4 Years Later, The Mozilla Tide Has Turned 923
dave writes "In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, in light of the excellent Firefox 0.8 release it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
Amusingly enough, they don't always work in IE either. My mother and sister where having problems with not being able to type in the Rich Text Control. I showed them how to turn it off every time, but it was still very annoying. I finally gave them Firebird 0.7. No rich text controls, no pop up ads, no viruses, just pure web browsing bliss. They haven't looked back.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
In any case, Rich Text email is highly overrated. My family can barely send an email, much less know what to do with all those formatting buttons! Sometimes, less is more.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
It has to be possible though, and without much extra work, because I have seen WYSIWYG editors on message boards now, that work in IE and Mozilla with no trouble.
Whatever they use at Codejock [codejock.com], which I think is WebWizForums [webwizforums.com], says that If you are using Internet Explorer 5+ (windows only), Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.3+, Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1+ [codejock.com] it should work fine.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I wish I could get my mom using firefox/thunderbird. She has a burning hatred for the word "mozilla", and I do truly mean the word, because she's been using mozilla for a few months, I just disguised it to look like Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. She loves it, but she's convinced that mozilla is the devil or something.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
docs [mozilla.org]
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember reading somewhere that design is the art of making choices. Well designed apps (or products for that matter) make good choices. Apps that don't make choices are passing the buck, in a way. Many open source developers seem reluctant to make those design choices, and pass the responsibility on to the user. Sometimes they can forget who is their target audience. Note that I don't think the Mozilla folks are in this category - Firefox is remarkably easy to install and works great with the default settings.
The best approach IMHO is to make the hard choices and bury the option settings where the geeks can easily get at them, but where Grandma is not likely to Ctrl-Alt-(whatever) her font settings to Cyrillic by mistake. (Of course if Grandma is a geek who reads Cyrillic then by all means go for it...)
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be a nice feature to have...but I believe that this is a Microsoft proprietary extension to the JavaScript DOM, not a standard. Which is not to say that the Mozilla team is incapable of reproducing it, just that they may have some qualms about it.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Informative)
It's already implemented. Mozilla has Rich-Text controls; They have dubbed it Midas [mozilla.org].
It's been in Mozilla since around 1.2 or 1.3. Of course though, their implementation is standards-based, while IE's is not. Just like XML document loading, and various other features of the DOM, you have to code for standards, and then again for IE to work.
If you have a text area whose ID attribute is called "edit", you can easily start to use Midas by doing something like:
You can also view a Midas Demo [mozilla.org].
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I was laughing the other day about how I am excited to go browse a webpage again. I was tinkering with the features of firefox, and was just loving it. I had used Mozilla on my Linux box at home, but to be using firefox at work on my Win2k machine is absolutely refreshing. Keep up the good work guys.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
The IE-only way of doing this doesn't work. The standards-based way however does work. Most blogging tools support rich text in gecko browsers. That MS uses its own proprietary stuff instead of the standards is hardly surprising, and I suspect yahoo and geocities are just suffering from inertia (because admittedly, mozilla hasn't had this capability for more than a year).
You can use User Agent Switcher (Score:5, Informative)
One solution is to download and install the User Agent Switcher Extension [myacen.com]. You can then have FireBird/Fox/Mozilla send the IE 6.0 User Agent string.
Another extension that was a requisite for me to move from IE to FireBird/Fox was the GoogleBar [mozdev.org], which emulates the Google Toolbar for IE. (They also have ones to mimic MSN and Yahoo! toolbar, IIRC.)
Re:You can use User Agent Switcher (Score:5, Insightful)
Except by doing this, you're casting your vote as "I am an IE user so no need to fix your website." instead of "I use a standards-based browser and my experience on your site sucked." Webmasters DO use logs to see what percentage of their visitors are using what browsers, and this information is used to decide whether revamping the site to standards is worth it. By faking your UA string, you're skewing the stats against yourself, and are actually hurting your cause instead of helping. It's better to leave the UA alone and work with the site in other ways... this way you're investing in a long-term fix, not a short-term one.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lets help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lets help (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's IE still supports the original keywords of course, but that's because Microsoft pretty much came out at the beginning and said they'd challenge the patent in court if need be, and Netscape backed down (or at least didn't sue.) Opera et al though had more to fear from a lawsuit and adopted the "!"s instead.
You're right, if it wasn't for the built in extentions to IIS and Apache to translate HEAD to HE!D, etc, on the fly for non-Netscape browsers, we'd all be stuck with Netscape and IE.
