mozilla.org Releases 0.9.2.1Tuesday August 14th, 2001mozilla.org today released the source code for 0.9.2.1, which is the code that matches Netscape 6.1. This comes from the 0.9.2 branch, and is being made available both as part of the MPL license requirement, and as a way for third parties to easily use it to write compatible plugins and addon features to Netscape 6.1, as well as Mozilla. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/ There are many binary subdirectories marked 0.9.2 or 0.9.2ec . Do any of these binaries match the official 0.9.2.1 source code? If not, is someone able to do builds for us to play with? Is there any schedule to merge changes back in? (I'm posting this using Netscape 6.1, and so far it feels more polished than 0.9.3. Could just be my imagination.) You are confused about the difference between the branch and the trunk. The checkins to the 0.9.2 branch leading up to Netscape 6.1 (aka 0.9.2.1) are a subset of the changes that landed on the trunk between 0.9.2 and 0.9.3 Milestones. There is nothing in the 0.9.2 to 0.9.2.1 list of checkins that did not first land on the trunk leading up to 0.9.3. There is nothing to migrate from the branch to the trunk. We have all that plus about 1000 to 1500 fixes that didn't go into Netscape 6.1 (aka 0.9.2.1). --Asa 0.9.2 nightly directories were nightly builds from the 0.9.2 branch before and after the 0.9.2 Mozilla Milestone. 0.9.2 branch nightly builds happened until Netscape stopped 6.1 development on the 0.9.2 branch (that point became known as 0.9.2.1) 0.9.2ec nightly directories are nightly branch builds post 0.9.2.1. These 0.9.2ec builds are the results of a few backward migrated trunk fixes. Any of the late July 0.9.2 nightly directories http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/2001-07-27-00-0.9.2/ for example, are very close to the the same source as is tagged as 0.9.2.1. If you really want a binary that is from the 0.9.2.1 tag then download Netscape 6.1. --Asa what the heck he is trying to say? http://mozillaquest.com/News01/Netscape-6-1_Mozilla-0-9-2-1_source_story-01.html Is he saying Netscape didn't use Mozilla code? Because that doesn't seem to make any sense to me... Well if you can't write facts - make them up, If people don't answer you put words in their mouth. -- says Mr Mike Angelo A mozillaquestquest.com article in relation to that one would be quite humerous indeed. I don't see how a mozillaquestquest.com article about this can be more humerous than the original... I don't know much about the development of Mozilla, but I do daily visit mozillazine.org and can positively say I know know more about how Netscape 6.x and Mozilla are being developed than he does... Maybe I'm ignorant on this issue but would somebody help me out here. Why is this such a big issue? If you know anything about Mozilla you know that Netscape people are working on the project, and that they are using the code produced through the Mozilla project for Netscape 6.x. "... which is the code that matches Netscape 6.1." It says right on Mozilla's website. Why would they lie about that and what would it matter if they did. OMG, Netscape 6.1 is based on Mozilla 0.9.2.1 and not 0.9.2 or it came out before 0.9.3 and didn't have a 6.1 PR2. Wooopdeefriggindoo. Why don't we concentrate on the fact that Mozilla is an awesome browser and I can't wait until the commercial release is out. I use it as my main browser now and it just keeps getting better with every release. I could care less about Netscape's browser because I'm not going to use it, I'm going to use Mozilla. "...Mozilla is an awesome browser and I can't wait until the commercial release...I could care less about Netscape's browser because I'm not going to use it, I'm going to use Mozilla. " Um, Netscape 6.1 is a commercial relase based on Mozilla. There will never be a Mozilla commercial release since mozilla.org is not a commercial entity. Mozilla.org provides binaries for testing and development purposes. --Asa I'm getting *really* fed up with this guy and his "articles". What the heck is motivating him, anyway? He's trying to say that Netscape is based on a branch from 0.9.2 rather than the trunk, and he's trying to work that up into an indictment of the buggy Mozilla code. That he doesn't recognize the non sequitur speaks volumes about his understanding of the process. The funny thing is that he's rhetorically segregating the Netscape developers from the Mozilla developers, as though the Netscape folks don't work on Mozilla. . . I'd say don't post his articles here anymore, even to criticize them, as you're just increasing his hit count. http://www.intac.com/~aboutcmp/SiteDsgn.html -- web design tips from the master, Mike Angelo. Thought a few of you may get a kick out of this :) Be sure to follow the tips link at the bottom... How can he possibly be giving web design tips? His site is the most amaturish, ugly looking piece of crap I have ever seen. What exactly does he do for a living? Anyone who can see certainly wouldn't hire him as a web developer. His "insightful" comments about the mozilla development means he has obviously never been a software developer on anything bigger than a tetris game. He is probably one of those sad try hard geeks you meet at parties who tries to convince you that IBM invented the CRAY super computer. i'm not exactly sure what he does for a living, but from what i was able to dig up this morning, on one of his pages he stated that he's been a writer / experienced computer user for 35 years. (learned a lot in 35 years obviously) if you do a whois on mozillaquest, it gives you the name idealnet, care of matrix wireless. if you do a who is on matrix wireless, its a different name, but the same address, so my assumption is that he would be involved w/ this company: http://www.matrix-wireless.com This sounds like it could well be his company... The home page claims speeds up to 25Mbps, but the FAQ claims 1.544 Mbps (T1). If he can't get consistent information for something he's directly invovled in, how is he going to get it on Mozilla? BTW, the web site is much cleaner in design than MQ. But that's apparently since he decided to upgrade to FrontPage 4.0... Even one of its default themes is better than MQ. Read the gray box bellow the article index, it explains what he is talking about. Its a serious leap in logic though, and is just sensasionalistic reporting. And where the hell did this guy get the definition of a memory leak? That whole "memory leaking/memory releasing" side table in that article makes _no_ sense to me. It's pure dribble. About that memory-thing in his article... He obviously knows as much about the memory-usage of Mozilla as I do, but I would like to learn a bit more (if possible...). Using Mozilla as my primary browser and E-mail app, I use it 100% of the time and I have sometimes taken a peek at the windows task manager to see how much memory Mozilla is eating... When browsing around and opening new windows I have been up to 80 or 90Mb (never seen 100Mb or more, but that must be that blank page he opened :) Might we be able to convince him all the white in that blank page he used for the test uses up as much memory is at sends out light into your room?). When I close pages memory usage reduces, possibly not to the level it started from, I'm not sure. Stranger things however happen when minimizing my last Mozilla window. Most of the time memory usage by Mozilla drops in a second from (lets say) 50Mb to 500Kb. It then starts to increase again. First slowely, but with some giant leeps up to something about 25Mb. Total memory usage reported by the taskmanager however doesn't change a bit. Whether mozilla is using 50Mb or 500Kb a second later, total memory usage still is 195Mb. Can anyone explain this? No, this is Mangelo bashing forum. ;-) Netscape is the king of memory usage after Quake III Monster on this machine. Quake can do anything since it draws monsters :-) Besides from bashing HTML damn design, can't people just look to the article? Or Read usenet? Even ZDNet "talkback"? Yea, they are "cluelessly bashing end users" but I didn't want you to hear from this to me... THey are the majority of the NET :-) Knowing enough TCP/IP to connect to net days are over. IMHO Mozilla/Netscape (branch) needs a offical response from developers about memory usage. Also they don't have to keep "well" with Sun java. From my point of view, Opera uses less mem etc. words fade away when a web site invokes java. I seriously suspect Sun/Java is responsible for much mem usage bashing. Mozilla is "untouchable" already but can't people "touch" and bash Sun for giving whole damned JVM forcely to people just caring about damn Yahoo chat or a Java stupid game? "I seriously suspect Sun/Java is responsible for much mem usage bashing. Mozilla is "untouchable" already but can't people "touch" and bash Sun for giving whole damned JVM forcely to people just caring about damn Yahoo chat or a Java stupid game?" I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. First of all, Mozilla does not have a JVM. To get a JVM with Mozilla you have to XPInstall one. No one is forcing anything on anyone here. --Asa It seems quite obvious to me: Netscape won't tell anyone the verion of Mozilla that Netscape 6.1 was based on. It wasn't 0.9.2, honest (which is what those fibbers at Netscape would have us believe). And 0.9.2.1 is meant as an upgrade to 0.9.3 because it was released afterwards, it wasn't released so that people to get access to as close as possible to the source code of Netscape 6.1 because that would just be too nice on the part of Netscape. End sarcasm. You are clearly confused. Netscape was based on an extension of the 0.9.2 branch. This was never hidden. Netscape continued to check into that public branch long after Mozilla released 0.9.2. The point on that branch that coincided with the release of Netscape 6.1 was tagged and called 0.9.2.1. 0.9.2.1 was in no way an upgrade to 0.9.3. 