June 5, 2002

11:22 AM

Mozilla 1.0 released. Four years after Netscape open-sourced the code to its web browser in February 1998, the Mozilla browser is finally out of beta and ready for download. To celebrate, there's a big party next Wednesday at San Francisco's DNA Lounge and satellite parties around the world. Take a bow, everyone.
posted by waxpancake (72 comments total)

And it's possible that Dealership might play the S.F. party...
posted by waxpancake at 11:30 AM on June 5, 2002

i hope they fixed that bug where when i go to a website (often espn) and try to visit another website, it ignores the host portion of the URI and tries to grab the file off of the espn server. that's real annoying.
posted by moz at 11:36 AM on June 5, 2002

how come i still can't post of mf with 1.0 of mozilla?

oh, wait...........nevermind
posted by ericdano at 11:40 AM on June 5, 2002

I think we should all get drunk tonight.
posted by mrbula at 11:43 AM on June 5, 2002

Ja-he-sa-us Christ, after being an M$ slave for an embarrassingly long time (excluding that neoplanet phase), I finally made the Mozilla leap just about 5/6 hours ago, so I've got 1.0 RC3, and NOW they release 1.0? ANOTHER 10 meg dl on my dial-up?
Bugger.
posted by stuporJIX at 12:39 PM on June 5, 2002

Ah, here's a big moment for the Internet. But still I'm thinking, <please don't let the flames begin>that Opera is better</please don't let the flames begin>. So, I will probably not switch to Mozilla, altough I'll definitely give it a try.

And stupor, did you expect them to stay with the Release Candidate?...
posted by kchristidis at 12:52 PM on June 5, 2002

Sounds cool, but I'll probably wait for Mozilla 1.06 or so. Since we've had to wait a freakin' eternity for a useful version, waiting another few months shouldn't be a problem for anyone, right?
posted by mark13 at 12:56 PM on June 5, 2002

so far, so good, kchristidis. i'm posting this via 1.0. plus i think i've fixed the mozilla bug (which is a bug regarding HTTP 1.1, now turned off, and my proxy -- thanks chris).
posted by moz at 1:01 PM on June 5, 2002

mozilla on OS X == SLOW.

IE and omniweb are ridiculously faster.

to the trash with you!
posted by aenemated at 1:18 PM on June 5, 2002

aenemated: my experience show that Mozilla is probably the fastest OS X browser and far faster than IE. Perhaps there is a problem somewhere with your system?
posted by gyc at 1:23 PM on June 5, 2002

... did you expect them to stay with the Release Candidate?

I just didn't expect to have to update within a few hours of the initial dl. C'est le vie!
posted by stuporJIX at 1:23 PM on June 5, 2002

Three or possibly even two years ago, this would have mattered.
posted by Mars Saxman at 1:31 PM on June 5, 2002

Extra! Extra! Tomorrow the June 6th snapshot will be out! I'll be one day ahead of you 1.0 suckers!
posted by aaronshaf at 1:37 PM on June 5, 2002

Posting with Moz1.0, and I like it. I don't like the email client too much, though. Too Netscape-Gold. :P
posted by brownpau at 1:40 PM on June 5, 2002

Is anyone going to go to the party at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco? It's on a Wednesday, but I'm definitely there.

I'm hoping that Dealership will play. Not only would it be nice to see them live, but I'd be interested in meeting Justin Hall's new flame!
posted by insomnia_lj at 2:06 PM on June 5, 2002

It's here, I'm not complaining anymore.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the launch party is being held at the DNA Lounge and not some Netscape/AOL handpicked location?
posted by Dean_Paxton at 2:07 PM on June 5, 2002

Mars, I think it does matter, but in a very different way then it would have 1 1/2 years ago. While I don't think IE's market share will topple anytime soon, the release of Mozilla 1.0 (and the resulting distributions to come) offer a viable and visible alternative for those looking. IE isn't perfect, neither is Moz, but for some folks, myself included, find the Moz faults easier to deal with. I also think its very valuable to have a competing implementation of the standards to drive the IE/Win dev team (and perhaps make them jealous in the process). Neither of these will have the overall impact on #s that a release during "the wars" would have had.

