...as long as they also do standards support and compliance.

As a web developer I have on huge migraine... IE... Netscape... specially now there is mozilla, i see no point in using IE or Netscape, however unstable Mozilla can be, currently... I am only sorry I can't devote time to help mozilla get better in stability *sigh*

Besides, there is no IE for Windows, OS2, BeOS, MacOS, Linux, etc... that is complete in every platform... Mozilla might lack a lot of stuff, but from platform to platform, there's at least something one can count on: it's a browser!

Hugs

If you don't want to use proprietary technologies like XBL on your pages, you don't have to.

I'm not impressed. IE55 has nearly no improvements related to IE50. It's lame. Mozilla/5 and Opera 4.0 shows the direction related to XML and CSS TODAY: http://home.germany.net/100-261485/xml-in-o/xml-browser-chart.html Poor: Scripting and DOM in Opera 4.0, so Mazilla/5 leads...

Well, I work for a company that uses the IE control for distributing web content on CD's. Works on 4x and 5.0 and not on 5.5.

As you can imagine I am fed up with MS, and its divergent support. I hope and Pray Mozilla chases STANDARDs!!!I am tired of seeing a new release of something with MS that breaks another MS object. Please Please go for robust development that is maintainable through the future without destroying the past.

If Mozilla wins the standards game, stays small, and continues on the path it is currently in, I forsee a far more stable future. Opera is neat and cute, but I think the future is Moz.

I have been watching Mozilla for a couple years now and have been impressed on where it has come from and where it has gotten to. I am confident that it will meet its goals and will hopefully soon meet milestones that allow our organization to us it in the near term!! 200,000 users help "sell" support for Mozilla you know!!

Well, I work for a company that uses the IE control for distributing web content on CD's. Works on 4x and 5.0 and not on 5.5.

As you can imagine I am fed up with MS, and its divergent support. I hope and Pray Mozilla chases STANDARDs!!!I am tired of seeing a new release of something with MS that breaks another MS object. Please Please go for robust development that is maintainable through the future without destroying the past.

If Mozilla wins the standards game, stays small, and continues on the path it is currently in, I forsee a far more stable future. Opera is neat and cute, but I think the future is Moz.

I have been watching Mozilla for a couple years now and have been impressed on where it has come from and where it has gotten to. I am confident that it will meet its goals and will hopefully soon meet milestones that allow our organization to us it in the near term!! 200,000 users help "sell" support for Mozilla you know!!

this ie5.5 moving away from standards is the stupidest thing ever.

standards support now!!! with at least css-1,css-2,dom-1,xml and hopefully svg. and since ie5.5 doesn't have that, they better work on those first.

If a web standard is to ever become a "real standard", it has to be used. Mozilla being an open source effort with achiving full standard compliancy as one of its goals, is so far the best place to get people to use web standards. Why support standards? Unless Mozilla's goal is to be the only application in the world, I'd say that supporting standards is a good thing.

Microsoft on the other hand wants to be in everything. To them standards is not important. In fact counter productive even. MS wants to make sure that people use their code and theirs only. What better way to do that than non-standard compliancy.

Mozilla on the other hand lives on standards. Mozilla needs standards to build on. Being an open source project it needs something most contributers can agree on, W3C standards happen to be one of them. I hope Mozilla will continue to support standards and work to form new standards as the need arise.

Now, if Mozilla's performance is as good as its standard compliancy...

Standards compliance is almost the whole reason why I use Mozilla and advocate it to others. It's the only path to sanity in web design.

By the way, what the heck is XBL?

I've recently been examining some of the liturature on XHTML, CSS and XML. These standards are now very mature and very usable if they are properly impemented in the browser and in authoring tools. And just as soon as I begin to understand which parts of the standard are supported in which browser and what's proprietary in each, somebody goes and changes the rules.

Microsoft appears to be more concerned with innovations that will keep people locked into their products than they are with standards. In fact, the standards are already so good that if somebody implemented them fully, people could probably be able to do 80 - 100% of what they do with browsers and web-servers without even touching an MS product.

