Holy mother of... that sucker is bigger than Windows 95.

What in heck makes it so big?

Tell you what though, I truly believe in two things...

One is Mozilla will beat it in speed and size and standards-compliance.

Two as a developer it will hurt me to say that I have to develop for IE5 - althouh both have XML/DOM etc... MS has done the usual trick of making the XML and the DOM objects which I can use from Visual Interdev, Visual Basic and even from withing VB Script on a web page.

I applaud Mozilla for its efforts, but this versio nyou are preparing is only half way to the finish line. You will win the speed, size and standards competition - BUT ONLY IN THE NEXT RELEASE can you focus on winning the developers minds.

What will it take? massive changes to Javascript, so it looks more like the DHTML which they use (use *sync toc* in IE or use *show toc* in mozilla - use IE though, it looks better): http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/c-frame.htm?921700812020#/workshop/author/default.asp

Also, developers desperately need information like this (use IE to view it, bcoz it has DHTML in it): http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/default.asp http://www.microsoft.com/xml/xmldom/reference/XMLDOMDocument_object.asp http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/c-frame.htm?921641437431#/xml/tutorial/use_om.asp

I hope you understand me. I love this project and the work it is doing. I want this project to deliver the most amazing and developer-friendly product. You have got the user-friendliness sussed, now don't stop, go for the developers.

Making a compliant ActiveX control was great, but its only a drop in the oceanus. Look at those links above and read them. In terms of developer features and ease of use, you guys and especially: 1. The Composer 2. The Javascript and DHTML design must ne extended 3. Mozilla XPFE

Good luck and I hope you take this challenge up. You guys can do it, you have shown your abilities to deliver.

IE5 is simply a superior browser to NS 4 or 4.5. It's blazing fast, and I can deal with the memory footprint (NS isn't much smaller, and it's a LOT slower).

I've had the pleasure of d/l'ing a couple mozilla builds and drooling over the layout engine. I will be happy to uninstall IE5 (if that's possible) once Mozilla is nice and robust and battle-tested. There's no way MS will ever have a technologically superior browser to Mozilla (i.e. NS 5+). Keep up the great work everyone!

Yep! But I can download the nightly builds every week :) Moz seem to be getting bigger. Hope it would still be a reasonable download in the final release.

Well, I have IE5 now. It was a nice download. 25 min @49.3kbps for just the browser. I've only had it a few minutes, so I can't comment on everything. The custom install options are nice. It has a compatability option so you can run both IE4 and IE5, which is good for web designers (if it actually works). The installation crashed my machine. Yup. Blue screen of death. The windows update shortcut now launches netscape, but the page doesn't work in netscape. Going to windowsupdate.microsoft.com brings up a page that says I have an older version of IE5 and I should download again.

I've heard a rumor (from a friend, i dont have a URL, sorry) that ms is porting MSIE5 for linux and then office.

Is it true???

I am just amazed by the attitudes on this webpage. As a developer, I take the stance of choosing the best tool for the job, no loyalties standing in the way. Unfortunately, when you are coding on the web you MUST support both browsers.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of time it takes me to get my pages displaying correctly in netscape. There are so many inconsistencies with the way tables, etc. are layed out.

You can get nit-picky with standard-compliance all you want... all I know as a developer is that when I code up a complicated page layout, Internet Explorer lays the page out the way I think it should be and Netscape is off on some planet of it's own.

The time that we are spending to complete this project has at least doubled because we have to make our pages work in Netscape as well as IE.

You guys better take off your blinders so you can see what's going on in the real world.

(BTW, I found this website because I was trying to get some info on when the new mozilla version was being released. I took a look at one of the nightly binaries the other day and was much impressed, the layout problems that I was talking about seem to have all been fixed. So, I'm hoping that the release is soon so that I don't have to worry about Netscape's compliancy problems.)

Well, Mr. Lefter, you seem to have answered the question yourself. If "we", at this page, have such attitudes, is precisely because we've been seeing what the next Mozilla and its layout engine can do, and we believe that it's much better than IE. As for standards compliance, your complaints are the exact reason why they are so important: if Netscape can't show things correctly, it's precisely because its current layout engine isn't 100% standards compliant, which is why it's important to support the Mozilla project so that we all can have soon a browser that isn't only free, but also makes job easier for web developers.

One thing to consider is that just because IE does something the way you like doesn't make it right. For example, many people have been touting Microsoft's DOM functionality in IE4. However, it's non-standard, and although it has a lot of features that Netscape's DOM implementation in 4.5 doesn't have, it's still not compliant, so technically it's a dead-end. Hoping that Netscape will be compliant with it will not get you anywhere.