0.9.3 had over 500 bugfixes that 0.9.2.1 did not have and 0.9.2.1 had maybe one or two 'bandaid' fixes that we rejected on the trunk because it wasn't the right way to do it. --Asa Maybe I'm ignorant on this issue but would somebody help me out here. Why is this such a big issue? If you know anything about Mozilla you know that Netscape people are working on the project, and that they are using the code produced through the Mozilla project for Netscape 6.x. It says right on Mozilla's website: "... which is the code that matches Netscape 6.1." . Why would they lie about that and what would it matter if they did. OMG, Netscape 6.1 is based on Mozilla 0.9.2.1 and not 0.9.2 or it came out before 0.9.3 and didn't have a 6.1 PR2. Wooopdeefriggindoo. Why don't we concentrate on the fact that Mozilla is an awesome browser and I can't wait until the commercial release is out. I use it as my main browser now and it just keeps getting better with every release. I could care less about Netscape's browser because I'm not going to use it, I'm going to use Mozilla. It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things but MozillaQuest is always publishing rubbish like this. He frequently misreports on the number of bugs and claims that Mozilla is too buggy. He once decided that there were 2,700 (or some such number) of bugs in the Mozilla build that a Netscape 6.1 Preview Release was based on and said that this was too much for a commercial product. He may be interested to here that Windows 2000 shipped with about 64,000 known bugs. The bug figures could just be a misunderstanding, but this Netscape-denies-it-uses-Mozilla-code-thing is just blatant misinformation. Alex Just wondering, when is the screenshots page of MozillaZine going to be updated? After MozillaQuest uses the current screenshots as a sneak preview of the Mozilla 1.0 browser-suite :) Back in March I sent a zip file of several screenshots to screenshots@mozillazine.org Nothing has happened since. They were of the Modern2 skin, so someone should send in ones of Modern3. (Hopefully they'll get used.) My shots included: --The BoxAcid Test being rendered perfectly. (It was important at the time) -- The classic skin -- The Modern2 skin and Sidebar --The "File bookmark" window (was new at the time) -- All chrome hidden or collapsed to show how much space you could get. You should probably try the same things. Highlight new features that weren't available in the previous screenshots (Which is pretty much all of them) Tell me what you want in each screenie. I will whack these on a server and also make it available to mozillazine should they want to use it. Tell me what you want in each screenie. I will whack these on a server and also make it available to mozillazine should they want to use it. What interesting things can Mozilla do that other web browsers cannot do? For starters, Mozilla supports much more of the CSS and DOM standards than any other browser. This is really important for developers and anyone who wants nifty, quick-loading web pages or awesome web applications in the browser. Mozilla gives power to the user in ways other browsers don't. You don't need some third party cookie manager, and you don't need Gator to fill in your forms (and steal you personal info); it's all built-in to Mozilla. Doubleclick has nothing on me, 'cause their cookie is deleted and will never be allowed again. If you pop the hood and start poking around in the .js files, there's a whole bunch more of customizeablitity just waiting for a UI - like selective control over access to javascript functions (any sites you'd like to block from popping-up windows?). Mozilla is also the only major browser with support for user style sheets and alternate stylesheets (the UI needs some improvement, but it's usable now). Of course, mozilla also has some nifty themes. You can use Mozilla for building applications. As I already mentioned, standards support makes Mozilla a great target for in-browser applications. But you can also embed mozilla in windows applications, just like embedding MSIE. Unlike IE, however, Mozilla itself can serve as a cross-platform application framework. For example, Komodo is an IDE built on mozilla. Mozilla is much safer than IE and Outlook, and not just because it's not the majority browser: Microsoft's scripting and ActiveX models are in themselves unsafe. Plus, using Mozilla makes you a part of one of the niftiest open-source projects out there. And lizards are cool. Somebody posted a message saying it would be good if there were more webpages exhibiting exciting and unique features of Mozilla. I thought it would be fun to do that so I asked what Mozilla could do that the other browsers could not do. I think it would be difficult to convince somebody to switch internet things for the "CSS and DOM support" since they will never see that. The cookie management is another thing that will be invisible to people looking at the webpages. I do not know what user stylesheets are. Mozilla's ability to be embedded is not unique to Mozilla. I use Mozilla to view untrusted websites because it is not Internet Explorer but I do not think that is something exciting and unique about Mozilla. I think lizards are cool too. Maybe that is because of their cold blood. I was hoping for something that would appeal to the senses. Internet Explorer's ability to place icons with bookmarks and its ability to change the colour of scrollbars are noticeable and pleasing to me. I suppose the webpage transitions are good too. I was wondering if Mozilla has any capability comparable to those. I suppose it does not since the W3C is against excitement and aesthetic appeal but if it does, those are the things that will cause people to like Mozilla. Well, I know what you mean. But you actually *can* make web pages that look exciting in Mozilla and just way dull in IE: I'm using standards compliant CSS on one of my pages and guess what? the page is broken on IE 5+. I'm using @import so the 4.x browsers don't show the CSS. But now, because it is so broken in IE and I really don't want to make special hacks for IE, I will be writing a server-side browser recognition and also disable the stylesheets for IE 5. I hope IE 6 behaves better on this topic, otherwise I will have to do the same for it. So now if you see a web page without colors, without layout in one browser (IE) and with cool layout in another (Moz/MS6), do you see any difference? By the way, I don't know what is so exciting about changing the colors of the scrollbars... Maybe you will find it exciting if Microsoft JScript can make your CD-Rom tray to open. Cool! Hmm, interesting. I think the reason you're not getting the kind of answer you expect is that the whole Mozilla community is built around the belief that web sites *shouldn't* use "features" that work in only one browser. That's the kind of stuff that caused the kind of browser-sniffing, code-forking crap of the version-4 browser era which we're still to some extent clinging to. The purpose of the Mozilla organization is not to provide yet another browser with unique features which lock out the competition, but to create a better Web based on standards and freedom. I'm sure you've heard that a thousand times, though. So if you really want something that shows off Mozilla's unique capabilities, and if it is acceptable for your audience, then I'd suggest you try using XUL. It's an XML-based language which can be used to create complex, robust user interfaces. It's what is used to build the entire Mozilla browser interface, but can be used in web pages as well. The -moz-border-radius CSS property is also pretty cool, it rounds the corners of CSS box borders. I disagree with your statement that proprietary aesthetic "features" used in websites are "the things that will cause people to like Mozilla." I believe that (most) people pick a particular browser because (1) it is what is available and easily accessed (such as IE being integrated and the pre-defined default in Windows systems), and/or (2) its user interface makes their browsing experience more pleasant. Almost nobody will choose a browser because it allows web pages to change the scrollbar color or have (IMO annoying) page transitions. One thing that you don't see mentioned much but absolutely makes Mozilla the best browser experience for me is that you can highlight regular test in a webpage and drag-and-drop it into the url bar or directly onto browser windows. For instance: find a page with an unlinked url in its text content. Highlight the url, then drag it out and back onto the browser window. It'll take you straight there! You can do the same thing with links, and you can drop onto other windows as well. No copy-and-paste steps necessary. I love this and as far as I know no other browser allows it. Not something you can put in a web page, just something I think is incredibly cool. > One thing that you don't see mentioned much but absolutely makes Mozilla the best browser experience for me is that you can highlight regular test in a webpage and drag-and-drop it into the url bar or directly onto browser windows. For instance: find a page with an unlinked url in its text content. Highlight the url, then drag it out and back onto the browser window. It'll take you straight there! You can do the same thing with links, and you can drop onto other windows as well. No copy-and-paste steps necessary. I love this and as far as I know no other browser allows it. < IE5 for Mac allows it. I hadn't tried it with Mozilla since I thought it was an IEism. In fact I still haven't since I try to only run one browser at a time. In Moz, do you have to hit enter after dragging an unlinked URL to the Address bar? That's what you have to do in IE and I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or not yet... And this is after 6+ months of IE/Mac being my primary browser... ;) As soon as some last layout bugs are fixed, I can use Moz day-to-day... I can't wait for that day, myself. Anyone know the Bug # that I should be watching for the problem with the drop-down on http://www.netbank.com/login.htm ? I also can't login with Mozilla to this site, but they are "working to fix it", as the bank has been for the past 6+ months. I reported it in Feb since it wasn't working in either IE5 or Moz. They claim it's a "Mac issue". I claim it's poorly written code. OK. I stop ranting. If anyone has suggestions that I can pass on to the bank, I'd appreciate it. Or if anyone has more pull than I do as a lowly customer waiting for the day I can drop NS 4.x in the Trash, please let them know what's wrong... 