What's up with Mozilla?

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My worries about Mozilla:

- it'll never run on my MacOS 8.1? (they say it will)

- it won't display pages with 'bad' HTML?

- it'll be too complex for hacking?

What I want is scriptable components that let me build my own browser with OS scripts...?

-- Jorn (jorn@mcs.com), November 12, 1999

Answers

A project like a web browser is very complex. Definitely too complex for casual hacking. I think the best you can hope for is some kind've sane plugin architecture.

Though... hrm. You can just take the layout engine (Gecko) and use it in a simpler browser which you could hack. Kind've like NeoPlanet. That shouldn't be too difficult.

Why do you think it won't display pages with 'bad' HTML? As far as I know, it'll do whatever it can to render the HTML it gets. Do you mean will it support non-standard HTML tags? Since the engine is based on open Internet standards, I doubt it.

I'm not a Mac person, but can that machine running MacOS 8.1 be upgraded to MacOS 8.5? That appears to be supported by Mozilla.

-- Bruce Z. Lysik (eldrik@logrus.com), November 12, 1999.


Re the response about upgrading MacOS 8.1 to 8.5 to run Mozilla: I don't think it would be recommended for pre-G3 Macs, there's a major performance hit even on a 275MHz 603ev w/1Mb L2 cache.

By requiring 8.5 they cut themselves off from 80% of current Mac users (and their bug reports and UI advice).

This also means slower adoption of the upgraded browser and thus yet more time wasted coding for browser nonstandards.

-- W Tenino (tenino@booksatoz.com), November 12, 1999.


Hey, I'm with you there. I've put a Mac G3 and an iMac up against every milestone since M5. I've fought with this thing. Sometimes it was great - I even started digging into some of the code.

But lately nothing seems to go right. Huge memory requirements even to launch the thing. I want this to work *even if not for me*.

I've been able to write menus, add menu items, that sort of thing. Perhaps it is too complex for hacking. Personally, I'd like to see a browser. That's a browser - not an email client or anything else. Keep it nice and small, and open up the insides for folks to build on.

Got to be a stable release out there some

-- Robert Brook (robert@brook.org), November 12, 1999.


I can't answer your Mac concerns, since I don't use one, but I would like to comment on web standards. I hope with all my heart that Mozilla will be HTML 4.0 compliant so that we can do away with the IE and NS only tags. It just causes a big headache for most web developers.

Unfortunately, Mozilla seems to be suffering from the same problems of browser bloat. I just want a basic, fast and easy to use browser; I don't need e-mail and newsgroup clients (I use other freeware that is better anyway). I have thought seriously about using Opera, but I hope that Mozilla will offer a free alternative.

I'm not holding my breath though. Who knows when it will ever be completed to everyone's satisfaction? I don't want to be a cynic, but I have my doubts as if it can make any inroads against Internet Explorer. It is too bad that Netscape let IE slowly eat up its market share and I think that most users will stick to whatever browser they can get to work OK.

I've tried to express this on Slashdot lately since they have had some Mozilla related material. Of course, if you say anything other than "Bill Gates is the antichrist" no one is going to listen there. . .

-- Oxnard (astroman@hickory.net), November 13, 1999.


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