Mozilla's Scott Collins on TechTVWednesday December 11th, 2002Mozilla Technical Evangelist Scott Collins was interviewed on the December 3rd edition of The Screen Savers on US cable channel TechTV. In the segment (available for viewing online), Scott gives demonstrations of the PrefBar, Chimera and MozBlog. He also talks about the early days of Netscape and why people should care about Mozilla. In addition to the interview, TechTV have also published article by Myk Melez about creating Mozilla extensions on their website. Cool, but the "Reason you should switch" right at the very end was very lame. How about making mozilla faster instead of saying "Because we don't want a world ruled by microsoft". Yes, he was probably short on time, but showing what was good about Mozilla would have been a better sell. All they had to do was show tabbed browsing and the popup blocker. That would have been enough. And a "Mozilla.org has a smaller, leaner browser called Phoenix for you Martin, if you think Mozilla.org proper is too slow." would have hit the spot. To their credit, I've heard Leo mention many times that he's a Moz fan. :) If I'd been asked for a good reason why it's advisable to switch to a Mozilla based browser from Internet Explorer, I'd have said that aside from the excellent compliance to recommended web standards, my reason for switching would be primarily based on security. The fact that IE contains numerous security vulnerabilities that have been left unpatched for many months, and that any security vulns that appear in any Mozilla based browsers get fixed within a couple of days after they're discovered. I would have asked the interviewer whether he really like the idea of a hopelessly insecure browser irrevocably intertwined with his computer's operating system, therefore posing the very real risk of compromising the safety and security, of the entire PC. Interviewer: "I've been playing around with Mozilla, I still play around with Netscape...For some reason it's a little slower - when I'm loading a page or somthing like that it's kind of like the difference switching the TV in analog or digital cable, there's that little pause...what's going on there and why should I switch over to Mozilla if I'm currently an Internet Explorer user." Scott: "I think you should switch over to Mozilla because you don't want it to be the world where Microsoft controls your Internet experience. I mean once all of the browsers are dead and they start charging, you and I will be in the business of selling farm equipment." This is like asking for a cup of coffee and getting a cow. No, that would be too relevant - you might have wanted milk in your coffee. Of course this kind of answer is a great strategy to avoid all those nasty end-users that Mozilla isn't meant for. "You should switch to Mozilla because it embraces and implements Web standards, scorning proprietary abominations such as <layer>, <blink> [tongue in cheek], and document.all. Mozilla heralds the new Internet era where Web developers can write pages once and have it work in any browser...once Internet Explorer catches up to us (and everyone trashes their Netscape browser)." Well, maybe this is over the top but probably still better than the threat of having to sell farm equipment if you don't switch to Mozilla... In order to get the media clip to play, since it is embeded WMF you need to display the source code and locate the url for the media stream. BTW I am using MacOS X. (<rant>I hate this format, and TechTV should know better than format their media in such a manner that you require IE since all WMF plugins for other platforms do not handle embeded WMF correctly</rant>) Anyway Scott Colins did demonstate Mozilla on MacOS X :) . He claims it was a mistake for Netscape to release an update to 4.x (since the code was mostly finished) and instead took the track to develope a browser based off Gecko. He stated that this let Microsoft take the marketshare away from Netscape. (I am not sure if Scott (if pressed further) that Netscape made a mistake by not releasing an update to 4.x, since the code was almost complete and then begin working on a Gecko browser, or if he meant that Netscape should never have abandoned the 4.x code line in favour of Gecko) Anyway I am unsure how Scott feels about the abandonment of the 4.x code other than that by not releasing an update to this code (a 5.x line) Netscape blundered and lost a lot of browser loyalty to Microsoft. I do not totally agree with his assement. Yes some of the loss of browser market share can be attrtributed to the lack of a timely update to the 4.x line. He is correct in accepting this responsbibliltiy on behave of Netscape. This is something Netscape could do control and do something about. This is fault and IN HINDSIGHT could have been habdled better, even if eventually Netscape did migrate to Gecko. Now here is the part of the assessment I believe is the major reason Netscape lost browser share to Microsoft. The failure by Netscape in providing a timely update to its 4.x line before worrying about the Gecko based browser had less impact on the browser market share than Microsoft's embeding/comingling of its browser code with that of its Windows OS. Most people today, let alone 2 years ago, are still on dialup. How many users will bother downloading an different or alternete browser on their new machine when the one already installed (namely IE) sorta already works. [Oh how I wish Microsoft had been properly sentenced by the courts and ordered to remove all embeded/comingled code by the courts. The sad thing is that the courts have never realized how much power leaving the embeded code in the OS gives Microsoft to act as an illegal monopololist. The courts believe it has stripped microsoft of its illegal monopolist tactics when the took away the desktop short cuts. If the judge believes this, then maybe I should visit her and see if she would like to buy a bridge from me. :) ] I think he did a very good job of showing off Mozilla. Yeah, I wish he would have come up with a better selling point at the end than "destroy Microsoft," more or less, but overall very good. So, here's my proposed Mozilla slogan: "Speed, stability, standards, tabs, popup blocking, and 100% customizability. It adds up to the world's best web browser." How's that? The interviewer put Scott in a difficult position right at the end by saying that Mozilla is 1 second slower than IE in rendering pages. Sadly, that's accurate. We haven't completely caught up yet. We need to fix the paint suppression logic so that we paint immediately. See this bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162123 We could also point to HTTP pipelining, which makes browsing on dial-up connections faster than the competition, and to all of the handy features that make using Mozilla more productive using the competition. If we can't add HTML in the text, can't we have our paragraph breaks back? Sorry, but the slogans have to be short, memorable, and easy to understand. Yours isn't really short enough. It might be a good summary of the advantages of Mozilla, though. 'Mozilla - because it's not Microsoft' (or whatever) is, unfortunately, a much better slogan. Unfortunately, that kind of thing does make Mozilla users look like whiny anti-MS zealots (which, to be fair, a great many Mozilla users actually are, but that doesn't really help the browser). In the end I don't think Mozilla really needs a slogan. I mean it's not like there's going to be an advertising campaign. People use Mozilla because it's good shit. That'll do. --sam You know, it's actually faster than IE for me on all of the computers I use it on. And since Mozilla is faster than IE, Phoenix just blows it away. I don't know why my experiences are different from others... #9 TechTV: another crappy windows-only streaming siteby johann_p Thursday December 12th, 2002 2:27 AM I am so sick and tired of these. Yes, I could hack out the streaming URI and view it with mplayer on linux, but why are those idiots forcing me to do this? Does'nt it occur to them that it might be a bit offensive to users who choose to use a different OS? test |