1. it doesn't bring down my whole win2k box if it crashes. 2. user style sheet are a wonderful thing 3. themes are cool 4. Best web debugging environment. When you are developing a web app using JavaScript, using Mozilla is a dream. Its JavaScript console and code-highlighted source view are a huge step above IE's pathetic setup. Not to mention the fact that Mozilla actually, *gasp* ... follows the published standards. 5. XUL ... mmm... xul... 1. It brought down mine. 2. What? 3. It is easier to make a web browser than to make a Mozilla theme. 4. That would be good if the "standards" were worth something. 5. What? 1) You're using a PRERELEASE. You clicked an button to accept the fact that this prerelease software could destroy your computer, explode the monitor and kill your children before you downloaded it. Or did you miss that bit. Please wait for an actual release before you complain about stability (which 1.0 /will/ have). 2) User stylesheets. Very Cool. Click 'view | use stylesheet' and you'll probably see the word 'none' selected, and no other options. Presumably (we can hope) by 1.0 there will be an interface for adding user stylesheets. What this means is that you can have a CSS file you have written, or downloaded, applied to any page you view. This means that you can 'skin' any webpage - you could have different stylesheets to make mozillazine look different, for example (though this is one small use). 3) I've never found a point-and-click program for writing a web browser. You usually have to type some stuff. Not like Theme Builder / Chameleon... 4) It's good that this page is unreadable in anything other than IE on Windows, isn't it? Oh, it is readable? That's because we have standards. 5) XUL. It's what finally achieves Netscape's vision of the browser as the platform. XUL is a cross-platforn interface that enables you to build any program you like from the Mozilla base. Take as examples: Navigator, Mail / News, Composer, Chatzilla, Komodo, Chameleon, Fabula, PubMed, JabberZilla... Anyway, to address your original question, what exactly would you put on a page to show of what IE or Opera or Konqueror do, if none of these things are good enough? If you're going to claim that IE has extended standards in such a way that you can do exciting new things, then you'll shoot yourself in the foot. Mozilla has adopted standards in such a way that you can do exciting things, in a documented, predicatable way. Things that I think are useful that Mozilla is lovely for are user-definible searching from the address bar (which I use /constantly/ with google), Chatzilla, Themes (though obviously not that much recently with so few current, but that should change with the feature freeze of 1.0), JavaScript console, and general stability and speed of rendering (yes, I'm serious), not mentioning security, or standards because they are a bit of a given. Run the same browser on Windows, MacOS, BeOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2... A client for the Jabber http://jabber.org/ instart messenging service: http://jabberzilla.mozdev.org/ Themes: http://x.themes.org/ [currently down?] Easy ad blocking: Right-click and choose "block all images from this server." Integration with Google, or the search engine of your choice. Free-as-in-speech source code and open development. ...and many more! Of course, there are also some things that other browsers can do that Mozilla can't. Pick whichever one suits you best. I like being able to use the same internet thing on every operating system but I think most people only use one operating system. My plan was to make webpages to flaunt Mozilla's capability. I do not think I can make a webpage to flaunt Jabber. If I make a webpage that tells people how to block our images then I will be dragged into a basement and beaten with my keyboard. I think the image blocking is one of Mozilla's best features though. I hope they can modify it to block those stupid Flash ads. I do not think the integration with search engines is unique to Mozilla. I appreciate all three of you responding to me. I think a cool feature is the keyword for bookmarks, so you just have to type the keyword into the url bar As much as I like the Mozilla project, every time I use the browser, mail client or newsreader I can see there still is a very, very serious quality problem: the software is too slow to load, non-responsive and buggy. I would really like to switch from IE to Netscape as my reliable main browser, but I cannot: we use it for serious thin client business applications and we would be buried under criticism. I keep telling myself: maybe the next release, or the next one, or the next one ... Please Netscape (or AOL or Mozilla, whoever is really in charge of this thing), wake up, and don't deliver us to MS. Heh, no one is really in charge of this thing ;-) . At least that's my opinion. Why don't you start contributing and getting involve? At least you will know what really is going on :-) . Try it, and you will know how much is being done too! basic "Heh, no one is really in charge of this thing ;-)" Am I the only one here who thinks that is NOT a thing to smile about. Without anyone in charge, making decisions and pointing the way, all we get is confusion and people pulling different directions. There always needs to be someone in charge. During the good times, things will just roll on their own weight and lack of leadership is not a big issue but when things turn bad, there needs to be someone who has the final word. In an open source project, this is something that is missing and the results are what we're seeing now; being on the n:th year of development without having shipping any 1.0 release and without having any known date for such a release. As much as I like the Mozilla project, every time I use the browser, mail client or newsreader I can see there still is a very, very serious quality problem: the software is too slow to load, non-responsive and buggy. I would really like to switch from IE to Netscape as my reliable main browser, but I cannot: we use it for serious thin client business applications and we would be buried under criticism. I keep telling myself: maybe the next release, or the next one, or the next one ... Please Netscape (or AOL or Mozilla, whoever is really in charge of this thing), wake up, and don't deliver us to MS. It just crashed and took the entire computer with it. I remember people saying Mozilla's advantage over Internet Explorer is it does not crash the entire system when it crashes. As usual my entire history list has been erased due to the crash. This reminds me of my last days of using Netscape 4.5. I kept using it but I always wondered why I was using it. n/t I do not know the build ID. One was downloaded from the "latest" directory on 17 August. The other was downloaded days earlier. heh, you download a nightly build and expect stability? You have to be kidding, the nightly builds (those in the nightly directory) are not tested at all. The developers do try to make them as stable as they can, but lots of times bugs get introduced. The nightly builds are there so that the builds can be tested often and bugs can be caught early. If you want some stability stay with the releases. I've never used Konqueror because I don't run KDE (or GNOME) on my Linux systems so I never thought about the following use before for favicons that many sites use because of IE's support for them: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82130 Using the web pages icon in the taskbar if it provides one would give an additional visual clue to which site each window is which is useful if you have a lot of windows open and can't see much of the text, it'd take the concept of app icons one step further, as well as being easy to spot the Mozilla mail and composer windows due to their icon you'd also be able to easily see which window has Google in it and other sites... This is the sorta feature that has use, but also has the sorta gimmicky value that would make the likes of CNET really love it. Of course not everyone will like it, but it should be made a pref even if it's a hidden pref so power users or mozilla distributors can turn it off. A well deserved vacation? Good job! I love 2001081703, it's solid. Why People should use Mozilla over IE I thought I might as well have a crack at addressing this issue once and for all and at the same time try and answer peoples questions about just why Mozilla is better than IE. For many people using Mozilla/Netscape (i'll refer to them both as Mozilla from here on) is a disappointing experience. They expect perfect software and don't get it. They think that it is slow, buggy, and uses lots of memory. These are fair comments, and I could just go and deny them as I am a Mozilla advocate but I won't because to some extent Mozilla is still slower and buggier than IE. It's getting better, but I still use Outlook Express for email for instance because it is still better. For those that don't have problems with speed/stability/bugs (and this has become the more common case recently as can be seen in Tanyels comments and the CNET review of Netscape 6.1) often they look at it and say, what does Mozilla have that Internet Explorer doesn't? And the answer is right now, not much. It has a pretty GUI and the sidebar which I personally find very useful, though it's not for everyone. It can do most of the things that IE does just as well, some things it does better and some things it does worse. It can't do "favourite icons" although this issue is mainly complicated by the fact that this particular feature uses the Windows icon format and so is platform specific. I've never seen page transitions, I suppose because I use Win 98. So right now at the time of writing when Mozilla is at 0.9.3 it is a pretty much even competitor to IE5. Many people have tried it and found it satisfactory but can't see any compelling reason to switch. Bugs still exist but not in numbers large enough to be worrying (Microsoft doesn't make it's bug databases open like Netscape so we will never know how many are in IE but I'd be willing to bet it's not much less). Things like standards and security all