernel code out there (DevFS, ReiserFS, ext3, PCMCIA, international patches at kerneli.org, drivers drivers drivers...) so maybe Mozilla's LOC count isn't quite as far ahead of the kernel's as it may seem :-)

  • Re:JAVA support in M12 : Needs Java 1.3 (Score:3)

    by Matts ( 1628 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @04:55AM (#1456852) Homepage
    Mozilla requires Java 1.3 for it's OJI (Open Java Interface). Currently Java 1.3 is available only in beta, but that should change before mozilla is released.
  • The Style Sheet support is FANTASTIC! (I'm a web developer, so I've seen the havoc that trying to support different browsers can reak!)
    For a really good CSS test, check out:
    http://style.verso.com/boxacidtest/ [verso.com]

    It renders horribly in Netscape 4.x series, but in Mozilla, it is EXACTLY the same as the reference picture. It got me pretty excited :)
  • It's good. No, it's great.

    I've been developing an app that relies completely on styles for changing it's display properties. Sadly some things just didn't work out right when I followed the CSS1 spec to the letter in IE5 (e.g. the "white-space: nowrap" style didn't work in td tags - you have to revert to the HTML 3.2 nowrap tag instead... bah!). However I decided to check out the output in Mozilla. Works beautifully. All styles are rendered exactly as described in the CSS spec. This is an incredible boon for me.

    However... of course this won't mean we can just develop web sites to the full CSS spec. Unfortunately those older browsers still exist, and often don't even degrade properly. IE4/5 now seems to have a 60% market share (or something like that).
  • But hasn't Netscape/AOL shown a complete lack of interest in fixing bugs in Communicator? Haven't a lot of the same bugs persisted from 4.5 to 4.6 to 4.7? I believe a lot of people have given up on them.

    That's not surprising. The Communicator base has no future. It's a dead product. Why fix bugs in something that you don't want anyone to use anyways. Communicator is only used for 20% of surfing anymore either, as people have started to use IE while mozilla is being developed. Put all efforts into mozilla so that when it is released everyone will be able to drop IE for a real browser.

    That's all that IE is anyways. An up-to-date crutch to use while waiting for Mozilla. A big thanks to Microsoft for providing a browser while we take the time to do it right!

    -Brent
  • M11 was alright, but still on the buggy side with odd menu glitches and a variety of other annoyances. M12 has fixed the menus, renders pages super-fast, and everything looks crisp. Not bad at all.

    But I couldn't get it to compile out of the box, even with the IDL libraries installed. However, I did track down a binary RPM and all went smoothly. Still, the memory footprint and CPU usage are excessive for day-to-day use. A couple of pages takes up a whopping 30 megs of RAM! Lots of debugging code, I'd imagine. There's still plenty of minor glitches, but nothing that should be too difficult to fix.

    I wonder if Opera will make it out before xmas for a comparison...

  • Crypto back-port (Score:3)

    by evilpenguin ( 18720 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @05:11AM (#1456865)
    You know, I've never really looked into the RFCs on SSL and https. Is anyone following Mozilla closely enough to know how hard it is going to be to get crypto into Mozilla after the fact, either by licensed RSA implementation "plugin" (ugh) or by use of some compatible, patent-free, open source library developed outside the United States and thus not subject to our boneheaded crypto export restrictions?

    I realize that this is a complex question...

  • Netscape is horrid with standards compliance, as earlier posters have stated. IE 5, and to a lesser extent 4, are quite good with supporting HTML 4.0 and the CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets) specifications. Most of the sites I've seen with "IE only-looks bad in Netscape" only post that because their style sheets are CSS1-correct but Netscape has lots and lots of problems with some of the features in the style sheets. You may want to check out The Little Shop of CSS Horrors [haughey.com] for a great demonstration of cross-browser compatibility.

  • Not to bash Microsoft for being Microsoft, but they're mindshare of IE is growing terribly fast. Communicator is buggy and lacking in features. They really need to get a rock solid product out the door and never look back.

    IE's marketshare is growing because it is the *only* browser out there. To claim that Communicator competes with IE is to claim that a '96 model Chevy competes with this years model Ford. Sorry, it'll never fly.