Re:Lets help (Score:5, Funny)
http://validator.w3.org/
Wait a minute..
Re:Lets help (Score:5, Insightful)
What you might want to do instead, is to have a 'tested with' list somewhere on your page, which lists the browsers you tested your page with. It shows that you take your work seriously, and mentions a lot of browsers people might want to try.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
the tragedy is that real "average" users use whichever browser ships as the default on their operating system.
a not insignifcant chunk of computer users aren't even aware of the concept of "applications". they don't see "explorer" it's just "the internet".
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as you could probably care less about the thickness of the heating wire inside your toaster, most other people on this planet could care less about what browser they use. They just want to get their pr0n|warez|stock info|etc.
Can you blame them? NO. They have more important things to be doing.
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
And by the way, I do care what is in virtually every product I buy. It's not enough that it "just works" - I know everything can fail, everything has its dangers. So I want to know where they are. I need to know what's in the product, and I hate it if everything is hidden to me and there are so many warning labels that I couldn't use the product if I really took care of all of them.
You may think everyone should be able to use products without understanding them. I want that everyone understands as much as possible of the technology behind them.
People should better understand _why_ not to put their cat into a microwave oven...
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Funny)
You may just spark the curiousity of a few people out here. And stay away from my kitty!
Re:The tides have changed.. Positive outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone knows why not to put a cat in the oven.
In Denmark we have a concept of an "average person" in our legal system. If you did things that the "average person" should know are stupid then you cannot sue. The average person should know not to put cats in microwaves, yet some people still do equally stupid things and get away with sueing companies for the damages these people do to themselves.
I have no clue how infrared communication works, nor do I care, but I know that when I push the buttons on my remote, the tv should come on.
Do you send angry letters to the company that made your remote when it stops working or do you know enough to change the batteries? what about when you cannot shoot the infrared signal though a wall? Knowing just a little bit about how things work make your life a lot easier.
Do you know exactly how the ignition system on your car works?
I am required by law to know, if I want to have a driver's license. Also I am required to know stuff about how quickly I can bring a car to a full stop at various speeds. I am required to know enough not to hurt myself and others.
Likewise, if a user double-clicks on the IE icon, they may not know that it's IE that opens up, but they know that "the interweb" should come up and their home page should load.
Again, I know enough not to hurt myself or my software. People should know that they are actually putting their software and data at risc when installing untrusted software. We teach our children not to talk to strangers, let's also teach them not to install strange software.
The tide is high, but are we rolling on.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos to the Mozilla team for Firefox. It is pretty sweet. Let's hope that the nameless company in the Pacific northwest loses it grip on the browser market. Not likely, but we can always hope.
Re:The tide is high, but are we rolling on.... (Score:5, Interesting)
At my company, users are switching in droves today, as a direct result of the IE patch our helpdesk pushed out yesterday.
Re:The tide is high, but are we rolling on.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Standards are being ignored and shoved to the wayside. Sure, make a website that conforms and blah blah blah, but does it matter? No, not really... People use IE. People will probably continue to use IE. If a website is "correct" and IE is "broken" because of ignoring standards and the webpage displays incorrectly the IE people are going to complain. The IE people will win, hands down.
It's unfortunate but it's true.
Easy to solve (Score:5, Interesting)
People immediately recognize "Netscape," even to this day.. which is a good thing.
Re:Easy to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Get them to use Mozilla, and explain open source later. Works well.
Firefox on OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought "Wow this is just like Safari without the metal." I mean, common it's a web browser. What I dont like is that the scroll bars are screwed up on Firefox if you load anything other than the default theme (Under OSX anyway). So with nothing to add over Safari, I probably won't be switching. But if I was using Windows at home, I'd love to have the tabbed browsing that IE doesn't provide. Then again, in windows I have a task bar...
Re:Firefox on OS X (Score:5, Informative)
Several of the bindings for Firefox changed between the 0.7 and 0.8 versions, so older themes that have not yet been updated for Firefox 0.8 will have problems; one of those problems manifests itself by making your scrollbars disappear. Once the themes are fixed, this problem won't exist (it's not specific to OSX).
Also, as for Firefox vs. Safari, I have a Powerbook, but I prefer Firefox on it. While it handles tabs similar to Safari, I can't browse anymore without find-as-you-type, a feature that only Moz/Firefox has (to the best of my knowledge). My only complaint about it is that NSITheme isn't fully implemented on OSX, so you don't get native-looking widgets (unlike on WinXP).