too often don't mean much to the end user. Note that it doesn't stop the 'soft trumpeting it's "support for DOM and CSS 1" for IE6 [chuckle, mozilla is working on css 3 as we speak]. So we can conclude that technology wise, there isn't currently a compelling reason to switch. But in another sense there most definately is. It's to do with the reasons they were produced in the first place. Many people never stop to question why Microsoft goes to the trouble of writing IE and giving it away for free when it clearly makes large losses. The answer is simple - it's to do with control. What came out at the infamous DOJ vs. Microsoft trial was the in the early days of the web when Netscape 3 was supreme Gates had his now legendary "conversion" when he woke up to the net and decided to reorient his company around it. But to make money out of the net, Gates needed to control it. So they started working on Internet Explorer. The famous quote "We'll give it away for free, we'll cut off [netscapes] air supply" has passed into geek history and at that point it became clear that MS was not at all interested in producing a good browser (hence the lousy and buggy standards support) but very simply in controlling the web. This worrying desire has now come to fruition and although Microsoft does not quite utterly control the web yet, it's beginning to look that way. The most obvious and blatant example of this is IE6. If you look at the official website you can see that actually they have not really added any new or interesting features apart from perhaps P3P support. In fact, there are a lot of changes to IE6 but most of them are not desirable by the customer so they are not highlighted. Let's look first at the so-called "Smart Tags". In Office "Smart Tags" are a good idea. They help improve an already excellent office productivity product by popping up options in the main windows when needed. In IE6 they were plugins that allowed small programs to effectively re-edit pages before they were displayed to the user. I say were because as soon as people discovered this feature all hell was raised and MS were forced to back down. They have now been disabled by default. Think about that for a moment - the sample implementation had every instance of say the phrase Microsoft Office in a document replaced by a link to an order site for it. This was the case even if you were saying, "Buy our product which is better than Microsoft Office". Needless to say, this made a lot of people very unhappy and it had no obvious use to the end user. Now look at the decision to drop support for "Netscape-style plugins" from IE6. What Microsoft refers to as Netscape-style plugins is the EMBED tag which when placed in web pages allow authors to place animations, multimedia and more into their sites. Instead, Microsoft is telling people that all webpages should use plugins written for its (mainly proprietary) .NET platform. The fact that this change will stop millions of web pages from working does not bother them - why should it when everyone uses their browser and they effectively have control. Another change that actually disadvantages the user, not improves things for them. There are many more examples of this whereby MS uses it's control of Internet Explorer like a lever to take over aspects of computers, and the user be damned. "So if IE is so evil then, how is Mozilla better?" you may be asking. Good question and the answer is simple. The Mozilla project was started by Netscape (although note it is not controlled by them) to make the best web browser in existence. This means that unlike Microsoft and changes made to it must benefit the user. Unlike Microsoft the Mozilla project has no hidden agenda and it frowns upon proprietary technologies controlled by any one company. This is why standards matter so much to the Mozilla developers and why when people say "This page doesn't work! Mozilla sucks" they get so irate. Because if the page was a proper webpage then it would in fact work. With each release of Mozilla it gets better for the user, whether this be through increased stability, fewer bugs or more features - contrast this with Internet Explorer which with each release has lately actually been getting worse! Mozilla was designed to be secure and has had well tested and thought through security policies (the code is available for all the study and improve), whereas Internet Explorer has a long history of serious security breaches that resulted in the Love bug virus amongst others. So if you're an end user reading this, who isn't (and indeed shouldn't be) concerned with web standards, security or even bugs then I have only one good reason for you as to why Mozilla is better: It's better because it makes sense. Do you want to use software built to achieve power and control for Bill Gates, or built to achieve an excellent browser? I know which I prefer. Thanks for reading - Mike Hearn mhearn@neuk.net jabber: tweedledee@jabber.org ...and the thing that maybe could be said even more explicitly is that whilst IE isn't looking like it's going to get many more features any time soon, there's nothing Moz developers like more than adding features (which is often as much a curse as an asset) - which means that come 1.0 and IE parity the future should only look glorious for Moz, which IMHO is fairly likely to leave IE in the dust by about 1.5 . I suspect if you compare IE7 and Moz 2.0 you won't be so quick to deny there are reasons to use Moz rather than IE. And if IE is still a contender you can bet that 90% of the motivation will be Moz (and Opera, and Konq) - the reason that IE hasn't improved is that Microsoft hasn't needed it to - now they do. "What came out at the infamous DOJ vs. Microsoft trial was the in the early days of the web when Netscape 3 was supreme Gates had his now legendary 'conversion' when he woke up to the net and decided to reorient his company around it. But to make money out of the net, Gates needed to control it. So they started working on Internet Explorer." Actually, Bill Gates saw the potential in the Internet before that. He apparently realised after someone demonstarted the then-dominant NCSA Mosaic browser to him. This was sometime in 1993 or 1994 before Netscape was even out (Netscape - or Mosaic Communications Mozilla as it was known earlier - started development in Spring 1994 and the first version was released on December 15th 1994 - which is why typing about:mozilla in Netscape Communicator 4.x brings up a quote from "The Book of Mozilla 12:15"). Microsoft claims it began to develop IE in 1994 and even back then planned to integrate it into Windows (remember this is pre-95), though there are obvious advantages to Microsoft's antitrust defense in claiming this. They investigated licensing Netscape Navigator in 1994 but finally licensed NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass in late 1994/early 1995. The first version was released with the Plus! pack add-on for Windows 95. Bill Gates decided to bet the ranch on the Interent in late 1995 and said as such in his 'Pearl Harbor' speech on December 7th. Netscape 2.0 wasn't even out then. So Bill certainly got the Internet later than you'd expect a technology leader to, but it was earlier than Netscape 3 (not that that weakens any of your other arguments). Alex "which is why typing about:mozilla in Netscape Communicator 4.x brings up a quote from "The Book of Mozilla 12:15")." I just thought it interesting to point out that about:mozilla in Netscape 6.1 is from the book of 3:31. #67 Re: Re: Re: Why people should use Mozilla over IEby AlexBishop Monday August 20th, 2001 5:03 AM Whoops! about:mozilla actually brings up a quote from The Book of Mozilla 12:10, not 12:15, in Netscape 2.x, 3.x and 4.x (in 1.x it just said "Mozilla Rules!"). My mistake, sorry. 3:31 is obviously March 31st, which is a few days before Netscape 6.0 PR1 was released (early April 2000). The two quotes are different but I believe they're both based on passages from The Book of Revelations. Alex March 31st was the day of the original releasing of the source of the nonlicensed parts of what was to become Mozilla Classic. It's got nothing to do with 6.0 PR1. They want to distance themselves from that. :) "March 31st was the day of the original releasing of the source of the nonlicensed parts of what was to become Mozilla Classic. It's got nothing to do with 6.0 PR1. They want to distance themselves from that. :)" Thanks, I never realised that. I knew that the source code was realised on March 31st 1998 but I never made the connection to about:mozilla. I just assumed that March 31st 2000 was when about:mozilla was implemented in the new codebase. Obviously I was wrong. I usually am. :-) Alex "Now look at the decision to drop support for "Netscape-style plugins" from IE6. What Microsoft refers to as Netscape-style plugins is the EMBED tag which when placed in web pages allow authors to place animations, multimedia and more into their sites. Instead, Microsoft is telling people that all webpages should use plugins written for its (mainly proprietary) .NET platform. " Uh, that's just wrong. Microsoft plugins are no more proprietary than Netscape plugins. Second, Microsoft plugins have nothing to do with .NET *AT ALL* and everything to do with Active/X controls, which have been the component model in Windows since God knows how many years back. Just about EVERY plugin on the net is implemented as an Active/X control these days, with the sad exception of Quick Time, which Apple says is going to come out as Active/X soon. "Many people never stop to question why Microsoft goes to the trouble of writing IE and giving it away for free when it clearly makes large losses. The answer is simple - it's to do with control." And AOL is going to the trouble of writing Mozilla and giving it away for free because.. what? They want to wrestle the control to them. Just like they want with AIM. I don't see AOL and Mozilla being any more noble. Of course it's about the benefit of the company as a whole. These are businesses! They are not giving away things because it's good for humanity. They are doing it because it serves their company in some way. Don't be so naive! "It can't do "favourite icons" although this issue is