The simple fact is that both browsers act oddly in different respects. One thing works in Netscape, and fails in IE. Another works in IE, and fails in Netscape. 80% compliance in CSS1 (which Microsoft touted as so superior to Netscape's 60% compliance) is actually a red-herring, because there is a good deal of that 80% compliance that is faulty. For example, take a look at http://style.verso.com/boxacidtest/ with IE4. NN4 and 4.5 are just as bad, but that's a moot point. Faulty compliance isn't compliance at all, and puts developers in the worst possible position.

What's the solution? The absolutely only solution to this problem is 100% compliance by all browser implementations. Not 60%, or 80%, but 100%. Why? Because without 100% compliance, the browser is essentially another branch that you have to develop for. If you have only 80% compliance, that 80% has to be *proper* compliance as well. That means no proprietary ways of doing things. And, from what I've heard Microsoft's DOM interface (even in IE5) is proprietary, and doesn't follow the spec.

People have been bitching about having to work twice as hard to make their sites work on different browser implementations, but I'm afraid that that will *always* be the case, unless you always build for only the latest browser implementation. With backwards-compatibility comes reworking. There's no way around it. Even with 100% compliance, there will always be reworking if you're concerned about the display of your page on older browsers.

The reason I bitch about Microsoft's standards compliance is that they constantly say that they are ahead of the game compared to their competitors. But, as I explained above, if you're not 100% compliant, you're still part of the problem, not part of the solution. They also have the audacity to blame Netscape for IE's lack of standards compliance. If you don't believe me, go back though our archives and you'll find a link to a page where they do just that.

In my opinion, IE4 and Communicator 4 were both on about equal footing. Neither was 100% compliant, so both contributed nothing to ending the problem. IE5 is out, and it is in the same boat. Mozilla is well on its way to being the only browser to be 100% compliant in HTML4.0, CSS1 and XML.

I hope that the Web Standards Project treats IE5 with as much disdain as they can muster. After flogging Netscape, it's time for MS to feel some pain.

IE4 is tough compared to NS4. Really tough. So of course IE5 is going to look better than NS4. But that's not looking at the big picture which comes into play after NS5

I agree that browsers should be 100% compliant with the standards and I understand your excitement for and backing of NS5. I'm excited about it too, that's why I was looking to find a release date. It sounded to me though that there was a lot of netscape loyalty going around -- I guess I was misreading the Mozilla excitement.

What I don't agree with is your views on innovation. If a browser is 100% compliant with the standards AND adds some functionality not available in other browsers, then why is that bad? Nothing is going to advance if we just sit around and wait for the WSP to come up with a new standard to implement. Someone needs to put new technologies into play so that a standard can be chosen.

I don't want to sound like a stuck parrot, but while standards coplaince is CRUCIAL to success, its stil only winning user-mindshare for the reasonspointed out above (that it will always take twice the time becoz the OTHER browser isnt compliant).

The real reason why IE5 will turn the screws is becoz of the non-cmopliant DOM and its extensions and all the other extensions they have made to the brwser to win DEVELOPERS (not users) over to using IE5 ONLY (thereby cutting down on their development time and simlifying things).

If Mozilla could become 100% standards and then in the nxt release focus exclusively on making Netscape the best damn development platform ever, THEN we could change this industry for ever.

VBX's and OCX's and ActiveX's and OLE and object models and so on, this is what developers want. It makes things easier and faster to develop.

No it's not. And that IE5 is named IE5 and not IE4.5 is silly--to me the 5.0 browsers should have been the first versions fully standards compliant. IE basically wanted to get there first, and they did, and now they have a swell radio button. But at the size of this thing, and the likelihood it will only clog up bloated Win98 even more, I'm considering not even d/ling the thing.

I agree with the point on composer above. I don't know that it's going to be possible to release a version of it that can do as much or more than Frontpage 98, but I hope so. Having gotten Frontpage from Indiana University for $5, I like the price but just know my sites are being made jaded towards IE. Composer can't even do frames, though, and thus for more than the most basic web designs I can't even consider it useful, though its basic interface still manages to be friendlier than Frontpage 98, and definitely more than the beta Frontpage 2000.