As for my impressions of 1.0, I think they got through a lot more work over the last couple months then I had expected. I only use the browser and i think its fabulous. There are some things that didn't make it into 1.0 that bug me (some small, some big, some huge), but overall I say anyone who has things they don't like about IE should give it a solid week of use and then decide what to do.

Dean, yes, very ironic... considering who runs the place... but stranger things have happened.
posted by 10sball at 2:12 PM on June 5, 2002

I'd like to post my own I-wonder-if-they-fixed-my-pet-bug post:

I wonder if they fixed the bug where a div border wouldn't display if there was a also a background set on that div.

I will soon find out...
posted by daveadams at 2:17 PM on June 5, 2002

I think the real opportunity here is for AOL and other ISPs who are looking to find a cross-platform stable alternative to IE to use as a deftault browser.

Personally I'm very excited about this. I have been putting off the effort it will take to be productive in a new browser. Here goes nothing.
posted by daveadams at 2:20 PM on June 5, 2002

Alas, my pet bug is not fixed. Although, I must admit I never submitted it or anything.
posted by daveadams at 2:21 PM on June 5, 2002

I'm happy to announce that 1.0 finally supports the overflow: scroll property. (In rc1-3 It would resize the whole page sideways and outward whenever I scrolled down an overflow:scroll box DIV.)
posted by brownpau at 2:37 PM on June 5, 2002

I'm downloading it for OS X as I write this. I have been using chimera quite a bit lately, and really like it. It's based off of Mozilla, but is nimble, quick, and has a nicer interface. Of course, it is still only at version 0.2.8.
posted by ry at 2:38 PM on June 5, 2002

oops. this is the correct link.
posted by ry at 2:39 PM on June 5, 2002

Chimera is pretty neat. it shares the same rendering engine (what draws the html components of a browser) as mozilla, but it has far fewer features but a native Aqua UI. i have noticed so far that the tabs get a little out of balance sometimes, and that when i deleted one of them, the tab bar wasn't updated. (could be a graphics driver problem? yet i haven't had this problem in the past.)
posted by moz at 2:50 PM on June 5, 2002

aaronshaf: 1.0 is more like a few weeks old, with some minor fixes. What you will be running is the unstable branch that is vastly more likely to crash than 1.0. In general it's not worth it from user point of view to run the nightly builds unless you're actually testing them or a critical bug that affects you has been fixed.
posted by azazello at 2:54 PM on June 5, 2002

What the heck is a "Mozilla" anyway? The splash screen shows a Godzilla-like creature. The web page depicts a T-Rex or similar dinosaur (not a good analogy for cutting-edge software). And the icons are little geckos (yes, I know about the rendering engine). The browser seems to have an identity crisis.
posted by gazingus at 3:25 PM on June 5, 2002

dyc -- no problems that i'm aware of. i say it was slow because i ran my typical 'flash test' on it. devlab.swift3d.com -- if it runs the intro slowly, it's worth fuckall. IE does pretty damn well, omniweb runs it REALLY fast (though omniweb has other issues that prevent me from using it full time) and mozilla ran it at maybe 5 frames a second. chimera and flash really don't play well together. it buggers out with the quickness. i refuse to try icab because it has an ugly icon. anyway, mozilla was awful, just awful. it may render, scroll, etc ... marginally faster, but if it plays flash that badly, it has no home on my machine.

i can appreciate the effort of the mozilla team, but i'm not going to use an inferior product to prove a point. IE works, for the most part, better than any other browser for OS X i've tried, as much as i hate to admit it. it's far from perfect, but 95% of the time, it works well. when i use something that's better in every way, i'll switch.

till that time comes, i'll be sticking with IE.
posted by aenemated at 3:31 PM on June 5, 2002

oop -- gyc. my bad.
posted by aenemated at 3:32 PM on June 5, 2002

wonder about mozilla? well, wonder a little more. to my knowledge, mozilla is the combination of mosaic and the intent to take over the world (just like godzilla). also, netscape was internally always considered to be "mozilla."
posted by moz at 3:45 PM on June 5, 2002

(i meant to say that i think netscape's browser was considered, internally at the netscape company, to be mozilla.)
posted by moz at 3:45 PM on June 5, 2002

And it's possible that Dealership might play the S.F. party...