mainly complicated by the fact that this particular feature uses the Windows icon format and so is platform specific." Windows .ICO files are .BMP files, which are just a short header, palette and an uncompressed bitmap (or RLE compressed). It takes about 50 lines of C/C++ code to read an .ICO file. "it became clear that MS was not at all interested in producing a good browser (hence the lousy and buggy standards support) but very simply in controlling the web." Huh? That's a totally bogus assumption! If they make a bad browser, nobody will use it even if it IS bundled with the OS. Look at notepad. Anyone who wants a real text editor dumps notepad and uses something like UltraEdit32 instead. Lots of people use Outlook (not OE) or Netscape or Eudora for email because they don't like Outlook Express (me for example). In order to get people to use their browser, they had to make it as good as they good. If you think that they just wrote something crappy for the sake of control, you're just wrong. They paid a lot of attention to making it a GOOD browser. If not, it's kinda sad to see that a browser that wasn't even made to be good, is still superrior to Mozilla - 4 years down the road. "And AOL is going to the trouble of writing Mozilla and giving it away for free because.. what? They want to wrestle the control to them. Just like they want with AIM. I don't see AOL and Mozilla being any more noble. Of course it's about the benefit of the company as a whole. These are businesses! They are not giving away things because it's good for humanity. They are doing it because it serves their company in some way. Don't be so naive!" Both Microsoft and AOL Time Warner want to monopolise the future. As AOL says, they want AOL to be "the operating system of your life" (personally, I find the XY Chromosome distribution of Human Genome 1.0 a perfectly acceptable OS myself). When they say AOL Anywhere, they really mean AOL Everywhere. Microsoft wants you to use Microsoft solutions for your PC (Windows XP), server (Windows.NET), PDA (Windows CE), cell phone (Stinger), media content (MSN), online communications (Windows Messenging Service), digital media and music (Windows Media and pressplay), shopping and personal data (Passport, HailStorm), Internet services (.NET) and some other things I've forgotten. AOL Time Warner wants you to use AOL Time Warner solutions for Internet access (AOL), media content (Time, CNN, Netscape etc.), online communications (AIM, ICQ), digital media and music (MusicNet), shopping and personal data (ScreenName, Magic Carpet) and some other things I've forgotten. Sounds pretty similar? That's because it is. Both companies want to be in control if there's anything to do with the Internet, telecommunications, software (especially Microsoft) or media (especially AOL Time Warner). And with the Internet becoming ubiquitous that's about everything. Both companies want to be the only player. None are particularly interested in open solutions (though I'd say Microsoft is generally worse than AOL Time Warner in this respect). It's like those science fiction movies where a single company dominates everything. At least there's two rivals here. Hopefully the competition will stop total domination by one of them. I'd say that with the dominance of Windows, Microsoft is the best placed at the moment. But that may change, particularly as Microsoft doesn't really dominate much outside the area of PCs. Of course a different company may rise to be bigger than both of them. Something else, like biotechnology, may replace the Internet, telecommunications, software and media industries as the main growth area. In reality, I think that there will be dominate players but that no single company will gain that much control. Smaller markets will be dominated by different players in the same way that RealNetworks dominates digital media, Nokia dominates cell phones, Sony dominates games consoles and Netscape used to dominate browsers. But then again, Microsoft is making inroads into all those areas... Alex > In reality, I think that there will be dominate players but that no single company will gain that much control. Microsoft almost included Smart Tags with IE6, which would make a mockery of hyperlinks. It would control every web site. In fact, it's still shipping with Office, so it is not dead at all. > Smaller markets will be dominated by different players in the same way that RealNetworks dominates digital media, Nokia dominates cell phones, Sony dominates games consoles and Netscape used to dominate browsers. But then again, Microsoft is making inroads into all those areas... Microsoft already is doing well on palm-sized PDAs. Ipaq has surpassed Palm in Europe, and greatly catching up here in its base. Streaming video/audio, consoles, etc, are not much different from browsers. They're easily co-opted through browser/OS integration, and most people I know don't care who makes what. At least they don't bother to. "2 major players not guarantee of competition" You're right there but it's slightly more desireable than just having one. "Microsoft almost included Smart Tags with IE6, which would make a mockery of hyperlinks. It would control every web site. In fact, it's still shipping with Office, so it is not dead at all." Smart Tags are a great idea, it's just the implementation that sucks. In their purest form Smart Tags are basically implicit links which was one of the early visions for hypertext. Microsoft's implementation is flawed. "Microsoft already is doing well on palm-sized PDAs. Ipaq has surpassed Palm in Europe, and greatly catching up here in its base." I live in the UK and recently Psion has decided to quit the hardware business. This is a shame since they've been making PDAs since the early 1980s but they've lost out to newer competitors (Palm, Handspring etc.). "Streaming video/audio, consoles, etc, are not much different from browsers. They're easily co-opted through browser/OS integration, and most people I know don't care who makes what. At least they don't bother to." Gaining dominance in streaming media by exerting an OS monopoly (as Microsoft is doing now) is a lot more dangerous than gaining a monopoly in browsers. HTML is, for the most part, an open standard whereas streaming media protocols (RealMedia, Windows Media) are closed. This means that whoever controls the standards can make a lot of money from licensing them. It's like that today with Philips getting a cut from every CD sale but by owning Windows Media Player, Microsoft can also promote the media it chooses through its WindowsMedia.com portal (of course RealNetworks can do the same thing with Real.com). And with Microsoft gaining monopolies in other areas... it's a little too much control for my liking. Alex "Microsoft plugins are no more proprietary than Netscape plugins. Second, Microsoft plugins have nothing to do with .NET *AT ALL* and everything to do with Active/X controls, which have been the component model in Windows since God knows how many years back." ...and therein lies the rub. Plug-ins could be (for the most part) platform and browser independent. Active/X controls only run on IE on Windows. By dropping plug-in support, MS is using IE's marketshare as a hammer to force browser add-in developers to either double their development costs (to do a plug-in *and* an Active/X control), or to switch to only Active/X controls. The big shops might continue to do both, but the smaller shops (I used to work for one) will almost certainly end up having to drop support for Netscape because of this. I don't see how this benefits consumers...all it does it make it harder for developers to offer cross-browser add-ins. That sounds pretty anti-competitive to me... "...and therein lies the rub. Plug-ins could be (for the most part) platform and browser independent. Active/X controls only run on IE on Windows." Platform and browser independent? Why would Microsoft care about that any more than they would care about making notepad platform independent? Their platform is Windows and anything else is irrelevant. It's not like Ford has to make seats and steering wheels that are compatible with Honda either, is it? "The big shops might continue to do both, but the smaller shops (I used to work for one) will almost certainly end up having to drop support for Netscape because of this. I don't see how this benefits consumers...all it does it make it harder for developers to offer cross-browser add-ins. That sounds pretty anti-competitive to me..." Oh geez. Of course it's anti-competitive in the sense that the competition won't LIKE it. There's nothing wrong with that. That's like claiming IE6 is anti-competitive because it's such a great browser that the competition is just left gasping for air. Maybe the DOJ should stop it because it's too good? Active/X is just a component model, like XPCOM that Mozilla uses. The fact that IE plugins are Active/X components means that they are not only plugins for IE but plugins for ANY application in Windows and since IE is an Active/X component, it too is a plugin for any application in Windows. That's damn cool, since it means you can embed Quick Time into a Word document or do anything else you want with it. When all plugins that I can think of, except Quick Time (which is being ported to Active/X) are already Active/X, it only makes sense to drop the legacy support for Netscape plugins. D I thought Mozilla supported ActiveX? Or am I getting confused with the plugin Adam Locke did for Netscape 4? That allowed you to run ActiveX controls in NS4. I assumed the same plugin was available in Moz He made a plugin for nav4? Adam Lock has created an ActiveX wrapper for mozilla so you can embed mozilla in, say, a Visual Basic app. You cannot run ActiveX controls inside of mozilla. OK. So I went to Adam's site and checked. >He made a plugin for nav4? Well here is a quote: "To complement the ActiveX control there is plugin project that shares many of the same files. This allows Netscape Communicator and Mozilla to display ActiveX controls. This project is still in the early stages, but the intended goals are: 1. Support for ActiveX controls via the <EMBED> tag 2. Support for ActiveX controls in Communicator 4 via implementation of the