I disagree that cross-platform is a bad idea. These people evidently don't have any foresight. Sure, the XP versions cause slowdown on "some" of "today's" computers. In ten years we'll all be using Pentium 18s and broadband, and the speed gap will be irrelevant. I swear, some people can't see past their nose.

The article claims that Mozilla should have been written as "a tightly written ActiveX control for Windows, but didn't" and as a result Mozilla is slow resulting in "Apple adopt(ing) the smaller, faster, KHTML browser engine.

I assert that had Mozilla been ActiveX only, many of the largest supporters (and, more importantly, developers), wouldn't have gotten interested in Mozilla in the first place. It would still be less used than IE and would NOT have the major support it has from other OSes - Linux being the most noticable.

Its good to see an article talking about Mozilla Firebird and such, but there really isn't any substance to the article. I mean, saying that Firebird "could make Microsoft's offerings look very shabby indeed" is like saying Linux COULD one day take over the desktop - something very possible but being pure speculation based on the assumption that Microsoft doesn't have a alternative in the works.

In response to this idiot, I would like to thank the entire Mozilla team for making the browser cross-platform. :)

Mozilla Firebird runs on my 333MHz, despite the fact that Windows XP does NOT.

It's a curious article. If the future truly is to phase the standalone web browser out, Mozilla may very well be too late. Apple took up KHTML, Microsoft has their own (Mosaic is it?), all that's left for Mozilla is Linux, and who knows... Gecko may even face stiffer competition from KHTML there as well.

Here's to hoping that things aren't as doom and gloom as the article insists.

I'm pretty sure that crossplatform development and open standards are the future. There will always be different operating systems and different computer architecture for different needs, but at some points they will all have to talk to each other.

Even Microsoft will have to open their minds in this direction if they want to stay as a major player in the software business.

The truth is cross platfrom wasnt and isnt a viable proposition from a "business" point of view. That is of course if the business you are in is Market share of course...

The business of making a browser the way it should be and in the spirit on the 'net is of course a different business altogether.

Tired arguemnts from the Guardian - but an interesting assertion at the end. It wouldn't take long to get people off IE. My experience is that right now, its easy to get users off IE onto Mozill/NS7.2 if you can get em to look at it. Moz1.4 wins hands down and has nothing to detract from it being the best browser out there.

Be nice if the opportunity afforded by MS declaring IE to be stagnant was used effectively to do some "business" and eat its market share up like the ripe block of cheese that it is.

As as web developer and end-user, cross-platform, standards-compliant Mozilla is a blessing to me in many ways. However, this article is correct in that -- from a business standpoint -- investing significant resources into the development of a product with a small potential user-base and little payback is not good. I do believe that it's important but priority needs to be given to the biggest slice of the pie, at least initially.

With exposure, Gecko-running browsers could dominate I think. I also think that most people use the browser that comes with their OS and rarely, if ever, update the thing (until a new AOL comes out) and probably aren't aware of how much better their online experience could be with an alternative or that alternatives even exist. To me, IE has become the old beater car that Netscape 4.x became; an unfortunate piece of garbage that I must make the sites I develop with Mozilla compatible with because most people use it. Produce a simple-to-use, Gecko-running browser with the ability to automatically self-update it's components unobtrusively, bundle it with popular OS', and watch the market-share swell.

I know it's been argued ad nauseam, but Guardian may have brought up one correct point: the time it took Netscape/Mozilla to rewrite everything from the ground up gave away a piece of the market that it couldn't have afforded to lose. Assuming that Netscape 7.0 was the first usable version of Gecko for the public, we lost 4 years of competition. Could the code have been so bad?

Just wait 5 years until Linux has taken over the desktop with Mozilla in tow, then we will see which platform development was wasted on supporting.

By the way I find it amusing how the article implicitly claims that Mozilla is slow; in fact, even the app suite is generally faster than IE. And I bet he's writing that article on a 1 GHz+ machine with 512MB too...

I don't want to give the impression I'm a brainless Mozilla partisan (because I'm not) or anti-Microsoft (because I'm not), but it's clear that article was pretty much bollocks in pretty much every particular. I like the Guardian as a newspaper but their technology coverage is woefully inadequate and incompetently written - to be fair, the same applies to most other newspapers.

(Oh, and did I misread it, or did that whole single-platform diatribe also neglect to mention that Netscape was *always* cross-platform even before Mozilla? I mean I first used it on Sun and HP workstations...)

