The latest Mozilla (M17) is available for download. I'm grabing it now, but my net connection has been so slow and unreliable the past few days I'm not sure I'll get it. Netscape has also released M17, under the name Netscape Communciator 6.0 PR2 (Preview Release 2.) I'm just going to report back on Mozilla though. I'm still very behind this project (I mean spiritually or something, I'm not actually helping in any way.) But I don't have very high expectations. Lots of fighting lately, especially since the WSP published that scathing aritcle blasting Netscape for the slow progress of Mozilla (and demanding they take Netscape 4.x off the market.) Suck got into the action with their own brand of software review (i.e., lots of quips, not many facts.) Then Monty Manley wrote What went wrong with Mozilla, to which everybody and their brother on the Moz side replied (see Mike Cornall's There is nothing wrong with Mozilla in Linux Today as well.) Back and forth. The bickering is getting worse. If only the product were getting better. We'll see. At least you can play Pac-Man on it - take that IE. And surprisingly, my connection to ftp.mozilla.org is rocking. It's almost half down since I started this little blurb. Check back for the results.
Initial impressions: At least they are trying. As expected, no major news to report after a quick spin with M17. Still unusable for all but the most fervent Mozilla-ite. Of course, it's still in development. Evidently they did say about 20 milestones before release way back when, so maybe they are not so far off course. Seems like people are saying about 5 more months. It was pretty stable in basic surfing today. Just slow. And the renderer seems to leave lots of artifacts around my screen. But mainly it just seems slow. Time to optimize I guess. Of course I know nothing about doing a project of this size, but maybe they can't work on speed until everything is in place and stable. Plus, the whole net is slow for me today, so that is probably affecting my judgement. How is that for a wishy-washy first impression? Bottom line: Unless you are curious, don't bother. (yet?) But go Mozilla! We're counting (maybe too much) on you.
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- jim 8-08-2000 2:35 pm
Initial impressions: At least they are trying. As expected, no major news to report after a quick spin with M17. Still unusable for all but the most fervent Mozilla-ite. Of course, it's still in development. Evidently they did say about 20 milestones before release way back when, so maybe they are not so far off course. Seems like people are saying about 5 more months. It was pretty stable in basic surfing today. Just slow. And the renderer seems to leave lots of artifacts around my screen. But mainly it just seems slow. Time to optimize I guess. Of course I know nothing about doing a project of this size, but maybe they can't work on speed until everything is in place and stable. Plus, the whole net is slow for me today, so that is probably affecting my judgement. How is that for a wishy-washy first impression? Bottom line: Unless you are curious, don't bother. (yet?) But go Mozilla! We're counting (maybe too much) on you.
- jim 8-08-2000 7:10 pm