I notice the watermark feature from Frontpage works in IE but not in NS (in NS the background scrolls with the text and in IE it stays stationary- http://www.bigfoot.com/~anakin301). Is this an example of CSS1? Someone said I could maybe accomplish the same thing in layers with NS but I'm not sure what they mean by that, certainly Frontpage doesn't discuss layers and I don't think Composer does either.

dammit all, blow that link off what is the gig with the parentheses botching up my links? I see everyone else using them. http://www.bigfoot.com/~anakin301

oh never mind. they apparently are automatically added (I was adding them myself)

Mark Wilson, maybe YOU want proprietary single-OS "solutions" like OCX and ActiveX, but most of us want things that are cross-platform solutions.

What would I expect from someone gung-ho over a browser that does everything it can to break Java.

<A HREF="http://msie.winzig.com">Stagnant now, but still has good info.</A>

Mark Wilson, maybe YOU want proprietary single-OS "solutions" like OCX and ActiveX, but most of us want things that are cross-platform solutions.

What would I expect from someone gung-ho over a browser that does everything it can to break Java.

Stagnant now, but still has good info: http://msie.winzig.com/

I'm afraid that Mark Wilson makes a good point: Microsoft is still going full steam ahead with its "Let's add a bunch of flashy gewgaws to our implementation that have nothing to do with standards, and have everything to do with persuading developers that the cool thing to do is to develop for MSIE/Win32 and say 'to hell with everybody else'" strategy. People who have gone to school to be taught VB and think it's the creme de la creme of programming say, "Oh goody!" while those of us who know better cringe.

If Netscape 5 is standards-compliant, it'll win developer mindshare. If it's fast, stable, and above all NOT BLOATWARE, users will help take care of the myopic "the world runs on Windows" types.

Intersting article today (in Wired, I think), that points out that smaller companies tend to use MSIE, while larger ones go more for Netscape. IOW, the co's that have breadth of vision don't want to get into the trap that the little guys seem anxious to jump into.

I found these numbers on a MS webpage. Ie 5 stats:

my Netscape install is about 20 MB Browser size install 27 BM Typical install 55 MB Full install 78 MB

download sizes min IE5 is 7.5 NS stand alone is 7.7 Base NS 4.5 is 12.8 MB Typical IE5 17.2 NS Pro is 17.9 Full IE5 29.4

All this shows me is that Microsoft has good compression. Programs that use ver 50 MBs of disk space piss me off. So most games piss me off.

BTW, ActiveX sucks. Follow this link http://www.zks.net/p3/

Basically, its an ActiveX control that freezes the computer and if you have a P3, or one of those p2 with IDs, and place the ID number in a cookie.

I develope web pages by hand none of that fancy WYSIWYG and I can tell you that I have to fix stuff for IE not NS. I don't use anything that isn't a standard, IE has rendering bugs just like NS. But unlike IE Netscape has better security features and less people willing to hurt. Why do you think there are so many virii for windows than MacOS & *nix.

Thomas Winzig - you are totally wrong. Totally and utterly. Try to see my point. I want the OSS development of Mozilla to learn from IE and its developer tactics and APPLY THESE TACTICS to Netscape across the platforms.

Do you understand now? I want cross platform everything, OK? But, I am also a wake up call for this development project. Get the small developers (thanks Tekhir) on your side by making things easier to do.

Do not make Composer a simple application. If you do that, you will have shipped a standards compliant browser WHICH NO ONE WILL DEVELOP COMPLEX weh applications for.

Your focus is on standards and I applaud that. Its important to me to. But even more important is being able to do sexy NEW EASY WEB DEVELOPMENTS agaist the browser. Sorry, but XPFE just isn't what I am looking for. Composer should be the one. Users will choose standards and developers will choose ease-of-development. Which one will win in the long run? Think about it pleae, its important.

I disagree with Mr. Wilson. As a freelance Web designer (and a high school student), I want the standards first. Standards support makes it easier to develop Web applications, because you only need to write the application once and it'll run anywhere.

And, for what it's worth, no real developer would use Composer.... At least in its current form, it doesn't support HTML nearly well enough (generated HTML, mind you) to work well in a professional environment.

What professional would possibly develop to exclude a full half of their audience? Proprietary extensions, despite what MS may say, are a thing of the past.

Frodob, I totally see where you are coming from. And lets consider what you said. No developer would use Composer. Why? Because the features aren't there. The fact that it is COMPLIANT (with some of HTML) is irrelevant, you as a freelance developer will only use a development environment which ENHANCES your development skills.

Now do you see my point? MS says "stuff it" to standards and gives developers the best damn features and tricks to do the coolest stuff.

Take XML as an example. We will make Moz 100% by the book. MS will make XML/DOM development techniques so it uses ODBC and so XML is a layer over db tables and so that the text boxes on the forms are dynamically data bound to both the XML and to the tables.

