Status of Mozilla Project?

[petey]

I recently have been learning about the Mozilla project. From scanning newsgroups etc, It seems most people don't take the Mozilla project seriously. Some see it as a codebase providing some good spare parts. Others see it as an example of the effectiveness of Open Source software.

Few seem to think of it as a serious contender in the web browser market.

Why this dubiosity amongst the web/software development community? Are they basing their opinions on anything but the latest milestone release of Moz? It's actually not that bad. A heck of a lot better than N6.

If Mozilla passes Netscape 4.x in overall product quality, (and I think it will) I would think it would do very well as a browser, whatever form it came in.

Am I missing anything?

Petey

 

[rycamor]

I think most people are venting their frustrations at having to deal with a pre-release piece of software being marketed as a finished product. One the one hand, I sympathize with the Mozilla developers, because they are honestly trying to create a truly cross-platform W3C-Dom compliant browser, and no other project has even come close to attempting this. They either make it DOM-compliant on one platform (IE), or make it a somewhat less compliant and less robust browser for all platforms (Opera).

On the other hand, I think the public was led to expect results much sooner than was realistic for a project of this type, and the Mozilla people made it worse by adding features that are well...neat, but not essential, such as "skins", the mail client, Composer, IRC, etc... The gecko rendering engine itself is a masterpiece, but its interesting to note that that is only a 2-3 meg download, while the rest is eaten up by all the other features.

Let's face it, Mozilla is NOT Netscape. Netscape ends with the 4.x series. They made the (some say questionable) decision to scratch all the old source code and start fresh, bugs and all, so it's no surprise that they just now getting somewhere.

 

[petey]

Thanks. So in a nutshell (correct me if I am wrong) Mozilla has a compact and powerful rendering engine (Gecko) at its center, but its production schedule is bogged down by nonessential add-on features. Meanwhile Netscape needed to make a move, released N6 (based on an immature Mozilla), people rolled their eyes, and so they (Netscape and Mozilla) have had to play catch-up ever since.

Live and learn I guess. So Mozilla is going to really have to prove itself out of this situation. I personally think it could, if people take the time to give it an objective look. Maybe the Browser Wars will start afresh, who knows?

Comments anybody?

-Petey

 

[iSeriesCodePoet]

I have had very few problems using Mozilla. I enjoy it. To those developers who are watching this. "Keep up the good work, I will be downloading the first full release and using it primarily" Please let us (Tek-Tips members) know if the solutions I provide are helpful to you. Not only do my posts help you but they may help others.

Mike Wills
IT Corporate Support
RPG Programmer
koldark@koldark.net

 

[Trevman]

The skins were not really feature bloat -- they were an easy add on to the already xp scripted interface. The entire mozilla ui is written in XUL, which is a markup language based on XML. When you are using mozilla, the User Interface you are using is basically just like one really big and complicated webpage. Its quite neat if you think about it. Try looking in the chome directory of yoru mozilla folder and unzipping the .jar files, such as classic and modern. YOu can see all the code behind the UI -- its all css and xml. Neat. ===
Supports Mozilla and Web Standards
Knows HTML/XHTML, CSS1, JavaScript, PHP, C++, DOM1
===

 

[rycamor]

I agree that the whole XUL concept is spectacular, but having a completely scriptable interface is going to slow things down. The application has to load and use its own XML parser, just to know what it's going to look like today.

My point is, for most peoples' concept of a browser (I.E., the general public), skins and a scriptable interface are beyond their needs or even interest. Thus when they compare mozilla to the other browsers, they aren't taking into account the vastly greater features that mozilla offers. Thus mozilla gets judged--perhaps unfairly--but still, that's the game. I just wish Netscape could have released a more simple, direct browser sooner, to compete with IE, and worry about the scriptable interface, etc... later.

However, for the future, I'm sure we will see the scriptable interface become standard. In the end, scriptable interfaces like mozilla will become the whole user interface to most software (such as Komodo by Activestate), and even to the whole computer. This has some very cool possibilities, so I'm not discounting the value of the work the Mozilla team has done, and I will definitely be playing with XUL soon ;-).

 

[Trevman]

Yeah it does tend to slow things down. nglayout in its purest form (for instance, K-Meleon) renders pages much faster than IE or Opera.

They are working on that proformence issue though -- Brendan Eich is working on a bug to precompile the Chome JS so that it runs faster. ===
Supports Mozilla and Web Standards
Knows HTML/XHTML, CSS1, JavaScript, PHP, C++, DOM1
===