Re:Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
The more Microsoft continues to integrate, the more it sets its customers up for even greater degrees of security risk. As vuruses and and other maladies continue to plague the Windows OS, people will begin to see the light - bigger and more bloated is not always better, no matter how tightly "integrated" it is.
Re:The tide is high, but are we rolling on.... (Score:5, Funny)
yeah, but each time I'm with friends and they surf, and they get popups, I show them fire(bird-fox), and tabbed browsing.
I'm betting that Microsoft is getting customers faster than you're making friends.
Re:The tide is high, but are we rolling on.... (Score:5, Informative)
I remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess what? They were right after all. Congratulations to the Mozilla team and thanks for the excellent browser(s)!
Re:I remember... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I remember... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm always curious what exact configuration the people who say this are running. I've run both the suite and the separate browsing app (firebird/firefox) for literally years, and ever since about mozilla 1.2 it has been fast and stable for me, on at least 10 different machines.
One well known caveat is that if you're having stability problems you should start with a fresh profile. I've had this problem exactly once. Saw crashes, created a new profile, copied over bookmarks.html, and the crashes disappeared.
The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Interesting)
Happy Trails,
Erick
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Informative)
IE can do tabbed browsing, with an extra download.
It can do pop-up blocking, with an extra download.
It can do probably do better cookie management and other features, all with extra downloads.
Why not just download the one browser that has it all? It won't be any help if everyone switches to a new IE that has all these features built in, but it's one of the great examples of how it's MS playing catchup, and not everyone else.
I introduce more and more people here at work to Mozilla all the time. It's great when I visit people and see them using Mozilla. I might see a pop-up on the screen, and say "you know you can disable that?" Or sometimes when we get into privacy concerns and someone mentions cookies - "Mozilla has a great cookie manager, instead of accepting or rejecting, you can select wether you want one or not". Some people say "but there's so many, what a pain!" to which I can respond "but it'll remember the sites that you say are ok!" "Really? Wow!"
Even the image management is great - sometimes you can't get rid of ads entirely, but you can block a lot of images.
I think there are a LOT of compelling features in Mozilla. Mozilla is, IMO, the technological leader, not the follower. IE may have more users, and it may be the leader in usage, but it's simply not as good as Mozilla, IMO.
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:4, Informative)
That is because Firebird 0.7 and firefox 0.8 have a google search widget built in, and other searches can be added to the list.
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Insightful)
FireFox features I can't live without:
All that boils down to:
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Interesting)
Better standards support. IE would have to break backwards compatibility to fix this. They won't.
Better security track record. No known unfixed security flaws. This is a good reason to go from outlook (express) to thunderbird too, by the way. Don't be a worm victim. Switch.
Smaller download. Firefox 0.8 is less than 7 megs and getting smaller. I very much doubt IE's next service pack will fit in that category. If your choice is between firefox or IE's next service pack, and you're on modem, it makes sense to go for firefox. I have a modem-using friend who uses firebird 0.6 as a browser because she doesn't want to suffer the huge download to bring her basic installation up to the current service pack.
Better extensibility. IE doesn't have a framework for easily and quickly developing extensions with just a zip tool and notepad. It won't have it till longhorn.
Better web development functionality. The javascript console, the dom inspector, the various bookmarklets, the less permissive engine (which points out errors in your code much more easily than IE), and the in general better standards support work to make gecko-based browsers much better choices for web developers. Though I admit that is a niche market.
Currently in most cases firefox is also faster (except on first load of the app, because it's not preloaded). But I suppose an IE service pack might fix this. I doubt it though.
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Interesting)
As a result, standards-based sites often look prettier in firefox.
Re:The Popup Killer spreads the Gospel (Score:5, Interesting)
And, because they're standards compliant, the alpha effect and the Tetris game both work in Opera too. But not in IE.
I could really care less about who wins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I could really care less about who wins. (Score:4, Informative)
MIRROR (Score:5, Informative)
By Dave Whitinger
In 1999, I editorialized that the browser was the battleground that would win or lose us the whole thing. 4 years later, it is time to update the article with a slightly more optimistic view.
On November 5th, 1999 I wrote an essay to the community titled The Battle That Could Lose Us The War. In that essay I described my mounting frustration over the losing battle we were fighting in the area of web browsers. My conclusion was that if Microsoft was able to dominate the web on the desktop, it would be a short matter of time before they could extend and dominate the web on the server. I knew that Mozilla was our last and only hope for winning this.