--sam

I see the cross-platform nature of Mozilla to be a strength. While Microsoft continues to push its monopoly, unimpeded by the courts, and centered on its Windows platform, Mozilla is silently working toward being the de facto default browser on all non-MS platforms, even with the Safari debacle. And while none of the other platforms comes close to the numbers of Windows, if all of them together use a browser that is, for all intents and purposes, identical, then it keeps MS from being able to single-handedly dictate the web standards as it sees fit.

Microsoft wants to continue the Windows stranglehold on the desktop, certainly. Now that IE is the clear choice of just about everyone, they are using the same technique that made IE the dominant browser to continue the Windows dominance-- that is, tighter and tighter integration with the Windows desktop, and dropping development of IE on other platforms. If you want the newest IE browser, you will have to get the newest Windows version... and since MS just about owns the browser market, they will be sure that most people are going to want or need the newest IE browser, and they will do that by setting their own standards, as always. It is the goal of MS to make the web into a place that is compatible only with Windows and IE.

That is where Mozilla can become a big pain for MS. If it were a bunch of different niche browsers for each of the different operating systems, it would be far easier to get web designers to ignore those "insignificant" browsers, and develop only for the new version of IE. But since Mozilla renders the same regardless of platform, it is not a bunch of niche browsers... it is a single entity, greater than the sum of its parts. And by being the best choice for non-MS operating systems, that ensures that the Windows users that would choose Mozilla (like me) will have a browser that has great enough numbers to make web designers at least consider developing according to W3C standards, not MS standards.

The Guardian article is written from the perspective of someone that considers the Windows platform to be the only viable one, and that will always be the only viable one. Windows is the home turf of Microsoft; a full frontal assault based only on Windows is not what I would call a winning idea. By being cross-platform, Mozilla has a better chance of capturing enough market share to keep MS from dictating its own standards and ignoring the W3C... and that is a very good thing. The W3C standards are based on an egalitarian ethos, while the MS standards are based on continuing to convert computerdom and the net into a bigger and bigger MS cash cow-- stifling the common good for their own financial gain. As such, the cross-platform nature of Mozilla benefits all, including users of the Windows versions of Mozilla.

If the Mozilla/Netscape developers had done as the article suggested and spent the resources they had developing a Windows-only browser, I think that I, and the scores of other Windows Mozilla users, would be worse off, not better. The browser itself may have been faster, less buggy, or otherwise superior to the product I am using right now, but I don't know that it would be as viable a browser. Evangelizing Mozilla and its W3C support (to web page designers) would be a lot harder if it was not cross-platform.

The writer of the Guardian piece clearly missed the big picture.

Frank

Well, moz is running prety fine on my old ThinkPad 600: Pentium II 300, with 196MB RAM, and Windows 2000 ... it is really a very low end system as far as i understand ... people allways complains about speed ;)

MSIE is bundled with the operating system, apparently at no charge - in the very near future it will be totally and utterly integrated in the operating system (A a consequens of the DOJ thingie). The most popular tools got special MSIE for Win modules, many of them only make MSIE for Win web-code. No contest.....

I would like to thank the entire Mozilla team and the commercial supporters, like the bug blue, that has brought us this wonderfull crossplatform web-browser. Without you 30-70mio users of non-Redmond based systems would have been left in the dark......

Building a "cross-dekstop-OS" browser is a good thing, however, I remember many MANY arguments about stupid little things where someone would bring up some crappy little embedded computer, a cell phone, or a PDA as the reason to/not to do something, citing "cross platform". This is where many resources were wasted - moreso than just getting it working on Windows/Linux/Mac.

Cross-platform was the right way to go, especially because *nix needs a quality browser. The legitimately horrible decision was to create a suite. It's taken Netscape/Moz 5 or 6 years to finally recognize that they should be focusing on a browser, not superfluous, unrelated apps like news, compose, chat and even mail. Firebird demonstrates what's possible when some focus is present and the results are pretty impressive.

After reading this article I have no idea what the point of it was. Who has the better browser - Microsoft or MozillaFirebird? If I relied only on this article I'd still no nothing about either. Why did the author mention TB? Nice press, but this is the only mention of a mail client in the article. Was the point to talk about the lack of innovation in browsers or about how the author dislikes supporting operating systems other than Windows? What the hell was he talking about?