What admin can't? Admins who have only administered through easy-as-pie GUIs and wizards. These people wouldn't go through the hurdles you just mentioned.

mm, that's an easy answer, and it allowed me to take a potshot at Microsoft Admins. Whee :)

Don't know how it is in the states, but around here the usual school doesn't have an administrator. Usually a teacher handles the PCs, and most of this is unfortunately still in his/her free time. Sure the contractor who installed the whole thing most likely could do this, IF he took the time to get to know the Mozilla architecture far enough which is something that will not be a vast help to sell future products since nobody asks what Browser they get. And even then it would be unacceptable for the school to have to call in the contractor every odd time they need to make a minor change there.

What admin has the time to do that? Options slow people down and cause confusion. Keep it simple stupid - put a simple GUI on it, or create a custom distribution for those people. Expecting them to find and spend the time educating themselves and making these changes is unrealistic.

If the community really weanted schools (and intranets) back, they could simply make another gecko-based project aimed at being administrated via the network. Granted, it's a lot of work for us, but it's no work for the admins. And honestly, it's that kind of guerilla warfare tactic that makes open-source so much more powerful than corporate software anyway.

Microsoft certainly *can* afford to write a browser from scratch in much less than four years. (How long did it take them to write IE4, which was done from scratch? It wasn't four years.)

They've got essentially infinite development resources (well, as much as they choose to throw money at it), which kind of helps.

I'm with you on market share not being the really important thing, though, and your other points. Mozilla is never going to overtake IE, but if Gecko-based browsers can manage 5 or 10% eventually and a few other alternative browsers also pick up a few %, then we can move toward a much healthier Web situation with IE's dominance reduced to, say, 75%. (At the moment, IE's at around 90%+)

--sam

I can understand your sentiments regarding TCPA, but what's wrong with .NET? I see .NET as a huge boost for Windows programmers. Ximian is thankfully working on a UNIX-implementation (Mono), which brings .NET to my platform of choice.

If you're referring to .NET My Services (Hailstorm), that project is no longer worked on by Microsoft. So what exactly don't you like about .NET?

With all the reports of the lack of security reported against I.E. every since 1997 how do you think Microsoft kept its users and at the same time increase their user base. Does it make sense for customers to continue to use an insecure product? Where Eudora, for example, survive for very long if it had had the same number and frequency of security reports. It would have been quickly dropped by its user base, unless its users are not very bright.;)

What worked in Microsoft's favour was code intermingling, setting I.E. as the default browser on Windows Machine, making it hard for users to set any other program as their default browser. Some companies kept using Netscape primarialy for its security for mail and browsing. But the more Microsoft set its browser to pop up regarless of which bowser the users set as default and added proprietay tags and replaced the then standard Javascript and Java with VB and its non standard Microsoft Java users felt they had little choice but to swith to continue using the web.

What could Netscape do to counter this? Sure they could have released a Version 5 for Netscape. Could they have ensured this version would work with the web sites of the day. Not likely since the competitor kept changing the standards its browser followed with every service pack. The only choice Netscape had IMHO was to strive to be as standard compliant as possible, otherwise it was dead.

Think about it. Your competitor has comingled its code into its OS. Your competitor also has chosen to diviate from W3C standards and has even produced WSIWYG web site design tools which follows these propritary standards which only work well in its browser. How could Netscape keep up with a moving target. Netscape could have set to the task of implementing Microsoft's propritary standards, but what would keep Microsoft from the next day tweeking the standard so that it now only worked with IE. Thus the only way Netscape could move forward was by strictly adhering to W3C standards. Netscape had to use standards which could not be changed at the whim of Moicrosoft.

Little would have changed if there had been a version 5 for Netscape. The code they were working with was not very standards compliant and could not easily be made compliant. It had to be scrapped. Netscape, to remain in the game, desperately required a standards complient browser. It is too bad that it took 4 years to get a standards complient browser, but if time had been wasted working to first release a version 5 and Microsoft might have 99-100% of the browser market.

I am very happy that Mozilla correctly(IMHO) chose to scrap the 4.x code. By so doing they kept Mozilla in the browser game. Now as Mozilla/Netscape matures toward a version 2, as gecko is used in many projects including the AOL browser and as users tire of the insecurity of IE the gecko based browsers will gain market share.

BTW without Mozilla's insistance for following standards it is very likely a lot more web sites out there would fail to open in anything but IE. You know what brought me to testing Mozilla (starting with milestone 6) was the fact that with Netscape 4 ten to fifteen percent of the sites I visited failed to open and another ten percent displayed a downgraded Netscape page. Today for the sites I visit, including my two banks, display fully without a redirection to a downgraded page for Netscape. This situation would have been less likely today if developers had took the precious time to first udate version 4 to version 5.

