[techtalk] mozilla (was:Netscape and Java)

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 02:35:10PM +0100 or thereabouts, kev wrote:
> Jack Baker wrote:
> 
> > Sorry for the last...miskey.
> > Has anyone tried the Mozilla browser?

Yes. I get the milestones, My husband grabs nightly CVS snapshots
and I've used some of those. It's been improving since M10, still.
I like it, I file bug reports when I can, and I am looking forward
to the finished product immensely. It's... er... well, it's still
buggy, though, for now :)
> 
> Could you explain what this is? How is it different to Netscape?
> I though Mozilla was just the name given to their source code.

You should probably look at http://www.mozilla.org for the full
scope but the quick (and possibly even half-right) version, 
which I hope to goodness I have got right:

Netscape's code for Navigator and Communicator was proprietary.
In 1988 they made lots of the code for Navigator 4.0 openly available. 
(Not anything that was, for example, from other companies who had
their own rights to it, just the stuff that they owned.) So that
anyone could see it and improve it. The codebase was dubbed 'Mozilla'. 

The Mozilla project is a bunch of people seeking to improve it.
What the Mozilla folks started working from was the 4.0 version.
They want it to run - and to run well and fast - on all flavours 
of Unix (including Linux), on MacOS, and on Windows. (Did I miss any 
out?). There's an awful lot of code there, but they're making
headway.

They have turned the code inside out, and have rewritten huge
amounts, introducing lots of new things. They want it to be
very very modular. If you don't want to be able to do email
from your browser, or support Chinese characters, you should
be able to remove those bits and the rest will still work.
Similarly, you can add Klingon support if you really feel the
need. So they've spent lots of time rewriting the user interface,
the rendering engine (called Gecko), and making the thing 
modular (it wasn't before). They also developed a bug-tracking
system which they released: bugzilla. (If ever you wondered
why the silly name, now you know: mozilla+bug) The modular
thing is very important for them. There's a lot of modules,
too.

The original Mozilla folks were mostly employed by Netscape.
They want anyone who wants to to be able to get involved, and
want lots of "external" developers :) If you want to download
the lot to compile it and run it from CVS you're welcome. If
you want to fix bits, I would imagine they'd be delighted. They 
also release nightly builds (which are simply compiled and stuffed 
on the ftp site: they don't always work, if the snapshot was taken 
at the wrong moment :) In fact, I'm not even sure they check it
compiles, as I'm sure I've failed to build it more than once :)

It's a very big project and not yet complete. They have a 
series of milestones on their roadmap. When they hit them,
they release what they've got so far, in a form that will
(hopefully) work for all platforms. This is different from
the nightlies, as there's no guarantee that the nightly
snapshots will work. The milestones are milestone 1, milestone
2, etc. When you hear people talking about using Mozilla,
especially with a number, they're talking about using one 
of the milestones: we're up to M10 by now. Note that these
aren't even beta releases. They're alpha. 

We're now up to milestone 10. I have been getting them since
M8 (not that long, no). The rendering onto the screen is
indeed very fast for me. Other times, it decides to wait
five minutes before starting. If you use it, expect to 
find bugs, and even if you decide it's currently too buggy
for you to want to keep it, I think it's a great idea if
you enter the bug into Bugzilla: "I have this version on
this platform, and it's doing weird stuff on this website
/when I try to use email/when..." etc. 

I think it's improving very fast now. I don't know enough
about Mozilla or coding in generally, but I would guess that
this means that they have sorted all that module stuff out
and are now at a stage where the underlying stuff works
well enough for any changes to be immediate improvements.
I find it mostly usable, but I only visit about four sites
where I need graphics (and one doesn't work for me with it),
and I don't use it as a mailer or anything like that. I
don't even need the bookmarks to work (they didn't, on a
recent one, and proxies didn't work on a different release.)
If you need those, you will probably think you don't want
to switch :)

Oh yes, you can find the licence it is released at on the
Mozilla site, and you can find a lot more information there
too. 

End of blurb. Feel free to correct. 

Telsa

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