Awww, found out recently from my friend who asked me about our little band playing the S.F. Mozilla party that Jamie's already set for the night.

But I'll be there as a spectator. I've been fascinated by Mozilla development ever since I heard a Netscape announcement about the project.

Three or possibly even two years ago, this would have mattered.

I'll bite, also. In addition to 10sball's reasons (particularly that Mozilla is a free, non-ad-supported, W3C-minded alternative to IE with excellent DOM support) I'll suggest: Faster portable web app development for large-scale projects. Partly because of:

1. UI features for developers such as the Javascript Console and DOM Inspector.
2. Exposure of chrome and theme-able UI.

Which, having put into practice, is really helping me to reduce dev cost while keeping usability enhancements to web applications.

Also gotta say, that it seems screaming fast on Windows 2000. And do I even have to mention? There's a checkbox to eliminate pop-up ads. Which is nice. Well...at least it matters to me. :)
posted by massless at 3:50 PM on June 5, 2002

Mozilla, is nice, I use both IE and mozilla. IMO, IE is a little better at rendering, while mozilla has excellent features like pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing.
and if you didn't get what moz was talking about, clicking his link in mozilla does this
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
posted by patrickje at 3:57 PM on June 5, 2002

gazingus - All about Mozilla the character.
posted by jazon at 4:14 PM on June 5, 2002

Three or possibly even two years ago, this would have mattered.


You know the purpose of making software isn't always to defeat Microsoft. Its a good browser and has something no other browser that I know of has: tabbed pages and its cross-platform. This may not matter to most people, but to some of us its a very big deal. It all depends on how you use your computing hardware.
posted by skallas at 4:23 PM on June 5, 2002

"What the heck is a "Mozilla" anyway?"

Mozilla is actually the name of the giant Godzilla-like lizard that Netscape used as a mascot for so many years. Jamie Zawinski coined the name, because Netscape would be the "Mosaic killer"... and it was too! It's worth noting that Jamie and most of the early Netscape team were all from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and many were involved in the development of Mosaic.

I've met Jamie before and helped him out a bit at times. Really nice person, and a kind of hero to me, in that he did important things at Netscape, got out when the getting was good, and he chose to do something that, while financially risky, really mattered to him. He's got a LiveJournal account now, too!

I didn't know that Jamie was contributing bug reports to Mozilla, but it's nice to see his bug reports. Not as nice as reading his gruntles, but still...

Choice extracts:

Based on past bug-reporting experience, I give it a 50% chance that one of you is going to suggest to me that I bleed a chicken over my personal style sheet or something.
-------------------------
It should not be possible for *any* javascript, no matter how egregious, to fuck me this hard.
-------------------------
Since I don't actually give a shit about Java, I just deleted that whole directory, and now Mozilla works again.
-------------------------
1.0rc1 is (a bit) old. 1.0rc2 has been released and there are nightly builds more recent than that.

Yeah, uh huh: "maybe (the bug) magically went away through no effort of my own! Why don't you run an untested nightly alpha, I'm sure that'll be more stable."
-------------------------
Question: how does IE handle this?
I don't have IE available, unfortunately. :( Jamie? Do you?

You're funny!
posted by insomnia_lj at 4:27 PM on June 5, 2002

Okay, here's what always bugged me in what comes to the whole Mozilla project: a whole army of programmers and contributors and beta testers and (the list goes on), is gathered to create a fine browser. The whole project reaches fruition a few years after, and all we get is an improved version of the Netscape browser (which is a big deal, but could have been better). And finally, the thing is still a ram-gobbler. There's obviously something wrong here. Am I missing something? (apart from the fact that "Microsoft has loads of cash" and "the Netscape browser is shitty".)