legacy plugin API. 3. LiveConnect and scripting support so that ActiveX controls can be controlled from JavaScript and other means Please note that only steps 1 & 2 are there at the moment! There is no scripting support at present! The Gecko layout engine has extended plug-in support. The hope is that the ActiveX plug-in will be able to utilize the advanced features of the new API to allow. There are a number of ActiveX implementations already for Netscape Navigator/Communicator but the intention is that this will be the first open source version. Also, due to its implementation with ATL it will also be one of the lightest and fastest as well. >You cannot run ActiveX controls inside of mozilla. You sure? :-) > >You cannot run ActiveX controls inside of mozilla. > You sure? :-) Well it can't with the default settings. Mozilla can also cure cancer, with the right plugin. :P From Adam Lock's FAQ What is the ActiveX plugin? It is a plugin designed to allow ActiveX controls to run inside Netscape Communicator 4.x and Mozilla. http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/faq.htm Now maybe he never finished it or maybe it is switched off or maybe it needs a specila build or maybe it doesn't plain work. That is the source of my confusion RE ActiveX controls. As for curing cancer, a cure for my hangover would be good enough :) D I thought Mozilla supported ActiveX? Or am I getting confused with the plugin Adam Locke did for Netscape 4? That allowed you to run ActiveX controls in NS4. I assumed the same plugin was available in Moz "Active/X is just a component model, like XPCOM that Mozilla uses. The fact that IE plugins are Active/X components means that they are not only plugins for IE but plugins for ANY application in Windows and since IE is an Active/X component, it too is a plugin for any application in Windows. That's damn cool, since it means you can embed Quick Time into a Word document or do anything else you want with it." You've been able to that for years with OLE (object linking and embedding). Alex "You've been able to that for years with OLE (object linking and embedding)." Well DUH! OLE, which is now referred to as COM (Component Object Model), is the basis for ActiveX controls. "Well DUH! OLE, which is now referred to as COM (Component Object Model), is the basis for ActiveX controls." Actually, OLE and ActiveX are built on top of COM, though you're right that OLE isn't used very much any more. It still doesn't change my point that you could stick a QuickTime movie inside a Word object before we had ActiveX. Alex The difference is that Microsoft is a monopoly, and monopolys have to play by stricter rules. For example, it's illegal for a monopoly to use its marketshare to put competitors at a disadvantage, unless they can show that the consumer benefit outweighs the anti-competitive aspects. That's what the appeals court just decided in Microsoft's trial. In this case, there's no plausible consumer benefit, and significant anti-competitive impact, so it seems to me that this is probably an illegal action on MS's part. "For example, it's illegal for a monopoly to use its marketshare to put competitors at a disadvantage, unless they can show that the consumer benefit outweighs the anti-competitive aspects." Terminating support for a dead technology certainly doesn't fall into this category. Even Mozilla is moving away from old Netscape plugins in favor of XPCOM plugins. I wish people would stop jumping at Microsoft when there's no reason. There's plenty of stuff that they do wrong. If you want to criticize them, use real arguments that are based on facts - don't make shit up. Moz is moving toward XPCOM, but still supports the old plug-in API. And that API is far from dead; it was the only way to make a plug-in that worked in both IE and Netscape. True, but if you really want plug-ins that work across different browser you need a better solution than that. What I'm saying is that using NS4 plugins is not the long term solution, Mozilla currently still support NS4 plugins but using NS4 plugins means limiting the ability of the plugin. I believe there is a need for a plugin standard. However I also think that any standard that is proposed now will have little chance of success as IE is the most widely used browser now. In the near future, I think activex will become the de-factor standard for plugins. There is already code that can get moz to support activex plugins on win32, not sure if it could work on linux (speaking of which, I think we should get win32 NS4 plugins working on linux via wine). The only thing I'm really worried about is dot net. If plugin developers require dot net for their plugins, then we are in trouble. You're right...we definitely need a plug-in standard. ActiveX is problematic because it's Windows only, and I don't think it's reasonable to require Linux users to install WINE in order to get their browser to work right. Also, ActiveX is a walking security hole...it executes code directly in the OS without any sandboxing, so any ActiveX control you accept has the ability to blow your system away or plant a trojan. Additionally, I'm leery of accepting any technological "Standard" controlled by a single company as opposed to a real standards body. Java could be a solution if Sun would ever release it. .NET could actually be a solution, if Ximian's open source implementation gets done quickly, but I think it'll take a bit too long to finish. I don't think there's an easy way around this one...IE's market share gives MS too much leverage. ActiveX was found to be safer on linux than on win9x/ME due to UNIX permissions and what not. There were suggestions to make it even safer by "sandboxing" ActiveX as a seperate user with limit abilities. Well, to be honest I think it is still too early to tell if dot net would be viable. Java would be a workaround the problem that some might accept, but it would mean that someone needs to get java working with all the browsers like it can with mozilla. Judging by the limited resources sun put into integrating their jre into mozilla, I have a feeling that they will not be willing to put enough resources to make java a standard for plugins. Well no real standard body would be able to do anything about this unless someone propose something and even after that it has to be implemented in the browsers (and after that in the plugins). We all know how many years it took to get some W3C standards implemented, and at how much effort. Plugins are even harder, now that one browser has the overwhelming majority. When people were demanding for W3C compliant HTML4 and CSS. They should have demanded a standard for plugins too. Its all in hind sight I guess. Who knew plugins would be so important, who knew IE was going to take over, who knew it would take mozilla so long... basic >>Moz is moving toward XPCOM, but still supports the old plug-in API. And that API is far from dead; it was the only way to make a plug-in that worked in both IE and Netscape.<< Not really. The important part of the plugin API is the connection between JavaScript and the plugin code. That has changed completely between Netscape 4.x and Mozilla, requiring completely new code. It never did work in IE, which had very limited support for LiveConnect in Windows IE and none in Mac IE. There never has been the cross-platform solution you describe, and the old API did die between Netscape 4.x and Mozilla. This is incorrect. I'm not a plugin expert but based on the bug reports I triage I'm pretty confident that the 4.x plugin API is alive and well and the preferred solution to the not even close to being finished XPCOM plugin API. I use several 4.x plugins straight out of my 4.x plugins directory. --Asa >>This is incorrect.<< Actually, it's quite correct, and comes directly from experience. >>I'm not a plugin expert<< I am. >>but based on the bug reports I triage I'm pretty confident that the 4.x plugin API is alive and well and the preferred solution to the not even close to being finished XPCOM plugin API. I use several 4.x plugins straight out of my 4.x plugins directory.<< You must be using them in a raw mode, not through the JavaScript bridge. Since plugins are largely about multimedia and multimedia needs branding, the JavaScript bridge to the plugins is an important component -- it enables rebranding of the UI. The bridge was based on LiveConnect in the past, but that has gone away in favor of a new XPCOM API. Attempting to call JavaScript through LiveConnect in Mozilla will fail. If you don't believe me, ask someone who works on plugins in the Mozilla organization, if you can find one. To date most of the work has been done by outside developers who need their plugins to function -- plugin support seems to be a very low priority You are talking about liveconnect no? Well liveconnect was not implemented back when NS6.0 was released, I think (Someone correct me if I'm wrong). It is implemented now. I am talking about LiveConnect, yes. Was it re-added to Mozilla this year? Plugin developers have long been told it was not part of Mozilla and we had to use XPCOM instead. That is still what mozilla.org says: http://www.mozilla.org/docs/plugin.html#upgrading "If your plug-in provides a JavaScript-accessible LiveConnect API, then you must upgrade your plug-in to the new Mozilla plug-in API. LiveConnect, as used in Navigator versions 3 and 4, depended on the presence of the Netscape JVM. Mozilla supports Java through the Open Java Interface (OJI), giving users the freedom to use any OJI-compliant JVM as soon as it is released, and the Mozilla plug-in API has been redesigned to eliminate the dependency on the JVM. Existing plug-in binaries on Windows and Macintosh that feature a LiveConnect API will still function within the new browser, but calls to the LiveConnect API itself will fail silently until the plug-in has been upgraded to the Mozilla plug-in API. Upgrading a plug-in is a straightforward process that involves mapping the old API to the new one, providing a backward adapter file, and recompiling the plug-in to reflect the changes. Step-by-step instructions for upgrading plug-ins can be found later in this guide." yeah, you are right. I somehow got it all mixed up. So liveconnect works like NS4 in javascript (with some caviats) and java. Seems like there still bugs in bugzilla about liveconnect that has to do with ns4.x compat http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54408 http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4493