    We all know now that it won't work to compete against Microsoft on features alone. If IE and Mozilla are identical, no one will use Mozilla. Mozilla needs to compete in areas that Microsoft can't. Outside of just plain old web browsing. Mozilla will need to use applications like Internet Appliances, wireless phones, web pads, administration front-ends, as a wrench to get in the market. From there, they'll be able to overtake MS. Nokia, AOL, Zope, and other companies will be using Mozilla in their applications. As a plain browser, Mozilla and IE can be used interchangably. So there is no loss if everyone uses IE for web browsing. When Mozilla is finished, people will use it. But embedded is harder to replace. Mozilla needed to focus, not on just browsing, to the work with the companies that will embed mozilla to make mozilla the best embeddable browser ever.

    -Brent
  • the developer preview of gecko (the rendering engine that lies at the heart of mozilla) fit on a floppy. Since then the mozilla team has added a UI to the project, as well as OJI architecture, plugin architecture, mail and news code, etc. This project is still quite small comparatively speaking and will be fast and stable.

    Asa

    (posted with an M13 cycle nightly build from 12/29)
  • No. The announcement can't wait until there are binaries. *ANYONE* can generate binaries from the source.

    Why wait for binaries to make an announcement?

    What platforms do you think we should wait until binaries exist for before something is announced? If there's no unixware binary or no intel solaris binary or no sparc linux binary, should we wait?

    Why wait for a webmaster to update a website when the files are on ftp?

    here's how it works:
    - developers write code and check in changes to source control
    - interested parties check ftp sites or cvs and download snapshots. Read Changelog. Compile. Provide feedback. Repeat as often as time permits.
    - developers/testers know well in advance of any official announcement when a new milestone is near *BECAUSE THE DOCS SAY WHAT WILL BE IN NEXT MILESTONE*
    - developers announce on slashdot for the benefit of the testers who may not be able to build snapshots, but are interested.
    - slashdotters download src code and compile to get optimized binaries that take full advantage of their system libraries and architecture.

    I would never prefer a binary for something that I could easily build from source. The only times I get a binary are when it's for an OS that I don't have a nice development machine, or for something hard to build like X11.
  • You can actually enable the memory cache in the Preferences dialog without touching the prefs file. It's under the "Debug" preferences, the last option in the list.

    And it is off by default.
  • I always see a "wait for the mirrors" article posted to every announcement like this, and it always gets moderated way up high. Maybe because it seems helpful. Well, actually what you're doing is insulting somebody's intelligence.

    The Mozilla build team is experienced enough to figure out for themselves when to post the source - copies of the build probably went out to the mirrors before being posted on the mozilla site. By the time binaries are available the slashdot effect for the sources will have subsided. They know what they're doing.

    The important thing right now is to get as many developers as possible building the source. If you're a developer and you're just downloading the binaries and maybe sending in the odd bug report, you're kind of wasting your talent don't you think?

    For anyone who hasn't built it yet... the source download is 20-something meg, but it expands to 130 meg or so, then inflates itself to over 600 meg by the time it's finished building, so you'd better have a nice round gig free. The build takes about 45 minutes.

  • Gecko still does fit on a floppy (Score:3)

    by deusx ( 8442 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @05:32AM (#1456892) Homepage
    Browser != HTML engine.

    Mozilla as a browser will not fit on a floppy. Various Mozilla technology components, such as the Gecko rendering engine, most likely will.

    You don't really think that Nokia, who IIRC expressed interest in using Mozilla on a wireless device, will be using the same Mozilla browser as it's assembled on Linux and Win32, do you?

    No, they'll prolly be using a version of the HTML engine, with a new browser wrapped around it.

  • I pulled down a pre-M12 nightly last week and for the first time, Gecko nailed ZDNet pages properly.

    At last, some hope that it will be an acceptable mainstream browser. And, oh, at least on Win32, the XUL widget stuff is suddenly many orders of magnitude faster. Still a bit awkward-looking, but it's pretty much as fast as native dialogs.

    It's still months away from being a product, but it's clearly turned the corner. Now if they can work on usability, especially in terms of plugin/embed support, etc., they may yet have something interesting indeed.

