Mozilla Starts To Follow a New Drumbeat 226
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Key, then, to the Drumbeat project is openness, specifically openness as applied to the Internet. That fits in well with the original impulses behind Mozilla and Firefox. The former was about transforming the Netscape Communicator code into an open source browser, and the latter was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches. Both Mozilla and Firefox have succeeded, but the threats have now changed."
Re:Take Control?? (Score:2, Informative)
No, it doesn't sound like that at all:
"Mozilla Drumbeat is [..] using technology to help internet users [..] take control of their online lives."
Furthermore, directly below what you quoted you can read this:
"Open. Built on technologies that anyone can study, use or improve without asking permission.
Participatory, fueled by the ideas and energy of 100s of millions of people.
Decentralized in both architecture and control, ensuring continued choice and diversity.
Public much like a public square, with space not just for commerce but also for vibrant social and civic life."
Open, participatory, decentralized and public. Does that sound like someone wants to take control of your online life? Doesn't sound like that to me.
Re:Communioncator (Score:5, Informative)
Netscape Communicator (or simply "Netscape") was Internet Explorer's main (only?) competition in the late 90s. It was a web browser developed and released by Netscape which at one time was dominant, but has since been relegated to history.
There are two main reasons for its demise:
1) Microsoft finally woke up and realised that the Internet (and specifically the World Wide Web) was important, and developed IE, finally bundling it as part of Windows
2) Netscape decided to make version 5 a complete rewrite from scratch, which gave MS all the time they needed to improve IE to the point that it made Netscape look like a bad joke.
To my mind, 2) is what really killed it; Netscape 4 was buggy and slow, and while it was definitely comparable to IE4, IE5 was superior (and I say that as someone who went from Netscape 4 to Mozilla - I have never used IE as my primary browser, and most likely never will). Netscape did release versions 6 and 7, based on Gecko and the Mozilla code base, but by then it was far too late. (They also sucked compared to Mozilla/Firefox and IE).
Hold on one second... (Score:3, Informative)
I thought Firefox was about Mozilla being bloated and slow, and nothing to do with IE or Microsoft at all?
Ministry of Truth (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox "was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches"? Maybe in Stallman's world.
In the words of one of Firefox's creators: (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html) ... These browser efforts were reactions to the rot we had seen in the Mozilla application suite."
"We discussed the rot within Mozilla, which we blamed on Netscape and Mozilla's inability to assert independence. He suggested it'd be perhaps preferable to start again on the user interface, much of the code in the front end was so bloated and bad that it was better off starting from a fresh perspective.
Re:Open cloud vs Facebook, Google, Twitter (Score:2, Informative)
And I forgot i wanted to say something:
Unite may or may not grow to be the "next big thing" in social networking, but once the mozzilla community develop an equivalent for firefox while passing the idea as theirs, it sure will.
Mozilla Developer Center crash reporting (Score:4, Informative)
There is a discussion of Mozilla product crashes at Mozilla Developer Center crash reporting [mozilla.org].
Re:I have an idea (Score:3, Informative)
That might have something to do with the fact that MSVC++ generates 30% faster code (on the particular codebase in question) than g++ does...
Not that this is the only source of Linux performance issues (pango, I'm looking at _you_), but lack of a usable pgo mode in gcc (what it does have falls down on keeping track of its own profiling information and errors out when applied to Gecko), is a quite noticeable.
Re:Crunchy Goodness! (Score:3, Informative)
More lies out of you, huh?
gcc's optimizer is pretty good, actually, and the only compiler that seems to beat it is icc, and then not by much. If anything, gcc should have a more profound effect on OS X than on Linux since Apple uses an older version of the compiler (4.2) to avoid the GPLv3, while Linux distributions can use the latest and greatest.
But since when have facts mattered to a troll like you?