Looking at the bugs on LiveConnect in Bugzilla, I'm more confused than ever. Was LiveConnect resuscitated in March by Patrick Beard? If so, what is the impact on plugin developers? I'm working off of really old information, but how I understood it is that there are 2 forms of LiveConnect. Java LiveConnect and Plugin LiveConnect. Mozilla contains the Java LiveConnect but not the Plugin LiveConnect. What I heard was that in order to program the plugin LiveConnect they would need a jre that they could modify, but now that they allow you to swap jre's they can't do that. That is also the reason why, when loading a plugin in Nav4, it would always say "Loading Java..." in the status bar. Because it was :) Again, I may be totally wrong on this. "Not really. The important part of the plugin API is the connection between JavaScript and the plugin code. That has changed completely between Netscape 4.x and Mozilla, requiring completely new code. It never did work in IE, which had very limited support for LiveConnect in Windows IE and none in Mac IE." Microsoft claims http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=22220 that it only dropped support for Netscape-style plugins after Netscape did. Now if I understand this correctly, Netscape only dropped support for LiveConnect which IE never really supported anyway. That would mean Microsoft is stretching the truth a bit. Can someone clarify this for me? Alex Actually, the text from MS in your link is ambiguous as to what technology they dropped: >>"We only dropped support for this technology after Netscape did," a Microsoft representative told me Monday. "And yes, we did alert developers about this change months ago."<< If "this technology" is LiveConnect, then it's an accurate statement. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but it's not clear to me this was a deceptive statement. Hiya macpeep, hope I didn't piss you off too much. It's just personal opinion remember! Anyway, here are some answers (presumably you would like them): "Microsoft plugins are no more proprietary than Netscape plugins." Fair enough. "Second, Microsoft plugins have nothing to do with .NET *AT ALL* and everything to do with Active/X controls, which have been the component model in Windows since God knows how many years back. Just about EVERY plugin on the net is implemented as an Active/X control these days, with the sad exception of Quick Time, which Apple says is going to come out as Active/X soon." Actually you're wrong. MS has announced that from now on plugins will be implemented as .NET objects. ActiveX and COM are (theoretically) things of the past. "And AOL is going to the trouble of writing Mozilla and giving it away for free because.. what? They want to wrestle the control to them." And how would they do that? Actually AOL is funding it mainly because it is a legacy of Netscape and they want a browser yes, but they don't control it. Mozilla basically controls the browser. "It takes about 50 lines of C/C++ code to read an .ICO file." I know that, I was talking more about platform design issues. For instance, MacOS X uses very different icons to Windows. "If they make a bad browser, nobody will use it even if it IS bundled with the OS." On the contrary this is exactly what happens. IE is not a good browser. If it was it would render web pages correctly. And the Department of Justice disagrees - they say bundling with the OS is important. "Lots of people use Outlook (not OE) or Netscape or Eudora for email because they don't like Outlook Express (me for example)." The Love bug spread because lots of people -do- use Outlooke Express. Mainly because it is bundled. I use it, 'cos it's still better than Mozilla Mail (at the moment).
"If you think that they just wrote something crappy for the sake of control, you're just wrong. They paid a lot of attention to making it a GOOD browser. If not, it's kinda sad to see that a browser that wasn't even made to be good, is still superrior to Mozilla - 4 years down the road." Superior in what way? I tried very hard to be specific about what the differences are between Mozilla and IE. You haven't, just saying IE is "superior" isn't good enough. On standards complience and security it most certainly is not. On OS integration it is. Take your pick. thanks -mike "Hiya macpeep, hope I didn't piss you off too much. It's just personal opinion remember! Anyway, here are some answers (presumably you would like them)" Nope.. :) And thanks for replying, in particular without losing your temper after my uh, slightly emotional reply to your original post. "Actually you're wrong. MS has announced that from now on plugins will be implemented as .NET objects. ActiveX and COM are (theoretically) things of the past." Ah, you may be right, tho I haven't heard about that announcement. .NET objects, AFAIK are ActiveX objects. At least that's how objects are in C# if memory serves. Maybe MS is just renaming technologies again. "On the contrary this is exactly what happens. IE is not a good browser. If it was it would render web pages correctly." IE *IS* a good browser. IE 5.5 is in my view the best browser - by far - out there, and I would say that the vast majority of people agree (and I'm not talking about market share.. I'm talking about web designers who use web browsers for their work etc. etc.). I sure have more problems viewing pages with Mozilla than IE, but then again, that can very well be because pages are tested with IE and are left containing a million bugs because they still look fine in IE whereas Mozilla renders the pages with all the million bugs. *shrug* "Superior in what way? I tried very hard to be specific about what the differences are between Mozilla and IE." Stability, speed, simplicity.. It just works, displays pages rights, never (or extremely rarely) crashes etc. It's not bloated with an email app (though OE is "bundled" with IE to be fair, but it's a separate app), chat client, web page editor etc.. It doesn't attempt to work on 100000 gazillion platforms but instead tries to be great on one platform. The Macintosh version is supposedly even better than the Windows version, and those two platforms cover about 99% of all users.. But still, there's a reason why I'm here and it's not to bash Mozilla. I *AM* hoping that Mozilla would become a better browser than IE because I think Mozilla is a much, MUCH better platform to build on for the future. Right now though, IMHO, IE is stil superior. Like you started your reply with.. these are just our own personal opinions.. :) I'm cheering for Mozilla, but in my score card, IE is still ahead in the game. "IE *IS* a good browser. IE 5.5 is in my view the best browser - by far - out there, and I would say that the vast majority of people agree (and I'm not talking about market share.. I'm talking about web designers who use web browsers for their work etc. etc.)...." As a web designer, the thing I care most about is standards, and IE dumps ALL over them (IE 5.5 for the Mac is radically different than IE 5.5 for the PeeCee in terms of standards compliance). And IE does attempt to work on more than one platform, bro -- Mac and PC. That's TWO. :) There are big differences between the two. Go check the WASP pages to see what I mean. Stability? IE 5.5 (PeeCee) is hardly stable, especially on upgraded machines. IE doesn't install nicely or play well with other versions of IE. Next, IE doesn't display pages right if it isn't standards compliant. So the argument for "right" unless you mean "designed for IE" is bogus. Simplicity? What, when it takes two clicks to add a page to your bookmarks? From a UI point of view, IE 5.5 is hardly a modicum of simplicity...just how many icons do you see there? And how do you customize the thing? Moz already kills IE dead for many reasons, but here's one: BLOCK IMAGES FROM THIS SERVER. Bang. "And IE does attempt to work on more than one platform, bro -- Mac and PC. That's TWO. :) There are big differences between the two. Go check the WASP pages to see what I mean." Who cares? IE for PC rules and from what I've heard, IE on Mac is even better. So what if they are different? I didn't even KNOW they were "radically different" like you said. Why should I care as an end user? A web designer like you might care cause you have to test on more than 1 browser.. For an end user, it's completely irrelevant. "Stability? IE 5.5 (PeeCee) is hardly stable, especially on upgraded machines. IE doesn't install nicely or play well with other versions of IE." Mean time between failures for Mozilla is slightly lower than Netscape 4 for me.. About the same.. That means roughly one crash per day or so. IE 5.5 crashes so rarely for me that I don't even remember when it last crashed. Maybe you've just had bad luck.. Or maybe I've had good luck. Still, I know lots and lots of people who have chosen IE for exactle the reason that it's MORE STABLE than Netscape. *shrug* It seems it depends a lot on your setup. "Next, IE doesn't display pages right if it isn't standards compliant. So the argument for "right" unless you mean "designed for IE" is bogus." I surf on the REAL web with REAL pages. Not "box acid"-tests etc. The sites on the REAL WWW look better in IE than on Mozilla. They look more "right". I don't care if they follow standards or not or if the HTML is broken. No end user does. That's the web designer's problem. Why would I "upgrade" to something that makes the web look WORSE - as an end user with no political interest in my browser choice? "From a UI point of view, IE 5.5 is hardly a modicum of simplicity...just how many icons do you see there?" Two.. Back and Forward. I have removed the rest and moved the links bar, address bar and button bar all to the same row to minimize the screen real estate the bars take. "And how do you customize the thing?" Right click on the toolbar (like everywhere else in Windows for a context menu) and select "Customize". On the Macintosh IE, you have a page full of icons and you drag and drop