In the years since then, despite enormous and sundry pressures against them, the Mozilla project has moved forward at a remarkable pace. They somehow rebounded from each major setback even stronger. Milestones were passed, 1.0 came and went, and the layout engine Gecko started to pick up speed and became used in a variety of applications, including Galeon and Netscape 6 and 7. When AOL finally turned the developers loose, they responded by apparantly doubling their efforts and moving even faster and smarter. Whether you like Mozilla or not, their persistence is an inspiration to the entire Free Software community.
So much progress has been made, in fact, that today, more than four years since my gloomy outlook was keyed, with unspeakable pleasure I am now in a position to report that this tide has finally turned. The Gecko layout engine seems unbreakable and is reportedly more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. The Firefox browser is fast and stable, and supports the plugins out there that the users want and need, and, for the first time in several years, my wife is actually excited about her Linux desktop again. For the first time since Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, I am seeing people switching browsers in droves.
Furthermore, we now have the same browser as the Windows users. By making sure that my web pages look good in Firefox, I can be sure that it will look similarly in Firefox for Windows. Speaking of Windows, many of the Windows folks that I know, including those computer newbies that still think the "internet" is in their "Internet Explorer icon", have already made the switch to Firefox. Joe-User is excited about Firefox, and this means fast adoption of this browser in all computing circles.
Not only is Mozilla/Firefox a superior product, but it is built in the best traditions of quality software: simple, extensible and free (libre). The extensions support in Firefox is simply genius and will continue to create an entire industry of software products to enhance and customize the browser for individuals.
At the risk of fostering an attitude of complacency, I must say that the Mozilla project has breathed new life into the web, and as a side-effect, into the Linux desktop. The war is still far from over, but the tide of this crucial battle has most definitely turned. Things have never looked brighter for Linux (as a server, and a desktop), nor for the computing community as a whole, as a direct result of the tireless and outstanding work of the Mozilla developers. Well met!
droves you say!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Droves you say?! is that future sight?! firefox comes up less than WEBTV in most of the webtrends reports I am seeing. I look at the statistics for a number of frequently used (100k visitors a day) sites and do not see firefox gaining users. (note - Ill happily eat my words if the statistics show a significant increase.) but still... droves?
Joe User does not give a fuck about standards... in fact - he is HAPPY to view websites that have broken table tags and still display in IE. Joe user wants to continue not thinking and have stuff given to him. for that reason alone, Internet Explorer will continue to be the most used windows browser, and until the tides turn on the desktop operating system situation, IE will stay in its comfy place.
Webtrends is useless for a metric in this regard. (Score:5, Informative)
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics. Be careful what you accept as facts and what context the facts are from.
Re:droves you say!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla will win ground on 3 representative features: No popups, different security issues, and tabbed browsing.
The popups affects everyone using IE. Impress upon people that popups are the result of Microsoft screwing people over and not caring - it's not even a half truth. It's an obnoxious misfeature that irritates end users but gives Microsoft friends in business. It should have never been implemented. While Microsoft serves their own interests and contemplates their cash flow, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Internet Explorer has about ninety billion security flaws. Even if you have all the patches, you'll still want to disable ActiveX. You still don't have a convenient way of blocking images from particular servers (spam related, annoying, inappropriate). I'm not going to pretend that Mozilla is flawless on the security front, but it does represent a distinct minority of security problems. Bad people attack IE, Microsoft is slow to fix IE, Microsoft designed IE with a million other security issues. While Microsoft drags their feet and does everything possible to make money, Mozilla went ahead and solved the problem.
Mozilla presents tabbed browsing, among other features, that are simply better than what IE offers. Type ahead links, one key to search for text, Google built into the button bar, a spiffy download manager in Firebird 0.8, and 2 clicks to block images are fantastic additions to your web browser.
So really, you'd be a complete fool to use IE. Maybe Mozilla isn't your cup of tea, but you'd be a fool to use IE. Maybe you are required to use IE for a few specific sites, but you'd be a fool to therefore use IE for all your web browsing. Maybe you can't install Mozilla on your lab/work computer, but you can install Firebird on a USB Flash Drive ($20 or less) and take a better browser with you everywhere.
So maybe they aren't switching in droves, but a person would have to be a complete fool to use IE exclusively. When the word really gets out about that, the results will be hardly surprising. Like they say, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". Internet Explorer is no longer a leader.
Netscape 7.1 -- Un, well, I hate to say it, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironic that... (Score:5, Interesting)
When will the bigwhigs realize that open-source does not necessarily mean risky, dangerous, or taboo in some way?
