...is broke as a motherfucker. when i start it, it uses 70-100% cpu for about 10 seconds, then goes idle, and never displays a window. i'm not too worried about it tho, since the tinderbox build i just downloaded works great.
Quick link to a list of changes since 1.0?
1.0.1. looks like a downgrade to me
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/1754.html
It works as good as 1.0 . It's mostly a security fixes release.
Changelog:
lol punycode
So far, I've been getting a pop-up on a place I didn't get one before I just switched over, a redirect to http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official (past installations left my homepage blank as I had it set) and a random redirect to spreadfirefox.com which I have no idea how I've triggered.
Firefox 1.0.1 works fine for me on Linux, Windows and BSD. No issues at all. All except for a few obscure extensions work great.
And now they're killing Mozilla 1.x. ;_;
FINALLY. It's been in need of killing ever since Netscape 4.0.
>FINALLY. It's been in need of killing ever since Netscape 3.0.
fixed
Mozilla 1.x didn't exist in Netscape 4.0's era, let alone Netscape 3.0's.
No, but Mozilla was based on the original Netscape Communicator codebase. And ever since version 3, Communicator has been unwieldy bloatware. Why has Firefox been so much more successful than Mozilla proper? Because it has worked to reduce that bloat back into something more usable.
Mozilla is a rewrite. It shares little in common with NC4.
If Firefox were actually faster and had a smaller footprint, I'd be gung-ho. But it's not. Somewhere down the line they got lost.
I agree with splitting application off. I also think Nvu is a huge step up from Composer. But why is the codebase for FF1.0.1 larger than the entire Moz1.7.5 suite?
Maybe I missed something. Someone explain this to me.
Netscape has always been Mozilla, but that was not my point. My point was that Mozilla 1.* imitated and expanded the interface and design of Netscape 4.*, which was bloated and badly designed already. Mozilla made it even worse. Firefox finally fixed it.
The download size has been getting progressively smaller with each update, as has the memory usage, as far as I know. It's still pretty big, but that's more to blame on the Gecko engine than anything. Supposedly there's an optimized one coming in 1.1, and maybe some of the work on the minimoz project will make its way back into the main codebase, too.
>>16
Mozilla <= 4 and Mozilla >= 0.6 (how counter-intuitive) are different codebases maintained by different people. I said "Mozilla 1.x" in reference to the latter.
Back in the day, they were much more interested in improving and promoting Gecko than the UI, so I don't find it surprising that they had a lot of false starts before revamping the UI with Firefox.
Firefox's simplified UI was a problem for me, too. I'd seen enough slow, buggy and ugly Web sites to develop an impression that plug-ins == bad, so I held off installing Firefox extensions for a long time (under the mistaken assumption that extensions were as dysfunctional as plug-ins).
Mozilla's inclusion of heaps of features into the base distribution at least ensured that everyone saw that it was capable of more than the bare essentials offered by IE.
I never said anything about the codebase - I know it's a rewrite. I was talking about the outward appearance and behaviour of the program.
>>17
That may be true, but the same was true for Moz1 as well. Apparently 1.8 was significantly faster than 1.7 (before it got the axe).
Any speed and footprint improvements in FF are definitely welcome though.
Okay, my bad. I was always under the impression that Moz was based off of Communicator's code, as they are so similar.
Originally that was the idea, but after they worked on improving NC4's code they decided it was so crufty they threw it out. That's why it took so long for the current incarnation of Mozilla to reach 1.0.
1.8 was fast because of the optimized Gecko version I was talking about. It's coming to Firefox in v1.1, they claim. But really, why would you say that Firefox lost their way?
When they said "smaller and faster" I sincerely thought it would be smaller and faster. Well, it's smaller, at least in download. Codebase and footprint are similar. Speed is similar.
So what was this all about again?
Better eye candy, less every-feature-in-your-face-at-once imposing, easier management of Extensions, more marketable name, and the benefit of being "new".
It's all a matter of perspective. Not one of those "features" holds any appeal for me, and some of them are entirely artificial justifications.
Frankly, I think FF was an exercise in good marketing. Just that.