(Concluding...) Someone would thought that, with the project gathering so much attention, the result would be something huuuge. (when it's just good)

PS: The tab under which this thread is loaded writes "(Untitled)". It just can't read the page's title...

(Also, I'm supposed to be passing an exam about a damned programming language called C, in less than 5 hours (it's 2:30AM where I live), and I'm here surfing the web and testing Mozilla. What I'm saying is, pardon the incomplete expression of my thoughts.)
posted by kchristidis at 4:28 PM on June 5, 2002

I've been playing with Mozilla release candidates for the past two weeks or so (because Mac IE 5.1 seems to have a nasty bug where it occasionally chokes on rendering table-based pages, i.e. 90% of the web--anyone else ever experienced this?), and my initial impression still stands:
Gecko rocks, the rest of the browser sucks hard. Main pet peeve: why is the preferences interface identical to the 4.x series, even though there are dozens of new panels? I've got high hopes for Chimera and other embedded-Gecko projects.
Speaking of IE, my installation of it clocks in at 10.5 MB. A browser-only installation of Mozilla 1.0, which I would hope would have all the debugging code removed, eats up 23MB. Sigh.
irony: I'm using Moz 1.0 to post this.
posted by darukaru at 4:54 PM on June 5, 2002

By the way, what the hell is up with making 1.0.x and 1.x revisions separate code branches? Wouldn't the logical step be to fix bugs in 1.0 before moving on to the next minor version?
posted by darukaru at 4:59 PM on June 5, 2002

And finally, the thing is still a ram-gobbler.

Quick, how much RAM does IE take in Windows 2000, XP, 98, 98SE, ME?

You will never be able to properly tell, as... when it became integrated into the shell, it's always loaded. This gives IE the edge on speed for loading as well (something Mozilla allows with it's pre-load/startup option), sure, an "instance" of IE looks small in memory, but it's not, well maybe not, just checked with this page an IEXPLORE.EXE is taking 21MB of RAM....)

So, boo-hoo, that's gobbling RAM? Nothing more than the competition...
posted by jkaczor at 5:10 PM on June 5, 2002

i'm probably not going to use mozilla, but i might go to the party to watch the geek love.

i'll be wearing pants.

i hope.
posted by fishfucker at 5:14 PM on June 5, 2002

By the way, what the hell is up with making 1.0.x and 1.x revisions separate code branches?

I wondered the same thing
posted by Dean_Paxton at 5:17 PM on June 5, 2002

Oh... also... for those so inclined: Mozblog
posted by Dean_Paxton at 5:22 PM on June 5, 2002

You will never be able to properly tell, as... when it became integrated into the shell, it's always loaded.
On a platform where IE is non-integrated:
IE recommended memory allocation: 11792K
Mozilla recommended memory allocation: 28796K
posted by darukaru at 5:57 PM on June 5, 2002

Actually, that's not very helpful, so I did a quick and highly unscientific bakeoff, as follows:
Gave IE 32MB memory partition to play in
Gave Mozilla 32MB memory partition to play in
Launched IE
Launched Mozilla
Loaded shockwave.com in IE
Loaded shockwave.com in Mozilla
(both browsers share the same plug-ins folder, using the latest Shockwave and Flash players)
Checked actual memory usage:
IE was using 17MB of what was allocated to it.
Mozilla was using 30MB of its partition.
I'm running Mac OS 9.2.2, 384MB installed RAM, virtual memory off.
posted by darukaru at 6:15 PM on June 5, 2002

32 MB of RAM costs around $5 these days. But I guess it's better than comparing their hard disk footprints.
posted by Mars Saxman at 6:55 PM on June 5, 2002

On my Powerbook running OS X I had two problems with IE5.1.3, there were a few memory leaks and it was prone to crashing (usually at inopportune times like submitting a really long rant to a message board). I just tried running 5.1.4 see if the leaks were still there, but it quit on me somewhere in the high 20MB range. My guess is about 15 to 20 minutes of use. My recent nightly build of Mozilla is currently using 66.5MB of memory, and its been running since 9-ish this morning without crashing. But hell, I currently have 590M of memory free, so I don't really care.
posted by 10sball at 7:08 PM on June 5, 2002

So because RAM and disk are cheap, there's no longer any worth in optimizing RAM/disk usage?
posted by darukaru at 7:26 PM on June 5, 2002

So because RAM and disk are cheap, there's no longer any worth in optimizing RAM/disk usage?

