Product: Mozilla 1.3 final
For: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
From: Mozilla.org
Price: Free (open source)
Summary: After a four-year gestation, this Netscape-derived browser finally reached official release status. Version 1.3 continues to suffer from some DHTML compatibility issues and other problems, including the inability to properly display certain types of attachments in its email client. (In some cases, they can't even be seen.)
Although Netscape fans insist the browser is at least as fast as IE at rendering most pages, the program often felt sluggish on our 1.7 GHz test machine. Those seeking a faster browsing experience should look to Phoenix (derived from a stripped down subset of the Mozilla codebase), Internet Explorer 6 or Opera.
Pros: Arguably the most W3C-compliant feature set of any browser. See the Browser Compatibility Chart at WebReview.com for details.
Cons: No transparency support in Macromedia Flash pages. Some DHTML and JavaScript routines may not work as they do in Internet Explorer. The email client didn't perform acceptably in our tests.
Introduction
Mozilla was a project that was originally planned to be Netscape 5.0 -- a large-scale rewrite of the code originally developed by Netscape (which was, in turn, based on code originally released back in March 1993 by Marc Andreessen as "Mosaic"). But after Netscape was bought by AOL and the browser market proved to be a challenging category in which to make money, the company decided that making the code open source would be the best way to proceed.
As it turned out, the code proved to be much more of a mess than almost anyone had expected -- except, perhaps, those tracking the numerous name changes for the browser project over the years. Perhaps it was due to the scramble to release new versions during the heat of the browser wars in the second half of the nineties that saw Microsoft usurp Netscape as the dominant player in the browser market, but the Netscape code, like its naming strategy, was a mess. Buggy 4.x releases helped assure Microsoft's position, and Netscape's new owners decided that a total rewrite was needed. That's a euphemistic way of saying the existing code base was found unworthy of further effort.
In the early months of this full-scale overhaul of the code, development seemed to be proceeding at a reasonable rate and "milestone" builds appeared regularly. But, by Dec. 1999, industry watchers (including us!) began to refer to Netscape 5.0 as "the much-delayed browser." At that time, it was expected to reach official release status by Feb. 2000. How wrong that estimate proved to be!
Shortly thereafter, the Netscape 5.0 effort was abandoned completely.
By Nov. 2000, after more than 32 months of development , Netscape 6.0 was officially released... to almost universal disdain. But the army of free software developers that had been expected to carry the Mozilla.org project forward still struggled to clean up the unwieldy code. Dissenting voices began to name Mozilla as proof that open-source development doesn't work -- a position that open-source fans and developers alike countered by observing that the Netscape code had been more of a mess than anyone had expected. Mozilla, Galeon, Kmeleon, Nautilus and several other Mozilla-based browsers serve as their defense.
Installation
Mozilla 1.3 is available for several different platforms, with only minor platform-specific differences. We tested the Windows release under Windows Me and Windows XP. It is available in two versions. Those with a high-speed connection may prefer to run the tiny Web front end "stub" that downloads and installs the rest of the code over your Internet connection (there's also an option to save the code after it is downloaded); others can download a single 11MB standalone installer. In both cases, an uninstallation option is provided via the usual Add/Remove Programs control panel. As with previous Netscape/Mozilla releases, the browser asks you if you would like to make it the default viewer for Web pages when first run.
An option to pre-load part of the software into memory to speed load times is provided during the installation process, should you wish to minimize the time required to launch the browser. (Internet Explorer uses a similar trick by default on Windows machines.) If this option is selected, a small Mozilla icon (earlier releases depicted a Gecko) appears in the taskbar.
Compatibility Tests
We tested the code, as every web developer should, during the development of several web site projects we've been working on. We were generally pleased with the stability and performance of Mozilla 1.3 and the Gecko Web display engine. However, there were a few functions that didn't work as expected. It's difficult to point a finger at Mozilla, when some of the culprits are JavaScript 1.2-based Dynamic HTML animations supplied with Microsoft FrontPage. However, these animations work more or less as expected under all recent versions of Internet Explorer and even under Netscape 4.7, so it was still a surprise to see Mozilla fail to display them at all.