I wasn't suggesting that they should attract anyone. Firefox may be described as a reaction to the criticism received by Mozilla. The exercise in good marketing, as you put it, was about making Firefox less intimidating to the average user than Mozilla.
Isn't the codebase just the entire Mozilla codebase? Firefox is built inside the main code tree as far as I know. Forking the code and throwing out the parts that aren't used would only make the development process that much more complex, and would not do anything but save a bit of diskspace and bandwidth for developers.
Reducing the memory footprint significantly would require rewrites of the entire rendering engine, which was never the goal of Firefox. Others ARE working on that, however, as seen with the optimized Gecko that's Coming Soon.
The main driving force of Firefox (or at that time, Phoenix) was to streamline the browsing experience. Mozilla was big, slow and bloated (both code-wise and interface-wise). This meant developing a better interface, and upgrading and optimizing the GUI toolkit. Later on, things like extensions were added, but mostly Firefox has always been about the interface.
And the main thing to realize is that the interface is the program. The Mozilla suite may be just as capable as Firefox, but nobody save a few stubborn power users are going to use it unless they feel comfortable with the interface. The real accomplishment of Firefox was that they took an open-soruce project, which are infamous for being lacking in interface design, and made it usable to everyone. And it's all thanks to focusing on the interface.
I can only wish more open-source programs will follow their lead.
i don't see why more people don't use firefox nightlies or tinderbox builds...
Personally, I don't have the time nor patience to deal with potentially unstable versions. The official releases usually have enough bugs to annoy me as it is.
<3 Firefox anyway!
>>29
I used to use Mozilla nightlies all the time with no stability problems. That was back when I didn't need stability because I wasn't doing any serious work online.
I also like the "wow" effect of seeing a lot of things change at once. Using nightly builds takes the fun out of that.
> Mozilla was big, slow and bloated
So they started an interface from scratch, rather than fixing what was already there. And in the end Moz beat FF at its own game before they pulled the plug. This might not be fair though, since Moz was being used for testing optimizations for FF.
As for the interface - are you sure? I have little faith in the ability of OSS to make a good interface. Moz's interface was made by Netscape. FF's is stunningly similar to IE, so you could argue that Microsoft came up with that one.
But I don't actually buy the whole "better interface" argument. What are the large differences between the two? Other than a skin they seem to have mostly the same buttons along the top. The menu layout is different, but not hugely so.
And I'm utterly unconvinced that Moz had a clunky or unintuitive interface (this coming from an Opera user). Most browsers are very similar. So what's the huge improvement for FF? Looking subtly more like IE? That's not huge.
FF's success is more marketing and less merit, IMHO. Not much wrong with that; Mozilla was going nowhere.
>But I don't actually buy the whole "better interface" argument. What are the large differences between the two? Other than a skin they seem to have mostly the same buttons along the top. The menu layout is different, but not hugely so.
I fired up Mozilla 1.7.3. I happened to have around.
First reaction: It sucks compared to FF. This is the same reaction I got to GIMP 1.x, just not as strong of course.
Second reaction: There's a bar under the URL bar which I can minimize, but not remove. I tried to find a way to remove it, but I can't. What's worse, nothing outside the URL bar reacts to right-clicking. In FF, you get to check on-off different toolbars or to open the customize menu when you right-click.
The preferences menu is A LOT less messy in FF. Same goes for menus in general.
Finally, there isn't necessarily a huge outward difference between a good and a bad interface: if the difference was obvious, we wouldn't have so many bad UIs.
Fair enough. So why not fix those issues with Moz then? Why the rewrite?
Once a name is tainted, it tends to remain tainted. Further up this thread, you saw the bad publicity that Mozilla version anything was getting. Digital cameras will always be inferior to film cameras. Linux will always revolve around cryptic, scary console interfaces. Macs will always be overpriced and slow. Laser printers will always suck for colour documents. Etc.
Rebranding neatly sidesteps the issue.
> So they started an interface from scratch, rather than fixing what was already there.
Because sometimes it's easier to start over from scratch than trying to untangle a big mess. There's only so much you can accomplish with incremenetal changes. Here, it wouldn't have been enough.
> And in the end Moz beat FF at its own game before they pulled the plug. This might not be fair though, since Moz was being used for testing optimizations for FF.