Of course there's worth, but there's less of it than worth in making a fully cross-platform browser, at least to the people making priority decisions on the Mozilla project. The fact that 32MB of RAM costs 5 bucks means that they can set low memory consumption as a low priority compared to, say, not having three completely separate code trees.
posted by daveadams at 7:47 PM on June 5, 2002

Congratulations to all, indeed! Now I will be the person lacking developer/programming skills who asks the big dumb question. I like Netscape and hate IE and have been hoping that when Mozilla 1 was released, that I could use it. Can I? All those bug reports and release versions are kind of scary. And waxp, will Mozilla 1 correctly render websites such as yours, which urges viewers to upgrade their browsers?
posted by Lynsey at 8:12 PM on June 5, 2002

So it took how many years to add tabs to Netscape and release it as a new browser??
posted by rushmc at 8:34 PM on June 5, 2002

darukaru, by no means did I mean to imply that there is no reason to optimize, I was merely pointing out my priorities here. I can live with the 2-3x footprint (although if the leaks are still there its WAYYY less) if the application is more stable. From there, and I didn't mention this above, I would want the rendering side of things optimized (rendering performance, dhtml speed, what can be done wrt plug-ins). Only then would I focus on footprint (both memory and storage). I have resources to spare at this point, so I can live with the current state of affairs.

Rushmc, I normally love feeding trolls but I have more southpark people to make.
posted by 10sball at 8:48 PM on June 5, 2002

darukaru: Perhaps the roadmap helps? Briefly, 1.0 is a feature freeze. This permits third party vendors (say, Netscape!) to create commercial browser packages around the Mozilla core, and developers can depend on a frozen API for things like the XUL language. Bug fixes will continue to be folded into 1.0 as possible. Nevertheless, feature enhancements will continue on the 1.1 side. It's not really that mysterious -- the development of the browser will continue, but they wanted a solid basis for vendors and OEMs.

As for memory usage, do not forget that IE features such as the rendering engine are built into Windows -- and Microsoft probably has access to Apple development internals as well. I don't blame them, but I don't think this is the fairest comparison.

Lynsey, of course you can use it. I've been on Mozilla as my primary browser since 0.9.1 at least, and the speed increases (winter) and crash reductions (spring) have been dramatic. Mozilla 1.0 is perfectly usable as an end-user browser and is by no means unstable vis-a-vis the standard set by IE. The thousands of open "bugs" are for the most part trivial rendering errors, things deferred to future releases, feature enhancement requests, and even evangelization (e.g. getting websites to do things in a more standard way).

Mozilla 1.0 is intended to be the most standards-compliant browser on the planet. I think it does a great job, though it's probably a matter of opinion. Mozilla is absolutely a recommended choice for the Browser Upgrade Campaign, which is aimed largely at users of Netscape 4.x (and to a lesser extent IE 3 and 4). It handles style sheets and CSS2 at least as well as IE5.5 and probably as well as IE6 (again, partly a matter of opinion).

For my part, I love Mozilla's features, though I still have problems with lost cookies. If it weren't for that I would be shouting from the hills for it.
posted by dhartung at 8:50 PM on June 5, 2002

Heh, don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking Moz. I'm even trying to use it as my everyday browser. It's just little things that make me wonder sometimes. Thanks for answering, everyone.
posted by darukaru at 9:08 PM on June 5, 2002

i've been using galeon for a while now, in preference to mozilla, whose rendering engine ("gecko") galeon uses. it's fast, it's lightweight, and it's packed with cool features which don't climb up and get in my face. of course, it only runs on unixes...
posted by hob at 10:14 PM on June 5, 2002

Its a good browser and has something no other browser that I know of has: tabbed pages and its cross-platform.