I could be wrong. This is the way I understand the Mozilla history.

Well, it's great that the Moz Team has finally figured this "bug" out.

Many realized at the time that putting www/mail/news in the same process was a fundemental design flaw in Netscape 3, and there was absolutely no decent reason to repeat that atrocity in Mozilla.

"I wonder if some people take "shots" ;) at the Mozilla suite, not so much because it is a bad idea that Mozilla is a suite of internet apps, but because they don't need/like some of the bundled apps or only want a browser"

That is preceisly why it is a bad idea!! If only 5 or 10% (1%?) of Moz users are using news, chat and compose, then it has been a horrible waste of time and preciously limited resources to develop them. Especially considering there are multiple good options for each of these apps on every platform.

And after 5 years, the closest we have to what the masses have been waiting for are the 0.x versions of Chimera and Phoenix whose futures aren't even clear!

Woah. You're over-reacting - don't be so sensitive. Maybe I'm over-reacting, but it feels like you've spent a whole reply (including the title) trying to put my comment down. You've complete misunderstood what I was saying (which could well be down to my writing style) by trying to paint me in to the same corner with the anti-Mozilla trolls. I'm a big fan of Mozilla and have used it as my primary web browser for over a year, and dabbled with it for far longer. I evangelize it amongst my family and friends trying to get them to use it, so I'm certainly not "taking shots" at it.

Just because you rarely have problems with Mozilla doesn't mean there aren't problems, and nor should you use that as a basis for dismissing other people's grievances and trying to shove them under the rug. I agree, too many people whine about Mozilla's resource requirements... I suspect they have unrealistic hardware expectations and trying to run it on much older systems. Now, there's an argument that Mozilla should run all systems possible, and there's another argument that we shouldn't worrying about that and just looking to the future. I'm not going to get in to that though as my original comment about the memory usage was to highlight the fact that Mozilla had jumped from it's normal 25MB footprint to almost 4x that in its failed attempt to download newsgroup headers. Read what I said. Do you really and honestly think that it's acceptable for a news client to spend over 2 hours trying to get to grips with a newsgroup? BTW, to give you some perspective: 1.2Mbs DSL line and dual P3-850 w/ 384MB. That seems like reasonable hardware to me.

Now, as for the meat of my point and your response. I like Mozilla. I like and want Mozilla to be a suite. I want to use it for more than just browsing. I want it to be an integrated suite. But what has that got to do with it being in a single process space? Microsoft Office is a very tightly integrated suite, but do Excel, Word, Outlook, Access, etc all run in the same process? NO! Thank goodness. (Note: I have to use Outlook for work and I tried using Word as my email edittor for a while. I had to stop because of problems that kept forcing me to re-type messages. Just like browser crashes in Mozilla would take down my email if wasn't using Netscape 4.79.)

Obviously Mozilla has been well componentised. I can pick and choose which items of the suite I want to install. This is good. I would choose to install more than just the browser. But again, explain to me why it all has to execute in the same process space? That's just bad and fundamental implementation fault. I'm not asking for the suite to broken up, just each component run in its own process space. The last decade or so has seen a big move in desktop OSes that support isolation of processes (e.g Win 3.1 -> Win NT), and for good reason. The current implementation of Mozilla goes completely against that philosophy. This is my grievance.

And what if you want only Mail/News? Or only Chatzilla? I hope that happens soon.

"their customers had needs and they built a suite that met them."

That's just plain non-sense. Just look at Chimera which has achieved a major portion of the Mac market despite being significantly handicapped in name recognition and distribution against Netscape and IE (and not even being 1.0 yet).

It is utterly obvious that a "suite" was a termendous over-shot.

That's great that the Mozilla team are working on this. Is there somewhere that documents this process (Bugzilla???) so I can follow it? When is it expected to land in the trunk, and which release version of Mozilla can I expect to see it in? Sure, it's not the end of the world, but it does stop me using Mozilla properly.

I don't know why you made your comment about people rattling on against Mozilla being a suite of more than just a browser. I wasn't. In fact, if you read my comment properly you would have seen that I want to use more than just the browser. I quote: "so I stick with the hardly ideal solution of Netscape 4.x for my mail and news, and Mozilla for my browser". Right now, Mozilla is IMHO unusable as a complete product. Some bits of it are fantastic and the Mozilla team deserves all the congratulations they get. Some bits of it are very poor, and it's these bits that make the whole suite unworthy of it's v1.x status. Again, IMHO ;)