“Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know what Mozilla is in general. For those of you in the dark, check out the overview provided by Mozilla for a decent breakdown of the project. The purpose of this review is to assess the win32 port of Mozilla 1.0 and its immediate successors (1.1a and .1b) as a milestone in the development of what may prove to be the greatest challenger to the Internet Explorer empire. We’ll consider the pros and cons of Mozilla’s core renderer, its implementation (Navigator), Mail, Chatzilla (an IRC client), and the bundle as a whole.” Read the review over at ArsTechnica.
Mozilla Milestone 1.0: the Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I do hope they have fixed some really silly bugs on Windows.
After downloading not even very many files, select Tools->Download manager to see all the files downloaded & just try to clear the list. They must be using some fancy On^4 algorithm when it should be On linear. For a thousand entries it can take 20mins on a Athlon while the cpu freezes up.
Secondly rendering of Chinese web sites tends to leave text all over the graphics, Chinese sites tend to be use extreme amounts of stupid graphics.
Wonder if these 2 bugs are on other platforms?
Other than that, wouldn’t use anything else.
Can we end the review introduction cliche “unless you’ve been living under a rock…”? Please?
—
[author@arstechnica] ~] /usr/bin/generate_review
Enter name of software: Mozilla<enter>
Enter version number: 1.0<enter>
Opinion of software: eh… <enter>
Seeding and generating random cliches…Done.
Uploading review…Done.
[author@arstechnica ~] /usr/bin/nethack
Overall, a good browser.
Doesn’t render as well as IE6.
Doesn’t support foreign character sets well.
Some web pages don’t work properly (DHTML, forms).
Each browser does not open in its own process.
Doesn’t do drag and drop very well.
Some good privacy options.
Tabbed browsing is handy from time to time.
Anti-ad functionality. This is a major time saver.
Not having Flash is rather nice actually.
Slimmed down functionality = faster web experience.
I don’t use Mozilla’s chat or email.
I use Mozilla for most of my day to day browsing needs. If I need IE6 for a particular page, I have to cut and paste the URL into an IE6 window as Mozilla does not have good drag and drop support.
Things I’d do for Mozilla:
Much better integration with Windows.
Have each browser instance able to be its own process.
Clean up the config dialogs a bit more.
Do extensive testing for page rendering.
Keep adding anti-ad and privacy features.
All in all, I’m a fan. Good work.
#m
As far as I’ve heard, Mozilla 1.1 is still in Beta, even though Netscape has released final products based on Mozilla 0.x.x. Maybe some of the bugs will be fixed by then…
-JM
from the article:
there is no feature compelling enough to prompt a switch from IE 6
I can think of one: When mozilla crashes, it does not bring down my desktop. When IE crashes, well, I hope I saved my data in all my other apps, just in case
(this happenned to me one to many times, which is why I’ve been using mozilla since 0.9.5)
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&th=…
Tabbed browsing is the only thing I find compelling about Mozilla. People rave about the popup killing option, but these people have obviously never heard of The Proxomitron
Anyway, the one thing I DID ike about Mozilla is it’s mail program for many reasons, but especially because of its ability to disable Javascript and cookies within mail messages. However, because of a few annoying design quirks, I was back to using Outlook Express within a few weeks. Hopefully things will improve in 1.1.
“I can think of one: When mozilla crashes, it does not bring down my desktop. When IE crashes, well, I hope I saved my data in all my other apps, just in case”
Get off of the 9x kernel and you won’t have that problem
Multizilla is a replacement for the existing Mozilla tab feature that I installed recently. It is more functional but it took a bit to change the default settings where I wanted them. There are screenshots on the home page.
http://multizilla.mozdev.org
There is also a Mozilla plugin to replace the google toolbar for IE
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
The mouse gesture plugin is ok but the default settings are annoying and I often highlight what I am reading so I usually leave it turned off.
http://optimoz.mozdev.org
There are a host of other Mozilla projects but I don’t know what most of them are.
http://www.mozdev.org/categories/index.html
http://www.mozdev.org/projects.html
I downloaded Mozilla 1.0 today, deffinitly better than pre 1.0 versions, much faster, hopefully it won’t quickly degrade like previous builds. I thought I was going to see some irony that mozilla barfed on the layout of the comments on a story about itself but it appears to be just the link someone posted screwing things up.