Why is Firefox such a memory hog? (Score:5, Interesting)
On a related note, a freshly opened Galeon used 120M of RAM, while a freshly opened Firefox used 86M. I don't really know exactly what that means, but a lower RAM usage number is always a good thing to see.
Why on earth does a web browser like Firefox take up 86 MB of memory? That seems like an awful lot of memory for just a web browser. Is it GTK2 that is taking up all that space?
Re:Why is Firefox such a memory hog? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow... 4 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
embedding into applications? (Score:5, Interesting)
--
lds
Re:embedding into applications? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:embedding into applications? (Score:4, Informative)
Browser wars (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the kinds of games that are popular on the internet, for example. Flash, Shockwave, java, etc. These areas are still dominated by Microsoft, and I don't see much progress with Linux. A lot of people are still having trouble getting something like Flash working properly. I keep getting pages that say that I need to upgrade to Flash 6. I have Flash 6 installed on my Linux box, and it works well on most pages. But there are the corner cases that it fails on.
We don't need just the browser to work. We need everything to work. Does the Firefox browser have Java in it out of the box? Java was terribly difficult to get working under Mozilla, and like Flash, didn't work all the time.
Even something as simple as playing two sounds at once would hang the browser. We've got to fix these problems before Linux becomes big on the desktop, or the users will not have a good time.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does mozilla get all the press? (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera may be a bit behind on OS X but it was independantly tested as being the world's fastest rendering browser. It sticks to interdational standards like superglue and your fingers.
Is the reason it gets nowhere near the press Mozilla does that Opera is not open source? What are your thoughts on this one?
The company released it's IPO intensions a few days ago (Initial Public Offering; it's "going public" or starting to sell shares of stock to make shareholders the owners). I personally am very excited. I think it's a margainally better product than Moz and that makes it best in the world, IMHO.
Re:Why does mozilla get all the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the reason it gets nowhere near the press Mozilla does that Opera is not open source?
Erm, yes. Opera isn't free beer or speech. Open source projects can't be bought by MS, can't be destroyed in the way MS did to Netscape.
Hence the article - the web browser is absolutely key to the desktop market, and this time we're wise to what a bad idea relying on a company (however well intentioned) to supply that key component is.
Re:Why does mozilla get all the press? (Score:5, Insightful)
To borrow a phrase "The Future is Open". Nobody wants to root for something like Opera when a better Open Source alternative is out there. Opera is exactly what the IT world is heading away from where possible. Also you won't see a closed source browser like Opera riding on the coat tails of the Linux Desktop revolution, however slow that may be.
Lastly and to go back to my first statement Opera costs money. Its been ingrained in consumers heads since the 90's that browsers are Free. If Mozilla costs money you could bet that it never would have stood a chance and IT Press would not be rooting for it.
Frankly Opera just don't have much of a future for general Internet browsing.
Three words: automatic popup blocking (Score:5, Insightful)
My only current quibble is the new way FireFox handles download in 0.8... I liked that "launch" button dammit!
Alternate universes? (Score:5, Interesting)
In dave's original 1999 article, he had written:
Meanwhile, over on MozillaZine's Firefox discussion board, Firefox developer "bengoodger" responds to criticism that Firefox is insensitive to the needs of its users [mozillazine.org]:
In a subsequent message he explains further (emphasis mine):
So are we all in this together, or is the community just sitting on its collective ass, waiting for bengoodger to vanquish Microsoft all by himself? (I realize it's not so black and white, especially given Mozilla's extensible structure, but still I found the contrast of opinions revelatory.)
Proprietory plugins are the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The browser wars? What was it all about? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a far cry from the days when hundreds of developers worked on making MSIE one of the fastest and smartest browsers out there.
You really have to wonder whether it was worthwhile for Microsoft. What would have changed if Netscape had continued to sell their browser? Fewer people using Windows? Hardly. A less powerful browser platform? Not really: the browser never could be the operating system.
Personally I thought the whole browser war was part of the same hype that caused Oracle to invest so much in web terminals, or whatever they called them.
The browser is just one more applet, fundamentally. Comes in all shapes and sizes, and so long as it respects the rules, no-one cares what logo it shows in the top corner. I come here for Slashdot, not for the browser.
So, since development on Mozilla and its cousins continues unabated, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft start to play catch-up. Will they, I wonder? What can they gain?
