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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => General Internet News => Topic started by: JamesR on April 02, 2003, 10:27:54 PM
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In the biggest development in the Mozilla project since the 1.0 release, mozilla.org has announced (http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html) that Mozilla 1.4 will be the last version of Mozilla to be an application suite. After 1.4, the minimal Phoenix browser and Minotaur (aka Thunderbird) mail clients will take over and work on a single Gecko Runtime Environment (which all Mozilla-based apps can share rather than each app having to use its own) will be thrown into high gear. Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0?
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Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0?
Only if it makes it easier, which I actually doubt it will.
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So phoenix is becoming the 'official' mozilla browser or something? That can only be a good thing :-). I'm a phoenix addict myself.
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*Jaw drops*
/me checks the date, to make sure it's not April 1st...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
Mozilla may be a bit clunky in places, but Phoenix tops the clunkiness scale, then invents a few new places of its own! Premier league Clunky, Champions League of Clunky, and the World Cup of Clunkiness!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
They cannot be serious. :-o
I just took a quick extra look at Phoenix just to re-familiarise why I stayed the hell away from it. Oh yeah. The bookmarks menu on the personal toolbar is exactly like IE's... BAD! Menu appearance/disappearance is as clunky as hell, and the memory footprint is as bad or worse than Mozilla's! I'm sorry, what was the point in Phoenix again? Oh. It starts a little bit faster. And what's with the IE-like placing of stuff in the menus? Who are the developers, high priests of IE advocacy?
If Phoenix is going to get better, they should have held off this decision until it hit at least 1.0 release... right now it is in no shape to replace Mozilla Navigator.
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@mikeymike
Hmm.... that's not right, that's what I think of Mozilla. :-D
I've gone from Netscape, to Opera, to Mozilla and to Phoenix... and I have no intention of going back since this is the smoothest browser I've had installed on my machine. (There are still a couple of bugs though).
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I would never use mozilla its slow and ugly i hate it, opera is the best browser followed by intenet explorer. :-D
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I never really liked Mozilla's browser. In fact, up until a week or two ago, I mostly used IE (!) even though I had Opera 6, 7, Mozilla, K-meleon and Netscape installed (the latter one not for long, tho :-D)
But since i discovered Phoenix (thx zudo, odin ;-) ) I haven't used anything else. I like the customization options for the toolbars, which is what I found lacking in all the others (except K-meleon, which I had some other issues with).
It still has a long way to go, but I think it looks *very* promising and an Amiga port would be great, IMO.
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Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0
I think the biggest persuasive factor would be the release of Amiga OS 4.0.
Never know, after that we may see all kinds of stuff ported...
Siggy.
(Is it just me, or is there an upsurge in carriage before the horse going on around here?)
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At the moment, I'm using Mozilla 1.3 for web and mailnews. Because it is a bit slow when dealing with huge amounts of mail (I have large mail archives), I have Mozilla and my profile both in ramdisk. This makes it very very fast :-)
Phoenix claims to be faster than Mozilla. Ok, it normally has a slight edge on it when cold starting, but on my system there's no difference at all (both in ramdisk and their profiles). Performance using both applications is nigh-on identical.
Phoenix claims to have a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla. Who are they kidding?!?
Mozilla may be heavier generally, but I like where everything is and it is nice and snappy in general usage. The menus in Phoenix are as clunky as hell and the bookmarks shortcut you can have on the personal toolbar is ripped straight out of IE. And I don't appreciate the stupid positioning of stuff in the menus just to make it a bit more IE ish. Since when are a programs preferences to be found in the 'Tools' menu?!?
If Mozilla is to be split up into smaller, faster, seperate apps, PORT THEM DIRECTLY! I don't want to be the victim of what some little IE advocate thought would be a good idea at the time!
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Who cares about memory footprints? Why don't they take care of real design problems first?
The reason I dumped Mozilla and went back to IE is because Mozilla is the least responsive browser I've ever used. Visit a page, and it has to download the whole thing before it refreshes the display. At least with IE, you can read the top of the page while the rest is downloading. A better download manager would be nice, too.
Mozilla has some strong points here and there, like the ability to display partially corrupt image files (instead of blocking them like IE), and, of course, pop-up supression, but on the whole it's not very well designed at all.
Sheesh. Geeks.
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I've just found the nightly builds for Phoenix, I'll give it another chance :-)
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@ Waccoon
Let me guess, you're a WinXP user with 1GB RAM?
You don't care about memory footprints? I really don't know what to say to that!!!
Of course getting rid of the major problems first is a good plan, and large memory footprints are down to debug libraries in memory as well, so the two are linked together, but the Phoenix team are claiming that CURRENTLY it has a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla, which is blatantly not true!