  • Well... (Score:2)

    by Gleef ( 86 )
    It was buggy and unstable (considerably more so than 4.61), so yes, but the bulk of the difference between M11 and M12 is supposed to be bug fixes, so that should be less of a problem.

    Other than Lynx, there's no released browser out there that's free of major problems. I use Netscape because I need inline graphics and ECMAScript, and it sucks less than the alternatives. I plan to switch to Mozilla (or some other Gecko-based alternative) as my regular browser as soon as the bug fixes get it to the right point where I can use it and still get all my work done.

    ----
  • It fits on those LS120 floppies. What were you thinking? A 1.4M floppy? hahahaha silly rabbit.
  • Every day that IE 5 is out there and Communicator 5 is not, is a victory for Microsoft and its legions of FUD-spewing zombies.

    Not really. A web browser is a commodity product. Like bread. You buy one brand of bread one week, but another brand the next week. Nothing keep you using one brand of bread over another expect your own preference. It's the same with a web browser. There is no technical reason forcing you to use a certain web browser. Use IE this week, Mozilla the next. Even if IE had 100% marketshare, it wouldn't mean anything when Mozilla was released.

    I agree with you about MS FUD though. They'll try to milk as much from IE as they can. DIE, baby, DIE!!

    -Brent
  • I haven't used M11 on Linux, but I can tell you that on both Win32 and the MacOS, while Mozilla looks cool, it's unusably unstable...My systems usually run without any major hiccups, but the moment M11 was launched, my machines would quickly grind to a halt....

    I'm not bashing Mozilla, i hope that's not what it sounds like. I like Mozilla. It's just not in my eyes releasable (as of M11)... I'll go download M12 and (*hope*)that more progress has been made....
  • I'm not familiar with the mozilla source, but since hooks have been left in for netscape to put in RSA code, I'd be very surprised indeed if it weren't dead easy to drop in some OpenSSL.

    Woohoo: 128bit encryption for all.
    --
  • If you're new to the nightly build and 'M' release program here are some tips.

    Milestone releases are usually more stable than the nightly builds but suffer in that they are a bit dated.

    The M12 milestone (coming out this morning) has seen only limited changes in the last week and a half. It should be pretty stable (I've been playing with the recent M12 cycle nightly builds a lot and they are more stable than netscape 4.x on my machine.)

    And if you have not taken a look at the mail and news functionality because of performance problems in the past, now would be a good time. I've use mozilla news exclusively now and while it's a bit slower than 4.x it's quite usable.

    If you're interested in the bleeding edge grab a nightly build labled as part of the new M13 development cycle. There have been quite a few really cool checkins in the last few days that will not be a part of the M12 release.

    One final note: While many people report haveing to delete all old mozilla files before installing new ones, I've kept the same profile for the last two weeks while swapping in 8 new nightly builds without any problems (nice to keep all my bookmarks and news message read/unread status etc.)

    Mozilla is kicking ass. Get a build (get a recent nightly) and give it a spin.

    Asa
    (posted with an M13 dev cycle build from 12/20)
  • I got my source at ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/packages/infosystems/WWW /clients/Netscape/Mozilla/mozilla/releas es/m12
    sorry for no html link, i suppose i could look at a little html for that, but like I said, I already got mine :)

  • Still smaller than Emacs ;-) (Score:3)

    by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @06:38AM (#1456917) Homepage
    21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel?
    Well, it is less than the source for Emacs 21 (26 MB .{c,h,el} files).
    Of course, Emacs does do a lot more than Mozilla.

  • Mozilla is a very insanely complex program, which is probably why it doesn't have a lot of outside hackers. It's not a weekend project, and the codebase is enormously sophisticated.
    It is true that Mozilla is complicated. The checked out CVS source is huge at 128M and requires knowledge of things like COM that most unix hackers don't know. But the reason that Mozilla has failed to attract a large number of contributors is because up until M12, as pointed out by jwz (writing about the old code base, but the argument still stands), the browser hasn't been usable. And very few people have the resources and will to work on software when they can't see the benefits of their work. If M12 is as stable on unix as people are saying, I think that situation will change fast and you'll see many bugs fixed and features added (ad nauseum) Real Soon Now.
  • As for getting developers to build the source, it's too late to be helpful for M12.