Yes, Mozilla was being used as the test suite, so it's only logical it would get the optimized engine first.
> As for the interface - are you sure? I have little faith in the ability of OSS to make a good interface. Moz's interface was made by Netscape. FF's is stunningly similar to IE, so you could argue that Microsoft came up with that one.
The Netscape 3.0 interface wasn't too bad. With 4.0, it got worse. Mozilla is only loosely based on this, and adds immense amounts of clutter.
IE's interface is quite simple and streamlined. MS had tons more resource to throw at interface design than Netscape ever had. The IE interface is fairly good. In this case, the Firefox team took it and improved it.
> But I don't actually buy the whole "better interface" argument. What are the large differences between the two? Other than a skin they seem to have mostly the same buttons along the top. The menu layout is different, but not hugely so.
You are probably not used to doing interface design. The thing with interfaces is that they are very, very subtle. It's the tiny details that matter, and the list of every such tiny detail in Firefox is far too long to list here.
The means may not be clear, but the result is: You can have pretty much anyone sit down in front of Firefox and they'll figure out how to use it pretty much instantly. And none of this is done at the expense of the ability of power users to do what they want. Both the well-designed interface and the extensions help with this.
> FF's success is more marketing and less merit, IMHO. Not much wrong with that; Mozilla was going nowhere.
The marketing was done by people who used it and loved it. It was only late in the game that the real marketing campaign got underway, as all the people who had been convinced by the program itself got organized and wanted to take on IE. Personally I've been using it since 0.1, and already then I found it the best browser on the market.
I bought >>33's argument. I'm not certain I buy the following though (>>36):
> Mozilla is only loosely based on this, and adds immense amounts of clutter.
What? Where?
> You can have pretty much anyone sit down in front of Firefox and they'll figure out how to use it pretty much instantly.
What's so complicated about back, forward, reload? Those interface improvements that do exists seem to primarily cater to the power user. How many normal people do you know who right-click everything, or customize their interface?
Maybe I just don't get this. Both FF and Moz's interfaces seem remarkably simple to me (in fact I find them hamstrung, but that's a story for another thread).
> Mozilla is only loosely based on this, and adds immense amounts of clutter.
Pretty much everywhere. There are more buttons, more non-sensical preferences options, more strange sidebars, more little icons here and there, more everything.
> Those interface improvements that do exists seem to primarily cater to the power user. How many normal people do you know who right-click everything, or customize their interface?
That's the thing - a good interface hides the advanced options (in such a way that those who want them can still quickly find them) and streamlines the often used ones to be easy to find for both novice and experienced users.
Mozilla caters much more to the experienced users who'll find their way around even if the GUI is a bit cluttered. Firefox understands how to make the parts of the interface that are directly presented to the users quick and simple, while still having the more powerful options available but not in such a way as to clutter up the interface or confuse the user.
As has been said, these things are subtle. The inexperienced user will like one interface and hate another, without necessarily being able to point to specific elements of the design as being the reason. The experienced user has learned how to deal with bad interfaces and thus won't be able to clearly see the difference between the two either. Thus we need the interface designers who know the secrets about how to do this right. I'm not an expert at this by any means but I do have some experience in it, and this experience tells me that there are miles and miles of difference between Firefox's interface and Mozilla's.
This is slightly off topic, but... My last three years in uni, I worked as an "Assistant Lab Technician" helping students and faculty in the computer labs. Most of it was mundane stuff, but one of the more... interesting cases I recall was when someone came to me with a print-out and was asking why their homework wasn't printing out like how it appeared on the screen. I looked at the print-out, and sure enough, there were ugly line-breaks and blank lines on it. This was a new one.
So we went over to his computer, and... It turns out, the person had used the Composer part of Mozilla to type up his paper. And since he couldn't figure out how to get it to double-space, he was just hitting Enter twice every time the cursor got to the right edge of the page, like on an old typewriter.
Now, I've never been one of those prickish geeks who condescends at others for making simple computer mistakes, but that one was definitely a special case right there. I think what we ended up doing was copy-and-pasting it into Word and then using Find and Replace to replace the double line breaks with spaces.