I dont mind Mozilla as a browser, but its a bit big for my liking. Gecko on the other hand is a piece of art. I use galeon which uses Gecko so i get all the nice parts of Mozilla Navigator without the 100Meg RAM usage (yes, it seriously used that much).
I’ve been using Mozilla nightly builds for years now. If you’re new to Mozilla just get Mozilla 1.1b. It seems to be about as stable as 1.0 and they fixed a number of annoying bugs that were in 1.0. For example, try getting a right+click menu for selected text in the URL bar with 1.0. In 1.1, it works as expected. Try dragging and dropping the site icon in front of the URL to the bookmarks menu in 1.0. Did it show up where you thought it would? Didn’t think so.
As a web-developer, I love that toys Mozilla provides for free: IRC chat, DOM inspector, JavaScript console, JavaScript debugger.
Richard, I think you mean 10 megs, not 100. On my system is Mozilla is using about 10 megs with 6 pages loaded (tabs) and IE is currently using 14 megs with just this page loaded.
“I can think of one: When mozilla crashes, it does not bring down my desktop. When IE crashes, well, I hope I saved my data in all my other apps, just in case”
Get off of the 9x kernel and you won’t have that problem
It happened to me on NT too.
1. Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on the button for Task Manager.
2. Go to the processes view.
3. Kill all processes that are named “IEXPLORE.EXE”
4. Kill all processes that are called “explorer.exe”
5. Kill all processes that are called “explorer32.exe”
6. Go to the applications view.
7. Press the “New Task” button.
8. Run “Explorer” and it will bring your desktop back.
#m
The MultiZilla plug-in is very cool.
I am surprised that they don’t cut a deal to put it into Mozilla 1.1 ship.
MultiZilla is far better than the tab features that is in 1.1b.
I’ll have to check out those other plug-ins, some of which sound useful 😉
#m
I only use Mozilla to read online (on my hard-drive) documentation (so I use it a lot).
Mozilla is still beta (doesn’t matter if it’s 1.0), it doesn’t deal with slashed (read table) graphics yet. Maybe in the future there will be a compeling reason to change. Privacy and “History” logs being a good compeling reason.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish good luck to Mozilla
Oh, and, yes, a new interface (UI) would be appreciated but this is Open Source so they will not care about “clients” demands. Maybe an unterface with smaller icon on toolbar (smaller screen state) with a look like the classic Netscape4 but with no text (is it possible ? not on current version 1.0).
Most of the “themes” suck too. (and are very unstable)
“Oh, and, yes, a new interface (UI) would be appreciated but this is Open Source so they will not care about “clients” demands. Maybe an unterface with smaller icon on toolbar (smaller screen state) with a look like the classic Netscape4 but with no text (is it possible ? not on current version 1.0).
Most of the “themes” suck too. (and are very unstable)”
What? I don’t know about any instability. Why shouldn’t they care about client demands?? Of course they do. But there are more than enough decent themes with small buttons.
Nothing beats Galeon though. If there would be Galeon for Windows, _that_ would be a compelling reason.
(for those who aren’t lucky enough to run a Unix system that is 
)
Maybe K-Meleon will develop to something like this someday.
It’s nice having Mozilla for BeOS use <g>.
I think Gecko is great. Both Galeon and Chimera – you can tell they are on their way.
[author@arstechnica ~] /usr/bin/nethack
I wonder what is the addiction of NetHack? After one month of playing that stupid game, I got bored of it.
I can think of one: When mozilla crashes, it does not bring down my desktop. When IE crashes, well, I hope I saved my data in all my other apps, just in case
Hmmmm, I had IE crashed on Windows Me a lot of times, the most it would bring down is explorer.exe, not the entire OS. In Windows XP, that happen is extremely rare.
It happened to me on NT too.
That is because one of the DLLs IE had use crashed, causing IE to crash and bring down explorer.exe with it. Click Ctrl+Alt+Del, click on “New Tasks..” and go to C:Windowsexplorer.exe (or C:WinNTexplorer.exe). Michael has the full details, check out his message.
Richard, I think you mean 10 megs, not 100.
On Windows, 1.0: takes 20 mbs of RAM for one page. On 1.1a it takes 23mb of RAM. Six pages loaded up, it takes close to a 100mb of 1.0, and 26mb on 1.1a.
What? I don’t know about any instability. Why shouldn’t they care about client demands?? Of course they do. But there are more than enough decent themes with small buttons.