*ahem.* opera
posted by lotsofno at 11:00 PM on June 5, 2002

wowzers! even if I'm the only one, this is one of the most exciting things to happen since the web. it only gets better from here.
posted by greyscale at 11:09 PM on June 5, 2002

I tried Mozilla (Mac OS 9) a long time ago. It was crap and I chucked it. Tried it again, Mac OS X this time, a few months ago, and it has since become my main browser. I think I'll move to Chimera when it's a bit closer to being ready for primetime (I don't need another mail client etc.) But we're still talking about a client using the Gecko engine, which is as compliant to the standards as they come. IE seems to be the browser that's lagging now, at least on the Mac.

I am convinced that Mozilla is now in a position to give IE a good run for its money. I think Mozilla is definitely ahead right now. And I think IE is looking pretty lame by comparison.
posted by chrisgregory at 12:31 AM on June 6, 2002

Wahoo! Was a late-comer (0.9.8) to Mozilla, but I'll never be firing up NS4 or IE if I don't have to.

Thank you!
posted by hobbes at 2:07 AM on June 6, 2002

I've been using the Netscape builds based on mozilla since 6.0, and have been running 7.0 for a week and have been happy with it. I think it's pretty fast compared with IE that I have installed - both on XP and 2000.

I'm downloading the moz 1.0 now and may switch to running that instead of Netscape 7 or IE depending on how it reacts on my system.

As an observation, though - on the release announcement, why aren't the links, well, linked? I mean, they provide all those url's, but don't actually hyperlink them. I find it hugely ironic.
posted by rich at 6:58 AM on June 6, 2002

As an aside, the biggest opportunity with Mozilla is that it's not associated with a platform, so it will become the standard for web developers because the applications written for it will work everywhere (once it distributes). I don't think that's something IE will ever be able to do as long as MS retains ownership of that product, they just can't evolve beyond their business model. Perhaps someone with more business/economics understanding can give a better perspective on this, but it seems pretty simple to me. They can't even keep the Mac and Windows versions in par with one another, the Mac version always lags by at least 6 months.
posted by greyscale at 11:36 AM on June 6, 2002

Just a few comments from a Mozilla fan (I've been using it as my primary browser since M18). First, to Lynsey, Mozilla, since at least the 0.9 versions (and probably before that) has been in almost all ways superior to the 4.x and earlier builds of Netscape. So switch already. You'll like it.

To rushmc, if you think the only advantage Mozilla has over Netscape 4.x is tabbed browsing, you're just not paying attention. The CSS support alone is worth the price of admission. The stability would be a second selling point.

To kchristidis, if you know C and you think Mozilla should have a smaller footprint, ram allocation, or whatever: why not contribute to the project? I don't code any C, so I can't help out on that end. But maybe you could.

Finally, to no one in particular, the tabbed browsing and skins/themes are very cool features. And I may be in the minority here, but I actually like Mozilla Mail (the email client that ships with it) a lot and have been using it as my only IMAP/POP3 email client for a long time now.

Open source is finally cranking out some software that average users will dig. Mozilla 1 and OpenOffice 1.0 are both out there now, and they're both very good and getting better daily. If you haven't made the plunge yet, give them a try. And, after that, install them for your less-than-savvy friends. Spread the goodness. You'll feel all warm and fuzzy inside
posted by wheat at 2:34 PM on June 6, 2002

Most regular (read non-fanatical) users will not make a major browser switch without a truly compelling reason (or five). I resisted moving from Netscape to IE for as long as I reasonably could, but finally the features demanded that I do so. Mozilla makes no such demands upon me, sadly. I am willing to bet you money that it makes no significant inroads in the Windows browser market (at least) over the next three years.