Mozilla / Netscape, on the other hand, appear to be steadily working towards implementing as much of the standards as possible. BUT they're taking WAY TO LONG to get there.

The result is that just now there is no standards compiant browser. And in the future? Well, if you design your documents to use the full function of the standard in order to be useful and maintainable, you'll be able to use Mozilla/Netscape but not IE. But since "everybody" uses IE nobody will probably ever fully use the standards to their potential.

XBL and HTML is a relatively recent development... we're still not sure if it works completely as it should. IIRC the original intent was to allow for more rapid development of XUL widgets by exposing the anonymous content and script objects of elements to XML and JS.

XBL and HTML is an exciting prospect however. I believe XBL's syntax to be cleaner than HTC (and it's valid XML, too) I hope the W3 come to recognise the concept as more than just behavioural extensions to CSS - as a field of its own.

Netscape 6 is the one app that can make Mozilla-compatible apps ubiquitous. If we lose any more market share, there won't be any to regain! IDG Books decided to scrap Netscape 6 For Dummies because they don't think there's a market left for Netscape! Everybody is thinking this way! If the bugs in the standards aren't absolutely critical, leave them to 6.1! GET IT OUT or we will have nothing left to fight! Microsoft will own the Web!

XBL is an extensible set of DHTML Behaviors already nominated to the W3C to become a standard that works with current standards. And again it already has been proposed. What happens with that we'll see eventually.

Who makes the standards? The W3C, right? Who are they? A bunch of companies all with a bone to pick with Microsoft, IIRC. And the token Microsoft guy whose every suggestion is probably laughed at, or ignored.

We have NO idea what goes on in the W3C. It's all behind closed doors.

Maybe Microsoft would follow these standards closer if they had some input, and every thing they put forward wasn't rejected, and they were FASTER at getting them out and finalised.

If we are going to accuse MS of violating standards, I think the microscope should be pointed at Netscape/Mozilla. Is XUL a W3C standard? XBL?

Microsoft's extensions are very good. Behaviours would be useful if Netscape supports them. No company should have to wait for its competitors to catch up.

Found this link on slashdot. http://galeon.sourceforge.net/

Its a minimal Mozilla browser - very little clutter and only one status bar :)

Very cool story, Chris. I think one thing that you mention in your story but don't take into account in your prediction:

The desktop computer is not where Netscape 6 is going to win the browser war -- integration in Internet appliances that is where Netscape 6 will shine the brightest. Web pads, set-top boxes, personal e-mail assistants, and other Net appliances are starting to be released now and will grow exponentially as a market over the next year. Internet Explorer has no significant prescence at all in this market, and won't. The vast portion of these appliances run on Linux operating systems (such as Gateway's recently announced new line) as does AOL TV, and there is no Internet Explorer for Linux. Very soon the "browser market" of today will merely be a subset of a larger market for Web-enabled appliances. Only those appliances that run Windows will be able to use IE, and given the quality track record of WindowsCE, that isn't going to happen on a large scale overnight, if ever.

In short, as the Web-enabled client market grows to encompass and eventually dwarf the PC market, that 86% will start coming down significantly, and once AOL starts using Netscape again, it's all over for IE's dominance.

Does anyone have a list of bugs in Mozilla related to the W3C standards that Netscape promised for NS6? Is it even feasable to see full HTML4, CSS1 and DOM1 compliance? Or are we doomed by buggy implementations with proprietary extension?

I just checked my site that is visited by mostly Oracle professionals in decent sized organizations. As you might imagine, most of the people that visit my site belong to big IT organizations that have standardized on either Netscape or Internet Exploder. With this in mind, I checked my stats for the past 30 days as well as the past 6 months.

Regardless of the view, there was very little deviation of the browser percentages. The breakdown was:

Netscape Flavours: 35.76% Internet Exploder Flavours: 63.92% Misc. : .05%

I don't want to hear about this 86% BS. Did anyone also consider that WebSideStory (who allegedly generated these statistics) might just have an over-abundence of Microsoft-oriented web sites that they track!? That would certainly skew the numbers a bit.