[Page loading issues?] When was the last time you tried Mozilla? If it's pre 1.2.1, you really ought to try it again, you'll notice a big difference.
The download manager in Mozilla isn't very good, true. But I don't use it, so it doesn't affect me :)
Pop-up suppression works brilliantly in 1.3, again, give it a try.
"Geeks"?
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My own order of preference for browsers I've used:
1. Opera 7 (I use this when I have to use my PC, which I don't feel the need to do often).
2. IBrowse 2.3 (I use this 95% of the time)
3. Voyager (QNX)
4. Mozilla 1.x
5. AWeb 2
6. Phoenix
7. Netscape 7
8. Lynx (amiga gg port)
9. Voyager 3 (V3 on Amiga)
10. Internet Explorer 6
My preference is based on stability first, speed second, convenience 3rd, and compatibility last (if a site has flash or java or weird js usually avoid it like the plague). Note also that I don't use Linux. ;-)
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It doesn't have to load the whole page before displaying, it's just got a delay of some hundred milliseconds or so from start of loading until it starts displaying. You can tweak that if you know where it's set...
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People, the browser application itself is practically irrelevant here -- it's the rendering engine that's critical. By componentizing the suite it definitely makes an Amiga port more realistic.
Everyone has their favourites, but right now none of these are available as alternatives. We desperately need this.
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I don't understand :-?
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@ ikir
you don't understand what? :-)
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@ ne_one
It is important that AmigaOS4 gets a Gecko-based web browser for the sake of decent website readability/compatibility. However look and feel is almost as important.
I doubt many AmigaOS4 users want a web browser that looks and runs exactly like IE on OS4. I also however think that most AmigaOS4 users would find Mozilla directly ported to OS4 is a bit on the heavy side, and would want something lighter. Me personally, I would want a straight port of Mozilla to OS4.
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Actually, at work I use Celeron 500 systems with 128 megs running WinNT, and IE seems responsive enough on those systems. At home, I have a 2.6Ghz Athlon with half a gig of RAM, and I think Mozilla is too slow. To each his own, I guess.
I think there are more important problems to fix in Mozilla before getting to memory issues. Besides, it uses so much memory because the dev team wants to support SO MUCH stuff. Most every Windoze user has a pretty hefty system these days, so naturally they just program the browser to suit most people's hardware. It'd be nice if Mozilla was lighter, but if that was a priority it wouldn't be so big in the first place. I doubt they'll ever fix that.
I'm not saying big memory footprints are a good thing. I *AM* a 6Meg A1200 user, after all. :-D
I'm using version 1.3 now. It's faster than 1.1, but not by much. Maybe there's just something screwy with my system. You never know with Windows.
It'd be nice if I could run Mozilla and IE5.5 side-by-side on my 200Mhz Mac at work to see how they compare, but Mozilla doesn't run on MacOS 8.1 as far as I can tell.
"Geeks"?
I define a geek as someone who is way too concerned about the technology and not enough with the functionality or practicality. You know, the kind of people who will spend five hours trying to download something from the Internet when they can instead buy it at a store for $20. My dad is pure geek, and instead of parking his car at the back of the lot and walking 3 minutes to the mall entrance, he drives around for 20 minutes looking for a closer parking space. ;-)
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@ Waccoon
I started using Mozilla over IE as my primary web browser when Moz 1.0 was released (I had been downloading and checking it out for a long time before that though). It did bother me that it takes a while to cold start, but I justified that over IE because I use Moz's more powerful features, and things are generally better placed in Moz to my liking.
One thing to remember when comparing IE to other web browsers is that MS severely cheats with the amount of IE that is cached on start-up and generally used all the time in any post-Active Desktop operating systems. The HTML rendering engine, probably the JS/Java engines are all in memory all the time. Of course, you're saying that "you're a user, you want benefits not excuses", so if IE works for you, fair enough.
My brand of cheating with Mozilla comes in with a ramdisk, and installing Mozilla and my Mozilla profile into that :-) It flies. Same startup time as IE, on cold start, and no disk I/O issues with Mozilla Mail (something I have a major problem with if I wasn't using a ramdisk... I have a lot of old mail I keep, Moz Mail isn't good when it has to actually do things with large amounts of mail).
