Gavin, 1 August 03
I’ve been using mozilla for over three years. With the ending of Netscape involvement, comes the end of an era, it also harbours great opportunities for mozilla to advance, with microsoft declaring that they are not going to release any new versions of internet explorer.
While a couple of years ago the mozilla mail client could crash and take down all my browser windows fairly regularly, these days Mozilla is mainstream and stable. It is now actually more stable than most other pieces of software that I have on my machine (microsoft office included). Even using developer builds it has not crashed in months of constant use on a range of operating systems.
There were times that pages would not display as intended, with the need to update to the latest nightly fix. Now pages display as intended even when the page author has designed without care for standards. Mozilla has a quirks mode to accept such non-compliant design (although I’m still not convinced on all the arguments for marquee tags in compliance mode).
There are now stand-alone versions of browser and mail program. It’s here that decisions need to be made. The present situation means for example the preferences menu can be under edit>preferences or tools>options depending on which mozilla product you use. The standalone browser (codenamed firebird) has few advanced preference settings displayed – supposedly in an effort to reduce bloat, however most of the functions that were present in earlier versions (codenamed seamonkey) can be edited by typing about:config in the firebird address bar – meaning the code for the settings remains just the UI has been removed.
Mozilla has a market share of under 2% which in itself does not seem like much. But remember – as Netscape was being overtaken in the browser wars, its 50% share was under 10 million users. Whereas 2% of current internet users is over the 10 million user figure.
It is also important to realise that a market share of almost 2% is built with zero targetted marketing. Until last month the Mozilla home page featured more prominent notices that the software was ‘for testing only’ than promotion of the wonderful features in Mozilla technologies (pop-up blocking, Bayesian spam filtering, tabbed browsing to name a few). The 2% probably includes a disproportionate percentage of net-savvy users, web developers, early adopters and industry leaders, which makes it a favourable base to launch from.
I’m glad I stuck with Mozilla – the beast shall yet be made legion….......