These themes come with small buttons but they hardly change the UI of Mozilla (they could change the look, but not the UI). Making a UI that follows the UI of the target platform is a good idea.
Maybe K-Meleon will develop to something like this someday.
I don’t know, the mailing list seems dead, the web site too, plus the CVS on SourceForge, my only conclusion I could make is that K-Meleon is dead.
It’s nice having Mozilla for BeOS use <g>.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it is just a problem for the Personal Edition users, but 1.0 is so unstable, rebooting into Windows or Linux could save you more time.
“Richard, I think you mean 10 megs, not 100. On my system is Mozilla is using about 10 megs with 6 pages loaded (tabs) and IE is currently using 14 megs with just this page loaded.”
I killed it completely, restarted it, straight to 16M,20M. But it keeps going up, after a few hours it will be 36M.
Better try 1.1a
IE also just hangs the desk on W2K as well on occasion, but I would just as soon restart W2K & get a coffee.
…they just don’t update the front page of the website very often.
If you look in the Forums it’s reasonably active. The stable release (0.6) is getting on a bit, but the current beta (0.6.5 build 387) is only 4 weeks old and is based on Mozilla 1.0. To get the beta you do need to join the mailing list.
I mostly use Opera but I rather like K-meleon.
“These themes come with small buttons but they hardly change the UI of Mozilla (they could change the look, but not the UI).”
You can completely change the Mozilla UI with a XUL addon. You install this just like a theme and it behaves like one. This way you could completely recode the UI.
Some projects already do this, like the Aphrodite UI:
http://aphrodite.mozdev.org/
There are also projects building a word processor out of Mozilla but that’s another story.
I use(d) IE 6 in a corporate environment, and I’m pretty sure that it’s a feature and not a bug that it does not save my personal settings (of any sort) from login to login. I bet it allows some master “ini” or settings file, so I’m stuck with whatever the IT guy/gal likes in terms of prefs.
Therefore, I installed Mozilla 1.0, and I really like it. Yes, there are a few bugs, but not as many apparent ones as there are in IE 6. Unless MS fixes the bugs in IE 6, it looks like Mozilla is my web browser of choice at work. At home I still use IE 5.5, still the best imvho.
Does IE6 have tabbed browsing & a feature equivalent to Image Manager on Mozilla? (ie. remembering not to download graphics each time you visit a predetermined site?) I haven’t tried IE6 yet, so I dunno. If it hasn’t…forget it. I’m hooked on Mozilla & Opera.
I’ve been playing with Mozilla over the last few weeks, and I seriously don’t know why Netscapes old 4x look is set as default. Major turn-off. So I quickly changed the skin.
I don’t like the Download Manager in Moz, simply ’cause you can’t resume downloads if getting cut off from a site mid-way through your download. Opera offers this.
I love the tabbed browsing. I haven’t tried the mail client or any of its other apps yet. I can’t say I’ve had any problems yet with any site, but I haven’t visited many foreign sites yet. Overall, I’m very, very impressed.
OpenOffice, Mozilla & DScaler are some of my favorite apps, and they are all open source & free. Amazing.
You can completely change the Mozilla UI with a XUL addon. You install this just like a theme and it behaves like one. This way you could completely recode the UI.
Some projects already do this, like the Aphrodite UI:
http://aphrodite.mozdev.org/
Aphrodite, from what I saw in the screenshots, is just what you have from another theme. Nothing new, just the same old UI with a different (though quite interesting) look.
Does IE6 have tabbed browsing & a feature equivalent to Image Manager on Mozilla?
IIRC, from IE 4.0, IE saved the images from the websites. For example, if you named the saved website as “yahoo.html”, a folder containing all the images and other files would come out as “yahoo_files”.
I don’t like the Download Manager in Moz, simply ’cause you can’t resume downloads if getting cut off from a site mid-way through your download. Opera offers this.
A lot of stuff other download managers manage to resume download Opera couldn’t do.
“Aphrodite, from what I saw in the screenshots, is just what you have from another theme. Nothing new, just the same old UI with a different (though quite interesting) look.”
Woah, just try it out. It’s _not_ the default UI. Sure it’s not terribly different but it shows that you _can_ change the UI. Still don’t believe me? Look at multizilla, they did tabs in such a “theme” when tabs weren’t implemented yet in Mozilla.