So, in the end, we are compliant (YEEHAA!) and they have the hearts and minds of the developers. We have the hearts and minds of the users (YEEHAA!) and their developers and PUMPING out IE5 web pages. Since those pages look cooler in IE5, users will think fondly of us and what will they do? They will surf with IE5.

I love Netscape and I love the OSS tradition and I love to love it. It's romance embodied in technology and devlivered by Wired mags and read by people like you and me. True believers.

But the developers dont give a sh*t and they will use the stuff which makes their lives and their web pages ALIVE!! I have been checking out the MSDN and Visual Interdev in the last few weeks and this is what has caused me to change my world view.

They have made web pages into objects. You can call webpages.method (and to make a procedure a method, you just declare it as one with what they call a "design time controls" - its doesnt affect the HTML or the user AT ALL please note) but it makes it easier for the developer(notice a trend here). Whats also cools is you can call other pages methods and have your current page data (such as a lookup dropdown box) update - without submitting your page.

So, bottom line. Unless you guys get some sexy new technology in there and unless Composer ships and makes it damn easy for developers to prefer Mozilla, the user will love you but the street developers (not the big shop developers) will go with the tight fit of Interdev and Ie5 and NT server.

Last comment. We are following the standards. They are participating in creating them. CDF, XML. We wait for the standards to emerge, they piss everyone off by jumping in feet first and splashing on everyone else.

I am more than happy to carry on this conversation with anyone outside of this forum. I believe its important. Standards is the achilles heel, but unless you win the developers by giving them a super-duper Composer filled with wizrds and tricks and includes and totally extensible, well...

As far as I'm concerned, "Composer" shouldn't be mentioned in the same paragraph with "Web Development". It's the only authoring tool I've seen that actually produces WORSE code than FrontPage, and that's saying quite a bit. Not a single "serious" sitebuilder I know would even consider using it.

Not to sound like a commercial here, but my favorite two authoring tools are put out by Macromedia: Dreamweaver and Flash. Both are stable and have consistent and logical interfaces. Both do what they're designed to do with a minimum of fluff. Both produce files that are to be envied for their compactness. In the case of Dreamweaver, it produces good, clean HTML/CSS that is second to NONE in compliance to standards as well as legibility, does everything that FP does in terms of site management, does it with a lot less overhead, and doesn't monkey with hand coding (unless it contains invalid markup). And it's easily extensible, using standards-compliant HTML and JavaScript.

(If Macromedia would port these two apps to Linux, I'd banish forever the X86 MegaVirus from my machine without a backward glance. And, by golly, my wife could just learn to love The GIMP.)

If Netscape is going to include an authoring tool in the next commercial release, it could find a much worse example to follow.

Composer came out some time ago, and is also, you know, FREE. MSs competitor is Frontpage Express, and that doesn't do much better. Composer is also mainly, I think, for those who want to put up fambly photos of Spot and Joey, etc. In any case you're right, it doesn't even support frames at this point. It would be nice if NS would put out something better than Frontpage 98 free with Communicator, but I don't think it's likely. What is more likely is an upgrade version of Composer down the road that can be purchased for those who want proffesional web development truly integrated with their Mozilla. This allows Communicator to be free, and come with the Joey free version for lower end users, and those who want to use frames, etc. (at LEAST) can pay a little more for the upgrade. Hopefully this happens, another scenario would be that NS hires out the upgrade, like it did with NetZIP, and endorses it.

This talk of building frames for Composer is setting the sights so ridiculously low that any work done to achieve it is simply wasted work. No, what is needed is Aurora thinking, DOM-Javascript thinking, OSS extensibility, making web pages into object which are easily manipulated from outside. Making server extensions to web servers (the MS Frontpage extensions are available on UNIX, NT and others...) to increase the tight fit of Mozilla/NS and the Composer and the web servers.

I have been thinking about the XPFE and its sexy crosss-platformness. And you know what I realised? After being so excited I realised that this is a C world you all are living in. It's like being racist or sexist. I as a VB developer (the largest group and the group which churns out the most work, because we reuse objects and components) we are sidelined. Mozilla's good ideas are aimed squarely a a minority market.

Unless you win the MASS of developers over, we will continue to develop in the environment which leverages our existing skills and existing components the best.

So, without us, who is it who is actually going to benefit from all your hard work? If I don't build with Composer, then how am I going to deliver your standards to my clients?? So, let's remember that for all the exiting stuff you are doing, it's still the market forces and the developers you hav to win over.