    You don't get it. It's never too late to get the source: once you have it you can keep up to date with the development tree through CVS. How do you sell a puppy? By letting someone take the puppy home. How do you get developers to sign on for Mozilla's final development phase? By getting the source into their hands.

    what purpose is served by slamming the FTP servers to grab the sources, especially when most people want the binaries?

    Interest in Mozilla tends to peak around the time of each milestone release. That's the best time to sign up new developers. Nuff said?
  • Actually, tinderbox is limited to the architectures running it. If you have a common but different installation which causes build problems compiling on your system will expose this, which can be filed as a bug, and fixed...

  • So let me get this straight: Microsoft's marketing practices are as bad as slavery and abusive child labor?
    You are committing the fallacy of the Extended Analogy [tulane.edu]:
    The fallacy of the Extended Analogy often occurs when some suggested general rule is being argued over. The fallacy is to assume that mentioning two different situations, in an argument about a general rule, constitutes a claim that those situations are analogous to each other.

    This fallacy is best explained using a real example from a debate about anti-cryptography legislation:

    "I believe it is always wrong to oppose the law by breaking it."

    "Such a position is odious: it implies that you would not have supported Martin Luther King."

    "Are you saying that cryptography legislation is as important as the struggle for Black liberation? How dare you!"

    HTH. HAND.

  • No wonder Microsoft wanted to see Netscape dead. Microsoft has everything to lose if the world will collectively embrace a new, standards compliant browsing platform. Mozilla will provide just that, and like M12 is starting to show, offer an additional bonus: it's quickly becoming the absolutely best browser out there.

    Sooner than you think, the Mozilla 1.0 release will be in the hands of anyone that's interested, in complete source form. This WILL spawn zillions of of new, Mozilla-based browser version. They will have minuscule market shares at first, but that's when the big players will enter: Computer manufacturers will start making browsers to bundle with their machines, application developers will start integrating browser features into existing apps, big corporations will create custom browsers for internal use.

    Each of these new browsing platforms will make little difference on its own, but grouped together, they will create a single, compatible, cross-platform application environment that is based on accepted industry standards. Mozilla will be the catalyst of life in this expanding pool of diverse browsers, and together the pool will quickly challenge Internet Explorer's position as the dominant browser.

    There will be no reason to ponder if Compaq, Dell or Apple will include the Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer with their machines. They can and will roll their own, emphasizing their brand's unique selling proposition through innovative, custom features and look-n-feel.

    How will that be possible? Luckily, it's a certainity that Microsoft will be barred from forcing their distribution channel (OEMs) to distribute Internet Explorer with other Microsoft products. This will level the playing field and launch wide-scale Mozilla-based browser development.

    The emerging new browsers will share an API that is the W3C standards suite, and in this Microsoft-vs-the-world situation Microsoft will witness their embrace-extend-extinguish strategy becoming a public relations nightmare. Eventually Microsoft has to follow suit and develop a standards compliant browser. When this is realized at Redmond, it may very well be that the company will even switch to use the Mozilla layout engine as a goodwill stunt.

    Consequences: Microsoft will lose some of the applications barrier to entry they've so feverishly protected all these years. Faced with this reality, they will even claim that the barried never existed. The Open Source camp will rejoice, but only to see Microsoft products grow their market share by sheer inertia.

    Marko

    Disclaimer: my crystal ball was being polished, so I had to pull this out of my ass. Sorry.

  • Netscape: they knew what they were doing (Score:3)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Tuesday December 21, 1999 @07:07AM (#1456938)
    They knew all along that cludging standards and implementing their own half-assed versions would make it more difficult for the end-user, but they did it anyway for the same reason all software companies make their own proprietary file formats, etc. They wanted to lock the end-user into using only Netscape. Yes, some of it had to do with general coding laziness, and some of it had to do with not wanting to have to wait for the various international bodies to shove stuff through committee and release a spec, but most of it was classic monopoly-building strategy.

    What they didn't count on was MS coming along and being better at this game. MS and monopolies -- you'd think they could've seen it coming.

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