LinuxInsider Talkback

Re: From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises
Posted by: Nigel McFarlane 2003-12-16 12:02:57

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Didn't Netscape lose the browser war? Mozilla, the technology that lies underneath Netscape products and a slew of its own products, just gets better and better. Netscape is effectively dead, but Mozilla keeps on keeping on. In 2010 we'll look back and say 2003 was the year that Mozilla really began. Mozilla-based products have attracted many flattering reviews and several industry awards this year. At the same time, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, which are Mozilla's most obvious competitors, are moribund at best.

Re: From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises
Posted by: capn_buzzcut 2003-12-18 13:14:02 In reply to: Nigel McFarlane

You know what? Forget about bloating Mozilla even further and instead give me a "Home" button on the standard toolbar and faster load times. Why is Mozilla so much slower than every other browser? I say improve performance first. Until then, I could care less about all that other crap.

Re: Give me a "Home" button (where the buffalo...?)
Posted by: rickst29 2003-12-18 17:44:29 In reply to: capn_buzzcut

One man's bloat is another man's feature ;)
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You can get the bloatware you desire (i.e., the Home button) from:
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http://home.no.net/trihand/mozilla/home/en/
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Mozilla takes less than 2 seconds to load on the PCs at my house (Windoz and Linux). These are NOT high end gamer machines (I'm talking PC-133.) Unless your PC doesn't have enough memory (128MB for Win9x, 256MB for anything else) or unless you're running on an old Cyrix...
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I should also note the obvious: about half of the 'slowness' in loading IE is hidden within the startup of Windoz. Similarly, Konqueror startup hides a lot of its initialization in KDEinit.
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I feel that the two most important features of a browser are: (1) to be SECURE, incapable of infecting your PC with root exploits unless you CONFIRM that you want to install or run certain content; and (2) to implement the W3C specifications (HTML, DOM, XHTML)correctly.
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For me, 'speed' is way down the list (behind features like tabbed browsing and mouse gestures), and I'm finding Mozilla 1.6 to be very quick and "snappy" anyway.
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With regard to #1, Security: The "security" of IE/Outlook is beyond question. In this house, we don't dare to touch IE for anything except Windows Update, and Outlook is REMOVED (as much as possible).
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With regard to #2, Properly Implementing the W3C standards for web-based content: No browser I have used, except for Mozilla and its derivatives, handles CSS2 well. (I won't even start in about the rest of DOM-2.) Many fail to even implement "basic" HTML 4.01 correctly.

Re: From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises
Posted by: bhuot 2003-12-16 21:56:29 In reply to: Nigel McFarlane

I have been reluctant to use Mozilla for a long time as it crashed when ads didn't load and it didn't store its bookmarks as separate files as Internet Explorer has so when it crashed I lost all the websites I saw. I figured out that I could drag and drop the link to the desktop, but that doesn't work with Firebird .7. I stopped using Mozilla the suite even though Composer was quite useful for me because it locked up for over a minute many times when it launched. I wish they would focus on stability and not on all this other fancy stuff that the end user doesn't care about. I personally wish developers would write platform specific whenever feasible, because when they support different platforms they don't often times work as well on the less popular platforms and they are not as efficient. Mozilla should try for efficiency and stability first.

Crashes, bookmarks
Posted by: rickst29 2003-12-18 18:30:40 In reply to: bhuot

Your bookmarks are in an everyday html file, "bookmarks.html", within the 'xxxxxxxx.slt' directory of your profile. You could copy this file to a "backup" place. And of course, you can edit it with any html editor.
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If you are suffering crashes, then (1) you should really back up entire profile (the whole directory tree) fairly frequently. And of course, you should be opening bug reports on these events. You ARE using a talkback-enabled version, right?
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Finally, I must strongly recommend that you not use ANY pre-release 'development' versions if you expect to have an 'official release' level of stability. (i.e., don't use Firebird 0.7, or 0.8, or anything before 1.0; or any Nightly; or any 'alpha' milestone, or even any 'beta' milestone of the Suite.)
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Are/were you using 1.5, or 1.4.1 (more reliable on Windoz), or ??

Re: From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises
Posted by: bangular 2003-12-17 08:30:39 In reply to: bhuot

Mozilla _stable_ branch is very stable. Mozilla on Linux is MUCH more stable than on windows (mostly because this is where the majority of development occours). Also, 1.6 is nearing stable status. So if your experience with mozilla is the earlier 1.x series you might want to try 1.6 when it reaches stable status.

Re: From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises
Posted by: muser43 2003-12-17 08:08:57 In reply to: bhuot

All Mozilla bookmarks are stored in an html file in your user directory. On windows that directory is C:\Documents and Settings\my_username If you want your old bookmarks look in:
C:\Documents and Settings\my_username\Mozilla\Profiles\default\whatever_name_you_used\bookmarks.html