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Mozilla 1.0

21:22 / 10.06.02

Well here we are, four years of development, a cast of thousands (well 300 plus) built it and its the great shining light of the open source movement. But is it any good?
Well I'd say it at least kicks Netscape 6.0 up the arse, which isn't that difficult but its a start. Fast downloads once you visit all your old favourites for the first time and it supports all the web standards. This makes a small web designer as myself do small happy dances.
Better than IE and Opera? Well its close, but you can tell techies designed it as it is a tad clunky to mess with. I'm going to stick with it and see if if it makes any difference at all to my web 'experience' none detected so far though.

Ok they did it, 2 years too late for some people, IE is something like 95% of all browsers (or some other stupid figure) and people have binned netscape 6.0 long ago, is this plucky contender going to compete? Well AOL and Netscape are shifting to it and a lot of people are looking verrry closely at how they can use it in their new internet fridge/door/coathanger embedded devices. I'm hopeful that microsoft will get the kicking it deserves but I suspect that I might be being optimistic.

I'll be keeping an eye on my site stats and see how it goes.

Right off to download some cool skins...

nedrichards is confused

22:21 / 10.06.02

It's huggable. The real test for me is that when I put on the IE skin noone I know can tell the difference and when I put on 'orbit' or 'modern' they say "what's that cool browser".

And then I tell them about the popup blocking...

You're right it is a bit clunky but as people start to play with some of the technologies they've developed like XUL and embedding the gecko rendering engine in all sorts of fun places it should be interesting.

11:02 / 11.06.02

For Windows I still prefer Opera. On Linux, it's the better product (Opera is not very good on Linux IMO).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone's tried out the PR versions of Netscape 7 and seen what they've done with it.

12:53 / 11.06.02

Re: clunky. You've got to remember that Mozilla is really only for the development community. The average user will only see the parts of Mozilla that get included in future releases of Netscape.

Re: it's chances. Strictly in the browser wars. The fact that Netscape's now the default browser for Compuserve users, and may become the default browser for AOL, makes things interesting. But, to be honest, there is A LOT more at stake here then just yet another browser. Mozilla is the first instance of a corporation adopting the bazaar software development model that was popularized by the open source movement. Mozilla doesn't have to "win" the browser wars to have a drastic effect on the software indutry. As long as it does good enough to show corporations that the bazaar model is a valid one, then companies will start to experiment with the development model. And that's where things can get interesting.

15:57 / 11.06.02

Mozilla doesn't have to "win" the browser wars to have a drastic effect on the software indutry.

Yeah fun isn't it? In their intro to Mozilla apparently their Bug tracking and project management software Bugzilla is already being used by hundreds of projects all over the world. Wonder how many are experimenting with the 'Bazaar Model' as well.

Something to be happy about, Linus Torvald must be doing little happy dances as well

.

17:05 / 11.06.02

I linked to this in the Free Software thread, but I'll do so again.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the bazaar method and how it contrasts to the Cathedral method (the method ussually used by the software industry). Specifically, it tells the story of his time spent as the lead on an open source mail program.

Note though, the bazaar method is older then Linux. Linus decided to use the method when he put out the call for help, but he didn't invent it. In fact, if memory serves, a fair amount of the early innovations of the computer industry were created through the bazaar method. The Home Brew Club in Berkeley ran on something like this. As well as the early days of MIT. The method is born out of the free and open exchange of information.