Java is handled via an optional download on machines running Windows and Linux; the Mac OS X release uses Apple's native Java implementation.
Some web pages will display a "plugin needed - Click Here to Get the required plugin" icon and dialog when confronted by a missing Flash animation engine. This is easily solved with a click -- the browser goes off to the site specified by the plugin's codebase. Some users may, however, be stymied by messages such as the one that appeared following a click on a page requiring a Flash plugin. We ended up at a Macromedia page warning us that "We are unable to locate a single Web player that best matches your platform and operating system." Manually choosing the Flash player for Netscape and Netscape-compatibles yielded the desired result.
We also encountered some pages that didn't seem to properly handle CGI code stored on the server. We found that the code created by the Zcomment.cgi plugin for the Coranto news management engine worked properly under IE, but didn't work under Mozilla 1.3.
We also found that some attachments that opened correctly in most other mail programs didn't work properly in Mozilla's integrated Mail client. In fact, we gave up trying to use it after several issues cropped up. It's too bad -- Mozilla 1.3 adds a potentially useful Junk Mail filter that many users would undoubtedly benefit from. We just couldn't get the darn thing to work reliably.
There are also a few known bugs in Mozilla, the worst of which can crash almost any version/flavor of Mozilla with just 5 lines of plain HTML code. This bug was finally fixed in the closing days of May, 2003.
Themes
Mozilla's extensive support of themes, providing the capability to change the rendering styles of the program's buttons and other user interface elements, is a feature customization buffs will appreciate. We ended up preferring the Mac-like "AquaMoz" theme (installable directly from the mozilla.org themes page) to the standard themes bundled with the program.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheet support appears to be robust and table handling is virtually identical to that of Internet Explorer, differing only in the rendering style of horizontal lines and certain table border types. We encountered quite a few pages, however, containing JavaScripts that misbehaved or didn't work at all under Mozilla. The "minimize/maximize" toggle chevrons on the PC Buyer's Guide Alerts page is a good example. On Windows or Macintosh computers running Internet Explorer, these chevrons (small dual arrows in the upper-right corner of each window) collapse or show individual windows; under Mozilla 1.3 (and earlier releases), they do nothing at all.
While the blame for this problem is best directed at Microsoft, the fact is, many people wouldn't know a W3 standard if they tripped over one. They just want their browser to render pages as the author intended and, in this area, the popularity of Microsoft Office, FrontPage and other tools that encourage the use of Microsoft extensions to the Web paradigm works against Mozilla and other browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine (and Opera, etc., etc.).
What's Ahead
In May 2003, the Mozilla team released Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. According to the developers, Firebird and its mail/news client sister Mozilla Thunderbird will become the focus of future development after Mozilla 1.4 is released.
The most noticeable of the changes is a new default theme, based on Qute by Arvid Axelsson. The Preferences dialogue has been replaced with a redesigned Options dialogue and you can now clear your history, cookies, cache etc. with a single click. Many improvements have been made to the bookmarks system, including an IE-style context menu for items in the Bookmarks menu. In addition, this release includes Quality Feedback Agent (Talkback), allowing crash data to be sent directly back to the developers. Mozilla Firebird 0.6 also features many of the enhancements that have been made to the Mozilla Application Suite, including automatic resizing of large images to fit in the browser window and smooth scrolling.
The Mozilla Firebird 0.6 FAQ has further details.
Conclusion
If nothing else, the last remaining Netscape 4.x and 3.x users should see this release as a good reason to move up from their now-obsolete browsers, which suffer from a number of weaknesses and compatibility issues that serve to make life much more complicated for Web developers. Mozilla certainly looks to be the best bet for Linux users seeking W3C compliancy and maximum conformity with the latest Cascading Style Sheet specification. For users of Windows PCs and Macs, however, the lack of support for Flash transparency and certain DHTML functions in Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers means that some pages simply won't render as they do in Internet Explorer -- and some may not load at all. Beyond that, it's largely a matter of taste. ::
For Further Reading
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