I think Netscape and Mozilla will have a hard time regaining corporate or casual user market share. They'll have a nice lead in the appliance/pda/embedded market though.

My dilemna as a corporate web developer is I want to use Mozilla because of its superior standards support. But if I do it's likely it won't run as well as IE in our NT and MS based system.

I'd love to be able to send out a totally customized and branded browser to our clients so that they can access everything on our web site. But if I do that I need to duplicate or rewrite and maintain several apps that won't run on Mozilla so I'm duplicating effort and increasing costs. And what of users of the web site not using Mozilla? With a small marketshare initially when will the company finally adopt Mozilla as the standard? We just settled on IE because of Netscape 4's crappy standards support. We simply cannot wait longer.

I write to standards as much as possible but I fear 100% standards compliance in Mozilla is not going to get people to switch to it, especially in the corporate market.

1) Look at the title to this post. The w3c, won't let the people who make the websites help make the standards they (should be, when there's a stable, popular browser that has standard suport) code in, and they SHOULD let the coders help. 2) If IE had standard suport, this mess we're in would be a LOT better!

HitBox and other counter statistics have consistently overestimated IE against Netscape compared to other surveys based on more representative websites.

I believe this to be likely because Netscape probably has slightly higher presence at work (where a few companies have still standardised on it, even though obviously the majority are on IE) compared to home (where nobody bothers installing a different browser).

(Counters are more often used on amateur "play" sites which are more likely to be visited from home. Any real professional website has logs and doesn't need a counter.)

Of course, that doesn't alter the fact that IE probably really does have a share somewhere in the 75-85% region (on my own site, which is biased towards Windows users because I produce Windows shareware, IE's average share this year is 75%). The release of Netscape 6 will probably not change this in any significant way, but life will be better for the 15-25% of us. ;)

I don't think they should rush the release - Netscape's support is dribbling away very gradually just as it has been for the last several years, there's no need to panic now. Obviously, the sooner the better, but not if it isn't completely finished (from a UI, usability, and reliability perspective).

As for standards support, the latest versions of (X)HTML, CSS1 and ideally large chunks of CSS2, ECMAScript and the DOM (whatever version) are the important standards. I think Mozilla will/does do a credible job of implementing these standards. IE isn't as good, which is obviously a shame.

As for the net appliances thing; WebTV and Dreamcast are the only significant "net appliances" that have been released to date, that I'm aware of; one of these is owned by Microsoft and the other uses Microsoft's browser and operating system. I have to agree that the future does look bright for Mozilla in this area, but let's not count our chickens until they're hatched. (Also, the whole net appliance idea is a bit of a waste of time, but. :)

--sam

AOL could switch to Netscape when the market for new internet connections on home PCs is saturated. Anyone know when that will be?

Many people have commented on the "slow" development of mozilla. Although this is true to a certain extent one must realize that where as IE and Netscape have never started from scratch (Spyglass for IE and Mosaic for Netscape I think) Of course it takes time to reproduce everything from scratch. The Mozilla people are doing 10 years work in 2. That is quite fast. Once it gets up to speed with IE I am confident that it will quickly surpass IE in every category and win back significant market share. Sure some say that no one will download it. But I know that a lot of people have window 98 FE and have IE 5.5 now. People want the newest thing and most people will download eventually. The people who aren't prone to download on there on use services like AOL and MSN and will be nagged until they upgrade. In sum, given time Netscape/Mozilla will make a comeback unless people would rather pay 50+ for Win ME then download a 8 MB file in the days of 2 GB + mp3 collections made over 56k modems. If you build it they will switch.

Release Netscape 6.0 in September ! This is ideal ! Don't wait until November... Please !

As multimedia is where the net is heading, surely if MS tightly integrated its media player with the browser, it would create a deep threat to wider consumer adoption of Mozilla. I mean, why would you bother downloading another browser that lacked multimedia support!