Microsoft don't need to update their browser.. yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward to today. The only looming threats are Opera and Firefox. The problem with all Open Source is that they have absolutely no marketing. It solely relies on word of mouth. 1 person tells another, who tells his friends, etc. and the usage theoretically increases exponentially (subject to gross errors of course). But even exponential growth is tiny if the current user base is small.
Until the Firefox usage rates increases to a threatening rate MS will sit on its shoddy browser and milk it for all its worth.
I'm sure MS knows FireFox is better, but why spend money to update their browser when the competition can't effectively communicate to a target market? A great product is no good if no one knows about it. Eventually the 'diffusion' of FireFox will increase enough to cause MS to grudgingly update. Then you will see a TRUE browser war.
I'm still lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox takes away the master password from the personal security manager, so it's just as much of a personal liability as IE if your machine's compromised. This makes it a spectacularly bad idea for the office if you deal with sensitive websites, and for casual home user who may not know security well.
Firefox takes dozens of basic features like animated GIF removal away from the configuration panel -- instead you have to know what undocumented value to insert in a hidden configuration screen. Even Internet Explorer offers this option in a mouse-accessible location!
Why are the Firefox folks hiding features? Why not add an "advanced options" chevron for the things you think only 2% of users use? Removing 50 options from the mainstream configurator altogether means that you've disappointed a different 2% of your users with each new annoyance.
Re:I'm still lost (Score:5, Informative)
It's smaller, faster. The UI is more easily configurable. It doesn't include an email app, WYSIWYG HTML editor or IRC client that I'm never going to use. For fellow Gentoo users, it compiles faster. Default theme sucks less than Mozilla's.
Firefox takes dozens of basic features like animated GIF removal away from the configuration panel -- instead you have to know what undocumented value to insert in a hidden configuration screen. Even Internet Explorer offers this option in a mouse-accessible location!
This is being worked on. Firefox is not complete. It is not even "One dot Oh". Firefox is incomplete software. The GUI for preferences is slowly but surely getting better. Mozilla has more people working on it than Firefox does. Eventually Firefox will supplant Mozilla as the official mozilla.org browser. Eventually. Not yet.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
Four years later... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, as long as the standards are winning, I really don't care what browser is winning. Personally I prefer Opera, but it's yet another of those browsers that are "not MSIE". And as long as there's many enough of us, hopefully Microsoft can't embrace and extend.
Though I fear what will happen once the DRM shit comes. "This page requires Internet Explorer 7.0 with Enhanced Content Security Pack(TM) running on a Trusted Computing System(TM). Please upgrade to take full advantage of our site."
I only hope Linux will push through and become at the very least a minority they can't ignore before that window of opportunity closes. Once shut out of the market, there's no easy way coming back in.
Kjella
IE is painful (Score:4, Interesting)
The only thing I wish they'd do is ditch the Firefox name and keep it Mozilla. Or shall we call it "The browser formerly known as Mozilla"?
still long way to go though (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm too pessimistic. At least I can wish that the world is better place than what I think it is.
Understatement of the year? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Convicted Monopolist, having supposedly wiped out opposing browsers, have been utterly negligent with Incompetent Exploder for years now. It has fallen way behind in useful features, and it never made any attempt at standards compliance. As for the security holes..... I know they claimed the other day that it was now the most secure because they had fixed so many problems, but anyone who has ever done any software QA will know the utter incompetence of statements like that, in fact the number of bugs discovered is more likely to correlate with th elack of quality of the underlying code, much of which still remains, so it is almost certainly still very bad indeed. IE was another case of "decommoditising the protocols", as described in the infamous Halloween Memos, delibarately breaking standards compliance and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator of quality and interoperability.
The big problem is that ignorant or indolent web designers have churned out buggy code that works (sort of) in Inept Eradicator, but will fail in any standards-compliant browser, the closest to that ideal of standards compliance being Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror (not in any order, and apologies to any I missed). Some designers have apparently used that other utterly useless M$ product, Frontpage, which AFAIK has never had a good review in any magazine. Standards compliance is absolutely essential, that is why the Web grew so quickly, but now growth is jeapordised by the ill-defined non-standard set by the Monopolist and the fact that incompetents have chosen to work to it.
The way forward is of course to make sites which are fully standards-compliant (relatively easy, there are lots of better tools than Frontpage, some of them free, and a free validation service at w3c.org.) The trash that went before such as IE is best forgotten, otherwise we will forever be infested with bugs, security holes and Billisms. (A Billism is a feature which is illogical, unwanted and ineptly implemented, which forces itself upon you because Sir Bill presumes to know better than you what you want to do. Word is particularly full of Billisms.)