In case anyone is interesting in the ramdisk software, it's $35 from Cenatek software (www.cenatek.com), works on any version of Windows, isn't bloatware, and is reliable, fast and stable. No, I don't work for Cenatek :-)
Btw, I'm more concerned with "how well something works" than "how it works", but if a piece of software performs a task reasonably, but how it goes about it is badly, I'm likely to think worse of it. OE, for example. Where security bugs go to retire :-)
Mozilla's memory footprint - it is large, but not 'out of control'. NS7's is 'out of control' from what I've seen. One minute it can steam along quite happily on 11MB (far less than Mozilla on average), then the next minute it's over 50MB (way above Mozilla on average)... very odd. IE has a bit of a habit when it gets unhappy about something to soak memory as well, and because of its integration into Windows, worries me that it's going to hold on to that memory after the process has exited anyway, regardless of what Task Manager says (Win2k and resource usage is funny, you can have six different utilities including taskmgr tell you entirely different stories about what's going on).
If anyone is interested, I've written quite a bit about my take on Mozilla on my website (www.legolas.com), I don't advocate it as you'll see, I'm pretty critical of it.
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One thing to remember when comparing IE to other web browsers is that MS severely cheats with the amount of IE that is cached on start-up...
I'm aware of that, which is why I really wanted to see IE and Moilla running side-by-side on my Mac. To me, cold starts mean nothing. I'm talking about scrolling issues, button delays, screen refreshes...
My brand of cheating with Mozilla comes in with a ramdisk
HAHA! I do the same thing with my Photoshop swap file. Photoshop likes to swap everything out to disk no matter how small a file you're working on (like, a tiny button for your website). Putting the primary swap file on a RAM disk helps a lot. Irony sucks.
OE, for example. Where security bugs go to retire
Yes, but a mail client shouldn't be running ActiveX controls in the first place. That's bad design, and has nothing to do with the technology itself. How something works IS how well it works.
I have ActiveX controls set to "prompt" in IE. It causes real headaches when visting media-rich websties, but it stops all scripts before they run. I've heard of the dreaded script viruses, but I've never gotten one since I turn off ActiveX. Since I CAN turn off ActiveX and scripting in OE, I feel no reason to put up with the unbearably slow performance of Mozilla Mail. If they sharpen up the performance, I'd love to switch. OE6 is starting to run into a lot of crashing problems on my machine when I repeatedly delete and create lines with the backspace and return keys. And, of course, I can't downgrade to an older version, since Microsoft really doesn't want you to do that!
NS7's is 'out of control' from what I've seen.
Since when was any version of Netscape good? ;-) I used to be a Netscape 4 deevotee, but when IE5 was released, I realized Netscape was losing market share because it was crap, not because of anti-competitive behavior on Microsoft's part.
I don't advocate it as you'll see, I'm pretty critical of it.
Well, I'm pretty critical of everything. It's not like I really LIKE Windows and IE. ;-)
BTW, I wasn't joking about my dad's car parking habits. He really does that!
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@ Waccoon
I'm aware of that, which is why I really wanted to see IE and Moilla running side-by-side on my Mac. To me, cold starts mean nothing. I'm talking about scrolling issues, button delays, screen refreshes...
I've only noticed button delays sometimes on interfaces like the preferences menu... odd. Scrolling issues, here's where things get funny. I've been using a Logitech trackball for years, which means using Logitech mouse drivers to use all the mouse buttons. Hence no mouse wheel. I had untold problems with Win2k and mouse scrolling for ages, and in the end I've hacked up my own custom settings to control scrolling, and Mozilla, while on most systems is a bit on the jerky side is the only application that responds particularly well to the customisations I've made :-)
(IE/OE) OE's problems are more than that - bad control of security settings, no option to say "plain text only" when viewing email, and just and ignore HTML mails (the start of the iceberg that has "email-based vulnerabilities" written on it). It would help if OE used its own, very light HTML rendering engine, Eudora does that, which has the effect of not victimising the user with awful-looking complex HTML emails and also no chance of a vulnerability getting through.
With IE, you shouldn't *have to* click "no activex/scripting please" to get a 'safe browsing experience'. Plus the prompts to install new software like Flash really pisses me off. IE has but one task on my system: Windows Update, and even then I only use it to get the list of updates, that I'll then use Mozilla to read up on, read the EULAs carefully to ensure that MS aren't trying to get root privs on my PC (WMP patches are a favourite for that, followed by recent Windows service packs), and download them manually if I want them.
(Netscape being crap) NS4 was ok versus IE4. At the time it was a bit slow. NS's problem after that was that it simply didn't improve in most of the important factors, and IE did, significantly. And MS leveraging their monopoly does make a big difference, particularly among those who don't look further than their own nose for a decent piece of software (which must 90% of the world's online population, 5% use IE out of choice, and 5% use something else :-))
(being critical) Maybe if more people were openly (and had half a brain) critical of Windows, MS might *improve* it a bit, rather than making stupid Disney UIs. Or at least stop trying to get root privs on people's PCs through dodgy EULAs.
(car parking habits) My dad does the same, though he does have an excuse, so it's not behaviour I've noted particularly :-)