them to the toolbar. How do you customize the Mozilla button bar or rearrange the personal toolbar so that it's on the same row as the address bar? What? XUL? Huh? Are you kidding me?! As a web developer. I care mostly about three things: stability, feature set and market share. At present levels of development, IE is the clear winner on each of those counts, and the gap is not narrowing. I'm sure this will be perceived as just more flamebait by many, but it's something those involved with the project need to know. Unfortunately, I just don't see them taking developer attitudes into account. Finally, I don't believe your intentions about Mozilla project are bad, so I think some inaccurate statements of yours must be coming from either your obsession with IE or a relatively small user experience from Mozilla. No offense about the "obsession" thing, simply as a Navigator user I cannot understand why a good-but-not perfect browser like IE is considered top quality software. Everyone who used the straightforward appoach of NS will understand what I mean. Quoting par example: "Mean time between failures for Mozilla is slightly lower than Netscape 4 for me". Definitely Mozilla is *vastly* improved, regarding to stability (I don't mean polishing bugs and regression problems, issues considered normal in a development process). The inglorious days when NS4x was crashing everytime it was trying to render some badly written page (or even good ones) are long in the past. I still like NS4x for its UI responsiveness and small memory footprint but this damn thing was crashing like mad (thankfully, it wasn't affecting Windows). There are still some related jokes around the Net about that. Now with mozilla I am able to browse for hours over many different sites and multiple windows without a single crash. I have noticed the great stability improvement (I mean the immunity to crashes due to web page structure) on various hardware setups under Win95, Win98 and Win2k. On the same machines, NS4 was a nightmare, despite of many attempts for tweaking (using Netscape's knowledge database). After watching so many specific web page related crashing bugs filed in Bugzilla (the vast majority of them being fixed now), I am sure I know why Mozilla is better on this aspect. They keep an eye on this kind of problems at top priority. Not to mention talkback crash data. Great debugging feature. I am sure Asa Dotzler can give you more impressive data about stability for the last milestones. <rant> IE6 dropping NS4 plugins support? So what? After all these years browser makers have not been able agree to create a standard plugin system that is supported by all browsers on the same platform (much less cross platform). I've yet to see webstandards.org complaining about plugin, I don't see plugin developers really doing anything about it and Mozilla seems to be moving away from NS4 plugins too (by introducing xpcom plugins). So why complain about IE5.5r2/IE6 not supporting NS4 plugins? If anyone really wanted cross-browser plugins, they should already have proposed a standard, get it to work with all major browsers and get plugin developers to used them! It is not unexpected that Microsoft or even Netscape might make such a move, after all NS4 plugins are old and browsers have changed a lot. What about audio/video players like RealPlayer and WinAmp? Surprise! They have plugins too! Are we going to ask for cross player plugins? </rant> back to work There actually is a cross-browser plugin standard, which allows a single plugin to operate on multiple platforms, and even ahs built-in security features to prevent plugins from behaving maliciously. It's called Java, and the plugins are called applets. Sure, Java has issues, but Java applets in theory fill the same gap as plugins. Note that not all browsers support java. Now that WinXP doesn't include java and MS no longer support java, it may not be viable to use java as a plugin alternative. In mozilla there is even a real java based plugin system. Its called pluglets, but it is not a cross-browser solution. >>There actually is a cross-browser plugin standard, which allows a single plugin to operate on multiple platforms, and even ahs built-in security features to prevent plugins from behaving maliciously. It's called Java, and the plugins are called applets. << That's great, but to be useful in an integrated way, applets need DOM access. Unfortunately, there's no cross-platform, cross-browser way to give applets DOM access. Like raw plugins, they can just sit there in their own little pane, aloof and alone, having nothing to do with the rest of the web page. They can't act as components -- for instance, you can't have them know the state of a checkbox in HTML, or enable or disable that checkbox. This means you have to do your whole UI in Java if you want to do anything significant. IBM's directDOM bridges this gap from what I've read... I'm not good with Bugzilla so hopefully someone can see if a feature I want has been entered, and if not, enter it for me. Thanks in advance. The feature I'm looking for comes from IE. When you click a link on a page and then go back later, that link is still active. It'd make keyboard-control much easier. Someone else probably already asked for this, but just in case. I think this is a very good feature. What will the current layoffs at Netscape mean to Mozilla?? I believe the layoffs are only in the server division. When Netscape first started the server software was the cash cow. When AOL bought Netscape, the server divisions of Netscape and Sun were basically merged to form iPlanet (I imagine because AOL has little interest in server software). According to something I read on CNET, a third of the iPlanet employees are currently Netscape people and after the layoffs it will be around 20% (assuming Sun doesn't also lay off any workers - from what I understand the venture's not doing as well as hoped). So I don't think Mozilla will be affected. Of course this is only my understanding and I'm often wrong so this may all be incorrect. Alex I thought iPlanet was formed before AOL come along? There's been speculation of when Mozilla 1.0 will be released ever since the project begun. The consensus is that we're getting pretty close to 1.0 right now - maybe a few more months or so.. Earlier this year, it was still "too early to tell". What are the estimates now? How many more 0.9.x milestones will we see until we get to 1.0? How many more months? As far as I can tell, it's always three months away. Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. At the company I worked for last year, we tied ourselves up in knots trying to make sure we supported Mozilla by the (then) January 2000 release date. If you notice some faint taste of bitterness in my postings, it has a lot to do with that little fact. I'd recommend that anyone with commercial web interests should wait for the Netscape 6 market share to climb to ten percent before doing anything to support it. That beats trying to plan ahead for this unplanned project. #126 Remember, it took 10 years to accept the safety beby NeilPryde Friday August 24th, 2001 4:00 PM I sure hope it won't take that long for Mozilla! Well, if you want to see how fast moz is in rendering compared to IE, you can go to www.santoslaguna.com.mx Wait till the flash finishes, and in the homepage see IE crying to render the page... hehe. It takes about 30 seconds on my machine (maybe a newer version of IE improves it) and in moz it takes just a sec! cool... Mede Tried it on my 56K dialup PC using Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 6.1. Ignoring the initial Flash splash screen, IE took a good three or so minutes to render the page. What surprised me was that it would go for long periods (several seconds) without transferring any data. It seemed to take ages just to get the basic layout right. IE remained unresponsive while loading the page. Netscape 6.1 took just under 82 seconds (based on the time it provides with the 'Document: Done' on the status bar) and got the layout right quickly. There was no pause in the data transfer and it remained responsive throughout. Of course, this is only one page and I'm sure someone (macpeep probably) could provide loads of pages that IE renders faster. Alex Honestly, I think this "rendering speed" issue doesn't interest us dial-up users (56K/64K/128K). Speed limitations due to modem technology and ISP's limited backbone bandwidth is much more of a loading performance problem here in Europe. But there is at least one glazing exception : javascript/dom performance is abysmally slow and this makes browser nearly unusable, at least for intranet applications. There is already a Bugzilla bug about it and I hope they'll soon address the problem (although curent target milestone for this bug is 1.0) "Honestly, I think this 'rendering speed' issue doesn't interest us dial-up users (56K/64K/128K). Speed limitations due to modem technology and ISP's limited backbone bandwidth is much more of a loading performance problem here in Europe." I agree that that's true in most cases. But if a site takes a long time to download, there's a definite advantage if the browser can render what's already been received rather than having to wait until the whole page has been downloaded - as NCSA Mosaic used to make you do. (Though this is more dependent on a browser's incremential reflow abilities than its rendering speed.) In the example mentioned, IE took ages to render the page and actually stopped transferring data at some points. I don't know the reason for this (but I'm pretty certain it wasn't due to the Internet being busy) but it was certainly nice to be able to see some of the page earlier in Mozilla. Alex IE always seems to be non-responsive when loading a page. It's a PITA to stop the load or go to another page. Set your home page to a site such as www.msnbc.com. Load IE and try to do File Open to go to another site. Try the same thing in any version of Netscape. This is the kinda thing that slays me when people talk about how fast IE loads compared to Netscape or Mozilla. It just APPEARS to load faster.. stop the timer when you can actually USE the browser and you will notice the time is not that much different... |