This battle is not yet finished.

Mark,

One major flaw in your argument: VB is NOT cross-platform.

And proprietary server extensions suck, btw.

I spoke of putting frames into Composer because I didn't think I needed to drone of a list of everything it doesn't have, and because frames are one of the most basic advanced features--and one of the most necessary. nowhere did I say that the frames should be the only thing added to composer--I figured those reading would add the rest of the missing features with their minds. It does happen in some people.

Zontar is right, VB is programming for Windows only and once "write once run anywhere" becomes a reality, it will be a useless language because no one will have to program for OSs any more. Pity.

BTW, cross platform means EVERY market, and I would hardly call that a minority.

Ha ha ha, you all talk about cross-platform. That's amusing becoz I am also keeping an ear in the Javazilla crew. Look in their list of people involved, and you will see me there.

What I have also noticed is you lot slagging Java off. So, please! Don't try to leverage the write-once bandwagon when you have jumped off it!! Thats's just plain cheecky!!

When they deliver Javazilla, my issues will remain. Until the developer is won over, the browser that the developer's IDE targets is the browser most people will want.

Its easy to do the maths. I develop in Interdev, so Interdev offers me fantastic features whic IE can use. MS blasts the world with IE browsers. Suddenly I can use those extensions. In the background I can hear the whimpering of your developers as they see the developers dissappear, then the users and then finally the Gateways and others who KOVU so highly admires.

It all starts with the developers guys! You have the skills to develop AWESOME stuff for me as a developer, you can set my world alight. But until you do, I will continue to develope in MS IDE's.

Last exampe. You can put all you want into XML compliance. But at the end of the day, MS ships an XML IDE and guess what? Your compliance means diddly squat becoz you don't have an IDE which makes use of it, but they do and it make XML apps which are compliant to THEIR vision.

So, what are you giving developers so they will build to YOUR vision?

no, Sun is going to co-develop with NS hello, this is an AOL-SUN-NS deal. Develop MS dogdung if you will, that's your problem. The sad fact is that NS has 45% of the market now, and will be up to 70% again when AOL drops IE. You will be developing for only IE5, and since more people have IE4, IE3, NS3, and NS4 combined than will ever HEAR about IE5, you will be developing for a pathetic amount of the browser population and, thus, no one except IE5 users will be able to see your site as it should be seen. Those with any marketing clue at all will agree. And of course, the new NS will support all real standards, including everything except MS dead-end proprietary BS. Gee, what would anyone with IQ over 8 do?

I'm sorry Mark, that sounded bad. But I don't think you're giving AOL the credit for having the clout they do, especially with Sun and Netscape under their wing. The deal just went through, give it a chance to germinate.

Please forgive my hostile tone above, I really don't want to be that way.

:) Peace all, long live Mozilla.

See my other post with the satistics from reseach online to show how most people NEVER change their browsers and use the one they have already got or which came with a bundle.

So, yes AOL does give NS a fighting chance when they bundle their software with NS. However, one should think on two things. Unless the court decides otherwise, the browser is coupled to Win95/98 and almost eveyone uses Windows to surf the net expect for 20% of the users who are Mac.

So, given that they don't change browsers and they use what is in front of them an they are all on Windows 95.98... well even a child with an IQ of 8 can see the trend here!

Besifes, my point isnt to win the browser ANYWAY. That's YOUR point. MY point is to win the developers, and judging by the webmasters on the net only 25% of them use NT, you can still protct your franchise there, but what will it take?

Yes, it will take wooing the developers away from superor development environments where there is more native integration. Thus I come back to my signal issue... woo the developers!!

(No, I am not saying Dreamweaver isn't superior!!)

...with a significantly improved version of Composer, fully integrated with Navigator. Yes, that is the answer.

Re: browser use, you're right. But Windows 95/98 has seen nearly all the sales it will, and MSs next consumer version is years away (unless you count Win98 second edition, which likely won't see anywhere near the sales of 98 or 95 (Windows 2000 is specifically for NT users) This means that almost all of the market share will move in the direction of Netscape, first with the release of 5.0 (and yes, I agree, if developers for consumer programs will be wooed 5.0 MUST come with a FANTASTIC version of Composer, fully integrated with Navigator), and then with AOL's embrace of Navigator.

In short, IE has used most of its fuel (minus trailing with MSOffice 2000 and/or trailing along with other programs), NS has yet to light theirs. Given a fully functional and integrated version of Composer, I think they can do it with little problem. They had better, because the trial, even when over, will have to be appealed, and it could take years to get any results.