June 7, 2002

Mozilla 1.0! Mozilla 1.0! This powerful Open Source web browser is now ready for public consumption (for the most part), on any desktop platform you can imagine. This is a major milestone for web technology and the Open Source movement, and it was a long time coming.

Mozilla fans are quick to point out recent news of yet another security hole in Internet Explorer. IE security holes are a very big deal and Microsoft deserves all kinds of Mr. Yuck stickers for them, and Mozilla may be an excellent escape from such dangerously insecure computing. Murphy's Laws insist it's only a matter of time before we find security holes in Mozilla, though not necessarily as ubiquitos or as devastating as those in IE. But do the drastically different design, implementation and release methodologies and motivations imply Mozilla should be held to a higher standard than Internet Explorer? Is version 1.0 of Mozilla more mature than most 1.0 applications? Certainly it isn't as mature as the market leaders that have been out in the field for years (some are already finding bugs with Moz1.0), but does this milestone mean we're just about ready to diversify the browser market with a powerful, Open Source alternative?

I haven't had any problems with Moz1.0 yet, and I'm making it my browser of choice until I do. Tabbed browsing rules, though I already miss Opera's "use tabs for all windows opened by the page" feature (pop-up ads would get trapped as tabs-- not that I used Opera all that much). The supporting suite of apps, including a email client, news reader, and web page editor, is solid enough to recommend to my parents. (I can't wait for Mozilla Calendar; when properly integrated with Mail, bye bye Outlook!) And Mozilla's facilities for web developers, including the DOM browser and color-coded View Source, are slick. I intend to support Mozilla in all my web designs and applications with as much priority as Internet Explorer (though I've already been trying to do this for Netscape 6.2).

comments...

Daniel Talsky, June 9, 2002 2:46 AM:

You can turn off popups in Moz1.0. It's in the FAQ I think. Don't you EVER respond to your comments?

michael, June 10, 2002 5:32 AM:

I have to say I like it. I was completely turned off by the unholy slowness of Netscape 6 but Mozilla, despite a couple of annoying bugs (one involving spontaneous loss of keyboard focus, and the other concerning the Search command in the address bar dropdown) and some other keyboard-unfriendly behavior, it's already supplanted IE on my (home) machine.

Dan Sanderson, June 10, 2002 5:34 AM:

*blinks*



*turns on pop-up catching feature*



*dances*

Dan Sanderson, June 10, 2002 11:51 AM:

Daniel: You can turn off unrequested windows, but that sounds a little too generous. Some web apps use pop-up interfaces, and I think that'll block them too. It might be smarter than that, but I haven't had time to test it yet. Does it block, say, comment posting pop-up boxes for most weblogs?



michael: Both bugs acknowledged on my end; they're annoying. I've got a few other minor details, though I'm not compiling a list yet. I don't like the behavior of the mouse over the location box, but mostly because I'm just used to using that box heavily in IE. (I forget to click before trying to select text and end up dragging the current location as a bookmark to my links bar.) I care enough about it that I should probably try to participate in the bug reporting process somehow. Maybe next month. :)

michael, June 10, 2002 12:05 PM:

Dan: The popup control is very nice actually. What it seems to block are popups created by automatic javascript when a page is entered, etc. Popups generated on mouseclicks and other events seem to work just fine -- I tried the blog comment links at /usr/bin/girl and they worked fine.

Dan Sanderson, June 11, 2002 3:07 AM:

Bah, my weblog admin interface has problems posting from Mozilla, and I don't know why. erg.