Mozilla and its relatives, not forgetting Netscape is an excellent base from which to move forward once more, without deviating into the closed, unstable and constantly changing world of Illegal Monopolies and their badly deficient producta. (Point to ponder - a monopoly is only necessary when a company can not succeed on the strenghts of its products, therefore th eneed to create one is in fact an admission of abject failure.) I use Mozilla at home, as do all my friends, and we are all quite keen to recommend it to others. It has also been getting favourable reports in the press. Long may it continue.
Re:Understatement of the year? (Score:5, Informative)
IE6 is remarkably web-standards-compliant
Bullshit.
It manages to get CSS 1, a specification over seven years old mostly right. However, it ignores or screws up vast swathes of CSS 2, a specification that will soon be six years old. It doesn't even attempt to handle the four year-old XHTML 1.0. It doesn't understand most selectors. It doesn't understand any of the CSS table model. It violates a number of mandatory sections of the five year-old HTTP 1.1 specification. It can't render PNG images correctly, despite the fact that Microsoft promised support in Internet Explorer 4 and the fact that it's been around for over eight years. It can't even decide between "quirks mode" and "standards compliant mode" reliably, as it throws an eppy when faced with the XML prologue in XHTML documents.
Don't even try to argue that Internet Explorer is in any way a decent browser when it comes to supporting standards.
Mozilla is there for the future users (Score:5, Insightful)
When Linux starts to move in to more and more corporate desktops, people won't be able to rely on their IE habit anymore, and will be forced to use a Linux browser. This is when you'll start to see it in greater force.
And even further down the line, when Linux starts to invade the home desktop space also, we'll be glad the Mozilla project (and the KDE/KHTML project) has been around for so long. These things will come, it's only a matter of time.
Shipping News (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm rather unimpressed by this about face. I thought the original artical back in 1999 was way off base.
The author seems to have taken the Shipping News to heart.
"imminent storm threatens village"
But what if there's no storm?
"village saved from deadly storm"
Only it's worse, because the deadly storm was entirely manufactured by a combination of personal insecurity, unrealistic expections, and a "complain until some one else fixes it" mentality.
It was obvious to me that the Mozilla developers were going to have to pay the price for a few years to get their house in order before their hard work became obvious from the external perspective.
Developers are supposed to know better than to run around complaining "the sky is falling" while the people involved are wrestling with really difficult structural problems. What's amazing is that the people involved stayed involved, while having to read this kind of crap in the first place.
It always saps my strength when management runs around saying "nothing is happening fast enough" when I've just spent a month of long hours excavating down to the bedrock.
Just what is this guy taking credit for?
"falling sky threatens village"
But what if sky doesn't fall?
"village saved from deadly sky"
It doesn't get much worse than that.
Adblock for Mozilla is great too (Score:5, Informative)
Ad-blocking with Mozilla is GREAT. See http://adblock.mozdev.org/
It even works with Slashdot ads....
firefox icons (Score:5, Funny)
the new logo appears to be a gigantic fox humping the earth [mozilla.org]
I wonder if that's the old IE 2 earth icon he's humping?
Other Browsing Fronts in the War? (Score:5, Interesting)
Web pages are copyrightable code and content. There have been features around for years to take this bundle and automatically put it into something else (a PDF file, a archive folder, etc.). What hasn't been addressed are the legal implications of doing that.
If I go to a sight that says it's pages are protected (for example) what happens if I send the page in an HTML email to my boss. It may even make a differnence if the pages claimed to be copyrighted, gpl'ed, or click-through-licensed.
Where Microsoft can win this game is by making everything on Windows locked down tight in Longhorn. They then make sure that every author can set their price per page on the Microsoft web: "Downloading a page out of Internet Explorer isn't allowed unless you pay $0.001 cents per byte." (or some such nonsense).
Why would anyone use a non-free browser in this manner? They wouldn't unless they were forced to. Microsoft can do this by convincing every blogger and Parent Teacher Association that they're losing money by not exclusively using Microsoft technologies. For the insurgents who write out of some (un-American!) sense other than profit, they can probably stir up enough noise and uncertainty in the court rooms (whether they do the suing or a puppet) that makes people just feel like the "web" was the equivalent of some sort of sixties commune. Groovy and completely unsustainable.
The fact that free software has a pair of good tools (apache and firefox) is still barely into this game.
What else can be done? Legally I don't know. I'm not a lawyer.