You don't spend years reinventing the wheel just to offer consumers...another wheel, virtually indistinguishable from the others. This is DOA.

::: adds 10sball to the list of folks who confuse "trolls" with anyone who doesn't agree with them. :::
posted by rushmc at 6:23 PM on June 6, 2002

hey rushmc, thanks for acknowledging your resistance to change. it helps put your comments in perspective. we fear change, yep yep. you stay wich that there IE browser thing honeychild.
posted by greyscale at 6:36 PM on June 6, 2002

Perhaps I have an itchy trigger finger from reading too much slashdot, but I call them as I see them, and I saw, in your one line post, a troll. Your comment was so vague that if I had taken the time to reply a "that's not what I meant" followup would have been quite easy...

Now, your follow up post had some meat to it. Compelling reasons for me [on OS X] is primarily the afore mentioned stability. And while I don't use tabs much I couldn't live without popup blocking or some of the other Prefs Moz has that IE doesn't. Oh, I always forget to mention bookmark keywords because they're totally second nature to me now. Here's a pretty good rundown of Mozilla user features. From my experience Mozilla is a very different tool for surfing then NN4 was. Do common surfers know they need these things? Do they know they even exist? Probably not.
posted by 10sball at 6:45 PM on June 6, 2002

I am willing to bet you money that it makes no significant inroads in the Windows browser market (at least) over the next three years.

AOL might be significant.
posted by normy at 7:38 PM on June 6, 2002

you stay wich that there IE browser thing honeychild.
So 'freedom of browser choice' means the freedom to choose anything as long as it's Mozilla-based? Gotcha.
Here's a serious question for the Moz people: wasn't the whole idea of rewriting the code from scratch to discard all the cruftiness that had built up from Navigator 1 to Communicator 4.5? Can you really say you've succeeded in this when members of the current developer team say that the code is now overly complicated, tangled, and crufty?
posted by darukaru at 7:56 PM on June 6, 2002

darukaru, et al: people ask the same questions and form the same opinions about things like Vi and Emacs and then there are people that use Microsoft Word and have never even heard of these relatively ancient editors. my point is that the comments about code, features, etc are way too subjective to be of any value in the context of this discussion. freedom of choice means you can pick your OS and have a viable web browser in common use. like duh. isn't this completely obvious? the choice isn't the browser because first Netscape dominated, then Microsoft, and MS didn't port to competing platforms. like duh again. don't you poeple know anyone who doesn't use Windows? DOn't you ever run an alternate OS, even Mac OS???
posted by greyscale at 8:14 PM on June 6, 2002

hey rushmc, thanks for acknowledging your resistance to change.

Yes, I resist change for change's sake. There are plenty of opportunities to change for some benefit.

Cute accent. Adds a lot to your arguments.
posted by rushmc at 9:06 PM on June 6, 2002

Okay, 10sball, I'll take you off the list, for now. Thanks for the tips on Mozilla features--I'll check them out. So far, though, I must say the interface seems needlessly cluttered with junk I'll never use (I had the same problem with Communicator).
posted by rushmc at 9:07 PM on June 6, 2002

Ok, so I downloaded it. One problem, actually 2. The email client doesn't seem to work, and what is one to do about integrating Shockwave into it? I tried downloading Shockwave again, but it "doesn't recognize the browser."
posted by Lynsey at 10:03 PM on June 6, 2002

Lynsey, try fooling with your settings with respect to the email client... it took me several tries to get everything configured correctly and receiving/sending. Based on my limited experience with it, everything seems to work fine.

Also, there's this page concerning plugins (like Shockwave), which might be of some help. Good luck.
posted by canoeguide at 4:48 AM on June 7, 2002

rushmc: I'll give you that the GUI is a little cluttered. I've been using pinball skin for a while now and like it a lot, especially on a small monitor.

Surf with IE if you like (I do sometimes. I haven't uninstalled it or anything--oh, wait. I can't uninstall it, now can I?). Some of us like other options and think that the other options are not just different, but better.
posted by wheat at 12:14 AM on June 8, 2002