Neowin Interviews Ben Goodger

Saturday January 24th, 2004

Mr magoo of Neowin.net writes in: "It's not often that we at Neowin get to talk to someone who really is pioneering a new look on the internet, so it was a real surprise when Ben Goodger, chief developer of Mozilla Firebird, accepted our invitation to have a quick chat about his job, and the great program that is Mozilla Firebird.

"Asides from a brief history of the browser, we've got Ben talking about what's happening to Firebird at the moment, why Internet Explorer users should switch, and much much more."

#1 Better than a non-IE browser?

by ajollyswami

Saturday January 24th, 2004 6:37 PM

"...I think we do a better job than any other non-IE browser at displaying web pages properly." - Ben Goodger

I personally think it should be stressed that Firebird (for the most part) displays W3C standard web pages *better* than IE. For instance, gecko does a much better job rendering CSS than the latest versions of IE. It's only the proprietary code that gecko stumbles on.

#2 Re: Better than a non-IE browser?

by mlefevre

Sunday January 25th, 2004 4:25 AM

Yes, but the fact is that, although things are improving, upwards of 90% of the sites out there are using broken and/or proprietary code, and upwards of 90% of users are using IE on Windows. Standards compliance is important to geeks and (one hopes) to web developers. Most users don't care how the browser works or how the site is written, as long as they work together.

#3 Memory issue

by offmdan

Sunday January 25th, 2004 4:59 AM

Great interview!

Although no major changes will happen to TB in the near future other than bug fixes, it may be worthy to notice that (at least on my Win98SE)... Mozilla eats 33,472 kbs of RAM ; TBird = 27,532 ; FBird = 24,288 ; PocoMail = 18,408 ; Opera = 24,664 (which by the way also includes Mail service).

#4 Memory issue

by offmdan

Sunday January 25th, 2004 8:43 AM

Great interview!