E-Commerce Times builds upon the ‘Web browser as an operating system’ notion, recommending that Web browsers focus on reliability rather than features.
The Web Browser’s Unfinished Basement
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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If they could just get Mozilla and its family to stop crashing when ads don’t come and have them time out quicker when a page won’t load and not lock up your browser in the process, that would help a lot.
Microsoft Bob. Need I say more?
“focus on reliability rather than features.”
That should also apply to windows, and MS Office … and a ton of other software out there!
am i wrong??
A rule that should universally apply to the entire computer industry… and one that has been, and will continue to be, completely ignored.
I thought Microsoft and the other big players were getting UCITA passed everywhere to prevent those darned reliability and quality terrorists from ruining the software biz!
Software that works? What would be the fun in that? As so many software companies derive enormous revenues from services, support, and maintenance/upgrades, why ruin a good thing?
To hell with software quality. It’s bad for business.
That must be a problem with your individual setup. I’ve never seen that problem on any computer I’ve used.
It is not a setup issue. Mozilla 1.4a/b crashes/hangs when it encounters some sorts of ads.
There really is no good Windows browser anymore. IE6 is plagued with spyware and a broken UI. Mozilla is plagued by bugs and instability. Opera is plauged by a semi-Windows UI, bugs and instability.
Thanks Microsoft for killing Netscape.
The last time I checked Mozilla 1.4a/b were alpha and beta releases. Before counting Mozilla out, why don’t you wait until the final version {1.4} comes out. If the final still crashes, then you can bash Mozilla all you want.
I don’t have any issue with “stability” with web browsers, using IE or Mozilla or otherwise. The random crash (in either, mind you) doesn’t bother me since it takes seconds to resume where you left off. I can’t even remember the last time I had IE crash (though IE6 crashes more often than IE5 ever did). Most of the time sites f**k up is not because of the browser, but because of their crappy code (IMHO of course).
Beyond this, neither Mozilla or IE have any kind of features that REALLY make me want to use over than the other. Mozilla has a lot of preferences that don’t seem to lead to any better of a browsing experience, and IE focuses more on privacy than new functionality (like stopping pop-ups).
I think there needs to be more specialized versions of browsers. The browser for the casual internet perusal (my mom), the browser for the avid web freak, and then a browser for the developer. These could all be centered around the same code base and simply present the interface in a unique way, hiding and revealing features as necessary. I gotta tell ya, I can’t find anything I’d really recommend to my mom or dad besides WebTV which my technophobic Aunt actually uses.
Just my three cents
You geeks here all complain that software should be more stable instead of gaining more features, but that’s only your geeky nerdy opinion. Average users don’t care! Joe Average WANTS new, exciting, innovative features. They don’t care how stable it is, if it works they’re happy.
Proof: back in 1995 Windows crashed 2x per day. The only people who cared were nerds, geeks and power users. Average users didn’t care about the instability and happily continued using Windows.
Nope, you can brag all you want about stability but the rest of the world, average users, want more features. Companies won’t stop listening to customer demand just because a few geeks tell them to.
If you don’t have a monopoly, frequent random crashes will be the end of your company.
As most ‘average’ users only use 10% to 20% of an application, it is disingenuous to claim that they are pushing for exciting innovative features.
Everybody cares about crashes, especially data loss crashes.
The average user, who has no idea on how to fix their computer, is hurt by crashes most of all. Before Apple fucked up their OS (pre OS X), many people went to Mac because Mac OS was stable.
There is no ‘resume’ feature in IE6 or Netscape. Opera has something like this because their browser crashes the most of all.
As for Netscape and ads, I used to be running 1.3.1. It crashed so much with certain ads, I tried 1.4a and 1.4b, neither of which work any better. I think 1.2.X was the last stable build.
I like the idea about separate flavors of browsers. However, I would settle for one that was super solid and never crashed or otherwise died (like Netscape or Opera running out of GDI resources… not pretty).
I must say Mozilla is the best browser I have ever used. I cram Pheonix into that category as well and even though its not finished it is so much faster than Moz.
I can’t relate to the crashes people are experiencing, I’m using Moz 1.3 and have been using Moz since 1.0 and I have NEVER had it crash once and that’s on 98 and 2000. In fact, as a web dev I have to check my pages in IE (I use 6) and 1 out of 3 times it crashes and takes my machine to a blue screen.
I don’t get the argument of Moz not having anything over IE. How about pop-up and window resize blocker? Or Cookie manager, tabbed browsing, quick launch (which is instant compared to IEs 5 second startup) plus all the extra features you get through XUL such as mouse gestures (hate them but they give you call right click/left click to go back in history and vica verca to go forward) and dynamic links (excellent – hook to dictionary.com – I can’t live without them), plus tons and tons more. The only thing IE has over Moz is a better XML stylesheet, apart from that it’s go nothing.
When I have to use IE (say on someone elses machine) I feel like I have lost so much it’s like going back 5 years in time and being stuck on MS-DOS compared to XP.
Another thing – anyone tried opening more than ten windows on IE and left still being able to use their machine? You’re lying if you say so! I’ve had at least 10 moz windows with at least 10 tabs on each and my machine feels as alive as when it was booted. I haven’t pushed it further because it would be ridiculous to do so but IE crashing at the prospect of opening 10 HTML pages at 30k each is so pathetic!
A friend of mine uses masses of IE6 windows on his machine (XP OS) until they all get bunched together (pretty much impossible to tell what’s what) and his comp is stable.
I do agree with you though that Mozilla’s tabs are extremely good at their purpose, I’d probably still be using Mozilla (or one of it’s children) but the mouse gestures and built in searches (ie: g in the URL bar followed by a term searches google, w searches download.com etc) of Opera make it to hard to go back.
Yeah, hate to get behind Microsoft here, but I’ve had as many as a dozen windows open at a time with no loss of stability. Of course, I do have an SMP 2x P3 1.13Ghz that might have something to do with that…still, in mozilla’s defense, I think it’s a much better browser IF it can get past its speed problem.
he claims konqueror is also a filesystem browser, pdf viewer and spreadsheet previewer…
he’s right about the filesystem bit, but the other two (and many more besides) are provided by KParts or plugins, and are not core functionality. in fact, web pages are the KHTML Kpart, so even theyre not really core, not is http(s), ftp, gopher, theyre all kio plugins.
all konqueror is just a filesystem browser with tabs, bookmarks and a massively extensible architecture.
(PS: he’s right about the single tab crash taking out the entire window though, its really really annoying)