But for the coders and writers and web users of today, get them using standards and free software and realize they're using it is a very good thing.
Second, maybe get something like source forge set up for people to GPL web sites. I'm not talking people's blogs here, but major site redesigns that have become standard compliant and how they did it. Heck, get volunteers to do site redesigns if the code becomes GPL and open to all. People need to realize that not only is it important to redesign their sites to be standards compliant, but it's also cheap to do so. The site probably won't convince the CitiBanks of the world to do anything special, but it will hopefully show and convince the community colleges and small businesses and non-profit organizations that this is really a do-able thing.
Greed is still a strong factor. If Microsoft ever does release a secure OS, then there will be a lot of people who succumb to greed. But if their whole stream of server, database, & browser is already Microsoft proprietary they'll certainly not see any advantage to going open and standards compliant at that point.
But that shouldn't take away from the great progress that Mozilla has made. It's been a fantastic thing to watch.
All Hail Web Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
There are still plenty of sites that are built to work only with IE for Windows, but now that the alternatives are so good and the advantages increasingly obvious, this is changing.
"Firefox" catches (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the handwringing and then the grousing about the name change, if /. is any indication, it seems to be going over pretty well.
Cool stuff you can do with standard code (Score:5, Informative)
css/edge [meyerweb.com]
This site showcases some amazing stuff, all done with standard HTML and CSS. No Javascript, no (specific browser)-only code. That doesn't mean it works in all browsers, as the different versions of IE have varying bugs and/or missing implementations. This site is flat-out proof that the internet doesn't need the majority of proprietary code that sites use. The fact of the matter is that in most cases, the author used the easy way (auto-generated proprietary code) as opposed to the right way.
Demo [meyerweb.com] and Demo-IE [meyerweb.com] are a good example. IE does get it mostly right, but not quite. On the complexspiral pages, you can see again that IE doesn't do the background image the way it's supposed to.
This is a great site. It's 100% standards-compliant (i.e. it follows the rules set up to ensure proper operation of the web), does some neat visual stuff, and points out IE's flaws all at once.
Netscape is dead (Score:5, Informative)
Re:About FireFox (Score:4, Informative)
Re:good FUCK people!! Get a clue!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good FUCK people!! Get a clue!! (Score:4, Insightful)
This article was about Linux, and how the use of Moz will help it. It was not about Moz specifically, so get over it.
Re:One thing against it... (Score:5, Insightful)
If 'programmers' adhered to well documented standards, and stopped trying to make eye candy by biting on the non-standard hooks in IE, then you'd find that the problem of choking would pretty much vanish.
It is a very clever strategy of microsoft to release a non-standard adhering browser, since as they currently control the vast majority on desktop machines, they puppet 'programmers' into doing their dirty work for them (keeping people on the MS platform).
The less tech-savvy of us will of course assume "this browser sucks, it can't render this page correctly", when it is the page itself that can't be rendered properly within standards guidelines.
Re:One thing against it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One thing against it... (Score:5, Interesting)
When it finally came out, they had hooks on the main page that kicked you out if you weren't running IE. I went medieval on their asses! I really let them have it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. One of the things I pointed out was how stupid it was since I could stop the page from loading all the way (just hit esc before it could execute the java code) and still click on links and they'd work just fine. So then I bookmarked the links, and everything worked just fine.
They took out the offending code within one day, so I can actually visit the main page again.
Re:One thing against it... (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, let's be clear -- Mozilla accepts all sorts of non-standard stuff. However, they don't accept non-standard stuff when it was invented by Microsoft, rather than Netscape.
If Mozilla were to make a couple minor tweaks, they could easily be compatible with the majority of "non-standard" IE sites. However, they decided they were not going to be compatible with IE when they had a 50% marketshare, and apparenlty that's the decision they'll stick with even with a 1% marketshare. Their choice, but Mozilla Advocates shouldn't not be suprised because adoption is very slow.
(This is ignoring all the sites that don't want to work in Mozilla and actively sniff browser strings. That's basically a marketshare issue.)
Re:One thing against it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One thing against it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dare to disagree. IE is the most used browser, that I agree with. But not the most well known or commonly known one. Non-techie people I talk to don't have a clue what IE is and only once I mention it's the thing they use to go on the internet ( Remember, talking to a non-techie here... To most of them the web IS the net. ) I'll get an "Oh yeah..." as reply. People don't use IE because it's well known, they simply use it because it is there.
Re:One thing against it... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the users of IE can't even notice the name of the product in the title bar, how will they the name of browsers they don't even use?